Chapter 28
Chapter 28
J ones wasn’t sure why he felt such a noteworthy lack of fear in that moment. Maybe because he had finally and at last come to a resolution about Carol. Maybe because years of training kicked in and he felt at home in the unprecedented situation. Whatever the reason, as soon as he realized someone had a gun pressed to his head he went perfectly still, minus a few fingers that caressed Carol’s face reassuringly.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told her.
“I know,” she said with a quiet confidence that went to his heart. Unlike him Carol had no training or experience in bad guys and weaponry. That meant her unprecedented stillness came from her confidence in him and his ability to handle the situation. And if that wasn’t a shot of pure adrenaline, he didn’t know what was.
“My boss would like a word,” said the man with the gun.
“I’m available to conference,” Jones said. “Let the woman go.”
“So she can run away and tell tales to your two partners? No thank you. Let’s go.” He had the accent of one of the mainland gangs. When he lowered his weapon enough for Jones to turn, his hunch was confirmed. The man was oversized in the way untrained people often are, with showy muscles that were good for lifting heavy weights but might not hold up to the endurance of hand-to-hand combat. I bet you routinely skip leg day, Jones thought. Guys like that always did, focusing more on their bicep and deltoid development than the core muscles that would carry them through an actual conflict or emergency. Jones’s muscles weren’t as gratuitous, but they would perform well for him, as they always had. They would also give him speed and endurance, something else he thought his new captor probably lacked.
However, he was the one with the gun. After a quick frisk, he removed Jones’s gun and tucked it in his waistband. Jones didn’t mind because all of his moves suggested he was a rookie, especially the fact that he’d missed the wicked knife in Jones’s ankle strap. If he were alone, he would attempt to overthrow him now and end it. But there was Carol to consider, she so small and soft and, frankly, in the way. He had no means of signaling her to get down, to stay back, to find a spot and hide. Knowing Carol, she would want to jump in and help. It would be that sort of help that could get them both killed.
Jones didn’t realize his face betrayed his thoughts until she spoke. “Why are you giving me that look?”
“What look?” he asked. The guy with the gun motioned them forward and they began to walk.
“The Carol-is-making-me-crazy look,” she said.
“How can you possibly interpret that look?” he said.
“I’ve seen it a lot,” she said.
“Sometimes crazy is good,” he said.
“Sometimes it’s not,” she rejoined.
“I need to know that if I tell you to do something, you’ll listen,” he said, infusing his tone with extra urgency. This was life or death. He hoped she realized.
She bit her lip, giving him a few pensive blinks. “I’ll try.”
“What’s holding you back?” he asked. Did she not trust him as much as he thought she did?
“The thought that you’ll sacrifice yourself to play the hero,” she said.
“No, I’m stuffed to the gills with self-preservation,” he said and, impossibly, she laughed.
“Let’s make a deal.”
“No.”
She ignored him, of course, and continued speaking. “I swear to do everything you tell me, as long as it’s not some heroic attempt to save me by throwing yourself in the line of fire.”
He sighed. “Carol, you don’t get to set the terms of the bargain. That’s not how bargains work.”
“Of course it is. Then you come back at me with your terms, and we negotiate,” she said.
They reached a black SUV. Their captor motioned them inside, both in the back seat. Immediately Jones’s thoughts went to wrecking the vehicle, but, as if in preparation of such an act, the seatbelts had been cut out. If the guy drove as fast as the gangsters usually drove, Jones and Carol would launch like missiles when the big SUV crashed. To add insult to injury, the driver buckled himself and gave the belt a smug little tug as he eyed Jones.
Jones’s mind ran through the next option. He could garrote the guy, but that would also have the unfortunate effect of causing a wreck.
Carol’s hand rested on his thigh. “Your terms.”
He picked up her hand and brought it to his lips. “You do exactly what I tell you to do, and I promise to live long enough to make it worth your while.”
She stared at him unblinking one, two, three, four beats. “Okay.”
Before Jones could redirect his attention to their captor, the car stopped.
“The docks?” he said. “Isn’t that a little cliché for a meeting with a mobster?”
“Not if I’m taking you to a boat,” the man replied. He opened the back passenger door, herding them out with a wave of his gun.
“I’m not inclined to get on a boat,” Jones said, tone deadly as he calculated Carol’s position relative to his and the man’s. Currently they made a triangle. Not ideal, but he could work with it.
“Relax,” the man replied. “My boss wants me to bring you to him so you can have a little conversation. For now.”
