Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (30 page)

The hull around us began to vibrate as the big boat’s twin diesels started up and reverberated throughout the boat. They didn’t wait around long enough for the engines to warm up. I could tell from the change in RPMs that we were pulling away from the dock, leaving River Bend.

“Hey, kid. I know it seems pretty bad right now, but we need to hold it together.”

“It’s them,” he said.

“Yeah, but I don’t know who the hell ‘them’ is, what they want, or where they’re taking us.”

“They’re gonna kill us, aren’t they?”

“Not if I can help it,” I said, trying to sound surer than I felt.

We eventually squirmed around enough so that we were able to pull the hoods off each other’s heads by using our teeth. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference since there were no lights on in the stateroom, and there was no porthole to see outside. And I didn’t need to see outside to know we were headed down the river. It was too noisy down there in the hull to hear the chimes as the bridge tenders lowered the traffic gates, but I could feel the engines idle down as we waited for each of the bridges to open for the Hatteras’s high hardtop. I stood up and tried to feel my way around the cabin with my bound hands, looking for a sharp edge that might cut through the rope. I found a bunk light, but after doing a contortionist’s trick to try to turn it on, it didn’t even work. Zale lay on the bunk as I explored, and by the time I was through, he had fallen asleep on his side with his face to the hull. I thought that I would go to work on the ropes that bound him with my teeth, but I lay down next to him to rest up for the effort. Never in a million years did I believe that in those conditions, I would fall asleep.

I awoke to the clattering noise of the anchor chain rattling out. In that forward cabin, it sounded like the chain locker was right over our heads. I was painfully aware of our whereabouts from the moment I opened my eyes. The pain in my hands, wrists, ribs, and shoulders did not allow a gradual rise from the depths of sleep. The bindings around my wrists had loosened a little as I slept, but the rope had embedded itself in my flesh, and now as I moved, it felt as though it was tearing off a layer of skin. And as I was lying on top of one of my arms, the hand on that side had fallen asleep. I struggled to sit up, and when the blood started to flow back into that arm, the prickling pain intensified.

I sat on the edge of the bunk, waiting, assuming that now that we had anchored, they would come for us and something would happen. But no one appeared. For several minutes I heard the sound of their footsteps moving about on deck over our heads. When the footsteps stopped, they were followed by muffled voices outside the door to our cabin. There was a little
snick
as the master stateroom door closed, and then all went quiet.

I hadn’t even been able to make out what language they were speaking. Creek? Russian? English?

“You awake?” I whispered.

There was no answer. I could hear Zale’s rhythmic breathing.

Sleep was a great way to try to escape our predicament, but the problem was, now that I had slept, I was wide awake. I envied the boy his ability to sleep through this. It was his way of handing the reins over to me, saying, “Okay, you’re the grown-up, you figure out how to get us out of this.” And, yeah, I was supposed to be the adult here, but the problem was, I didn’t feel like being the one in charge. Hell, look at my track record. Ever since I was eleven years old, it seemed all I had been doing was screwing up and losing people. I’d managed to save a few strangers through the years, both as a lifeguard and as a salver, but the important ones, the ones I loved, were all lost. My mother, my father, Neal. And Elysia, the one I came so close to saving.

I looked down at the shadowy form of the sleeping boy, and I thought about that other child, the only one I had saved, Solange. She and her mother, Celeste, were now set up in a small apartment of their own, not far from Jeannie’s in Sailboat Bend. The little Haitian girl had started fifth grade and she was catching up fast. One out of five. Not much of a record. And now there were two more on my tally sheet. Molly and Zale. Onto which list would they fall?

I felt the sour taste of poisonous despair crawling up my throat, and I wanted to wail and tear at my hair and curl up in a ball and wait to die. That was what was going to happen to us, after all. It didn’t matter who these people were, what language they spoke, or what they wanted. They had us, bound up, locked up, powerless, and they wouldn’t do that unless they didn’t think we were ever going to get away.

I’d faced it before. Just a few months earlier I had been stranded, dog-paddling in the middle of the Gulf Stream for a day and night, and I thought I was going to die for certain. I remembered both the terror and the peace that had come over me at some point when I had given myself up to it.

