Dead Reckoning

She was silent for a moment before she asked, “What do you think they’re talking about?”

His heavy sigh could have been anything: fatigue, resignation, exasperation. “I don’t know,” he said finally, kicking his chair back onto two legs. “I got an idea but I never cared much for guessin’.”

He had a point. Guessing invited a lot of wondering, and that would turn into worrying. She had enough of that on her plate already.

While Gus jangled quarters and dimes, Chris tried to concentrate on not wondering if Jerome was hurting Natalie. Live today, right now, she reminded herself. Maybe it was time to go back to meditating. That practice had helped when she was having a tough time with the rig roughnecks. Funny how the simplest things got so easily swamped by worry and fear. You get busy, then you forget how to stay centered, sane.

“What I don’t understand,” Gus said abruptly, “is why these boys sound like they need your boat. The DEA could use any old tub they’ve seized recently.”

“I thought smugglers used Cigarette boats and fishing trawlers,” she said, thinking back over cruising posts and magazine articles she’d read.

“Then why don’t they take a damn go-fast boat then?”

“You know I won’t let them go without me,” she warned.

Before Gus could work up a head of steam, the office door opened. Chris watched Smith and Garza file back in and settle across from her again. Gus tipped his chair onto all four legs, clearly ready to do battle.

“Ms. Hampton,” Smith said, “you’ve given us the best chance in years to put our hands on Scintella. It’s a major break for us.”

“I’m sure of that,” she said flatly. “What about my sister?”

“We want to see her home with you safe and sound.”

That she wasn’t sure of. Smith didn’t seem to notice.

“We’ll put a team together and go to Isladonata, intercept Scintella and bring your sister back.”

“On what boat?”

“I phoned my partner, Special Agent McLellan, while Mr. Garza and I were outside. McLellan wants to pay for the upgrades in exchange for using your yacht.”

“Why can’t you take a seized boat?” Gus demanded.

“Logistical problem,” Smith snapped. “Last year’s hurricane season took out our suitable yachts. Ms. Hampton’s right. We need something that won’t make them suspicious.”

“And you’ll find a captain who can handle a hundred-ton vessel?” She ignored the yank on her gut at the thought of handing the yacht—her home—over to a bunch of weekend sea cowboys she didn’t know.

“It might be tricky,” he admitted.

“How will you find the island?”

“Hook us up with your sister and we’ll take it from there.”

She shook her head. “It’s not going to work that way.”

“Why not?” Smith asked sharply.

“She won’t talk to anyone but me.”

“That’s not wise—”

“Of course it’s wise. She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know your voice. What if Jerome tricks her into talking to one of his thugs? It’s bad enough that he could tap her phone.” Chris paused, lifted her chin. “But she knows me. She trusts me. If she does happen to come up with fresh information, she’ll call.”

Smith hesitated, clearly tempted. “We can set up a phone relay.”

Chris shook her head. “Not good enough. I’m going with you or there’s no deal.” When she saw that mule look come over Smith’s open face, she added, “This isn’t negotiable.”

“You don’t understand.” Smith leaned forward. “Two operations failed to bring Scintella in. Believe it or not, the long shot you’ve dropped in our laps may be our best opportunity to nail him. He might anticipate his men turning on him, but he might not guess that his wife would.”

“I just want to know Natalie’s going to be safe. If it comes down to a choice between catching Scintella and saving my sister—”

“There aren’t any guarantees where Scintella’s concerned,” Smith said bluntly. “Except that he’s dangerous and he’ll fight being brought in. He’ll do everything he can to stay free.”

And the DEA agents, no matter how well-meaning, would have their sights set first on Scintella, then on Natalie.

I’m the only one who’s going to be looking out for her.

“I’m captaining my vessel on this trip,” Chris told Smith as she stood. Before he could start lobbing objections her way, she said, “When you and your partner come out to the boatyard, I’ll be prepping my yacht.” Then she turned on her heel and walked out.

The small, silver key dangled on a chain held lightly in Special Agent Smith’s fingers. Behind him, late afternoon sunlight swept into Obsession’s salon, haloing him, making his blond hair almost golden, his roughly sculpted features classically Grecian in their shadows and highlights.

“I wouldn’t deposit or spend this all at once,” he said around a smile.

Safety-deposit box key.

