Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (7 page)

A thirty-foot cabin cruiser was tied alongside the houseboat. One of the men and the tough-faced woman from inside were already on the cruiser’s deck, holding weapons at the ready. Jerry, with my machete in his hand, joined them. The rest of us were motioned to get aboard. Paul led the way, followed by Rachel, Murphy, and Dalhover. Accepting the situation as just another reset, with wrists still bound, I climbed onto the deck of the cruiser.

“You first.” Gretchen motioned to Steph, then turned to Jay and asked, “What about Amy and Megan? Are you evicting them with us, or are you going to throw them ashore somewhere else where they can get killed?”

Jerry started to laugh again. Something wasn’t right in that guy’s head. I wanted to cross the four or five steps between us and shoulder him over the side. But that would probably get me shot by one of Jay’s assholes, not to mention losing my machete on the bottom of the lake.

“Amy and Megan are staying with us,” Jay told Gretchen. “Now get in the boat.”

A bearded man with a big gut and a sleeveless t-shirt pushed the barrel of his shotgun into Gretchen’s back. “Move, Queen Gretch.”

Gretchen shot him a dirty look and stepped over the gunwale to get into the cabin cruiser. “Let’s go, Steph.”

Steph turned on Jay. “You’re telling me that they decided to stay with you. Do they even know what you’re doing here?” It was clear that Steph didn’t believe Jay.

“Ask her yourself,” Jay answered.

The man with the beard pushed Gretchen and she tumbled into the boat, falling at my feet.

“Asshole.” I stepped toward the bearded dude.

He pointed the shotgun at my chest. “Uh-huh.” He smiled. “It’s a gun.”

I wanted so badly to kick in his perfectly white, good dental plan teeth.

“What do you mean, ‘ask her myself’?” Steph wasn’t moving. She got up in Jay’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jay nodded and a couple of his men took hold of Steph’s arms. “You’re staying with us, honey.”

“Fuck you!” I shouted.

Something, a gun butt maybe, pounded me on the head, and I collapsed to the deck, seeing nothing but stars. Gretchen was on her feet and raising her voice angrily at Jay. “What do you mean she’s staying? Jay, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Amy and Steph are nurses.” Jay wasn’t the least bit ruffled by Gretchen’s yelling. “They’re the first two medically trained people we’ve come across. We need a doctor, but short of that, a couple of nurses will do.”

“If you think I’m going to treat you when you get hurt, you’re crazy.” Steph left no doubt that she was serious. “I’m not about to help a bunch of kidnappers.”

Jay shrugged and looked at her with sad, kind eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’m the guilty one here. I don’t expect you to care for me when I’m sick. But those other folks on the island, they’re good people. They don’t have any guilt in this. You’ll help them. That’s all that matters.”

Jerry giggled away, like this was just the funniest thing he’d seen in years.

I tried to get up to my knees, but the barrel of a gun kept me down.

“You cannot be serious about this.” Gretchen’s voice was back to a diplomatic level. “These people are together. You’re just going to tear them apart to further your own goals?”

“You know the people on the island as well as I do, Gretchen,” Jay said. “You know they could use a nurse to treat them when they are injured or sick. Do you think sending Steph out into the world with these yahoos is going to be best for her or us? She’ll just get killed. We’re going to value her, give her a safe place.”

“You’re a lunatic.” Steph told him.

“Maybe,” Jay answered. “But that’s irrelevant. Take her back inside.”

The two men holding Steph pulled. She struggled, but couldn’t break away. She cursed at Jay, her captors, and everybody else. I was seething with anger and thirsting for revenge even before the door shut. But revenge would come later. First, I needed to be free.

We prisoners were crammed in below decks on the cabin cruiser. A padded bench wrapped around inside the bow, and it was clearly designed to convert to a bed. The space was cozy for a couple looking for romance out on a weekend cruise. For us, it was tight.

On the fourth highest of five steps leading down from the outside deck, Freitag stood with a rifle in her hand pointed tensely at where we were seated on the benches. Jerry and two others were up on deck. A few small lights illuminated the darkness in the back of the boat, and I saw Jerry standing in the stern. One of the three was just outside the open door and one was at the helm.

