Stone’s Target (Shadow Hounds: Rogue Waters #2)

Chapter 1

FRANKIE

The warm water lapped at Frankie’s armpits as she sank deeper into the reeds and raised her binoculars, waiting for the boat to appear. She’d grown up in these murky backwaters of Terrebonne Bay, and the bastards driving their boat through her swamp had no business being here.

The engine noise reached her, ticking over with suspicious smoothness. This was not some old fisherman’s tinny, this was a well-maintained boat. A rarity in these parts where most of her neighbors were like herself, living dirt poor and keeping their boat motors alive on the smell of an oily rag.

A creature splashed into the water to her right.

Frankie tensed, praying it wasn’t a gator.

She would much rather be on the water than in it but tonight called for desperate measures.

She pulled her knife from the sheath on her belt.

Against a gator, the three-inch blade would be about as useless as a feather, but her gun wasn’t an option. She wasn’t about to blow her cover now.

The guys in the oncoming boat were avoiding the main channels, sticking to the narrow sections frequented only by crab fishermen and gator hunters.

Here, the reeds grew high and thick, the water ran black as oil, and the few spots where it was possible to climb the banks were treacherous with mud and prime real estate for gators.

One wrong move and she would either alert these guys to her position or end up wrestling a prehistoric animal that both impressed her and scared the shit out of her.

If her dad was there with her, he would have her back. She could almost hear his voice, teasing her about her fear of gators and telling her to put the fucking knife away before she cut herself.

Her heart clenched at the thought of him.

Why didn’t you tell me what was going on, Dad?

Shoving away the question that had haunted her since she’d found his hidden notebook, Frankie sank deeper into the inky black water.

For three weeks, she’d been trying to track these sneaky bastards’ route, but they kept slipping away before she could figure out where they were going.

She’d initially figured they were ducking into one of the many smaller creeks branching off the main channel, but each time she thought she was ahead of them, they would shoot past and vanish.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, she planned to follow them straight to wherever the hell they were going.

Frankie tugged her kayak, Kevin, closer, ensuring the hard blue plastic was hidden in the thickest section of reeds, and peered downstream through the vegetation.

Dad had bought her this kayak for her fourteenth birthday, and once she’d learned what he’d sacrificed to buy Kevin for her, she’d made damn sure he knew how much she appreciated it.

When she worked on the Blackwater Deep Oil Rig, Frankie drove her boat out to the rusted buoy a quarter mile from the rig and then paddled Kevin the rest of the way.

Her dad had hated it when she’d paddled out in bad weather. But Frankie had always been stubborn like that. Once she set her mind to something, not even an oxywelder could stop her. And she knew exactly how much pain one of those could inflict.

The boat finally came into view. Four men were barely visible onboard.

Fuckers. Just like the last three times she’d spotted them.

Dad’s handwritten scrawl in the secret notebook she’d found after his death detailed these men making this trip twice a week on Wednesdays and Thursdays, always around midnight. But why?

Tonight, she was going to find out.

The boat whizzed by so fast she barely got a glimpse through her binoculars.

They shot past in absolute darkness and without any reflective safety gear.

That alone screamed criminal activity. Smuggling wasn’t exactly rare in these parts: drugs, booze, weapons.

These cobwebbed Louisiana waterways had been a smugglers’ paradise for centuries, but these guys weren’t the usual lowlifes who skirted these dark waters.

These military-grade assholes were up to something else entirely.

The second they vanished from view, Frankie climbed onto her kayak and powered through the water toward her jon boat that she’d hidden upstream.

Her shoulders burned as she cut through the black water, but she couldn’t afford to lose them.

She hauled herself and her kayak into the jon boat, started the silent electric motor, and gave chase.

When the massive silhouette of Blackwater Deep rose from the Gulf like a steel ghost, Frankie’s breath caught. She’d worked on that rig for nearly twenty years. She knew every weld, every crossbeam, every hidden passage.

It wasn’t just an oil rig, it was her second home.

Until it wasn’t.

And those men were headed straight for it.

She would have bet her favorite wrought iron sculpture that the bastards on that boat were involved in shutting down Blackwater Deep. A hundred and sixteen crew had lost their jobs when her rig was decommissioned.