Chris scrubbed her hands with a shop rag, feeling suddenly as if plucking that key from his fingers would change everything, that she’d be cast out into the perilous unknown. The end of innocence. The end of everything she knew and the start of a journey she might not complete.

The rising tide of fear was swallowed by the image of Natalie holding out an ice-cream cone to Chris. Chris had been fourteen and Natalie four. “Share!” Natalie had shouted and laughed, tossing her dark, curly hair.

Leave everything she knew behind? Risk her boat and her life to save her sister?

So be it.

She took the key from Smith’s hand and shoved it deep in her shorts pocket. “Thanks.”

“My partner doesn’t like the idea of your captaining us.” Smith stepped farther into the salon, abruptly losing his godlike demeanor as he glanced around, seemingly taking everything in at once.

“You told him I won’t take no for an answer.”

“Yes.” He paused. “For what it’s worth, I’m in your corner on this.”

Surprised, she glanced at him. His face showed nothing but the certainty of a man who knew what he wanted to do. “I appreciate that,” she said. “Where is your partner?”

“Busy. He’ll show on Monday.” He flashed a quick and charming smile. “Call me Smitty.”

She relaxed a little. Funny how nicknames knocked people down to size or elevated them into legend. Thank God his nickname hadn’t been something like Nine-Fingered Sam or Chainsaw Larry. “Smitty” was a guy you could trust. Like “Gus.”

Then she asked the sixty-four-dollar question. “How much boating experience do you have?”

“I’ve done a little Coastie work up the eastern seaboard.”

“Coast Guard, huh?” she shot back, surprised. “What’d you do?”

He shrugged, wandering past her to the aft deck’s sliding door. “A little search and rescue, a little cruise ship escort, stuff like that. Nothing too exciting.”

“Not exciting?”

Smitty chuckled. “If I never see another drunken offshore fisherman with a bad bilge pump, it’ll be too soon. Can I have a tour or are you in the middle of something?”

“No, I’ve got time. You’ve seen the aft deck there.”

“Yeah, it’s a great space.” Smitty’s gaze automatically moved from the port cleat to the storage compartment marked LIFE JACKETS to the round life ring and its attached line. His priorities fit hers, she noted with approval.

“She was under a shed and neglected for almost twenty years,” Chris said. “I’m surprised she even floats.”

“Old girl like this? She’ll never sink. That your distribution panel?” he asked, hooking a thumb at the sliding wooden door in the salon wall.

“Yes.”

She slid open the panel’s door to let him study the shore power switches, generator start-and-stop mechanism, the breaker switches for all the boat’s electrics.

“Nice setup. You wire all this up?”

She nodded. “The electrical wiring on the old panel was so frayed I’m surprised she didn’t burn to the waterline when the surveyor switched on the shore power.” She watched him close up the panel as she said, “I still have some wiring to check. There’s a light switch here in the salon that doesn’t work.”

He stood again and his gaze traced the probable route from the distribution panel to the light switch on the other side of the salon. “Take half a day to track down, probably.”

“Low priority,” she replied. “Come on down below. I’ll show you the engine rooms.”

Smitty might turn out okay, she thought as she led the way down the spiral staircase to the lower passageway. He seemed to know his stuff and appeared comfortable with the fact this was her vessel. Even Dave had wanted to jump in and fix things for her rather than wait for her to ask for help. But Smitty just put his idea out there—half a day to fix the light switch wiring—and left the decision up to her.

She opened the starboard engine room door and squinted against the door’s piercing screech. Note to self: Oil the hinges. She flicked on the overhead light and the starboard engine’s massive bulk sprang to life.

“A Detroit!” Smitty said, clearly pleased. “Twelve-vee-ninety-six?”

“Yep. Naturally aspirated, no turbocharging. One thing I wanted to do was paint the engine room floor here before the shakedown cruise so the leaks would show. I overhauled both Hortense and Claire, but—”

“Excuse me?” Smitty asked, turning from his examination of the engine’s coolant, collection tank cap in hand.

“Claire’s the starboard engine. Hortense is the port, just across the hall in her own engine room.”

His grin split his mobile face. “Claire and Hortense. Named after…?”