What were they going to do with us, I wondered. Were they really just going to free us? Run along now. Shoo. Don’t come back. It didn’t make sense. If they planned to let us go, really, why not just give us a boat and tell us to hit the road? There were plenty of boats moored around the island. They wouldn’t miss one.

If they feared that giving us a boat would only give us a way to return to extract revenge for their kidnapping of Steph and Amy, then how would they keep us from finding one of the thousands of boats tied off around the lake and doing just that?

The look in Jerry’s crazy eyes told me all I needed to know about what he wanted to do. He wanted to kill me and everybody else
with
me. Jay couldn’t do that with everyone looking on. But he could pretend to let us go, only to have us killed somewhere out of sight by his most loyal of thugs.

That
did
make sense.

The cabin cruiser bounced over a wave, and Freitag, in adjusting her balance, stepped down to the third step up from the bottom. I glared at her, telling myself for the hundredth time that I should have killed her when I had the chance. There was no depth to which she wouldn’t sink.

For no apparent reason, Freitag slowly stepped down one more step closer to us.

From the back of the boat, Jerry leaned over for a better angle into the cabin and called, “You all right there?”

“Yes, sir.” Freitag called back without turning.

Jerry stepped out of view toward the back corner of the boat.

Freitag glanced back over her shoulder and quickly moved down to the last step.

Being that close, she wasn’t far from where I sat on the end of one of the padded benches. I thought through a scenario to free us. I could wait until we hit the next big wave. Like all of us sitters did each time we hit a wave, I’d bounce up a bit. My motion would be natural, expected. But instead of being a victim of gravity and momentum, I’d use it to my advantage. I’d push with my legs and jump toward Freitag. She was five feet from me, and by the time she realized I was coming at her, she wouldn’t have time to react.

I could plow into her stomach, shoulder first—my only available weapon—and knock the breath out of her. One of the others could take her gun. One of them could free me and Murphy. But that’s where the plan fell apart. Jerry and his thugs would hear the struggle below. Then we’d be trapped below deck with one weapon, trying to get our hands untied when three guns fired on us.

I looked at my companions. How many of us would die when that happened?

Did it really matter how many of us died? The question was how many would live? If we did nothing, we’d all be doomed. I looked around at my fellow prisoners, wondering which of them had also figured that out.

Freitag glanced nervously over her shoulder. She was the only one of our captors that we could see.

I waited. I focused on the rhythm of the waves. I turned to Murphy and caught his eye.

He was up near the bow, furthest from the door, furthest from Freitag. I motioned toward Freitag with my eyes.

With a barely perceptible motion, he nodded. He understood. More importantly, he agreed. He was smart, and he was intuitive. He knew what fate awaited us.

Turning back, I noticed that Dalhover was staring at me. He’d caught the exchange between Murphy and me. He shot me a bare nod. He was on board, and his hands weren’t bound. We had a chance.

Without any urgency, I turned slowly back to Freitag and fell into the rhythm of the waves.

There would be no mercy this time. Not for her. Not for any of them.

I felt a pattern in the waves. It seemed like one out of every eight or ten we hit was larger than the others and would bounce us all a little higher off of our seats. As we came over one of the big ones, I started counting the small ones. I was going to make my move on the next big wave.

Freitag’s expressionless doll face made a change.

I counted through two waves.

She was troubled. Her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes seemed sad.

Another wave.

Another.

Her left hand let go of her rifle’s barrel. My excitement ticked up a dozen notches, but I tried not to let it show.

We bounced over another wave.

Almost there.

Freitag’s hand slid into her pocket.

It was going to be easy, at least the Freitag part. Just a few more waves.

The hand came back out of the pocket with a lock-blade knife.

Before I formed a guess as to what she planned with the knife, she caught Dalhover’s eye and tossed it to him. She turned to me and said, “Don’t kill them.”

I was dumbfounded.

Dalhover opened the knife and bounced behind Murphy to cut his bonds.

