Chapter 49
The cruise line was all too happy to let Shayna and Ricky board The Polar Star in Ketchikan as long as they paid for the entire cruise.
Shayna had booked at the last minute, leaving the only cabin left in her price range an inside—no windows—on the deck directly above the casino.
The electronic bleeps and chirps of slot machines made it sound like birds or rats under the carpet.
Ricky was already pissed at the world. Shayna died inside whenever she thought about the god-awful fit he was sure to throw later that night when they turned out the lights and all he could hear was murmuring gamblers and pinging slot machines.
He liked it quiet as a tomb when he slept.
Even the squeak of a mattress when she rolled over could set him off.
She felt sorry for his cellmates over the years.
Prison could not possibly have been that quiet.
Sometimes it seemed like he just needed something to be mad about.
The bed took up most of the meager real estate in the cabin, but the cramped quarters didn’t appear to bother him. That made sense. He’d spent the last forty-five years in a cell far smaller than this. At least they had a private toilet.
Ricky threw his backpack against the wall and began to pace the tiny cabin like a clockwork soldier.
Three steps took him to the head of the bed, where he turned, as if bouncing off the wall, to take three more steps to the wall at the foot of the bed.
It couldn’t have been more than ten feet.
Shayna scrambled to get out of his way, finding a spot in front of the bathroom, ready to duck quickly inside if Ricky got tired of marching back and forth and decided to make an L toward the cabin door.
Shayna held her phone at waist level. Leo was on speaker with news.
Ricky paused midstep. His bottom lip twitched and curled. “You were supposed to kill her at the hotel!”
“The maid came up the stairs while I was heading to the room. Couldn’t risk it.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?” Ricky groused. He made another turn to stalk back in the other direction. “You’re telling me Cutter is staying in a fancy room with that Hawaiian girl?”
“I don’t think she’s Hawaiian,” Shayna said. “You heard the way she talked when they popped Bart. Australian maybe—”
Ricky sneered. “I don’t give a shit where she comes from. I want to know why she’s shackin’ up with Cutter. It makes no sense. He gets on the ship with his wife but stays in the room with that … girl.”
“About that.” Leo’s voice came across the phone.
Shayna couldn’t help but think he was being awfully damned brave when he didn’t have to look Ricky Pink in the eye.
“I did some more digging about Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter. Turns out, he and Joellen—the wife on this ship—have been divorced nearly a decade. Looks like his next wife died—”
Ricky stopped pacing. “And just how did you find out all this new information?”
“Twenty-five bucks for a people search and background on the interwebs,” Leo said. “Nearly as good as my old police databases. Better, sometimes. You just have to know where to look.”
“Did it ever occur to you to do this people search a month ago?”
“Of course it did,” Leo snapped—again, way too casual for his own good. He’d have to face Ricky again at some point. Soon. “And I would have done one, too, but you seemed to have the logistics all worked out. I trusted you.”
“He’s got a point,” Shayna said, hoping to keep Ricky from pinching her cousin’s head off the next time the two men met. “We’ve been working off your information. You’re the one who told us Cutter was married to Joellen. You can’t really blame us for—”
Ricky waved that away. “It was my best guess,” he said.
“What else are you guessing about?” Leo asked. “You’ve told us a dozen times you, and I’m quoting here, you know for a fact that Cutter has the diamonds. You just guessing about that, too?”
“He’s got the diamonds!” Ricky puffed up like a deviled snake. “Let me get this straight. Cutter and Joellen have split the sheets and now he’s taken up with the Hawaiian gal?” He glared at Shayna, daring her to correct him.
She did not.
“Deputy Lola Teariki,” Leo said. “I’m thinking she’s his partner. But get this. It took some digging, but I was able to find out that Arliss Cutter’s married to his brother’s widow.”
“His dead brother’s wife?” Shayna shook her head, dumbfounded. “And he’s sharing the honeymoon suite with Miss Lola? That’s messed up …”
“This new wife,” Ricky said. “She lives in Alaska?”
“Anchorage,” Leo said. “According to the borough tax records. Her name’s Miriam. She didn’t even have to change her surname. Probably why we missed it until now.”
“We can use this,” Ricky said, pacing again. “I’ll show this guy what it feels like to lose someone important to you. We can start with the ex-wife, then his partner, and work our way to Ms. Miriam.”
“What are you talking about?” Leo asked. “Start doing what?”
Shayna had had enough. “I gotta tell you, sugar, I’m with Leo on this one. You don’t know this Arliss Cutter from Adam. Are you trying to find the diamonds or just make him pay for his grandaddy’s sins?”
“You can get an answer to most any question if you let a box cutter do the talking.”
“A box cutter?” Shayna stifled a chuckle. “That marshal looks like the kind of dude who’d shoot first and then shoot some more if you come at him like that.”
Ricky shrugged. “I say bring it on. He’s just a supersize version of his grandpa. It’ll do my heart good to end him when the time comes.”
“End him?” Shayna snapped her fingers in front of Ricky’s face to keep his attention. “You’re still forgetting about the diamonds.”
“I haven’t forgotten a damned thing. I just have other priorities.”
“Well, it seems to me that fifteen million in diamonds would be tippy top on your priorities.”
Ricky’s eyes clouded over, gray like a storm.
It was a sure sign Shayna needed to change tactics or risk an explosion.
If he’d been a normal guy, she would have reached out and touched him—his hand or his arm—but he had this thing about personal space.
