Blood Diamond (11 page)

I wanted to adopt my briskest stride and get to the cargo bay, but I forced myself to keep my pace purposeful without looking hurried. The crew of a luxury liner didn’t rush. The walk was almost as unnerving as rigging my brother’s truck to explode. Instead of being shredded in the blast, if I were caught, I’d end up in Inquisition custody, unable to protect Evelyn. My palms were wet with sweat, and I resisted the urge to wipe them off on my trousers.

The crowd flowed in the direction of the dining hall, leaving me to wade through them, my head ducked while I leaned forward to mask my height. If my path crossed any Inquisitors, I didn’t spot them and they didn’t stop me. Entering the cargo bay involved heading down a flight of steps to a pair of locked industrial doors. It was a two-step process to access the bay, involving a physical key and a code punched into a number pad. I opened the doors, fighting with their weight to push my way inside.

Other ships in the same class as the
Wave Dream
could carry hundreds more passengers. Instead of the extra staterooms, the ship had been rigged with an expanded cargo bay, fashioned after a modern warehouse. I stood on a catwalk overlooking half of the multi-storied space. A maze of crates, shipping containers, and pallets were secured with ropes and netting. Pulleys equipped with chains with hooks swung from the railing overhead.

It’d been a while since I had been in the cargo bay of any of the ships I used for my smuggling operations. According to Zachary’s directions, I’d find the supervisor’s office below me, accessed by a staircase somewhere to my right. I closed the door, making certain to lock it and reengage the security system. The catwalk creaked under me as I headed to the office. I descended to the main floor of the warehouse. It wasn’t until I passed through a gap between two stacks of crates that I saw the darkened office. The door had been left open.

“Odd,” I muttered, tucking Zachary’s clipboard under my arm. The supervisor, like Zachary, was one of my long-term friends. Brandon wasn’t the type to walk off shift without locking up, not when he was responsible for the legal and illegal inventories on board the ship. He didn’t like leaving a job unfinished, either. When Zachary wasn’t available, I went to him—and he often handled my most sensitive work, including the transportation of radioactive materials, including the Canadian medical isotopes I acquired for the Inquisition.

The industrial lamps overhead, while offering sufficient light for the rest of the cargo bay, didn’t penetrate far into the window-fronted steel box. I’m pretty certain it had once been a shipping container modified to Brandon’s liking. I’d have to talk to Zachary about the office later. I held back a lot of money specifically for equipping my men and women with the best they could get. Brandon deserved better than a makeshift office.

Easing my way through the door, I slid my hand along the wall in search of the light switch. With my luck and Brandon’s enjoyment of pranks, he was probably lying in wait, ready and more than willing to scare a few years off my lifespan.

“Brandon, if you even think about jumping out at me, you’re a dead man,” I warned before flipping the switch.

The office was empty, and knowing my threats were futile, I stooped over to check under the stainless steel desk bolted to the floor. When I saw no sign of Brandon, I frowned and stepped forward, plunking the clipboard down on the desk.

I looked over his work; there was no sign of a note, which worried me almost as much as the spread of clutter. Instead of his usual neat stacks, sheets were scattered everywhere. Two pages had even made their way to the floor. Bending over, I scooped them up, setting them in the inbox along with the pages at risk of falling.

The creak of metal and the scuff of a boot warned me of the presence of someone behind me. Muttering under my breath, I spun to put an end to Brandon’s effort to startle me.

For a moment, I mistook the woman I faced for Evelyn; they were about the same height with bright auburn hair. I hadn’t thought green eyes were common, but hers were more of an emerald than jade. There was nothing pleasant or friendly about the way she glared at me. Her sickly pale skin set her apart from the Fenerec. If she had any beauty, it was lost in the way she scowled with her yellowed teeth exposed. A splash of red lipstick drew my eye, and the shade was too close to blood for my comfort.

She held her braided hair in one hand, the end fashioned into a hangman’s noose. Stepping forward, her frown deepened while she narrowed her eyes. She hissed, “You heard me.”

