Chapter 23
T
he way she saw it, there was really only one thing a smart woman would do. Get up, not too fast. Brush her hands along her hips, frown at the wetness on her clothes, the blood, and the seawater. Take in the tiny utility closet they had crammed themselves into, lit by dim twelve-volt lights. Look at Brian, say something like
I got to get out of these clothes
. Let it hang there until he nodded. Then she would walk off, get to her room, lock the door, and text Frankie.
Smart, easy, and not even
wrong
.
The not-so-smart thing to do would be to continue to crouch here, in this tiny little room with a guy she’d just met, a guy who was talking into the marine radio, trying to bring in the authorities. Which of course was the last thing her employer wanted, something he might kill both of them for. No, he was her former employer. Well, whatever. If Frankie found them, they were both going in the drink.
“You okay?” Brian said. “You look like you want to say something.”
“I was thinking of turning you in to Frankie,” she said.
“Not a bad idea,” he said, nodding. “Get a little bonus.”
“Why did you go in after him? Your friend’s body? And don’t say because he would of done it for you.”
Brian shook his head. “Gilly wouldn’t have gone in for my corpse. Maybe if there was a big fat wallet in my back pocket.”
“So why?”
“Because,” Brian said, “I don’t like to lose things.”
He had settled down, Destiny noticed, and he was pretty good at following through on his plans. Climbing up high on the ship, avoiding the eyes of the crew, clipping the antennae wires and tossing it into the ocean before scampering back down, grinning a little as he pulled her into the closet. Crazy . . . but practical. So that, maybe, was part of the reason she was still crouched here. Things were fraying at the edges, but maybe he could hold shit together, at least long enough for them to get off this ship.
“You think Wells made any progress?”
“With his swimming dinosaur theory?” Brian said. “Yeah, I bet they’ve got him on the lecture circuit.”
“Nobody likes a smartass.”
“Sorry.”
She leaned closer to him. “Is that what it is?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen it twice, and all I know is it’s not something I’ve ever seen before, or even heard about.”
And that was the other part keeping her here, Destiny thought. This experience, as terrifying as it was, was also, well . . .
interesting
. Maybe the most interesting thing she’d been involved with for years, and Brian was real, very much a man who thought and moved, in that order.
Brian keyed the marine radio. He repeated the same message as before, the same exact words. Even the sound and speed of his voice was the same, and she realized he was being repetitive in case someone had only picked up part of the message before; this time they might be able to fill in the missing words. Practical, she thought. I doubt that’s going to be enough to save him.
Brian clicked the radio back to receive mode. They waited, breathing quietly with their mouths open.
Brian glanced at his watch. “We’ll try again in five minutes,” he said. “No answer, I’m going to get higher up on the ship, get a line of sight to the horizon.” He seemed about to say something else when the ship tipped hard to the side, sending her skidding into him. Below them, a long screech of stressed metal reverberated through the infrastructure.
“Feels like the boat’s flexing,” Destiny said. She’d seen reenactments of shipwrecks on television, the way they would tear in half once they took on enough water, the waves breaking the ships right in half. It was how the
Edmund Fitzgerald
had sunk, the ship in the Gordon Lightfoot song. Broke itself in half on a massive wave, sent her crew into the cold seas of Lake Superior, where they had died quickly of hypothermia. The water in that vast inland sea was not much colder than the Kaala was now.
“ ‘That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed,’” she said under her breath. “ ‘When the gales of November came early.’”
“Huh?”
“Old song. I think we’re the bone to be chewed on this trip.”
“Oh.” The ship shook again. “Whatever’s chewing on us,” he said, “it’s pissed.”
She planted her palms on the floor, intending to move back to her original spot, when he touched her arm. “Listen, thanks for helping me. I’m going to have to try and get somewhere where the signal can travel farther. You want to stay here, that’s fine, but if I were you I’d just go back to work. That way, whatever happens, you’ll be okay.”
“As long as we don’t end up in that thing’s gullet.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” she said, coming to a decision. “But you have a better chance with my help.”