Freitag looked up over her shoulder. Just loud enough for us to hear, she said, “The boat will come to a stop soon. Hurry.”

I turned in my seat so that Dalhover would have easy access to the wires binding my wrists. As soon as my hands were free, I was up on my feet. I stepped quickly over and put myself against the wall beside Freitag. Dalhover jumped to the spot on the other side. We weren’t visible from outside the cabin.

“What is this?” I asked.

She simply said, “Now we’re even, okay?”

“Even?”

“Yes,” she said. “So fuck you, too.”

The boat’s motor quieted as the helmsman throttled down.

I said, “Thank you.”

Dalhover handed the knife to me and said to Freitag, “Give me the gun.”

Murphy was beside me before I knew he had moved.

Dalhover had the rifle in his hands and was ready to spring. Freitag held her position with her back to the stairs.

The engine noise had decreased to a low rumble, and the boat slowed to a drift.

From above, I heard the sound of Jerry’s laugh. I smiled. He was about to be surprised.

“Send ‘em up,” Jerry called.

Freitag remained frozen, pretending not to hear.

“Send ‘em up.” More loudly.

Still, Freitag did not move.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs above. “Can’t you hear me?”

Dalhover swung around in front of Freitag, using her for a shield as he held the rifle over her shoulder, pointed up the stairs. His shout at Jerry to freeze was so loud that Jerry would have been startled into inaction, even had he not seen the rifle.

I peeked around the corner. Jerry was indeed frozen, with surprise in his eyes and his mouth hanging open. He had a pistol in his hand, pointed down at the stairs. My machete hung from his other hand.

“If you move even the slightest bit, you’re dead. You understand me?” Dalhover’s voice was frighteningly harsh. “If you think there’s any chance that I can miss blowing your head off from this range, you’re a fool. You got me, Jerry?”

No one spoke, but feet were shuffling on the deck.

I squirmed around the corner, holding the handrail with one hand, leaning far forward and keeping well out of Dalhover’s line of fire. I reached out to Jerry and laid a hand on his gun.

“Let him have the gun.” Dalhover ordered. “Tell your people if I hear them move again, I’m shooting. Do it.”

In a wavering, weak voice, Jerry called, “Don’t move.”

I pushed the pistol into Murphy’s hand. “You know I can’t hit anything.”

Murphy grinned and took the weapon.

I reached back up and took my machete. Rearranging ourselves, Murphy aimed the pistol up the stairway.

Dalhover moved so that Freitag could come all the way into the cabin. “You come down here, Jerry.”

I couldn’t see the stairway, but I heard no movement.

“You can walk down here or fall down.”

“You don’t need to do this,” Jerry pleaded.

“Now.”

A stair creaked. Another creaked.

Dalhover backed into the cabin.

Murphy scooted back a bit, and Jerry stepped onto the floor. Murphy grabbed the back of his neck and drove his face to the floor, placing the pistol against the back of his head.

Dalhover called up. “You two. Lay your weapons on the stairs where I can see them.”

“No,” a man’s voice called back down. “I’ll shoot your ass.”

Murphy used the barrel of the gun to persuade Jerry to make a guess on what to do next.

Jerry guessed right. He called, “Do what he says, Gerald. Just do it.”

“Do it, Gerald.” Dalhover called.

Muffled voices conversed above, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Murphy harshly nudged Jerry with the pistol barrel again.

“Do it now!” Jerry ordered.

“Good man,” Murphy said to him.

I heard the sound of metal being laid on the deck. It was one of the guns. Another followed.

“You two,” Dalhover called, “go to the stern. Face away from me. Put your hands on the gunwale.”

Murphy kneed Jerry in the ribs.

Jerry called, “Go to the stern.”

Feet moved on the deck.

“Don’t move.” Dalhover started up the stairs.

Murphy looked at me, passing responsibility for Jerry.

As he got up to follow Dalhover, I dropped a knee between Jerry’s shoulder blades and laid the machete blade across the back of his neck.

“Don’t hurt me,” Jerry pleaded.

