Chapter 4 #3
A monster wave nearly subsumes the boat, and it's long, drowning seconds of choking on seawater and the blatting, curtaining rain before I can catch my breath, and all thoughts of Killian's orgasm noises are swept away as we fight to hang on.
The spare goon—the one not piloting—is positioned in the prow, watching ahead.
A futile endeavor, it seems, considering you can't see a thing except waves and sky.
But as we rock on the knife-edge of a wave's crest, he points and shouts something.
And then all at once there's an outcropping of boulders, each one the size of a small car, and the pilot-goon guns the engine and slews our nose away, frantically spinning the wheel to stop us from smashing on the rocks.
We barely skid past them, and then a wave slams into us sidelong, and we're tilting precariously sideways—Killian lurches across the boat to the other side and hangs on, providing ballast to keep us something level; I kick across too, and another wave tries to crash us against the wave-break.
The orange rubber side scrapes along the boulder, making a gut-wrenching ripping sound.
Yet, when we clear the edge of the wave-break, the boat is intact, just scuffed, although the scrape looks bad enough that I think it was a near thing.
Now that we're around the wave-break, the sea is calmer, although the wind is still a howling gale blowing an ocean's worth of rain in whirling, scudding, blinding sheets.
Killian and I right ourselves; the bottom of the rescue boat is half-filled with seawater, and we slosh and splash as we scrabble back to our butts in the middle of the craft.
Lightning flashes, briefly illuminating the skyline ahead—low, squat buildings with tall hills behind. I can't make out much more than that in the quick blast of blue-white light.
"Can you tell where we are?" Killy asks, his voice pitched loud enough to be heard over the wind and rain.
I shake my head. "No. We could be literally anywhere. I have no idea how long I was unconscious. I know you've been out of contact for nearly two weeks, and if you were on the boat for most of that, this could be the Mediterranean, South America, Asia…no way to know."
The ride across the bay is mercifully brief, and we're nudging up to a dock; the lookout goon scrambles onto the dock and ties us off as the pilot goon kills the motor.
"Out," the chief goon orders with a jerk of his chin.
Killian climbs out and leans down to hand me up, one arm hooked around a dock piling.
Once I'm on my feet, he keeps hold of my hand, tangling our fingers as we stand waiting for the next instructions. The chief goon gestures at the rescue boat and snaps an order—both of his underlings crack off a trio of shots at the boat’s rubber sides, and within seconds, the craft is bubbling under the waves.
Clearly, these guys aren't taking any chances of being discovered.
Killian and I exchange looks as the boat sinks out of view, and then Chief Goon plants a hand in the center of Killian’s back and gives him a rough shove.
"You could just say 'let's go,' you know," Killian snaps. "We've cooperated so far, yeah?"
Chief Goon jams the barrel of his shotgun into Killian's left side, hard; Killian grimaces silently and twists away from the blow, turning an ugly look of raw fury on our captor that promises repayment in kind, with interest.
"You have no value. You are only alive because I do not yet have orders to kill you." Chief Goon kisses the underside of Killian's chin with the shotgun barrel. "Push me and I will not wait for orders. Yah? You understand?"
Killian straightens, stretching sideways with a hiss. "Yes, I've fuckin' got it, asshole."
"Killy, just play along," I breathe, as the goons march us along the dock toward shore. "The time will come."
He's radiating rage, which is disconcerting; I've never seen Killian angry before.
Nervous, anxious, excited, sad, worried, high, drunk, goofy, spazzy…
yes. Angry? Never. And in this case, he's gone right past mere anger into the kind of stewing, simmering fury that forebodes bloodshed in the very near future.
"Yes." His voice is heavy and hard and low. "It certainly will." He says this with a venomous glare over his shoulder at Chief Goon, who, foolishly, doesn't seem to realize his danger.
"Save it, Killy," I whisper, crush-gripping his hand.
He inhales deeply, chest and shoulders swelling—holds it…nods a few times, and then lets it out slowly through pursed lips, like a leaking inner tube.
In the intermittent flashes of lightning, I try to glean information as to our whereabouts.
The buildings, as we leave the marina, are low and blocky, none more than two or three stories, with the rectangular shapes of window A/C units and small balconies.
We cross diagonally over a 3-way intersection and follow a street running away from the marina; small hatchbacks and compact sedans are parked nose to tail on either side of the street—I see Fiat Pandas, Dacias, Fiat 500s, Toyota Yarises, all compact and subcompact cars; the license plates are the long white rectangles with blue borders on either side bearing the 12 stars of the EU.
And then we pass by a shop window with a small handmade sign written in crabbed, all-caps Italian, advertising something or other for 25 euros.
I pretend to stumble into Killian. "We're in Italy somewhere," I murmur.
"I don't think we were in transit the whole time," Killian murmurs back. "Been thinking and trying to remember. I think we were anchored for a good part of the time. But somewhere in Italy doesn't really narrow it down all that much."
I snort. "I mean, at least we have a general idea?"
“True."
"Shut up!" Chief Goon snaps. "No talking."
Killian's shoulders tense and his hand involuntarily clenches painfully around mine. I squeeze back. "Breathe, Killy. Not yet. Play along."
Our route through the town is circuitous, winding and switching back this way and that while traveling ever further from the shore.
The rain has slackened here, farther inland, mainly due to the buildings blocking the wind, although the occasional gust still swirls through the roadway.
It's still torrential, but now it's merely a vertical deluge and not the windblown fury of a storm on the open ocean.
Finally, Chief Goon stops at a seemingly random doorway and gives the door three hard pounds with the bottom of his fist. There's a pause, the rattle and click of locks being turned, and then the door is yanked open inward, the opening filled by a large male frame, a bearded face, and the yawning threat of a large-caliber handgun barrel.
Words are exchanged in what sounds like a complicated pidgin of Italian and whichever language these goons speak—it sounds possibly Bulgarian or some kind of non-Russian Slavic language, albeit I’m only guessing based on my very limited knowledge of such things.
It doesn’t sound to me like these guys know each other very well, and neither of them speaks the other’s language to any degree of fluency, requiring the mishmash.
After the brief exchange, we're admitted through the low, narrow doorway.