Force of Nature (42 page)

“There’s a bathroom over here, if you need it,” Annie told Robin.

“Yeah,” Foley said into his phone. “It’s going to take me about forty minutes to reach the rendezvous point. Best go ahead and take care of the cargo you already have. I’ll take care of mine.”

He was talking to Junior—Robin knew this with a cold sense of dread that was reflected in Annie’s horrified eyes. Dear God, if they were right, and Foley
was
talking to Junior, then the cargo to which he was referring had to be Jules and Ric.

“No!” Robin shouted. “You tell him to keep them safe!” but Foley surely didn’t hear him over the roar of the boat’s motor as it started.

Martell was dead.

Except he’d always believed that death would not hurt, that death would bring him to a beautiful, peaceful place, where gorgeous naked angels would sing him all of his favorite Motown hits.

Wherever he was now, no one was singing him shit and the beauty factor was about a negative billion. It was cold and damp and dark and hard and dirty, and every breath he took hurt like hell.

But since he didn’t believe in hell, there could only be one solution to this puzzle.

He wasn’t dead yet.

He reached for his phone, but of course it wasn’t in his pocket. If
he’d
gone over to the dark side of the force and decided to shoot someone and leave them to die, he wouldn’t let them keep their cell phone, either, just in case they roused before they kicked.

So Martell bent his legs, pulling his feet up to his butt, and he pushed himself, sliding on his back along the concrete, through the puddle of blood he’d already lost. Damn, there was a lot of it, and damn, just moving a little hurt enough to make him scream.

Maybe he’d been wrong all those years, and hell really did exist.

Still, he pulled his legs back up, weeping from the effort and the pain, and he did it again, following the arrow that hung from the concrete ceiling, beneath the words that meant even more to him right now than
life everlasting in heaven.

E
LEVATOR TO HOTEL MAIN LOBBY.

Annie didn’t know what else to do, except keep going.

She’d heard the same words Robin had, and she knew that when Foley used the phrase
take care of them
, he didn’t mean pulling an ottoman up to the sofa for their feet, and feeding them chocolates.

He was going to kill them both.

She knew, too, that if Junior really was with Ric and Jules, there was a good chance that they already were as dead as Martell—whom they’d left lying in a pool of blood.

But sitting here, defeated and broken, trying to figure out how she would survive in a world without Ric’s quicksilver smile…

It was just not her style.

And wouldn’t
she
feel stupid if Foley unlocked the door, ready to drag them up onto the deck to kill them—without having discovered if one of the cabinets in the room or one of those suitcases in the corner held a cache of automatic rifles and ammo?

Or a cell phone. A cell phone would be really nice.

“Help me,” she told Robin as she opened the cabinets and found a fully outfitted wet bar, a stash of orange life preservers and foul-weather clothes, a collection of bikinis of all shapes and sizes—mostly tiny—and various types of fishing gear.

He saw what she was doing, and dragged himself over to the suitcases. Apparently they were unlocked, and he pulled the top one onto the floor and unzipped it. “What the hell…?”

Annie came over to look.

“This is C4.” Robin looked up at her. “There’s enough here to…” He shook his head, his eyes rimmed with red. “Shit, I don’t know. Blow up Florida? I’ve never seen this much before.”

“C4, the explosive?” she asked. It looked like blocks of whitish-gray putty, like huge chunks of that sticky stuff she’d used to put posters up on the wall of her college dorm room. “Are you sure?”

“Very,” he said. “I played a Navy SEAL in
Riptide
and there’s a scene where I build a bomb. Most of it ended up cut out of the movie because it read as a little too ‘how-to manual.’ When we filmed the sequence, I used actual C4. Just like this.”

“Are you serious?” They had him working with real explosives?

“It’s stable,” Robin told her. “Believe me, the studio wouldn’t have let me touch it if it was dangerous. The blow-a-thumb-off part is the blasting cap, which…wow…Careful—that’s what you’ve got in there.”

Annie had unzipped another of the suitcases to reveal sets of metal boxes—the blasting caps, eek—and coils of gray-green wire.

“That’s something called time fuse.” Robin pointed to the coils. “Holy shit, we’ve got everything we need to blow this boat to hell.”

Provided they knew how to hook it all together. Most people wouldn’t have a clue—which was why Foley had so casually locked them in here with all this stuff. But most people hadn’t played a Navy SEAL in their latest movie.