“Great-aunts on my father’s side.” Chris smiled, faintly remembering lemon squares and tatted doilies and sunshine on a back porch surrounded by maple trees. No faces anymore, but feelings of warmth and contentment. Happiness.

“Nice to meet you, Claire.” Smitty patted the engine’s solid block, then turned back to Chris. “I’ll paint in here for you.”

Chris looked around the engine room’s still stout flooring, at the little worktable sitting below the pegboard she’d organized just last month, at the tool cabinet and hatch leading to the bilge compartment, all smeared with grease and ages-old dirt. “Nasty piece of work.”

“That I am,” he said with a grin, “but I’ll do my best.”

Friday evening, Chris eased her pickup onto the Galveston-Port Bolivar ferry and parked where she was directed by a bored ferryman. After an afternoon spent poking through Old Man Templeton’s salvaged spares, she was ready to get home and snag a late dinner. She’d found several items she could use, including a fuel pump to replace Hortense’s aging one. But she hadn’t found a propeller. The starboard prop was so gouged and chipped that the shaft had started vibrating. A few hours of that and Claire, the starboard engine, would shake to pieces.

Leaving the pickup’s windows rolled down and her wallet and cell phone under the seat, she slammed the door, then headed toward the bow where a small contingent of hardy souls braved the still-warm breeze. In a few minutes the last car came aboard and the ferry cast off.

The ferry’s bow wave arced below her as she leaned over the rail. Texas City refineries plumed white smoke into darkening sky. Laughing gulls shrieked as they careened toward her, then banked and slipped back to the wake to fish for minnows stunned by the ferry’s engines.

She turned to watch the birds. That’s when she saw him, leaning casually against the shoulder of a dark blue Buick, watching her. He wore a white T-shirt, jeans and black biker boots, his clothes a size too big for his rail-thin frame. His thin blond hair lifted in the wind. One hand rested on the Buick’s hood; the other fingered a cigarette. He could have been anyone.

Only she’d seen him before.

She pivoted slightly as though looking back toward Port Bolivar, not moving from the rail. He raised his head and looked at her, squinting against the ferry’s bright house lights. His thin lips stretched over his gaunt face in that same grimace of fear she’d seen as his out-of-control powerboat veered toward her. Except she’d changed her sailboat’s direction, and his powerboat should have kept going the way it was headed.

But it hadn’t. It had changed direction, too.

She looked again. The grimace wasn’t a grimace.

He was smiling.

Eugene Falks, she thought. The name on the police report was Eugene Falks.

“Nice evening,” he called. His voice was thin and razor-sharp, like him.

She said nothing. Her pickup sat directly behind the Buick. She’d walked right past him and not known it was him. He could have touched her. She shuddered.

She folded her arms across her chest, but that made her feel vulnerable—not easily able to move or defend herself—so she relaxed enough to let them drop to her sides again. Better. Deep breaths. Keep him in view but don’t let him rattle you. Settle down and wait.

Consciously, muscle by muscle, she released the tension from her body. The ferry plowed through the darkening water. Over the opposite railing, Chris watched whitecaps kick up. The man tucked one hand in his front pocket and hunched farther against the car, still watching her.

Was he a stalker? Had he picked her out in the grocery store parking lot and decided for whatever twisted reason to target her? Maybe being a natural blonde, dishwater or not, wasn’t such an advantage after all.

As the ferry pulled up to its dock, she faced Falks. He pursed his lips and sniffed, tossed his cigarette onto the ferry’s deck and toed it out with his boot. Then he reached into the front seat and pulled out a cell phone. In a moment, she heard her cell trilling in her truck.

He knows my phone number.

People streamed back to their cars. Chris gripped the railing with one hand as the ferry jolted into place. Falks snapped his phone closed, then yanked his Buick’s door open and folded himself inside.

The good news was, Falks would have to drive off first.

The bad news was, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t follow her.

Don’t walk like a victim. Chris strode toward her pickup, head up. She’d have to walk past his car again, but she’d do that on the passenger side, where he couldn’t reach out the window or door. At least it’d be harder.

She braced herself as she walked around the car’s nose. When she drew even with the Buick’s passenger side headlight, the car’s engine spat and clattered to life. Falks didn’t move, didn’t look at her, didn’t put the Buick in gear. She dug the keys from her jeans pocket. On impulse, she took a couple of steps back from her pickup until she could read the Buick’s license plate. Falks made eye contact in his side mirror.