But this was different. This time I was not alone. Zale was just a kid. An amazing, great kid. This was a kid who knew how to pole a dugout canoe and sail a Laser. A kid who drove a mean ATV and who wanted a dog just like Abaco. This was Molly’s kid.

And it wasn’t like me to give up. It was time to stop whining and moaning and get serious about our situation. With my bound hands, I reached behind me and touched the fringe of hair that fell across the boy’s forehead. I watched the way his lips moved as he breathed in through his open mouth. The cabin was growing lighter, and I saw the strip of light at the bottom of the door. Daylight had arrived, but there would be no cavalry. I’d been mad at B. J.—for what, I don’t even really know, so I had sent him off, preferring not to tell him that Zale and I had other plans. Why did I keep making the same mistakes over and over? Why couldn’t I learn to just let things go? Now, no one knew where we were.

First of all, I needed to figure out who and what we were up against. Were these the same guys I had seen out at Gramma Josie’s? Both were outfitted in black right down to their ski masks, but it wasn’t as though that was a terribly unique fashion statement for bad guys. I had assumed that those guys out at Big Cypress were Seminoles, but it didn’t make any sense to imagine them following us back into town and driving off with the
Mykonos
. And what good would it do the Seminoles to kill Zale? That would probably leave Molly and Janet in court fighting for years over ownership of Pontus Enterprises. I couldn’t see what they stood to gain. On the other hand, maybe all they’d wanted to do was scare the kid.

I was still trying to make all the different pieces fit into a coherent story when I heard people moving around out on the deck above us. Within the last hour or so, I had noticed that the chop slapping against the outer hull had increased. And we were doing a bit more dancing around on the hook. The front they’d predicted last night was likely passing over us, and that would make the wind swing around to the west. If the yahoos running this boat didn’t know what they were doing, we’d likely wind up dragging anchor and running aground.

XXIV

When the door finally did open, I had dozed off again into a sort of half-awake, half-asleep state. I had finally concluded that everything pointed to the Russians having killed Nick—because of his discovering their slots scam or trying to take the cruise line back or any of a million other reasons, that was the only thing that made sense. But I couldn’t see what the Russians would stand to gain by killing Zale. I couldn’t see any logical reason why they would follow the kid out into the Everglades and try to shoot him. Besides, if the will that Janet had produced turned out to be the one that stood up in court, Zale wasn’t even slated to become full owner of the company.

So when the door opened and this tall, good-looking blond guy was standing out there holding a pistol in his hand and telling us to get up, I just assumed he was a member of the Russian mob.

You can never really understand how hard it is to get around with your hands tied behind your back if you haven’t done it. He told us to get up, but it wasn’t that easy. First of all, we were both waking up out of a doze, and then we had to roll off the bunk because it wasn’t really possible to just sit up and climb out the way you normally would. Blondie was losing patience with how long it was taking us, but I did my best to ignore him.

Once Zale got to his feet, he looked at me with sleepy eyes and whispered, “Do you think they’ll let us use the head?”

“No whispering,” the gunman said. He was trying very hard to sound mean and gruff, but the fact was, he looked entirely too preppy to be that scary. There was even something vaguely familiar about him that gave me a sort of friendly feeling. Okay, the gun in his hand? That was scary, but the guy was wearing new jeans, a Polo sweater with the little insignia over his breast, and very clean boat shoes.

“The kid says he needs to use the head,” I told him. “I do, too. And it won’t exactly be easy with our hands tied.” I probably wouldn’t have been that glib with him if he hadn’t looked like a South Beach model.

He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. After he’d slit the ropes on Zale’s wrists, he pointed to the bathroom. “You first,” he told him.

I’d been aware of a heavenly smell since the cabin door first opened, but it was only now really starting to register in my foggy brain. “I smell coffee,” I said.

He ignored me.

“Not even just a half a cup?”

He twitched a little, and I think I was supposed to take that for a shake of the head.

“Oh, man. That’s cruel.”