“Don’t be silly—”
From down the hallway they heard the opening and closing of a door. Then another door opened, a voice called out something, and the door shut. Someone was searching the hallway, opening the other rooms. Brian reached up and grasped the doorknob, looking around the utility room. “Look for a weapon. Anything.”
“Brian,” Destiny whispered. “They’ll have guns.”
He pointed behind her. “Unscrew that broom handle, quick.”
She started to object, saw the look in his eyes, and quickly twisted the wooden handle off the push broom in the corner. He released the door handle and took the broomstick in both hands, holding it like a jouster’s lance. It wasn’t much of a weapon, not for a close space like this. He’d have to jab, to poke instead of swing. Maybe they’d be unaware, wouldn’t be paying attention, and it would be like in the movies, where the good guy . . .
She paused, wondering when she began thinking of Brian as the good guy. Maybe he wasn’t. But he was opposed to Frankie, and while Frankie was lots of things, a good guy was not at the top of the list.
“Brian?” Destiny said. “They have guns. You have a goddamn
stick
.”
He turned to her. “Go,” he said. “Quick. Go out there, tell them you were hiding. Try to lead them away.”
She stood, thinking,
Okay, it might work
, then paused with her hand on the door handle. It wouldn’t work. Frankie and his men were too methodical, too smart to just follow her blindly away from their search area. They had no idea what she’d been up to. They’d look, and although it would be a surprise for them to see her in the company of Brian, a guy she had no allegiances to....
Yeah, it would be a surprise. For all they knew, he’d taken her hostage.
“What are you doing?”
She moved in front of Brian, pressing her back against his chest, and wrapped one of his arms around her waist. She took other hand, the one still holding the broomstick, and positioned it so the wooden dowel was pressed across her throat. “I’m going to scream,” she said. “I’m your hostage, understand? When I break free, you get your distraction.”
She touched his arm, felt the corded muscles, pressed lightly but firmly. “I know what I’m doing.”
“You sure?” he breathed into her ear.
“I’m loud,” she said. “Be forewarned.”
She began to scream for help.
* * *
They pushed out into the hallway, the broom handle banging against the side of the door, Destiny screaming. He was happy to get out of the closet, because she was right about being loud; she had a clear, alto scream that sounded like an opera singer’s. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, but the sheer volume was like knitting needles in his eardrums.
They crashed out into the hallway, squirming, Brian struggling to hold her tight. She was muscular, her upper body twisting, leveraging her butt and hips against his waist. For a moment he wondered if it was a ruse, if she was really trying to free herself, and then one of her elbows smashed into his ribs and his grip loosened, not much, but enough for her to squirm away if she wanted. Instead, she elbowed him again, a deliberately glancing blow, giving him time to recover. He squeezed tighter. It was like holding on to bag full of pythons, all those muscles twisting and constricting.
It wasn’t a bad feeling, he thought as they twisted around. Wrong time for it but hell’s bells. How did that old Waylon Jennings song go? “The only two things in life that make it worth living, a guitar in tune and a good, firm-feeling woman”?
Good firm-feeling woman. Be better if she wasn’t trying to knock the wind out of him and screaming at him to let go. But better than any of the women he’d picked up at the Riff-Raff.
All of this flashing through his mind in the seconds it took for them to clear the doorway.
He spun around, trying to focus on the people in the hallway through the spray of Destiny’s hair. They were only ten feet away.
Destiny sagged in his arms.
A man and a woman, middle-aged, stood watching them with open mouths. The woman’s eyes were red rimmed and the man’s bearded face was pinched, somewhere between angry and bewildered.
“Not what you think,” Destiny said, shrugging Brian’s arms off her. “Seriously,” she said. “We were, uhh, playacting.” The couple was still staring at them, incredulous, the man cocking his head to the side. Destiny turned and pressed herself against Brian, then kissed him on the mouth and put an arm around his waist. “I have a thing about, uh, bondage,” she said. “We both do.”