He had to be the one to initiate. In prison, if someone got close, they were about to stab him.
Instead, she let her head tilt to one side, unthreatening.
“All I’m saying, sugar, is that we can do both.
We get our hands on the diamonds, and you get your revenge on all of old man Cutter’s descendants.
But it has to be in that order. You kill Arliss Cutter too soon—or, worse yet, whack someone important to him so he comes after us—and we are all royally screwed.
We need him to tell us where the diamonds are.
” She kept her voice low and calm. “He does know where they are? Right?”
“I told you, I know for a fact he—”
There was that phrase again. It was like a trigger.
“How?” Shayna said, throwing caution to the wind. “How do you know? What are those facts you think you know?”
“The grandfather was always carving on a hunk of wood,” Ricky said. “This marshal is always carving on a hunk of wood. Could be old man Cutter hid the diamonds in one of his carvings and gave it to the grandson—”
“Holy shit!” Shayna’s hand shot to the top of her head.
She held the phone closer to her lips. “Could be? Are you getting all this, Leo?” Then, to Ricky, “Do you even hear yourself? Maybe he put the diamonds in a hunk of wood? That’s a guess!
Not a fact!” She took a step closer to Pink.
“The longer I am involved with this goat rope, the more I doubt Arliss Cutter even knows there were any diamonds to begin with.”
“Shayna, I—”
“Oh no you don’t, Ricky Lee Pink,” she snapped, building up a head of steam.
“Don’t you Shayna me! Your tiny little brain is carrying around so much hate for some dead old man that you’ve invented this fantasy and attached it to the stolen diamonds.
Do you even understand what know for a fact means?
It means you have evidence, not some horseshit fever dream of revenge against somebody who had the gall to be born the grandson of the man who killed your friend.
Well, boo-hoo-hoo. We’ve all had friends get killed. ”
“Cutter’s wife was sick,” Pink said, the whine evident in his voice. “He needed the money. It made sense that—”
“That is the stupidest shit show I—”
Pink hit her hard in the mouth with his fist, knocking out a front tooth and breaking the other in half.
A week earlier she would have cried her eyes out, probably fallen down out of instinct.
If she played dead, maybe he wouldn’t hurt her anymore.
Not now. She was too pissed for that. Now she didn’t even feel the punch.
As it turned out, watching fifteen million in diamonds slip through your fingers made you stupid brave.
She spat the broken tooth onto the cabin floor and stared him down, bloody drool hanging from her lips.
Pink was twice her size. He could have crushed her like a bug.
Murdering her right there on a boat with three thousand people wasn’t out of the question.
Instead, he stood and looked at her, blinking.
That was the thing about his precious inmate code.
He’d knock your head off for whistling, or surprising him with an inadvertent touch, but he respected backbone.
Oh, he would still likely murder her at some point if she gave him the chance, but the sight of her bleeding from her snaggled tooth made him take a breath.
They stood there panting, eyes locked on each other.
On the phone, Leo issued pointless challenges. “You two knock it off! Pink, I swear, if you hurt her …”
Shayna ignored him. If Ricky wanted to cut her ears off, there wasn’t a damn thing Leo Bouchard could do about it. She had to handle this herself.
“Listen to me, Ricky,” she said. “I am sorry. You are not stupid, not by a long shot. Not at all. I was just pissed. I still am. Understand? I have invested a hell of a lot of time and money into this.” She sweetened the deal. “An investment I thought I was making for us.”
“I’m sorry I broke your teeth,” he said, as if that made them even.
She considered turning and walking out the door. That would have been the smart move, considering how volatile this moron was. But—the possibility of diamonds was better than the certainty of no diamonds at all.
“Look, Ricky.” She kept her voice low and even. “I’ve gotta be honest with you, hon. I could give a rat’s ass about what you do to that marshal. Kill everybody he loves, torture him to death. I do not give a shit. But I am begging you to let this thing with the diamonds play out first.”
The storm in his eyes began to clear by degrees.
“Okay,” he finally said.
The ship’s horn sounded one long blast followed by three short ones—backing away from the docks.
Pink froze at the sudden noise, hands open and slightly away from his body, as if he wanted to show he wasn’t armed.
Shayna hid a smile. Loud noises took the sauce out of him.
He’d told her as much, but she’d seen enough movies to know that when the horn blew in the yard, everyone had to get down or risk getting mowed down by someone with a rifle in the guard tower.
The horn and Ricky’s reaction to it emboldened her.
She wiped the bloody spittle from her lips and forced a smile.
Her plan had always been to take the money and run.
The longer she was with him, the more she realized she wouldn’t have to worry about Ricky Pink chasing her down.
Hell, the man was so institutionalized from four decades behind bars, he could barely function in the outside world.
He was liable to walk out in front of a bus without her there to help him.
He loomed over her for a full minute, chewing on his stupid lip while he thought his stupid thoughts.
Shayna lifted a hand, holding it in the air until he reached out and took it.
She smiled, hoping he saw it as a sign of contrition and not what it was.
In many ways, Ricky Lee Pink was still the same fifteen-year-old boy he was when the State of Texas locked him up and threw away the key.
When the time came, that would make it a hell of a lot easier to kill the son of a bitch in his sleep.
She ran the tip of her tongue over the jagged edges of her broken teeth.
They didn’t hurt, yet. She imagined the knife or gun or cast-iron frying pan she would use to put Pink out of her misery.
With any luck, the marshal would take care of the dumb bastard for her.