When we’d both finished with the head, he didn’t bother tying us up again. He pointed the gun to indicate that we should go up the steps into the main salon. Then he gestured for us to continue out through the sliding door aft.

It only took me a few seconds of examining the horizon to figure out where we were. Off the boat’s starboard beam, I could make out the hazy skyline of the city of Miami, the tall buildings seeming to touch the low gray clouds. The wind was blowing at a good fifteen to twenty out of the west-southwest, churning up wind chop across the wide bay that separated us from the mainland. I could see the brown scrub of an island off our port side and stern. I figured we were anchored in the cove off Sand Key at the north end of Elliot. Somewhere out in the waters off our stern were the remaining structures out in Stiltsville, the colony of houses that had existed out there in Biscayne Bay since the 1930s when old Crawfish Eddie Walker had built his first fishing shack. And beyond that? The lighthouse at Cape Florida on Key Biscayne.

If they were looking for an out-of-the-way place where they could do whatever they wanted, they’d certainly found it. On a warm spring day, Elliot Key would be crawling with boats and sunbathers, but in February weather like this, not a sane soul would venture out to this island.

Blondie grunted again and pointed with the gun at the stainless ladder that led up to the bridge deck. I looked over at Zale and I realized that he was thinking the same thing I was. That was where Nick, his father, had died. Neither of us stepped up to the ladder.

“Move it,” Blondie said. He poked me in the arm with his gun.

As I pulled myself up onto the bridge deck, I saw two people sitting in the twin helmsman’s seats on the bridge. Even with their backs to me, I recognized them, and it was not anybody I expected.

When Zale’s face appeared over the ledge of that deck, he recognized that head of hair just as I had. Richard Hunter slowly swiveled around in his chair to face us.

“Good morning,” he said. He held his guitar across his lap and he strummed a few chords. The woman sitting in the chair next to him glanced over her shoulder at us. Her long black hair disappeared down the crevice between her back and the chair, and though the upper bridge was encased on three sides with a plastic enclosure, the force of the wind swirling in from the back was making her hair fly around her face like a swarm of angry insects. Richard pointed to the bench seat that ran along the starboard side of the bridge. “Have a seat,” he said.

I motioned for Zale to slide onto the seat ahead of me. Once we were both seated, we looked at him and waited for him to say something. Richard Hunter was dressed from head to foot in brown camouflage military clothes. He was even wearing the black lace-up boots. A web belt circled his waist with a whole array of paraphernalia, from gun to baton. A knife in a black sheath was strapped to the outside of his right leg. He spread his arms, elbows in, palms upward, and said, “Well?”

“Well, what?” I asked.

He snapped at me “Shut up.” He spoke way too loud, and that’s when I figured out that he was already drunk at whatever hour of the morning it was.

“Where is it?”

Zale turned to me with a look of total puzzlement on his face. “What’s he talking about?” The kid was good.

I did, of course, have an inkling as to what it was, but I wasn’t about to let on. I raised my shoulders. “Beats me.”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought any more about the silver case we’d found in the safe. Once we were bound up and thrown into that stateroom, it seemed like the least of my worries. If I’d had to guess, I would have assumed that it was now in our captors’ possession. Apparently, I would have guessed wrong.

“Don’t you mess with me,” he shouted, pointing his finger at Zale’s face. He turned to me. “I’ve got no time for this. I’ve been chasing you all over the Everglades and back. You
know
what I’m talking about. Nick told Quinn that the kid knew where it was.”

Anna reached over and put a hand on his thigh. “It’s okay, baby.”

“Where
what
was?” I asked.

“If you think for a minute that I’m gonna let that kid get all that money—no way. Not after all my sister’s been through.”

Was that it then? The case was full of money? Why didn’t they have it already? Or was it that they just didn’t know they had it?

“I wouldn’t say your sister’s exactly had a hard life as Mrs. Nick Pontus.”

He exploded. “You shut up about my sister! You don’t know nothin’ about her life or what she went through as a kid.”

Anna reached over from the other helmsman’s chair and patted him on the arm, trying to calm him down. “
Sshhh
. Richie, baby, it’s okay.”