He didn’t grin this time.

The first cars started bumping up and over the landing ramp. Behind her, an SUV revved its engine. She waited until the Buick eased forward, then quickly opened the pickup’s door and hopped inside. One tap on the accelerator and the Chevy roared, settled into its purring rhythm.

“Go ahead,” she muttered at Falks as she put the pickup in Drive. “Follow me.”

Because her first stop would be the Galveston Police Department.

Chapter 3

Chris woke instantly. Someone was aboard.

She lay perfectly still in her cabin, holding her breath and trying to listen beyond the hum of the corner box fan. The boatyard’s shed lights glowed outside the open portholes.

Damn kids. She knew Dave should have run the little heathens out of the boatyard. Probably stealing electronics.

Footsteps above, in the salon. Heavy. Not a kid’s. A man’s.

Her skin tingled with fear. The face of the cadaverous man, pale, thin, eerie in the new moon’s light, floated in her mind’s darkness. Eugene Falks. She’d have to do something, not just lie here waiting for him to find her. Her arms and legs lay like stones. Was it really Falks? How strong was he? Could she fight him? God, she hadn’t hit anyone since seventh grade when awful Jimmy McAllister tried to French-kiss her in study hall.

No way was she going to let some weirdo come onto her boat and steal something or attack her. This was her home. Her home. No freakin’ way.

The molten lead that had filled her veins a moment ago surged into adrenaline. What were her options? Her cell phone was in the galley. Her tools were all put away. There was nothing in the stateroom she could use as a weapon. She hadn’t oiled the engine room doors, so opening either of those to grab a tool would alert the intruder to her presence. Still, he might not expect her to be aboard while the boat was in dry dock. She could take a chance on the noise.

The wrench. She saw it clearly propped up behind the door to her ensuite head. She’d used it yesterday and forgotten to put it up. Fortunately, it was a nice, hefty seven-eighths.

She slid out of bed and pulled on her robe, belting it tightly around her waist. She retrieved the wrench from the head, paused. Silence upstairs. Whoever was up there had stopped moving. She eased open her stateroom door, crept into the hall.

She paused again by the spiral staircase, heart pounding, to listen. A familiar click and shush told her the door to the port side office had opened. She switched hands on the wrench, then flipped it around so the open end—the end that made two prongs—was the business end. Swing or jab, it would work fine.

She crept up the staircase, skipping the step that creaked. The upper passageway loomed, dark and empty. On the port side, the office. On the starboard side, the galley. Aft, the salon, whose sliding glass door opened onto the aft deck. Dim light from that door cast long shadows of sofa and chair onto the floor. Beside her, the office cabin door was ajar. She sidestepped into the galley. The smooth tile cooled her bare feet.

Shoes. She should have put on shoes.

Without taking her eyes from the office door, she reached for the counter beneath the starboard window where her cell phone lay. Her hand found a notebook, a pen, the bowl of fruit. Chris tore her eyes from the office door’s sliver of darkness. The cell wasn’t on the counter.

Yelling wouldn’t do any good. Nobody hung around a boatyard after midnight. She hefted the wrench.

Knife?

She shuddered. No. No knife.

Leave.

Now there was a plan. But if Falks was after her, and if he happened to hear her, she’d never outrun him on foot. Not barefoot through a debris-strewn boatyard. She needed her car, to get to the police substation.

Car keys? She slid down the starboard cabinet to the floor, facing the office and willing herself to be small and unnoticeable while she tried to remember where she’d left them. After a frustrating and fruitless visit to the Galveston cop shop about Eugene Falks (Sorry, ma’am, we can’t post anyone at the yard, but we’ll send a patrol car by once in a while), and an equally frustrating call to Garza (Please leave a message), she’d driven home, climbed up the ladder to the aft deck, come inside, made sure all the doors and windows were locked, then tossed her keys in…

…the office.

Dammit.

She’d have to chance it on foot.

Chris turned the wrench in her grip. Right. Just slip around the L-shaped counter that separated the galley from the salon, walk across fifteen feet of carpet, ease on out the open door to the aft deck, then down the ten-foot ladder to the ground. No problem.

