Chapter 8 - The Sakonnet Crossing
The black waters of the Sakonnet River churned like liquid iron under the lash of the nor'easter.
Garrison’s sixty-foot high-speed interceptor—a vessel built from carbon fiber and fitted with twin diesel turbines—cut through the freezing spray at forty-five knots, its bow slicing through the swells like an obsidian blade.
On the bridge, Garrison stood with his boots planted wide, gripping the overhead grab rail, staring through the night-vision heads-up display.
Beside him, Dom checked the charging handles on three short-barreled carbines.
“Target is two miles south-southeast, Boss!” the helmsman yelled over the roar of the engines and the screaming wind. “The sportfisher is taking on water. Her port engine is smoking!”
Through the thermal green hue of the monitor, Garrison saw the vessel.
The forty-foot yacht was wallowing heavily in the troughs, rolling violently as ten-foot waves crashed over its stern. It was a pleasure craft never designed for a winter gale, pushed beyond its mechanical limits by a desperate crew.
“Bring us alongside her starboard quarter!” Garrison shouted. “Grappling hooks on the rail! Nobody shoots unless fired upon—I want Vivian Callaway breathing!”
The interceptor surged forward, closing the distance in less than three minutes.
Floodlights mounted to the interceptor’s mast snapped to life, cutting through the driving sleet in twin shafts of blinding, surgical white.
The sportfisher was illuminated in all its pathetic desperation.
On the aft deck, Carlo Sabbatini stood clinging to the rocket launcher rod holders, brandishing a chrome-plated shotgun. Behind him, huddled in the salon doorway, was Vivian Callaway.
Her mink coat was soaked through with black seawater, plastered to her shaking frame. Her immaculate hair was wild, gray strands whipping across a face contorted with hysterical terror. In her arms, clutched like an infant, was a waterproof Pelican case containing the encrypted drives.
“Back off!” Sabbatini screamed over the roar of the surf, raising the shotgun toward the interceptor’s bridge. “Back off or I swear to God I’ll dump the case into the ditch!”
Garrison didn't duck.
He stepped onto the open foredeck of his vessel, the freezing spray hitting his face, his dark coat whipping in the gale. He held no weapon in his hands.
“Shoot, Carlo,” Garrison called across the ten-foot gap of churning water. “Shoot, and my men will let that hull slip beneath the waves in three minutes. You have six hundred gallons of diesel below decks and a fractured bilge pump. You’re already drowning.”
Sabbatini looked down at the rising water swirling around his boots on the aft deck. The panic in his eyes was naked, animalistic.
“Carlo, shoot him!” Vivian shrieked from the salon, her voice cracking into a bird-like wail. “Shoot him! We have twenty million dollars in this box! Shoot him!”
Sabbatini lowered the shotgun.
He tossed the weapon into the sea, raised his hands, and fell to his knees on the wet fiberglass. “I surrender! Thorne, pull me off this damn tub!”
“No!” Vivian screamed, lunging across the slippery deck toward the rail, clutching the black case to her chest. “No! It’s my money! It’s the Callaway trust! You can’t take it from me!”
A rogue wave struck the sportfisher broadside.
The vessel rolled violently forty-five degrees to port. Vivian lost her footing on the icy gelcoat, her boots slipping, her body pitching over the low mahogany rail.
She hit the freezing ocean with a muffled splash.
“Man overboard!” the interceptor’s lookout shouted.
Garrison didn't hesitate.
He didn't think of the court orders. He didn't think of the legal cases. He thought of Scarlet Bennett sitting in her wheelchair at a bus terminal in eight-degree weather, left to die by this very woman.
Garrison grabbed a life ring tied to fifty feet of high-tensile nylon line, stepped to the rail of his boat, and hurled it into the black foam where Vivian’s soaked mink was dragging her beneath the surface.
The ring struck the water three feet from her thrashing hands.
“Take it!” Garrison roared over the storm.
Vivian surfaced, sputtering brine, her eyes wild with terror. In her right hand, she still clutched the handle of the heavy Pelican case—the money, the power, the generational arrogance that had defined her miserable life.
She looked at the life ring.
She looked at the case.
To grab the ring with both hands, she had to drop the box.
“Drop the case, Vivian!” Garrison yelled. “Drop it or you drown!”
For one horrifying second, the madness of old money flickered across Vivian Callaway’s frozen features. She looked at the black box containing her stolen empire.
She tightened her grip on the handle.
She reached out with only one hand toward the ring.
A rolling wall of black water crashed over her head.
The weight of the waterlogged mink and the heavy Pelican case dragged her downward into the abyssal depths of the Sakonnet River. She vanished beneath the froth without a sound, swallowed whole by the freezing dark.
Silence fell over the deck of the interceptor, save for the whistling wind and the rhythmic thrum of the diesel engines.
Garrison stood at the rail for a long moment, watching the black water swirl where the matriarch had disappeared.
May you like
Then he turned to Dom.
“Haul Sabbatini aboard,” Garrison Thorne said quietly. “And turn this ship around. I’m going home.”