Still…A movie wasn’t the same as real life.

“You really could do it?” Annie asked Robin now. “Make a bomb? One that works?”

“I don’t think you can call it a bomb if it doesn’t work,” he pointed out. “But yeah. I mean, I’ve never used real blasting caps, but…Yeah. I could do it.”

So, great. They could kill Foley by blowing up the boat. Of course, being locked belowdeck meant they’d die, too. It was not quite the plan Annie had hoped to come up with.

“I’ll need a knife to cut the time fuse,” Robin continued. “And we’ll need matches.” He laughed derisively. “
And
massive doses of Tylenol to bring this fever down. My hands are shaking. This is going to be hard to do.”

He honestly believed he had the flu.

“Blowing ourselves up seems like it should go, oh, say, last on our list of options,” Annie told him. She was still hoping to find an AK-47. She opened one of the coolers and…Dear God. “Um, Robin, did your character in
Riptide
by any chance know a
lot
about bombs?”

The thing at the bottom of this cooler looked an awful lot like a makeshift bomb on some kind of a timer. It hadn’t been turned on—the LEDs were unlit and weren’t counting down, thank God—but it still managed to look dangerous with all the wires and jerry-rigged parts.

“Who would put a bomb in a cooler?” Robin asked as he came to look at it. “You don’t think…?” He looked up at her.

Annie knew what he was thinking—she’d already gotten there herself. “A
cooler
nuke?” It sounded so unlikely that it just might be possible. But this thing looked as if it had been made by someone’s insane uncle Bob in the basement of his soon-to-be foreclosed-upon house. “Aren’t most small nukes made with parts stolen from the former USSR?”

Except there it was, down toward the bottom of the thing, beneath the snarl of wires: a metal piece that had Cyrillic writing.

“It looks…awfully amateur for a nuke,” Robin said. “But my experience comes purely from watching James Bond movies. I probably wouldn’t be able to recognize a real assassin with a blade-edged bowler hat, either.”

Annie laughed, despite the knot in her stomach, despite Martell’s brutal murder, despite her fear for Ric’s safety, despite her fear of her own potentially impending and surely painful death.

Robin was smiling, too, but his smile was not one of humor. It was tight and grim and it matched the almost unholy spark of light in his eyes.

“Whatever it is, let’s not let these motherfuckers use it,” Robin said. “Help me rig this C4 to blow. Find me some matches. We don’t need a knife. We’ll just use the shortest coil of cord.” He unwound one of the coils of what he’d called time fuse. “This’ll do it. It’s shorter than I thought. We’ll light it when we hear Foley coming below. It’ll give us lots of time—around ten minutes for a piece this long—figure between thirty and forty seconds a foot. We let him drag us up on deck, where we bash his head in, grab a life preserver, jump overboard, and swim like hell. You can swim, can’t you?”

Annie nodded.

“Good,” Robin said. “We better work fast. The boat’s moving slowly, which means we’re probably still either in the canal or the harbor. As soon as we reach open water, Foley’s going to put the pedal to the metal. And when we’re out of sight of land, he’s going to come below, and
take care
of us.” His eyes were grim. “Let’s be ready for him.”

When Junior’s cell phone rang, Ric glanced at Jules, who was on the same page.

This was not good. He, too, had picked up all the signals that Junior was killing time, waiting for something to happen—like a phone call telling him that Robin and Annie had been contained.

“Here we go,” Ric murmured as Junior, clearly pleased about something, hung up his phone.

“Fallback’s the galley,” Jules told him, his voice low. They couldn’t have been in a better position for that. They were standing a few long strides from the half flight of stairs down. Junior and his men were all closer to the back of the boat—the stern.

And sure enough, “Okay, boys,” Junior said, and his men all drew their weapons. “Surprise,” he told Jules and Ric as five gun barrels were pointed at them.

“Yeah,” Jules said, intentionally sounding bored. “Not really.”

If they could get their hands on even just one of those handguns, they could hold Junior and his men off indefinitely, from the safety of that galley.

“How’s this for a surprise, then?” Junior said. “You remember Foley, don’t you, Ric? He’s got your Amazon of a girlfriend.” He looked at Jules. “And your…dick-loving faggot of a boyfriend.”