Between the disapproval in her voice and my certainty she was at least a little crazy, I jumped back, bumping into the desk. She pounced, swinging her noose in the general direction of my head. While I was fairly confident in the fact that Brandon had a gun stashed somewhere in the office, I didn’t know where. With a psycho attacking me with her hair, I didn’t have time to find it; even if I did, I doubted I could bring myself to pull the trigger. First, I’d miss. Second, I hated the thought of hurting a woman, let alone killing her.

My idiotic male ego was going to be the death of me, likely by the lady stalking me with her braid. The only real weapon I could access was the phone. Sweeping out my hand, I knocked it off the hook, sending the base clattering to the floor. Unless Zachary had changed the system, the phone would detect that no numbers had been tapped into the touchscreen display. After twenty seconds, it would page the ship’s security.

I didn’t have any time to do anything else before she was on me. Ducking away from her makeshift noose, I slid along the desk, stumbling into one of the office’s two folding chairs.

I was so focused on dodging her hair that I didn’t notice her foot sweeping out at me. Agony stabbed up my left leg as her boot connected with my knee. My yelp was cut off as she once again struck at my head. I fell back against the desk, my elbow cracking against the metal surface.

“Stand still, damn you,” she hissed.

While I drew the line at hitting a woman, I wasn’t about to let her kill me without fighting back somehow. The only thing nearby I could use as a non-lethal weapon was Brandon’s bottle of hand sanitizer. Snatching it up, I thrust it into her face, depressing the pump as hard as I could, squirting the blue-green gel into her eyes. Squealing in pain, she jerked back, rubbing her face.

“Sorry about that,” I said, lurching for the door. Her pain didn’t stop her from sweeping out a foot to trip me.

My chin cracked into the doorframe, followed by my shoulder. Instead of falling, I bounced off and staggered into the narrow passage between crates, office, and shipping containers. Leaving the woman to shriek curses in my wake, I hobbled deeper into the bay, hoping to lose her in the maze of goods.

Whoever she was, there was one thing I was certain of: she wasn’t an Inquisitor. The mad were put down so they couldn’t harm anyone. Unfortunately for me, by the time security investigated the off-the-hook phone, someone would be in a lot of trouble, and that someone was me.

~~*~~

I felt like the world’s largest mouse, and I had the misfortune of being stalked by an insane feline. My knee held my weight. but it hurt like hell, the pain made worse by the fact I had to be quiet or risk being caught. The woman screamed catcalls at me, pissing me off more and more by the minute. If she had used words, I might not have been bothered so much by it, but she vocalized in meows, hisses, and ear-piercing shrieks.

On rare occasion, when she managed to lose my trail altogether, she spat curses, most of which consisted of incomprehensible gibberish. The kindest one I made out was something regarding my mother and an anteater. Maybe if I had been someone else, the insult against my family would have held more sway, but I was pretty sure my mother would be quite content if the crazy woman with her hair noose managed to kill me.

I was seriously starting to regret my stance regarding violence against deserving and dangerous women. I also regretted not having a gun or some other weapon. My willingness to put an end to her mad ramblings and her stalking astonished and distressed me. I’d already assaulted her with hand sanitizer, and that hadn’t been enough to dissuade her. It hadn’t done more than slow her down for a few minutes.

Then again, she had her hair fashioned into a noose. Any expectation of sanity from her on my part was about as unreasonable as her presence in the cargo bay in the first place. Zachary had a strict policy against hiring the mentally unstable; with hundreds of lives in his care, his crew had their backgrounds checked out. Due to my affiliation with the Inquisition, the vetting process included both Federal and Inquisition databases, something neither Zachary nor I liked, but were forced to endure.

I couldn’t blame the Inquisition, considering the
Wave Dream
was the ship that carried the medical isotopes they needed.

I hunkered down between a shipping crate and a pallet of boxes enveloped in plastic wrap, grimacing as the woman shrieked somewhere not too far away. If I escaped with my head intact, I was going to have a long chat with Zachary about how someone had broken into the cargo bay. Unfortunately, who she was and what she was doing on board came second to figuring out how I was going to escape yet another bad situation with my life intact.

It just wasn’t my week.