Five minutes later, we were all on the deck. I looked around at the lake to get my bearings. We were nearly a mile from either shore, far up the lake from Monk’s Island, and around several bends. No one still on the island had any chance of seeing or hearing what had been planned for us.

Hefting my machete, I looked at Jerry, Gerald, and the girl kneeling in the stern as they leaned over the gunwale.

Freitag must have seen the way I was looking at the three, because she guessed my thoughts. “You promised not to kill them.”

Implicitly, maybe. I looked at the three. Crap. “Sure. But they were going to kill us.”

“No, they weren’t,” Paul assured me.

I pointed my machete at the water around the boat. “Don’t you wonder why we were stopping in the middle of the lake?”

Paul looked around. His face went slack.

Gretchen asked, “Was that the plan, Jerry? Were you going to kill us?”

“Of course not.”

“Why were we stopping in the middle of the lake?”

Jerry turned to look up at Gretchen.

“Stay on your knees,” said Dalhover.

From an uncomfortably twisted position, Jerry asked, “How could you even think that?”

Gretchen repeated her question.

Gerald snapped, “We were looking for a marina.”

“A marina,” Jerry confirmed.

Gretchen looked around.

“Man,” Murphy said, “they’re lyin’.”

Freitag said, “We can’t kill them. Let’s put them ashore somewhere.”

“Or let ‘em swim.” Murphy was shaking his head and pointing at the water. “That’s what they were gonna do to us. If they didn’t shoot us first.”

“As much as I want to kill them, we can’t.” Dalhover made it clear that debate on the matter was closed.

“I agree,” Gretchen said.

Murphy shook his head. Mostly to himself, he muttered, “That’s a mistake.”

“Shit.” With the bulk of his heavy body already on the gunwale, Jerry pushed with his legs and slithered into the dark lake.

“Dammit.” Dalhover glared at Murphy.

Murphy said, “I wasn’t gonna shoot him, Top.”

Gerald decided that distraction was enough to try to save himself. He rolled over, swept his leg across Dalhover’s ankles and knocked him off his feet.

Rachel shouted, and Paul stepped back.

Gerald was on Dalhover in a flash, trying to wrestle the rifle out of Dalhover’s hands. Murphy jumped into the fight.

Gretchen shouted, “No!”

Another splash.

The girl was over the side.

While moving over to get my hands on the barrel of the rifle at the center of the wrestling match I said, “Let ‘em swim.”

Murphy hauled back and punched Gerald in the back of the head.

I got my hands on the end of the barrel, and though I didn’t have control of it, I was able to keep it pointed into the deck as the three struggled.

It only took another few moments.

Bleeding from his mouth and nose and drawing his breath in deep gasps, Gerald fell back against the stern, while Dalhover stood up, rifle in hand.

Murphy stood up, ready to punch Gerald again.

“Gerald, you didn’t need to do that,” Gretchen said to him.

Gerald glared back.

“Oh, my God,” Rachel shouted, “Where’s Jerry?”

I looked out at the water. I only saw one swimmer.

“He can’t swim,” Paul said.

Another one?

“Where is he?” Gretchen turned around and looked toward the bow.

I looked around. All of us did, except for Murphy. His job was to keep Gerald in place, and by the look on Murphy’s face, Gerald had better not try anything else.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” I’d seen enough James Bond movies to know that Jerry was hiding under the boat or something like that. “Turn off the engine.”

Paul was closest to the helm and did as asked.

“What are you thinking?” Gretchen asked.

I pointed at the water along the boat’s hull. “I’ll bet he’s hiding underneath and coming up for breaths.”

“That’s stupid,” Dalhover told me.

I asked, “Where is he, then?”

“Bottom of the lake.” Dalhover wiped some blood away from his mouth and looked down at Gerald in a way that should have given the man cause to worry.

Gretchen looked up and down the length of the boat. “Let’s check. Paul, you and Rachel go and look over each side of the bow.” She stepped over to the port side. “I’ll take this side. Zed, you take that side. Dalhover, will you look over the stern?”