The woman’s mouth was open. She blinked twice. “You scared us.”
“Sorry,” Destiny said, pinching Brian’s back.
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Sorry. I’m, uh, embarrassed.”
“You haven’t seen a little girl, have you?” the man asked. “Nine years old, blond? Her name is Taylor.”
“Oh, God,” Destiny said. “Not the same one that went missing earlier?”
“It wasn’t our fault,” the woman said. “We got in an argument, she was acting snotty and, well, we thought the argument was over. When we got back to the room, she was gone.”
“When you got back?” Destiny asked.
The woman’s face constricted. “What are you, a waitress? Screwing off on the job with your little friend? Nobody doing their job. No wonder our little girl is . . . is . . .” She started to sob and when her husband didn’t react Destiny went to her, fighting off the woman’s hands and holding her, looking back at Brian once with a look that said,
What can you do?
Destiny led her down the hallway, talking softly, asking where they had looked.
Brian motioned for the man to walk with him.
“Playacting, huh?”
He could hear other men talking on the deck above them; they must have heard Destiny scream. The whole ship might have. “Yeah,” Brian said. “What’s your daughter’s name again?”
“Taylor.”
“And how long has she been gone?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe an hour. We haven’t told anyone.” He paused, and jabbed a finger at his wife’s back. “
She
wouldn’t let me, not after what happened earlier. We feel terrible. I know Taylor’s safe, she has to be, but Ashley’s upset.”
“Where have you looked?”
“This was the last of C-level. We already checked B-level, the gaming area. There’s an arcade on one end, we thought she might be there.”
“She likes video games.”
He shrugged. “That’s the kind of place she might go, right? The kinda place kids would hang out. She’s been such a little shit this trip. Typical woman, right?” He looked to Brian for a reaction, got nothing, and sighed. “We stepped out for a minute, just to get our breath.”
Brian stole a glance at the guy’s face. Yeah, the guy was the real deal, calling his missing girl a little shit, a typical little woman. All of this in a bored tone. The ship was sinking, a creature was circling them and attacking anything that ventured close to a railing, and this asshole figured it was just a typical little woman thing. He felt his blood begin to heat and pushed it aside. There was no time for it.
“We’ll look below,” Brian said. “Okay? We’ll meet you back here, this exact spot, in twenty minutes. You go up to the top, talk to the captain. Have them put out an alert.”
The man swallowed. “It’s just that, with what already happened—”
“That’s the least of your worries,” Brian said. He stepped closer, close enough to smell liquor on the man’s breath, to see the way his short beard was turning gray. “There’s a chance we’re going to have to evacuate this ship. It’s taking on water, and there’s something down there waiting for us to go into the water. You want your little girl to face that alone?”
“There’s some talk about launching a couple lifeboats. Get away from the ship, head toward shore, get some help.”
“Yeah?”
“Listen, I think it’s a good idea. Send some help back for the entire ship. You find Taylor, maybe you and your girlfriend could hang on to her. That way Ashley and I could go for help, but she wouldn’t have to be out there on the ocean.”
“You’re kidding, right? Your daughter—”
“She’s adopted,” the man said. “Doesn’t mean I don’t love her like my own, you understand? We had her since she was little, and the whole time she’s been full of sass, always—”
“Go talk to the captain, damn it.” He raised his voice enough for Destiny to hear. “We’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes, no later. Get the captain to put out an alert.”
The woman looked back, wiping at her face. “Marcus?”
“It’s fine, Ashley. He’s right, we need some help.” He wrinkled his nose. “And no more cruises, ever again.”
They left, moving staidly down the hallway, the woman fumbling in her purse. They watched, expecting her to pull out a phone, and instead watched as she opened a compact mirror to check her makeup. Destiny looked at Brian, her color high. “Jesus, they’re parents?”
“I know.”
“We’re going to help, aren’t we? They don’t know about D-deck, and maybe she snuck down there.” Her eyes were very intent. “You are going to help, aren’t you?”