“Why?” I was starting to believe I’d been better off with the sharks.
“Americans, they’re always talking about money.
I give you money if you let me go. My family has money. I got important friends who will pay you.
That sort of thing. They think they can buy their way out of anything.” He gazed at me for a long, cold few seconds. “You don’t offer nothing. That makes me nervous.”
“Maybe I’m poor.”
He snorted. “Even the poor offer. You don’t even try to make a deal.”
“Maybe I’m crazy.”
He showed me teeth. “Maybe. Maybe you just think we won’t hurt you ’cause you’re so pretty.”
“No,” I said, and held his gaze. “I’m sure you’d try like hell to hurt me, for any reason or none at all. I’m sure you’ve slit throats and raped and tortured if you felt like it. Probably just yesterday.”
That woke a lot of murmuring among the rest of the crew. I heard the slap of boots—more men arriving from other parts of the ship, drawn by the tinfoil smell of trouble in the air.
“Huh,” the captain said. “So what you got to stop me if I want to do the same to you?”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.” The tingle on my back that I’d felt as I was drowning had subsided, but the nerves were waking up, and I could feel the outline of the torch forming again, black and steady. I could feel the black well of power opening, ready to flood into me if I opened the door. “You guys know comic books?
The Incredible Hulk?
”
Josue looked blank. He looked around at the others.
“Bruce Banner,” one of the crew piped up.
“You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
In any group of people, no matter how hard-assed they might appear, there’s always a geek. I was just surprised that, in this company, he’d admitted it.
“It’s like that, only I don’t have to wait to turn green,” I said. “I’m trying to help you out here, gentlemen. Don’t push me, and I won’t push back, and we’ll all be just fine. Somebody’s paying you to keep me alive and in one piece. Let’s just all get along.”
The captain was no longer amused. “Shut up, bitch,” he said, and shoved the barrel of his pistol under my chin. “You don’t threaten me. Not on my own ship. I’m not being paid enough for
that.
”
I didn’t reach for power. It reached for
me
, a black tidal wave that pounded into me like surf to shore, immense and burning.
No!
I rejected it, slammed the door shut and held it closed as the power thundered on the other side. I felt small and pitiful and ridiculously weak, and I knew I was only a second from death at the hands of these men, these
pirates
—but my other choice was worse.
“Sure,” I said. Josue hadn’t noticed a thing, from the outside; he thought he was still in control, not one heartbeat away from being a red stain on the deck. “You win.”
If he pushed that gun into me any deeper, we were going to be engaged. “I always do,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”
“Joanne Baldwin.”
“No. Who you
are.
You’re not afraid of me.”
“I just gave up.”
“Not because you’re afraid.” Josue was way too smart. It was a little creepy. Then he took it too far by saying, “I like women best when they’re afraid. They shut up more.”
“You’re a real charmer, did you know that?” He flashed me his pirate smile. “All right, so you’re going to put me in the hold. What then? You turn me over to whoever paid you to come get me?” I had an awful feeling I already knew who that would be, and his initials were Bad Bob Biringanine.
“Something like that,” Josue agreed. “Unless you plan to make me a better offer.”
“I’ll pay you twice what he’s paying you,” I said. I
did
want to get to Bad Bob. Just not as his helpless captive. Much better if I could hire myself a hard-bitten pirate crew and take the fight to him unexpectedly.
Josue slowly showed his teeth in a smile. He had two gold-plated incisors, both on the bottom, and it gave him a glam vampire look that must have been pretty effective in his line of work.
“Where you got all that money hidden, mermaid? In your panties?” He made a grab, as if he was about to make a withdrawal. I fended him off.
“No, idiot. I keep my money in a bank, like every other criminal who isn’t a complete moron. Look, I was on that ship with some of the wealthiest people on earth. I’m not just some casino rat. I know people.”
Josue looked unimpressed. “What people?”
“Cynthia Clark. The movie star?”
Pirates started naming movies with the geeky enthusiasm of film obsessives everywhere. From the breadth of their knowledge, I figured they must have the biggest DVD collection ever somewhere belowdecks. Not that they’d ever paid for any of it, of course.
