The throttle kicked a notch higher. I pushed off the bench and half leaped, half fell toward the motor. The boat bucked and I fell the rest of the way, nearly impaling myself on the tiller. My forearms came down on the fat skull of the outboard cowling. I gripped the sides of the motor and held on as it vibrated beneath me, the entire mount swiveling as if to throw me off. Icy spray struck my face. Gasoline fumes filled my nostrils.

I’d lost track of Ollie.

Dr. Gloria flew overhead, keeping pace easily. “Remain calm,” she said.

“Fuck you!” I yelled.

Suddenly Ollie broke the surface of the water, two body lengths away, her arms knifing toward me.

“Come on, baby!” I crouched and reached for her, my thighs jammed against the sides. Too much: My weight tipped the boat and I fell forward. I seized the rim and stopped myself, my face inches from the water. The remote-controlled prop swerved to compensate, and suddenly the boat was almost on top of Ollie. Her eyes shone bright in the moonlight. I thrust out an arm, and she latched on. If I hadn’t been wearing a jacket she wouldn’t have been able to get a grip.

The throttle kicked into high then. Ollie’s weight nearly yanked me out of the boat.

Dr. Gloria landed behind me in the boat. “Pull!” she said.

“You think?” I shouted back.

I got my hips below the rim of the boat, then gripped Ollie with both hands. It took all my strength to hold on; I had nothing remaining to pull her in. The boat slewed left, then right, the drag nearly pulling us apart.

The doctor kneeled behind me and put her arms around my waist. “Ready?” she said into my ear. “One! Two!”

Dr. G yanked me backward. I held on, and Ollie popped half out of the water. Before she slipped back she managed to get an elbow over the side. The wake dragged her feet behind her.

“Almost there,” Dr. Gloria said. I reached over Ollie’s back to her belt and heaved. She fell heavily into the bottom of the boat.

Ollie coughed water. Soaking wet, hair plastered to her cheeks, she was tiny.

The ro-boat accelerated, the nose lifted, and we charged toward the border. We were home free.

*   *   *

The engine deafened us with its two-tone whine and rumble; the hull bounced over invisible waves. I sat with Ollie in the bottom of the boat, my arms around her. She was shivering. Her cheek was a slab of cold meat.

After perhaps a minute, Dr. Gloria said, “We have a problem.”

“You mean now we have one?” I said.

I sat up straighter. The doctor pointed to our left, up the stretch of river that led between l’Île-Saint-Régis and the Quebec mainland. In the distance was a red light crowning a row of white running lights. A big front spotlight raked the water ahead of it. The boat looked to be a long way from us, but distances were tricky at night. “Who the hell?” I said.

“RCMP,” Ollie said without lifting her head. She was trembling, and her voice was strained.

“Looks like somebody heard the gunshots,” Dr. G said.

“Can we outrun them?” I asked aloud. I didn’t know how long it would it take to cross the river, or who was supposed to meet us on the other side. These were only two of the most basic questions I should have asked Ollie back at the marina.

The engine revved, died, then revved again. Dr. Gloria said, “Uh oh.”

The tiller swung toward my head. The boat began to turn.

Ollie said, “Drones.”

“What? The Canadians have drones too?”

“Jamming us.”

“Oh come on,” I said like an angry teenager. I couldn’t see anything above us, or hear any noise but our engine. How big were they? How high up? And how the hell were we supposed to get away from them?

Our boat continued to circle, the engine surging and dragging drunkenly. The lights of the RCMP boat bore down on us.

I grabbed the tiller and tried to push it straight, but it resisted me. Fine. I gripped it with both hands and pulled it toward me like a rower. It didn’t budge—but then something snapped inside the motor. I fell back, my hands still on the tiller. The boat had turned with me.

“I can steer!” I said.

“Throttle?” Ollie asked.

I twisted the rubber grip of the throttle, and it turned easily—but the engine speed didn’t change. Fuck. It was still under remote control.

Ollie pushed herself up onto hands and knees. She reached past me to the antenna, then ran her hand down it until she found something in the dark under the back rim of the boat. She yanked, and the engine died. Her fist held a bundle of wires.

Suddenly I could hear the rumble of the police boat’s engines. “Uh, Ollie?”

Dr. Gloria said, “I really don’t think they should be allowed to call themselves ‘mounted police’ when they’re on boats, do you?”

Ollie’s hands were shaking. She thrust the wires at me and said, “Find two that spark.”

“What? Oh Jesus.” I let go of the throttle and took them from her.

“STOP YOUR ENGINE!” a voice boomed over the water. “ARRÊTEZ VOTRE BATEAU!”

Jerks. We were already spinning in circles.

I held one wire in my left hand, and touched the copper tips of one of the wires on my right. Nothing. I tried another, then another, while the growl of the RCMP boat grew louder behind us. Suddenly two tips sparked and instantly decorated my vision with spots. The engine coughed.

“Those two!” Ollie said. “Go go go!”

White light hit us, creating an instant tableau: me holding a bouquet of wires, Ollie sprawled at my feet, and Dr. Gloria perched on the bow like an eighteenth-century figurehead. Everything outside the boat became black velvet.

I squinted and pressed the wires together. The boat heaved forward. Ollie reached up and grabbed the tiller to hold us straight.

The policeman behind the bullhorn was not happy with this. “ARRÊTEZ! STOP!”

The front of the boat rose as we increased speed. Ollie and I were almost on top of each other at the back of the boat, and Dr. Gloria, balancing on the front lip, did nothing to equalize our weight and bring the nose down. We bounced over the water, barely in control. The motion kept knocking my hands apart, and with each gap between the wires the engine stuttered. Binary throttles, I decided, sucked.

The motor was ridiculously overpowered for a bass boat, even one that was usually loaded with cigarettes. But still it was no match for the size of the RCMP cruiser; I could feel the cruiser catching up to us. The white light stayed pinned to us like a vaudeville spotlight.

Ollie sat up, looked around in the dark, then pointed a few degrees off to our right. Less than a hundred meters away, barely visible beyond the glare of the RCMP light, lay a hunk of rock and trees.

“The Hen!” she said. “Stay on the gas!” Even shaking with hypothermia, Ollie had a better sense of direction than I did. I’d seen l’Île Hen on the pen map. It was a banana-shaped patch of land only a couple hundred feet long. The US–Canadian border was only about a thousand meters beyond the island, cutting diagonally across the river. But that was still too far; the RCMP boat would be on us in less than thirty seconds.

“We’re not going to make it!” I said

“What are they going to do?” Ollie said. “Ram us?” She was grinning. Why was she—how was she grinning?

Ollie aimed us toward the Hen. A few dozen feet from it she cut right, skimming the northern tip of the banana, then jammed hard to the left. The spotlight cut out; the island was between us now. We shot along the shore, so close that the trees hid the eastern sky. A rock or submerged log would throw us from the boat. But I held the wires together and we flew at top speed, the sound of the outboard doubly loud this close to the land.

In a handful of seconds we were back in open water. The mainland was half a kilometer or more ahead of us, only visible because of the distant glow of streetlights. As near as I could figure we were heading southeast, paralleling the border. We should have been going due west. I shouted, “What are you doing? That’s Quebec!”