Shaking his head, Dalhover leaned over the back of the boat.

Murphy leaned close to Gerald. “It won’t bother me to shoot you if you decide to get froggy.”

“Froggy?” Gerald was confused.

“If you jump,” Murphy explained.

Not even knowing why, I told Gerald, “Murphy is a comedian.”

“Nothing back here,” Dalhover announced.

Rachel said, “Nothing here.”

“Clear,” said Paul.

“We’ll keep looking for a few minutes. “I doubt Jerry can hold his breath for long.”

Gerald said, “He’s not under the boat.”

“And how do you know that?” Gretchen asked.

“Because that dude’s crazy.”

“Yet, you sided with him.”

Gerald looked at Murphy with plenty of hate in his eyes. “You were going to let these fucks on the island.”

“Don’t you understand that you’re immune?” Gretchen asked him.

“Nobody knows that for sure,” Gerald argued. “We might all still get it, and you would have turned us all into monsters.”

Murphy shot me a look. “Told you, Zed.”

I huffed and flatly said, “Yeah, you told me. Everybody hates us.”

Dalhover glanced at me and almost smiled. “If you whiners don’t be quiet about that shit, I’m going to hate you, too.”

Damn, even he had a sense of humor.

From the front of the boat, Paul mused, “Ignorance. Nothing ever changes.”

Gretchen asked, “Does anybody see anything yet?”

Nobody did.

“We’ll give it another few minutes, just to be sure.” She was sad about that.

I wasn’t. It saved me the trouble of killing crazy-ass Jerry and dealing with the guilt I’d feel about it later.

“If you’re going to kill me,” Gerald spat, “just do it.”

Gretchen wasn’t impressed with Gerald’s machismo. “You watch too many movies. Nobody wants to kill anybody.”

I said, “Hey, that chick out there looks like maybe she’s getting into trouble.”

Dalhover looked. “Dammit.”

From her side of the boat, Gretchen announced, “Jerry’s not here. Paul, will you come back here and drive the boat? We need to go get Melissa before she drowns.”

Paul hurried back. Rachel followed and went down into the cabin.

“Looks like crazy Jerry drowned himself.” I looked at the others for consensus on that.

Gretchen shook her head. “I was hoping we could trade him for Steph.”

Shit. She was right. We could have. I looked back at the water, hoping to see Jerry coming up for air.

The cabin cruiser’s engine started and Paul steered it toward Melissa. Rachel came out of the cabin with a couple of life preservers. She tossed one in Gerald’s lap and moved to stand beside him. Paul was guiding the boat so that when we came up beside Melissa, she’d be on our side.

I asked, “Gretchen, we can trade these two for Steph, right?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it.”

“Jay will go nuts when he finds out about Jerry,” Paul said. “He’ll want revenge.”

“Are Steph and Amy in danger?”

“Hurting them won’t make any sense.” Gretchen sat down in a seat by Paul. She reached out and took his hand in hers. “Jay is crazy, but he’s smart. The whole reason he kept Steph and Amy is because they’re nurses. They’re valuable.”

I asked, “What about Megan?”

“He won’t hurt a child.”

I couldn’t tell if Gretchen was certain or whether she was hoping.

Paul slowed the boat.

Rachel tossed the life preserver to Melissa. “Grab it.”

Melissa did, looking up at me with fear in her eyes.

I shook my head. That was disappointing.

Paul asked, “What do we do with them?”

Gretchen’s mind was somewhere else by then. Maybe she was thinking about our chances of starting over somewhere safe. Maybe she was thinking about what might happen to Steph and Amy when Jay found out about Jerry.

Rachel said, “They both have a life preserver. They can swim back from here.”

Wow. She had a pragmatic edge, just like Murphy.

She saw me looking at her and smiled. “They won’t drown.”

I said, “I think we should take them back and try to trade them for Steph and Amy.”

“No,” Gretchen answered. “That really won’t work. Honestly Zed, once Jay hears that Jerry is dead, he’ll stop being rational. He’ll want to kill us all. He won’t have
any
interest in negotiating.”