To make matters worse, the company left a whole lot to be desired this time. While Evelyn wanted me, at least I was fairly certain it wasn’t so she could
kill
me. When a Fenerec wanted someone dead, they killed them. That was something I respected about wolves; they hunted to eat or remove a threat. Playing with their food—usually—wasn’t how they operated.

The lethal version of hide and seek I was playing didn’t sit well with me. My palms sweated, and it was a miracle I wasn’t panting, considering how fast my heart was beating. At the rate I was going, I was at risk of suffering from a heart attack long before she found me. My dignity—or what remained of it—took another beating.

There was a reason I wasn’t supposed to participate in field ops. Life and death situations and I simply didn’t get along. When I shot a gun, I had a tendency to close my eyes
and
flinch. The only martial arts I knew involved my knee and someone else’s groin, which I doubted was allowed in any school.

I leaned my back to the crate and slowed my breathing. Panicking wasn’t going to get me anywhere and panting like a worn-out racehorse wasn’t helping me any. Closing my eyes, I considered my options.

They were few and far between. All I could do was keep moving and hope Zachary could deal with her, because I had my doubts I could do anything about her.

The crate shifted behind me. Snapping my eyes open, I jerked in time to catch a glimpse of a pair of legs crashing down on me. Her knees hit my shoulders and sent me sprawling to the floor. My chin bounced against metal, clacking my teeth together.

Bursts of light danced in front of my eyes. In the short time it took me to shake off the daze from impact, the woman slipped a coil of her braided hair around my throat. Her knee dug into the middle of my back, pinning me to the floor.

“There you are,” she whispered in my ear. “Why don’t you just lie still like the good boy you are?”

The noose tightened and my attempt to reply ended in a wheezed croak. My ears buzzed, accompanied by a rushing in my head. Part of me knew I needed to struggle, but all I managed to do was make my fingers twitch. Her knee twisted against my spine. I tried to suck in a breath, but the noose cut off my air. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her pull a syringe out.

“See this?” She showed me the needle, a clear drop of fluid beading on its tip. “You’re going to take a nice little nap now, my lovely. Once you’re good, quiet, and tied up to my likings, I get to do whatever I want with you until you’re safely delivered. Aren’t I lucky?”

Her scowl had been hideous enough, but her smile sent shudders racing through me. Without loosening her hold on the noose, she jabbed the needle into my unresponsive arm and depressed the plunger. A chill spread up my arm from whatever drugs she pumped into me.

When my body went limp, the pressure against my throat eased enough I could suck in a breath. My throat ached. Despite the relief to my burning lungs, I struggled to keep my eyes open. As the cold from the drugs intensified, I was aware of her sliding off my back. My chest was one of the few parts of me I could feel; my lungs hurt. After another few moments, I didn’t feel anything at all.

As I fell into the dark, soothing embrace of the drugs, I heard a distant growl.

~~*~~

The problem with drugs, especially the ones not meant for general public use, was their relentlessness and unwillingness to ease their hold on their victims; in this case, me. I became aware of little things first, including a tingle in my fingertips and my throbbing throat. Something tugged at the stubble of my beard, which I hadn’t managed to shave. The yanks at the individual hairs anchored me to consciousness. Between my annoyance at the brief flashes of pain and my confusion over what caused it, I was able to remain somewhat aware.

For a long time, all I could do was cling to a single coherent thought: I didn’t want to sleep. I adamantly didn’t want to, though the reasons for my refusal flitted in and out of my head with the ethereal quality of a dream. As I won ground against the medication fogging my mind, the importance of why I needed to remain awake grew, until I was finally capable of focusing my attention on my situation.

A crazy cat lady had strangled me with her hair before stabbing me with a needle. I considered surrendering to the drugs she had dosed me with to alleviate my embarrassment over my predicament. Until the sedatives—if that’s what they were—wore off, I was helpless.

I hated being helpless. My annoyance deepened to anger.

I wanted to loop the woman’s noose around her neck and hang her. Considering that I couldn’t open my eyes, I evaluated my chances of escape without help at approximately zero. It was sometime between my contemplation of murder and contemplating how to escape that my knee reported it really hurt.