“For now?”
“He hasn’t decided what to do with you. He wants to have a conversation .”
Jones dithered. Take care of the situation now or get on the boat and take care of it later? He was eighty percent certain he could take the guy, but less certain in his ability to protect Carol from the fallout.
The man, once again reading Jones’s intent, now put the gun to Carol’s temple. “You can get on the boat now and we can have a nice, happy ending, or you can pick up what’s left of your girlfriend on the way back.”
“I’m going to remember this,” Jones warned him.
The man smiled, unpleasantly smug in his larger size. But Jones knew, even if he didn’t, that the most powerful things sometimes came in compact packages. He used his gun to motion impatiently toward the waiting boat. Jones helped Carol, catching her when she stumbled into him. The water was becoming unmercifully choppy, the waves agreeing their displeasure with the rumbling sky. Fat plops of rain let loose, smacking their cheeks and lashes. Any hope Jones had of using the weather for cover was dashed when the man ziptied their arms behind their backs and forced them to lie down in the bottom of the wildly pitching boat.
At least they were face to face. Jones stared at her, assessing. She looked mildly alarmed, afraid and alert but not petrified or terrorized. That was good. Fear he could work with; terror he could not.
“How are you holding up?” he asked. The man started the engine. Beneath them the boat vibrated, tickling their ears.
“Feels a little surreal,” Carol replied. “Like maybe this is another stop on the danger tour you’ve arranged for me.”
“If I planned it, we’d stop for food,” Jones assured her and, impossibly, she laughed. Her nose turned up when she laughed, and her cheek dimpled. Even bedraggled, hogtied, and soaking wet she was adorable. It was a bad situation they were in, but he couldn’t stop smiling as he stared at her. She smiled in return. If not for the man with the gun and the bouncing waves, it would have been perfect.
“Best date ever,” she said.
He wagged his brows and scooted a little closer. She eased closer and tipped her face but the tightness of the boat, combined with the erratic waves, made it impossible to do more than nestle. Her head rested against his shoulder. He wanted to pull her against him, to hide her away from danger, to keep her safe. It killed him that when he finally admitted how much he wanted to touch her, he was physically bound from doing so.
The boat slid against the dock, bumping wildly with each roiling wave. Two men stood waiting on the dock, their outsized muscles making them appear strangely homogeneous with their original captor. Either they were bulked up on steroids or they all had the same jungle trainer who wasn’t a fan of leg day. Jones studied them in silence, filing tidbits for later use. Which one was the leader? Which should he take out first? Who would be the first to run away once he realized Jones was a threat? War was about so much more than fighting and shooting; war was a mind game. Despite the ease with which Jones accessed his emotions, he’d always kept his mind untouched.
The dock swayed unsteadily in the rolling waves. Carol stumbled. Jones struggled against his ropes, “Can you let me go so I can help her?”
The men paused and looked at him, trying to gauge his angle.
“I mean, there are three of you,” Jones said, aiming for the aw, shucks farm humility that had always served him well. He had no idea if it would translate to this culture, but apparently so because, somewhat amused, they cut his bindings and allowed him to reach for Carol, threading an arm through hers to keep her steady. He gave her arm a squeeze. I’ve got this, he tried to say. She touched her head to his shoulder with a brief little tap. I know you do. In all his life he wasn’t certain anyone had ever believed in him more than Carol seemed to, and somehow that made everything inside him come alive. He would get them out of this unscathed.
The three men herded them toward a metal building, the only one in sight on the tiny island. Jones thought it was some sort of equipment shed, probably used or formerly used by one of the resorts. The double doors opened and the smell of diesel fuel eked out, increasing his suspicion. No equipment lurked inside. Either the shed was no longer in use or everything in it had already been stolen and sold off. Whatever the reason, it was now a lair for the local gang that tended to flow into all abandoned spaces like tiny spiders. Like spiders, the only thing that worked to eradicate them was heavy-handed extermination. Previously Jones had followed the back and forth of law-enforcement vs. gang with a weary sort of halfhearted interest. The gangs were too big, too entrenched, and too well-funded to be hashed out by the locals. A former SEAL and a couple of spies, however…
The old juices began to flow, percolating his adrenaline. He was ready to go, ready for action. He stretched his neck, first one way, and then the other, prepping his body to spring, as soon as the opportunity became available. To his right, Carol did the same, mimicking his stretch like a lion cub copying its predatory mother. It wouldn’t do to greet the gang’s leader grinning like a love-struck fool, but it was hard to tamp it down. Carol, he knew, would do whatever possible to help him. She would try to have his back, despite the fact that she was tiny and untrained. And now his heart thumped with something more than adrenaline, something that felt a whole lot like love.