“Famous friends doesn’t mean you have money. How you expect to pay me?” Captain Josue asked, and spread his hands to show how unencumbered I was by those phantom millions.
“Electronic transfer,” I said. “It’s how business works these days. People don’t carry cash, they carry personal identification numbers and ATM cards.”
He wasn’t convinced. “And how does this help me? Do you see any computers on my ship?”
I gave him a very slow smile. “If you take me where I want to go, I promise you, I’ll fill your ship so full of dollars you won’t be able to sleep without restacking bundles of cash.”
“Then give me your account number and PIN code. I’ll check it out.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I thought you didn’t have a computer.”
“That’s not what I said.” He laughed. “You give me the information and I’ll verify that you’re not a lying whore. That seems fair.”
“Sorry. It’s all I have to bargain with. Guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
“I was born at night, mermaid. Not last night,” he said. I didn’t like the confidence of his smile. “You show me cash, and then I believe you. Not before. Thiago, take her below.”
The guy who’d copped to being a comic book geek grabbed my arm and hustled me down the narrow space between the wheelhouse and the railing, toward the stern of the boat. “Hey, Thiago?” I asked. “I could use some help here. Talk to your boss, would you?”
“Shut up,” he said. “You won’t like
me
when I’m angry.”
So much for geek solidarity.
Two hatches later, I was shoved across a rusty threshold and into some kind of ship’s hold. It was nothing like the vast, spacious warehouse of the
Grand Paradise
; this was a cramped, hot, stinking metal box that gave mute evidence that the ship had once been a fishing vessel.
I swore I’d never eat tuna again.
“Hey!” I yelled, as the hatch banged shut behind me. “You’re really going to regret this!”
And that sounded so stock B-movie that I shut up and found a place to sit and rest my aching head on my aching crossed arms.
The burning torch on my back throbbed in time with my heartbeat, and I could feel it stretching back through the aetheric, a slimy tether that kept pulling on me, trying to drag me to the dark side.
“Keep your shirt on, Bob,” I murmured to the dead fish. “A girl’s got to sleep sometime.”
I curled up in a nest of burlap and old packing material from one of the crates, and fell completely unconscious.
Not a care in the world, strangely enough. Too tired to have one.
When I woke up, my whole body ached less, but that only meant the alert level had gone down from red to orange, damage-wise. No way could I swim far in my current state. I needed the ship if I intended to stay alive.
Well, if I couldn’t buy it, there were other ways. They were as dangerous to me as to the captain, though.
I banged on the hatch until I got attention, and was dragged back up on deck. It was midday, and the sun was dazzling on the water. I blinked against the glare.
Josue was once again lounging at the rail. “Don’t you ever work?” I asked him.
“Don’t you ever shut up?” He nodded to the crew-man holding my arm, and another gun dug into my ribs. “Now, maybe you’re willing to tell me the account number of all this mythical money you have to share?”
I shook my head.
“Wrong answer.” He turned to Thiago, who was holding me. “Shoot her and put her over the side. Do it in the stomach. That way she has time to change her mind before the sharks come.”
Damn.
I was glad this guy wasn’t a Warden.
Thiago tried to follow orders, but when he pulled the trigger, it resulted in a dry click. He tried again, frowning.
“Here, let me see,” I said. I took the pistol from him, held it in my hand, and melted the barrel into dripping slag that ran through my glowing fingers and in streams across the deck. “Oh, there’s your problem. Man, they really don’t make these things like they used to.”
I heard more clicks as other pirates joined the hunting party, but I’d disrupted the firing mechanisms of every single gun aboard the ship in one fast burst. So many delicate parts to a gun, really. Not like a good blunt object. “Don’t make me blow up your ammunition,” I said. “It’ll take your hands off with it when it goes up. Classic choice, though. Who wants a hook to complete the whole pirate image?”
Guns hit the deck and tumbled, metal on metal.Weapons skidded from side to side in the pitch and roll of the waves, and an Uzi nudged my foot. I kicked it to the rail, where it hesitated on the edge, then tipped over.
