From the moment he was dragged from the Hudson, Joe has never questioned how accomplished Bob Tom Damall is on a river; however given the events of the last three days, Joe certainly questions how sane the old man might be. Even as Joe bounced down the Hudson on his collection of PDF’s, he could hear Bob Tom lamenting the loss of his fishing pole. After a few minutes, however, Joe realized that all of his attention needed to be on the river, his kidnappers, and their actions, and not on Bob Tom’s antics.
It was four or five hours later and two hours after a curve in the Hudson had allowed Joe’s mound of PFDs to break free of the current when Joe’s walk along the shadowy edge of the eastern shore of the river in interrupted by the old man’s call. After a few minutes of helloing back and forth Bob Tom drops out of the night and lands by Joe.
The old man’s face is covered in dried blood as is one of his hands, but Joe can see that Bob Tom’s favorite fishing pole is tucked in his pants.
“You got it.”
“Course, I did.”
“What happened?”
“There was some discussion as to ownership, but once that got resolved, they handed it over.”
Joe stared at Bob Tom’s wound before saying, “Just like that.”
“Power of persuasion, Noby, rhetoric can be a powerful thing.”
During the ensuing days as they made their way south toward Manhattan, Joe kept expecting Bob Tom to say more, to gloat, to sing his own praises as he always seemed to do, but the old man never did offer any more explanation that those first sentences. It wasn’t until they were ten kliks north of the city and Bob Tom insisted that they scuttle the small power boat they had stolen the night before, that Joe wondered whether the riverman had done something so bad to the crew that he was worried about hawks looking for him.