Chapter 15 - The Crash of the Arthur B
Vanessa sat on the icy planks, staring up at Moreau in stunned horror. For the first time in her pampered, cushioned life, the currency of her beauty, her family name, and her tears was completely worthless. The world had stopped bending to her tantrums.
"You bastard," she whispered. "You told me you loved my mother. You told me we were family."
Moreau didn't even look back at her. He nodded to his driver, who slammed the trunk of the Mercedes shut and reached into his heavy overcoat.
A silver snub-nosed revolver cleared the leather holster.
Elizabeth pulled me back behind the reinforced engine block of our sedan. "Down! Claire, get down!"
"Drop the weapon!" a booming voice amplified by an electric megaphone roared from behind us.
Two Port Authority police cruisers screamed around the corner of the container terminal, blue and red emergency strobes slashing through the falling sleet. Tires shrieked against the wet asphalt as they executed a tactical block behind Moreau’s Mercedes.
"Port Authority Police! Hands where we can see them! Step away from the vehicle!"
The driver froze, his hand half-raised with the gun still pointed toward the wet planks. Moreau’s jaw tightened. In that split second of calculation, he realized that a clean getaway was impossible. With the cold, detached efficiency of a sociopath, Moreau shoved his own driver aside, lunged into the driver’s seat of the heavy Mercedes, slammed it into reverse, and floored the accelerator.
The massive SUV roared backward, its tires spinning for traction before gripping the slick wood. It smashed directly into the wooden mooring pilings of Pier 4.
The heavy timbers groaned, splintering with the sound of snapping artillery shells. The stern line of the *Arthur B* snapped like an over-tightened guitar string, whipping through the air and smashing the windshield of Moreau's Mercedes.
Vanessa screamed, rolling frantically toward our car as the wooden dock beneath the Mercedes began to give way. The SUV tilted backward at a sickening forty-five-degree angle, suspended over twenty feet of pitch-black, freezing tidal water.
"Get out of the car, Moreau!" an officer shouted, weapons drawn, advancing through the rain.
The driver’s side door kicked open. Moreau scrambled out onto the disintegrating pier timbers, clutching one of the aluminum hard-cases to his chest. He looked at me across the twenty feet of splintered wood, his face twisted in desperate rage.
"You Bennett women," he spat, his voice raw. "Your father ruined my father's line in sixty-eight. And you think you can lock me out with a court order?"
He turned to run toward the access catwalk leading to the adjacent barge slip, but his leather-soled shoes hit the diesel-slick wood. He slipped.
The fall was sudden, silent, and brutal. Moreau went over the edge.
A heavy splash echoed up from the dark gap between the hull of the *Arthur B* and the concrete pier. The aluminum hard-case hit the water first, sinking like an anvil into forty feet of black harbor sludge.
"Officer down by the slip! Throw the life rings!"
Officers swarmed the edge of the pier, their tactical flashlights cutting beams of white light down into the churning, icy water. Vanessa lay curled in a fetal position against our front tire, sobbing hysterically, her designer coat soaked in harbor slime and grease.
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I stood beside Elizabeth, watching the harbor water swirl. The storm wind whipped my hair across my face, cold and biting, but beneath the chill, I felt a strange, profound sense of stillness settling into my bones.
The ghost of Arthur Bennett had finally defended his harbor.