116! They all wanted answers.

But Frankie didn’t just want answers, she wanted revenge.

That rig closure didn’t just cost me my career. It’s a fucking crime scene.

Quarter mile off Blackwater Deep, Frankie cut the engine and cruised up to a barnacled buoy she’d been hitching her boat to for decades.

Peering through the binoculars, the other boat reached one of the eight massive legs anchoring the rig to the ocean floor.

Operating in stealth mode, the men climbed onto the dock at the base of the leg and three more men joined them.

Like soldier ants, they transported package after package from the boat onto an equipment cage that rose sixty feet up to the production deck.

The three-quarter moon hung low on the horizon, and a billion stars peppered the sky above, providing more than enough light to make out their movements. But the bastards were too far away to identify, and the packages remained a mystery.

She slipped back onto Kevin and as she set a cracking pace toward the rig, the men were silhouetted against the glow off the distant clouds. They moved fast, and with an efficiency that proved they’d done this work many times.

What the hell are they doing on there? Blackwater Deep is off limits!

If her father was seeing this, he’d have a coronary. Fuck, no he wouldn’t. He was as fit as a prized gator.

Tears pricked her eyes. Five weeks ago, she and her dad had been hauling tuna out of the ocean together, laughing about the fish her dad had lost to a shark before he’d landed it in their tinny.

Sixteen hours later, her father was dead.

She’d come home from her shift at four in the morning and crashed into bed.

When she’d gone to check on him after she woke, her dad was stone-cold.

There was no way he’d died of natural causes like the cops claimed.

Heart attack, my ass.

He was fucking murdered.

It tore her up thinking he’d been dead while she’d been sleeping in the other bedroom across the hall.

Why hadn’t she sensed something? Like she had when her mom fucked off, or like the time she knew Weasel Walters was tampering with her crab nets before she had concrete proof that had earned him a punch in the nose and two black eyes.

Dad wasn’t just her only relative, he’d been her best friend. It had been just the two of them since Mom declared she ‘ain’t gonna be a swamp rat no more’ and pissed off without even a second glance at seven-year-old Frankie.

Thanks for nothin’, bitch!

Now Dad was gone, and Frankie wasn’t just alone, she was so damn lonely it was like a fungus had settled on her chest. Every day was like wading through black slime, making it hard to think, let alone move. But that was what she had to do . . . move.

If she stopped, she would drown.

Finally, the men took turns climbing up the ladder, disappearing into the dark belly of the platform.

The last man, who was waiting for his turn, raised his arms.

Shit! He has binoculars!

Frankie doubled over, gripping her knees, trying to make herself as small as possible.

She thanked her lucky stars she didn’t have any reflector beacons on Kevin.

She, too, had operated in stealth mode on a few occasions.

It came in handy when she needed to spy on neighbors she suspected of stealing her crab pots.

Figuring the guy on the platform was either finished searching the ocean around the rig, or he was on his way to yank her ass off Kevin, she rolled her head to the side and slowly pulled her binoculars into position. He was gone. She checked the ladder. Empty.

She set the binoculars between her knees, grabbed her paddle, and let her fury fuel a pace that was nothing short of relentless.

She aimed Kevin toward the leg directly diagonal to where their boat was attached. This leg also had a ladder, but it was the poorer cousin to the main access climb. The landing dock alone was barely the size of a bathtub.

She climbed off Kevin and tied him to the ladder. Using a second rope, she pulled the kayak’s ass in beside the dock. With a bit of luck, if anyone returned to the opposite dock before she got the hell out of there, they wouldn’t see her ride.

Frankie scanned the open water around her, hardly able to believe she’d returned to Blackwater Deep.

She grabbed her iPhone, purely for taking photos since her social circle was nonexistent, and slipped it into her pocket next to her utility knife. Then she scrambled up the rusty ladder like a monkey.

At the top, she half expected the hatch to be locked, but either someone had gotten sloppy, or these guys weren’t as professional as they looked, because it lifted with a groan, and she slipped inside.

She was back inside Blackwater Deep. And nobody saw her. Bonus.

Now all she had to do was figure out what these bastards were up to and get out before sunrise.

Assuming they didn’t catch her first.