Collection of Stories

Vaugh swung his arm up clumsily, as if to steady himself. Koski drove a stiff right at his chin.

There was a violent crash. A splintering of wood. The Vigilant rolled over on her side. Koski was flung off his feet, hit the wheel with jarring force.

At the same instant he felt the paralyzing impact of the length of pipe Vaugh swung up and down — once — twice!

The gloom burst into flaming light that became so over-poweringly bright it was utter darkness.

The shock of cold water made Koski gasp. The gasp was choked before it barely began; he was drawing salt water into his lungs instead of air. He was under water!

He let his muscles go limp. No sense swimming while he couldn’t tell which way was up. The current tugged at him. Something smashed at his skull, stunned him. He opened his mouth, gulped.

A tremendous roaring in his ears. A motor exhaust! He had surfaced.

He’d come up beneath the police boat’s stern, banged his head against a propeller blade.

Vaugh had probably tossed him over-side from the pilot house; he’d drifted the length of the Vigilant’s hull under water!

He caught the patrol boat’s exhaust pipe; held on, though the metal scorched his fingers. The black transom above him, with the white letters: POLICE, New York City, lurched and twisted like a frantic porpoise. It would be tough to climb aboard over the stern even in calm weather. With the old girl rearing and plunging like this, it would be almost impossible.

A few yards off to port the Sea-Dog loomed up against the ghostly green of the Stepping Stone Light. Her Diesel was going cuddle-up, cuddle-up, but her clutch wasn’t in, she wasn’t moving. The ketch wallowed sluggishly in the tumbling waves. She seemed to be lower in the water than she’d been on the mooring.

Koski gauged his chances. He might not be able to muscle himself up over the Vigilant’s stern, with his water-soaked clothes, his knife-slashed arm, that crack on the skull from Vaugh’s piece of pipe. But if he was going to be able to do anything for Joe Mulcahey, he had to get back aboard.

He had one knee on the exhaust pipe, his fingertips touching a stem chock, was summoning all his reserve strength to pull himself up to the gunwale, when a voice only a couple of feet from his ear growled:

“She’ll go down in half an hour; it’ll look as if she simply sank in the storm.”

That was Cap Vaugh talking! He was still on the Vigilant!

Who was the treacherous old rat speaking to? Who had come aboard from the ketch, to join him?

Koski let himself down into the water again, listening. It would be committing suicide to climb into the cockpit with Vaugh waiting for him with that Thompson sub-machine-gun.

But he heard no more voices, nothing except the slam of the patrol boat’s motor hatch. Vaugh was getting set to drive the hundred and eighty horses, leaving the ketch, with anyone who might still be on her, to founder.

Maybe Joe Mulcahey wasn’t on board the Sea-Dog. Maybe the sarge wasn’t even alive now? But that was the only chance Koski could grasp at.

He toed off one boot, pulled loose his sock. He swam around to the Vigilant’s starboard side, dived beneath the hull.

He stayed under until he heard the starter whine, the motor explode into life.

He took two desperate strokes to get clear of the propeller before the clutch gears meshed. He nearly made it, but one of the spinning blades sliced at his right foot.

When he came to the surface, he was in a lather of foam from the police boat’s wake. His foot was numb; he couldn’t be sure how many toes he still had left but he wasn’t stopping to count them now.