A man sat in the center of the oversized shed, holding court in a cheap plastic lawn chair. He couldn’t look like any more of a king if he had a crown and scepter. And despite the overt cockiness that radiated off of him, despite the fact that he was positively tiny in comparison to Jones and the three goons, Jones knew this man was the most dangerous of the four because he was the one with the brains and power.
His eyes were beaded and shrewd as they surveyed Jones and Carol.
“The security guard. I was wondering when we’d meet,” he said. Jones, Carol, and the three stooges came to a natural halt a couple of feet away.
“Really? I’ve never given you a thought,” Jones replied, though his tone remained civil, almost cheerful. Nothing would be gained from antagonizing the little guy, at least not yet.
The man smiled. “You should have.” His accent was more diverse than the goons. They were locals who had been pumped up and grass-fed, opportunistic hired muscle. This man was something else, a calculating vagabond, the sort who always seemed to go where there was the most opportunity for chaos and harm. Jones had been in a lot of tangles. If you pulled the strings long enough and hard enough, they always led back to men like this one.
“Apparently so. I take it you have contacts in my resort.”
The man put his hands up in disarming surrender. “I have contacts everywhere. No need to concern yourself.”
Jones gave an agreeable little nod. “Probably so. What was will continue to be, despite my involvement. I’m happy to keep a low profile and put in my time.” He gave him his best farm-boy smile and Midwestern shrug. “I am curious, though.”
“Curiosity can be dangerous,” the man replied.
“Not if I don’t plan to follow through on it. I just want to know what’s so important, what’s so urgent that you feel the need to smuggle it in the middle of a storm.”
“Smuggle is such an ugly word. I prefer transport,” the man said. “And we are in the middle of the ocean.” He gestured expansively around them. “It’s always storming or about to.”
Jones waited him out, staring, silently challenging him to confess. In Jones’s experience, men like these had a compulsive need to boast.
“Sometimes people in power have a need. Like any businessman, I like to fulfill it,” the man said.
“Is it food?” Carol interjected. The men looked at her, startled, probably surprised she wasn’t too cowered to talk. “I bet it’s food. Food is the most smuggled thing.”
“It’s not food,” the man said. He seemed slightly annoyed by the suggestion, as if smuggling food was so far beneath him. What was bigger than food, more valuable, more dangerous?
“Drugs?” Carol tried. Again Jones had to smother a laugh, this time because she’d assumed the Gum Lady tone. If her hands were free, they’d be on her hips. And if the smuggler had any sense, he’d stop now. But clearly he had none, because he shook his head and spoke.
“Not drugs. Drugs would be much easier, no feeding required.”
Jones lost his smile because suddenly he knew. Animals wouldn’t be worth it, not worth kidnapping two Americans and braving a tropical storm. The man stared hard at Jones, and Jones stared hard at the man.
“I see we understand each other,” the man said. He glanced at his watch. “I have a boat to catch. And you, well, I believe we’ll leave you here as a little insurance policy while we deal with your partners. Rest assured we’ll see you later.” He stood. Jones stared down at him, disgust and adrenaline mingling into a potent and dangerous combination. The man stared up at him, feet planted in defiance, daring him to make a move. Slowly, his head tipped toward Carol. One wrong move, Jones knew, and they would kill her. With effort, he stepped aside.
Regal and cocky once again, the man swept by him, his goons following like oversized baby ducks. They walked out the door, bending their heads against the sudden lash of wind and rain. A gust of wind caught the door. Two of the goons yanked it until it closed, plunging the shed into darkness.
The only sound left behind was their breathing. Jones stared at the door, calculating, thinking.
Carol edged closer, her arm brushing his. In the suddenly still, stale air, she smelled sweet and fresh, a scent that went to his heart and lingered. “He was talking about people, wasn’t he? He’s smuggling people,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Jones rasped. “Probably little girls.” Somehow, it was always little girls.
Carol swallowed hard. Like him, she was probably choking on bile. “What are we going to do?” He loved how it wasn’t a question. Girls were about to suffer; of course they would do something, anything.
Jones took a breath, held it, and let it out. What he was about to propose was crazy, but it was all he had. He reached into his boot, pulled out the knife, and cut Carol’s bindings, rubbing the circulation back into her wrists.
“How well can you swim?”