Except she was sitting on the galley floor, butt frozen to the tiles, legs locked in place, eyes riveted to what little she could see of the office’s dark doorway. The only part moving at any speed was her brain, imagining Falks coming through that office door like a storm, his sickly grin plastered on his face.

“Move,” she whispered.

She stood. Her heart banged away at her chest wall, fouled her hearing. Crouching, she slunk through the galley, paused briefly at the salon’s edge to silently suck some air into her lungs. Her trembling hands clenched. The wrench felt like a puny baseball bat. Note to self: Buy a Louisville Slugger.

She straightened and took a step toward the salon door. Dark movement flashed on her right.

She swung, head-high.

A soft thunk—metal on flesh—then a muffled grunt. Chris recoiled, ducked instinctively into the shadowy galley rather than the backlit salon. On the other side of the L-shaped counter, just in front of the office door, the intruder wheezed.

Had she hit him in the throat?

She gripped the wrench tighter. Outside. She needed to get outside. The wheeze moved from the hallway toward the elbow of the counter’s L. He’d be an arm’s length from either the salon or the hallway. She remembered Falks’s long, spindly, angular arms. Come into my parlor.

The wheeze permeated the air like a metronome: Hiiiss, ruuush. Hiiiss, ruuush.

Options. Right. A galley door led forward into the pilothouse. But the door, like so many on the yacht, would creak when opened and Falks would know instantly what she was doing. She’d never have a chance. Nor was she fast enough to reach the office and grab her cell.

She had another option.

She could attack.

Chris breathed silently through her mouth while she laid the wrench on the linoleum next to her right foot. She felt behind her for the cabinet door she wanted, the one with the little plaque on it.

Hiiiss, ruuush.

Falks started moving again, inching along the L toward the little passage between the galley and the salon. A shaft of boatyard light speared the passage.

The plaque’s sharp edge pricked her fingertips. She opened the cabinet door and reached inside.

Hiiiss, ruuush.

Falks’s fingers curled around the cabinet’s sides. Chris’s own trembling fingers found the smooth, cold cylinder she was searching for. Falks eased into the light—an ear, a stretch of pale skin, one wide, pale eye.

“I see you,” he whispered.

Calm wrapped itself around Chris like a cloak, as it always did the moment before an irrevocable action: a softball arcing toward the plate and her waiting bat, the red-circled target coming into focus just before she squeezed the trigger, pen poised above paper as she prepared to sign her resignation. It was the moment anything was possible.

Falks was a man. Only a man.

Chris smiled. “Come and get me.” She drew in a deep breath and held it.

He leaped. She wrenched the cylinder from its holding clips and yanked out the safety pin. By his second step, she gripped the mini fire extinguisher’s handle, and by his third—he fell toward her like an avalanche—she shot a hard stream of chemical agent into his wide and glaring eyes, then skittered away, out of reach.

Falks shrieked, jerked away. “Shit!” he shouted, scrubbing his face, tearing at the smoky dust. “You bitch!” He collapsed back against the counter, reeling. Chris let out her breath, extinguisher raised and ready to strike. He fell backward into the salon. His curses stuck in his throat, then the coughing started as white smoke drifted around his head like a veil.

Chris bolted into the office, snagged her cell. Fire extinguisher in one hand, she punched 911 with the other. Falks’s coughs rasped, fading.

“Come on!” she shouted at the phone. Why weren’t they picking up? She looked at the phone’s LED screen. Because she’d dialed 991.

A thud and the crash of shattering glass, then a scrabbling on the aft deck.

The bastard was getting away.

Chris skirted the dying edge of chemical smoke as she ran from the office into the salon. She stopped short at the aft deck doorway that glittered with broken shards.

Falks’s long, white hand shone like that of a picked-clean corpse before it slipped from the deck railing and disappeared.

Chris studied Smitty’s lean back from her sofa vantage point. He stood in front of the salon door’s remains, hands stuffed in his shorts pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a cold wind. Or blame.

“I should have been here,” he said to the spray of glass at his feet.

The breeze kicked up by the box fans blowing from the galley ruffled his shirt sleeves. Outside, the predawn darkness carried a hint of dew. The cops had long since taken down their notes, given their assurances they’d find Falks and gone. They’d stayed almost as long as the residual chemical smoke, which had left a film of mica dust over the floor where Falks had jumped Chris.