“Good boys,” I said. The captain—no coward, even if he didn’t understand what was happening—pulled his knife, the better to fillet me. “Okay, not you, obviously, and I’m voting you off the island. Thank you for playing. Say hello to the sharks.”
I blew him over the side of the ship, out into the water. He hit with a tremendous splash and came up screaming.
I ignored him. “Right,” I said. “Your captain had an attention problem. Who wants to be in charge now?”
They all looked at each other. Nobody dared make a move to rescue Josue, who was flailing like a gaffed fish, although their gazes frequently cut in his direction. One man stepped forward—Thiago, who I suspected was the second in command anyway. “You are,” he said. “Miss.”
I smiled at him—my best, most winning smile, fueled by a wild edge. “You’re a smart guy. Thiago, do you want to make some money?”
“Sure.”
“Same deal I tried to make with your ex-boss. You take me in that direction”—I pointed toward where I knew Bad Bob was, as the torch on my back throbbed when I faced that way; no clue what the nautical course was, and I didn’t much care—“and I can promise you that you’ll get one hell of a great payday out of it. Better than holding up unlucky pleasure boaters, anyway.”
He exchanged looks with his fellow scavengers—okay, pirates—and one by one, they nodded. The sound of their captain’s increasingly desperate calls for rescue off the port bow probably had something to do with their quorum.
“Can we pick him up, please?” Thiago asked, like it was an afterthought, and pointed toward their captain. I turned my head and looked at him. The dawn wind blew my damp hair over my face, but I was pretty sure he could see my expression even at that distance, with that concealment.
“If he points so much as a dirty look in my direction, I’ll shoot him in the stomach and let
him
tell it to the sharks,” I said. “Make sure he knows that. I don’t feel like giving second chances right now.”
Thiago nodded. He had a good poker face, but there was a shadow of uneasiness in his dark eyes. “What do you want us to call you, miss?”
I smiled. “You can call me whatever you want, buddy. This isn’t going to be a long-term relationship. Believe me.”
Thiago gave some orders, the content of which was lost on me, but the ten or so men that crewed this rusty scow snapped to it. Somebody fished the captain out of the ocean and got him safely out of my sight. I felt the engines growl, shift, and surge beneath my feet as we got under way. The bow turned, heading toward a destination that wasn’t visible in any way on the horizon—except to me.
After enjoying the view for a while, I went down to the hold, where I found the captain enjoying the hospitality of the rotting tuna. I pulled up an empty crate. “So,” I said. “How about you tell me who hired you to fish me out of the water, Josue?”
“Vai pro Inferno,”
he said.
“Foda-se.”
“Want to see a magic trick?” I asked, and put my hand out, palm up. Nothing in it. I turned it palm down, then over again.
Lightning danced along the skin, clung to my fingertips, and dangled from my knuckles like a handful of tangled string.
Josue sat back.
“You know anything about Tasers? This is the same thing, only without the delivery system. Oh, and the batteries. And you know the best thing?” I leaned forward and smiled. “It never runs out of juice.”
There’s no such thing as a loyal pirate. “He was a man,” Josue said.
“Name?”
“I don’t ask names. He gave me cash money.”
“White hair? Big, blue eyes? Red nose? About this tall?” I indicated Bad Bob’s height, but Josue was shaking his head.
“No, never seen that one. This one, he was weird. Shaved head. Wearing leather like out of some motorcycle movie. Scary.”
My heart took a running leap. “How’d he pay you?”
“You won’t believe it: gold. Sunken treasure. He said he’d just found some.” Josue laughed and shook his head. “Crazy people out here. All crazy. I thought I’d find you, see if you were worth keeping. He shows up again, I shoot him if I like you and keep the money anyway.”
Josue had no idea what a bad idea that would have been. “Did he say what to do with me when you found me?”
“Yeah.” Josue’s smile was a model of impish delight. “He said tell you Kevin said hello. And to take you back to port and let you go. Crazy. Like I said.”
I let out a slow sigh. “And you figured you’d threaten me into giving you something else? Or just rape and kill me?”