Chapter 7
SEVEN
“Don’t move.” Duke lowered to a crouch at her side. “I think I can get you out of there, but I still think you’ll need to go to the hospital. There’s a lot of blood.”
Nope. Not another hospital. “I went straight down. I should be able to come straight back out.” She gritted her teeth and focused on holding in a persistent scream.
Connor would never understand this. He would feel like this was somehow his fault for letting her out of his sight. This would push him over the edge. “Any chance Connor won’t notice?”
Duke gave a sharp laugh. “No. Not a chance. As to pulling you out. I’m making sure the wood just scratched you. If you’re impaled, then we need an ambulance here before you can move.”
“Duke!” she wanted out. Now.
“I’m looking. You’re demanding, you know that.” He chuckled as he lowered to his knees and got close to her leg with his flashlight.
“Distract me.” She gripped his shoulder, holding on tight, but it didn’t ease the pressure on her leg or help divert her attention.
“See, more demands.” He snorted as he set down the flashlight, then wrapped both hands just above her knee. She had a few seconds to prepare before he inched her leg up.
Pain sliced from her knee to her ankle. She clenched her jaw and threw her head back. Mom always said words like that should never come out of her mouth. Her head pounded as the scent of that day returned. Blood. Dirt. A concrete floor. No. She wasn’t there. She was here.
“There. No way you can get out of here without help. I can’t carry you down that ladder.”
“Guess it’s a good thing you came.” Her voice trembled and she swallowed back tears.
“Well, you told me to.” He helped her hobble to a bench built into the far wall. “What were you doing here?”
Her cheeks heated and she focused on her hands in her lap. “I wanted to see if I could find anything.”
“Are you saying my team isn’t capable?” His tone sounded almost offended. “Because that sounds like what you’re saying.”
That wasn’t what she meant to do. “I never said that. You’re the one asking for my help.”
He sighed at her side. “Touché.” He stood and strode back over to the hole she’d made in the floor. “Wait . . .” He crouched then reached for his flashlight once again. “Well . . . that changes everything.”
“What?” Is he intentionally dragging this on? She tried to sit up straighter to see.
Duke glanced up at her and smirked. “If you hadn’t come out here, we wouldn’t have found the motive.”
“For the love of chocolate, will you please tell me what you’re looking at?” Her leg throbbed. “I feel the temp shifting. A gust front is going to blow through soon. We need to get off this boat or we’ll be soaked.”
Duke shook his head. “Can’t. I have to call in a team to pull this out. There’s probably over a hundred pounds of powder down here.”
That was unexpected. “Cocaine? In Piper’s Ridge?” She hadn’t lived here all her life, but for the few she had, drugs weren’t prevalent, especially the hard stuff.
“Probably not meant to stay here. I’ve been hearing that small towns are getting these big shipments. They move them through towns like ours because nobody expects them. Sometimes they're broken up here. Sometimes they're just passing through.”
“Path of least resistance.” Someone had decided to take the closest thing she’d ever thought of as home and turn it into a trafficking pipeline.
“Unfortunately. If we knew where it was headed or where it came from, we could put a plug in the pipeline, but this is the first big bust we’ve had. I’d gotten hints that there was traffic but hadn’t actually seen any proof until now. I did not expect to find this in Bailey’s boat.”
He reached for his phone and called dispatch.
The longer she stayed on this case, the more likely that the Cody force would find out she was actively working, and not for them. She closed her eyes and tilted her head so that when she opened them, she’d be forced to look at the damage the floor had done to her leg.
Without sight, she focused on the throbbing with each heartbeat. The heat as the blood ran down her leg. Spikes of pain tore across her leg as the breeze from the broken windows brushed over the torn skin.
“Don’t pass out.”
Ferd opened her eyes and the boat seemed to shift under her.
“Ambulance is on the way. You’ll need stitches and they’ll have to clean it. No way to avoid it. I’m sorry, Ferd.” Duke rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“So am I.” But not sorry she came. “But if I hadn’t fallen through . . .”
“They wouldn’t have found this. Likely, the boat would’ve been trailered and taken to a boat junkyard for parts. There, whoever killed Bailey would likely find it, have all the time in the world to pull out the drugs, and leave without anyone knowing what they’d done.”
“Sounds like you have a plan.”
He chuckled as the scream of sirens sounded in the distance. “No. It’s not that easy. I can’t leave this up to chance. I don’t know if Bailey was in on this or simply had his boat used against his will. Time will tell.”
If time was the issue, she might not see this to the end. “I may have to go home before you get to the bottom of this.”
His gaze dropped to her leg. “How are you going to explain that to your team? There’s no way you can go back to work now.”
Her gunshot wound wasn’t even fully healed yet, much less the nightmares that kept her up at all hours. Reliving the scene of having a gun pointed at her and the flare of fire at the same instant as the bullet tore into her leg was incessant. “I’ll think of something.”
“Is she able to come down or do we need to haul her out?” someone called from the shore.
Duke looked at her and waited. His expression open and understanding. She’d watched them bring Bailey’s body over that rail. That wasn’t happening to her. “I’ll figure out a way.”
“Why am I not surprised?”