“Accurate,” Jules said, putting his hand on Ric’s arm to keep him from going off, “but not quite politically correct.” His own heart was in his throat. It was all he could do to keep talking, but he knew if he didn’t, he and Ric were going to be very dead very soon. And then there’d be no helping Robin and Annie.

“You make me sick,” Junior said. “Pretending to want to make a sex tape and—”

“You know all about pretending, don’t you, Gordie?” Jules interrupted. “Robin told me you tried to get him to give you head in the bathroom during your father’s party. You are going to
love
prison, bro.”

Ric was looking at Jules as if he’d lost his mind. But sometimes jumping on homophobic buttons worked. Especially if the homophobe was a psychopath.

Jules’s goal here was to get Junior angry, and sure enough, the man was frothing now with outrage. So he pushed him even harder, this time in a different direction. “If you expect us to believe you’ve got Robin and Annie just because you say so, then you’re even dumber than I thought. If you want to negotiate, I’m going to need proof of life, so you better get back on that phone to your bitch, Foley, and tell him to keep Robin and Annie alive.”

“Negotiate?” Junior was beyond pissed. “You’re in no fucking position to make demands. You have some giant balls.”

Jules shook his head. “There you go again. You know, for a so-called straight guy, you’re much too interested in what’s in my pants.”

“All right. That’s it.” Junior had had enough. “You know what, asshole? I was going to kill you fast, but now I’m not.”

As Robin would say,
score.

Junior kept ranting. “I’m going to make you watch your friends die, starting with the faggot, and then the double-wide, and then the spic. And then it’ll just be you, you disgusting piece of shit, in the water, praying you drown faster—knowing you’re about to be blown apart.” He turned to the skinhead. “Tie them up.”

The skinhead approached. “Get on the deck, hands on your head.”

Jules looked at Ric, who was looking back at him. It was go time. As soon as he got close enough…And they couldn’t ask for a better setup. Skinhead was between them and the rest of the gunmen. If any of the others tried to shoot Jules or Ric, they’d risk hitting their friend.

But the way the skinhead was waving his weapon around was a bullet wound waiting to happen. It was unlikely Jules and Ric were going to be able to do this without one of them getting shot.

Ric was proving himself to be the best partner Jules had had since Alyssa Locke left the FBI, because once again, he was following Jules’s exact line of thought.

“It’ll be me,” he told Jules, meaning he should be the one to put himself in front of that gun barrel. “You’re a better shot. We need you in one piece.”

“Shut the fuck up and get on the deck!” Skinhead got louder.

And closer.

“Now!” Ric shouted, leading the charge, and Jules heard the skinhead’s handgun go off.

“I totally get why Jules loves you,” Annie told Robin as she went to the cabinets she’d rifled through earlier, no doubt to search for matches. “You’re not only funny—you’re also smart.”

“Cute, too,” Robin said as he tried to will his hands to stop shaking. So far, no go. “Don’t forget cute. And hot. The
L.A. Times
called me a contender for
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year.” He looked up because it sounded as if she were pouring liquid into a glass.

It sounded like that, because she was. She was holding a bottle of Johnny Walker and a glass, which she now offered to him.

“What the fuck?” Robin couldn’t believe her.

“You don’t have the flu,” Annie told him quietly. “You’re sick because you’re detoxing.”

“Get that away from me!”

But she didn’t. She came closer. “You’re going through alcohol withdrawal, and you know it. If you want steady hands, if you want to be able to swim to shore, you’re going to need a drink first.”

“It is, too, the flu,” he insisted, but his heart was sinking and he knew she was right. How many times had his mother promised to stop drinking, only to lie ill and shaking on the couch? Her mysterious illness had always vanished, though, as soon as she’d given in and poured herself a tall one.

And Jesus, he wanted that drink Annie was offering him almost as much as he wanted to keep breathing. “I promised Jules,” he said.

Annie nodded. “I know,” she told him, sympathy in her eyes. “I also know he’ll understand. Robin, if we get through this…” She stopped and corrected herself. “
When
we get through this, you’re going to need to detox someplace where you’ll have medical supervision. Until then…If you don’t drink this…One out of four people have seizures during alcohol withdrawal. If you have a seizure when we’re in the water…I’m sorry, but I’m not a strong enough swimmer to keep us both afloat.”