Chapter 17 - The Graveyard of Ships
Three miles downriver from Bear Mountain, the forgotten Mercer Shipyard jutted out into the churning Hudson like the skeletal ribcage of a prehistoric beast.
Rusting iron cranes towered over collapsed wooden piers, their steel cables whipping violently in the gale-force winds. The river was wild, black waves crashing against the rotting pilings with deafening roars, sending sprays of freezing foam into the night air.
Ava killed the headlights of the Mercer estate SUV three hundred yards before the rusted perimeter fence.
She stepped out into the deluge. The rain battered her face, soaking her to the bone, but her hands were steady as she held the Glock. Behind her, Vance’s cruiser slid to a halt on the gravel, its lights extinguished. Vance racked the slide of an AR-15 rifle she had pulled from the tactical trunk rack.
"We move in tandem," Vance said, her tactical voice leaving no room for argument. "I take the left flank through the fabrication shed. You stay fifty paces behind me. If you see movement, you don't talk. You shoot."
They slipped through a gap in the chain-link fence, their boots sinking into deep, oily mud.
Inside the cavernous, derelict dry dock, the wind howled through shattered corrugated metal walls. In the center of the flooded concrete basin sat the rotting hulk of an old wooden tugboat, suspended above the black water by four rusted steel mooring cables.
High up on the tugboat’s rusted wheelhouse deck, a single yellow kerosene lantern flickered against the storm.
And beside the lantern, perched perilously on the edge of the rotting wooden railing, was a small, shivering bundle wrapped in a yellow rain poncho.
Oliver.
The toddler was crying, his tiny voice swallowed by the roar of the wind and the crashing waves below. He was tied to the railing with a frayed nylon rope.
Beneath him, the dark water swirled with lethal currents, thirty feet below.
"Oliver!" Ava’s scream was torn away by the gale.
"Welcome home, niece," a voice echoed through the metal rafters of the dry dock.
From the shadows behind the tugboat’s collapsed smokestack, a man stepped into the yellow pool of lantern light.
Julian Mercer looked terrifyingly like Nicholas—the same high cheekbones, the same aristocratic nose, the same silver-streaked hair plastered against his forehead by the rain. But whereas Nicholas had warmth and dignity in his eyes, Julian’s face was a mask of hollow, psychotic hatred.
In his right hand, Julian held an industrial flare gun. In his left, a heavy combat knife resting against the nylon rope holding Oliver to the edge of the drop.
May you like
"Drop the weapons," Julian said, his voice carrying clearly over the storm. "Both of you. Or I cut the cord right now, and the little bastard joins his father in the cold."
***
