Chapter 13 #2
This was so not how she’d imagined dying. Her thoughts turned to Dawn, and she grieved for the little girl who’d lost one mother at birth and now was going to lose another one to sheer stupidity.
What had she been thinking to follow Alex to Cuba? Had she been so besotted with the man that she’d been willing to throw away everything, even her responsibility as a parent, for him?
She argued with herself that the purpose in going to Cuba had been to make sure Dawn had two parents to raise her. But now she saw it for the insanity it had been. Funny how, now that she was dying, so much became clear to her.
One fact stood clear of all the rest. She’d been a damned fool to love Alex Peters.
In forty-five minutes, Alex had enough chips to buy his way off the island even if he had to take less than legal means of transportation.
He tossed a hefty chip to the dealer and took the rest of his stack to the cashier’s window.
No sense getting greedy and attracting too much attention to himself.
The hour was late, but he gave a cab driver the address of a jeweler who ran a lucrative side business forging international travel documents. The man was grumpy when Alex pounded on the back door at this hour, but let him in when he saw the wad of cash in Alex’s fist.
It would take the forger overnight to work up a throw-away, one-time use passport and fake visa, so Alex headed back to the beach to hit up a couple more casinos for funds to pay for the documents. Prices had gone up since the last time he’d been down here.
He made drive-by hits on three casinos before he figured he had better not press his luck any further. He took his winnings and retreated to a hotel room to clean up and sleep off the past two days.
Katie jolted awake when something bumped the side of her dinghy. Crap. Was that a shark? She’d heard they rammed stuff they were curious about.
“Anyone home?” a voice called.
“Yes! I’m here!” She tore back the tarp and reeled back at the sight of fat rubber bulge right in her face, the leading edge of some kind of boat. And it was significantly larger than her tiny dinghy.
A man peered down at her over the edge of his boat.
“Who are you?” she asked cautiously.
“The United States Navy at your service, ma’am.”
“Ohmigod, am I glad to see you.”
“Folks usually are, ma’am. If you’d give me your hand, I’ll help you into our vessel.”
She clambered over the edge of the bigger inflatable boat and envied the guy his wetsuit. A second man was seated in the back of the craft at the controls of an outboard motor. This fellow tossed her a wool blanket which she eagerly wrapped around herself.
“You wanna save your dinghy?” the first guy asked.
“Not particularly.” She flinched at the speed with which he whipped out a huge knife and slashed her little lifeboat to ribbons. God. Had her life depended on something so fragile? After-the-fact terror rattled through her.
As her raft, now a floating pile of rubber debris, disappeared into the murky darkness, the rescue craft made a sharp turn and accelerated toward another vessel. A honking huge gray ship. She recognized the lines of a destroyer. Wow. André had sent the no kidding U.S. Navy after her, huh? Cool.
Not surprisingly, the crew aboard the destroyer gave her plenty of curious looks as they opened a water-line hatch and helped her aboard. She was hustled up to an infirmary not unlike the one on the Caelum, but much larger.
The corpsman who examined her declared her unharmed by her adventure. She was given a dark blue hoodie sweatshirt and matching sweatpants and led to a small cabin somewhere in the belly of the ship.
The sailor who led her to her room informed her that a helicopter would airlift her to Miami in the morning. Thank God. She was ready to be done with boats and water for a good long time. A sailor she was not .
Alex gave a mental sigh of relief as the Customs agent handed his passport and visa back to him. Normally, he would never travel on such hasty documents, but he was in a hurry to eliminate the last obstacles to a clean break with his past life.
He’d lost two days to travel: one to waiting for the passport to be made, and then another one flying south to Caracas.
There were no direct flights between Cuba and the United States, which had necessitated the intermediate stop.
He’d had to spend the night in Venezuela before he caught a morning flight to Miami.
He would go on to Washington in a few hours.
The sharp knives of his paranoia were dulling slightly, but certainty that he was being watched—and that his watchers meant him harm—remained.
Soon.
Soon all the loose ends would be tied up, and Alex Peters would be no more.
He supposed it was a little extreme, but what other choice did he have? Until everyone stopped chasing him, he would never be safe. And until he was safe, he couldn’t reach out to Dawn. He was going to miss her something fierce. Thankfully, she was very young and wouldn’t miss him?—
He swore into his bourbon. Was that what his mother had thought when she’d abandoned him and his brothers?
He knew all too well that the wounds caused by her departure cut deep and had never really healed, regardless of how young he’d been at the time.
Losing a parent sucked no matter what age a person was.
He dawdled in a bar, considering clandestine ways to bring Dawn to him wherever he ended up settling down, until his flight was ready to board.
He slid into his window seat, buckled in, and closed his eyes.
Katie. How was he going to deal with Katie?
His initial plan had been to kill her. But now he wasn’t so sure about that.
It would draw a lot of attention to him.
And her brothers could be a problem if they decided to come after him.
There were a lot of McCloud boys, and they were a dangerous bunch. He would hate to have to kill them all.
And what about Dawn? He could take her with him, now, but establishing a cover would be exponentially harder with a toddler in tow.
His father had often said that the three boys had provided the perfect cover for him, but Alex disagreed with his old man.
Besides, he and his brothers had been older than Dawn and extremely independent for their ages.
No, it was better for him to run alone, set up a new life, and retrieve her later.
But that left the question of Katie still looming. To kill her or not to kill her?