Chapter 9 - The Sluice Gate
Victor didn't know what a weir was.
To him, water was something that came out of a chrome faucet in Princeton or sat decorative and blue beneath the bow of a rental yacht in the Hamptons. He didn't know that these bogs were designed by nineteenth-century engineers who used gravity to drop hundreds of thousands of gallons through narrow, concrete funnels.
Ahead of us, the roar of the canal changed.
It was no longer the flat, wet sound of moving water; it was the hollow, booming thunder of an open spillway.
The concrete sluice gate appeared out of the darkness—a narrow, eight-foot gap in the earthen dam where the canal dropped twelve feet straight down onto an apron of granite boulders designed to break the water’s energy.
Victor finally heard it.
He looked forward, his eyes going wide with sudden, animal terror. He tried to turn the tiller handle of the outboard, but he turned it too hard, too fast.
The propeller struck a submerged cedar log.
The shear pin snapped with a loud, metallic *ping*. The engine revved violently, screaming without resistance, and then died entirely.
The jon boat swung sideways in the current, caught in the accelerating draw of the spillway.
“Help me!” Victor shrieked, his voice losing every trace of the cultivated executive. “Nora! Throw me a line!”
The current caught my canoe as well, but I had a paddle and eighty years of combined Sullivan and Miller stubbornness in my blood.
I didn't try to paddle against the current. You can’t beat a river when it wants to go down. Instead, I drove the canoe hard to the right, aiming directly for the ancient, rotting timber cribbing that flanked the northern edge of the concrete sluice.
The bow of the canoe slammed into the mossy wood with a bone-jarring crash.
I threw Daniel’s Buck knife down, grabbed the iron reinforcement rod sticking out of the timber, and held on with both hands.
The force of the water nearly ripped my arms from their sockets. My boots slipped on the wet fiberglass, but my fingers—hardened by decades of lifting military crates and working garden soil—locked around the cold iron like a vise.
Ten feet to my left, Victor’s aluminum boat hit the lip of the concrete drop.
The metal hull shrieked against the stone, balanced for one terrifying second on the edge of the fall, and then tipped forward into the roaring dark.
Victor didn't go over with the boat.
At the last possible second, he leaped toward the timber cribbing, his fingers catching the slimy, algae-covered edge of the lower wood beam.
His legs dangled in the roaring spillway. The force of the falling water was pulling at his boots, dragging him downward toward the rocks below.
“Nora!” he screamed, his fingernails digging into the rotting wood. “My hands are slipping! Nora, please!”
I knelt on the timber platform above him.
I looked down into his face.
The mask was gone. The charm was gone. The tailored clothes were shredded rags. Beneath the moonlight, he was just a small, vicious, frightened animal that had spent five years feeding on the trust of women who had loved him.
“Where is Julianne Vance’s money?” I asked, my voice completely steady over the roar of the falls.
“In the offshore bridge!” he wept, his shoulders dislocating under the strain of the current. “The encryption key is in the lining of my planner! The number is 4812! It’s all there! Just pull me up! Nora, I’m begging you!”
“You told me liabilities had to be written down to zero, Victor,” I said.
“I was lying! I’ll give it all back! I’ll sign the house over to Lena! I’ll leave the country! You’ll never see me again!”
“No,” I said, leaning down so his wild, terrified eyes were level with mine. “You won't leave the country. You’re going to stay right here in New Jersey. In a six-by-eight cell where the walls are made of cinderblock and nobody cares what your quarterly return was.”
I reached down with my right hand.
I didn't take his hand. He was too heavy, and the slime on his skin would have pulled us both in.
Instead, I unbuckled my heavy leather military belt—the thick, double-stitched cowhide Daniel had bought me when I made Master Sergeant.
I looped the brass buckle around his wrist and pulled it tight into a slipknot.
“Hold onto that leather, Victor,” I said. “Because if you let go, Daniel’s not down there to catch you.”
May you like
I tied the other end of the belt to the rusted iron reinforcement rod, stepped off the timber cribbing onto the solid earth of the dam embankment, and sat down in the sand.
***
