CHAPTER 25
Josie
Marcus looks so small in his hospital bed.
They’ve got him propped up on pillows, both hands wrapped to the wrist in white gauze, a dressing taped down one side of his neck and jaw where the flash caught him.
His left forearm is in a splint. There’s an oxygen cannula under his nose and three different bags dripping into his arm.
The monitor beside him keeps a slow green rhythm.
I stand in the doorway for a second and just look at him, because looking at him alive is a thing I need to do before I can do anything else.
Then I cross the room and pull the chair close and his eyes open.
“Hey,” I rasp. My voice is barely a voice. The man who shot Finn had his forearm across my neck long enough that swallowing feels like my throat’s full of gravel and talking is worse.
“Josie.” His own voice is wrecked, smoke scoured. He looks me over—the dried blood, the gauze a paramedic taped to my forehead an hour ago. “Jesus. You look worse than me.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It’s close.” He tries to shift up and winces and goes still. “What happened to you? Where’s Finn?”
In surgery, but I’m not about to lead with that. I might burst into tears.
“You first.” I lean in. “What happened on the boat, Marcus?”
For a moment he just looks at the ceiling. The green line on the monitor keeps its time.
“We made the pickup clean,” he says finally.
“Everything was normal. We were running back south, dark, right on the window. Connie was on the bow.” A pause and the next part comes slower.
“I saw a boat come up on our six. No running lights. I knew right away it was bad because nobody runs that water blacked out unless they don’t want to be seen, and the only people who don’t want to be seen out there are us and them.
I called to Connie to get down. I started to bring us hard to port and then I saw the launch.
” His jaw works under the bandage. “A flash off their bow. I’ve seen it before, Josie.
In the navy. I know what an RPG looks like coming off a tube and I knew in that half a second exactly what was about to happen to us and that there was nothing I could do about it. ”
The word lands hard.
RPG. Rocket-propelled grenade.
A military launcher fired across open water at a supposed fishing boat in the middle of the night. Not an engine fire. Not an accident. A weapon of war, aimed at Finn’s boat, by Voronin’s men, no doubt.
“The rocket hit forward. The whole bow came apart. The fuel went up. I went over the side and when I surfaced, The Quartermaster was already gone. Just fire on the water and… I don’t know what happened to Connie.”
“They haven’t found her,” I tell him and his eyes fill with pain. “I’m so sorry.”
He nods, tries to adjust his body and grimaces. “I grabbed a nav buoy and I held on. I waited to freeze to death and instead the Coast Guard found me.” He turns his head, slow, against the pillow. His eyes are dry and terrible. “Are they still looking for her?”
“Yes, they are. Maybe she made it.”
But even I know that sounds lame. I’ve been given limited information since coming to the hospital with Finn in the ambulance. They wheeled him into surgery, and the wait is killing me, but one of the Coast Guard officials told me there’s not much left to collect of The Quartermaster.
“I need to tell you something else,” I say.
His eyes come back to me.
“Mikhail came after me and Finn.” My voice scrapes raw on every word and I let it. “He blew out the back wall of the house with some kind of charge and he came through. He shot Finn in the chest.”
Marcus goes very still. “Jesus.”
“Finn’s alive. He’s in surgery right now, downstairs, and I don’t know yet, I don’t know how it’s going to—” I stop. I breathe. “I fought Mikhail off and he’s in custody. But Finn’s…”
My voice cracks and I can’t say anymore. For a long moment Marcus doesn’t say anything either.
Then his bandaged hand moves across the blanket toward me, and I take it as carefully as I can around the gauze, and we hold on.
“They hit us both,” he says quietly. “Same night. Same hour. The boat and the house.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not two things, Josie. That’s one thing.”
“I know.”
“It means Connie gave you up.” His grip tightens, just slightly, through the wrapping.
I watch the enormity of it land on Marcus the way it’s already landed on me—the grief and the fury fused together.
“She gave us up,” he says. It isn’t a question. “She went to Mikhail and she gave them you, but giving you up means she gave us all up.” His throat works. “Eighteen years and she handed it over.”
“I’m sorry” is all I can think to say to him. The betrayal is as deep to him as it is to Finn.
“And the thing is…” His voice cracks a hairline.
“The thing is I don’t think she ever once thought they’d come for her.
She thought she was buying something. Getting you out of the way, keeping Finn out of prison, getting her family back the way it was before you.
She made her deal and she got on that boat for a normal run like the deal protected her, like Voronin’s people keep their word.
” He stares at the ceiling. “They blew her up with the rest of it. She sold us to save us, and they killed her for free.”
A tear cuts through the soot still on the side of his face that isn’t bandaged.
“I think she was desperate.” Another lame statement. What I really want to say is that she was a stupid, stupid woman driven by jealousy and it cost her her life.
“She was mean and she was loyal and she loved that man so hard it rotted something in her and she did a terrible thing, but she didn’t deserve to die for it cold and alone in the dark.”
“Both of those are true, Marcus. I don’t know how you hold both of them, but they’re both true.”
And we sit there, the two of us, the only two people in the world who know the whole story of this horrible situation.
The betrayal and the rocket and the woman in the water and the man on the operating table and we hold on to each other through a fistful of gauze and we let it be as terrible as it is.
After a while, his eyes start to drift, the pain meds pulling him under.
I stand, lean over the bed, and press a kiss to the unburned side of his forehead, careful, my lips barely touching.
“I’ll check on you later,” I tell him. “And the second Finn’s out of surgery, the very second, I’ll come tell you. You don’t have to wonder. I’ll come tell you myself.”
His eyes flutter open. “Josie.”
“Yeah.”
“He chose you over all of it. He’d already chosen the white-fence thing. He told me. He was getting out.” A breath, eyelids drooping. “Don’t let anybody make him sorry he did.”
“I won’t,” I rasp. “Get some rest. I’ve got him.”
His eyes close and I leave him to it.
I make my way back down through the hospital, two floors and a long corridor, past the smell of antiseptic and the squeak of tennis shoes on polished industrial tile.
The surgical waiting area is a square of mismatched chairs and a wall-mounted TV playing the local news with the sound off. When I come around the corner, I see Cole rising from a chair before I clear the doorway.
“Josie.” He crosses to me fast, and the look on his face when he gets a clear view of me makes me realize for the first time, fully, what I must look like. “God. Okay. Sit down. Sit before you fall down.”
“I’m fine.”
It’s just some superficial cuts and bruises but paramedics patched me up. I waved off having a doctor look at me, wanting to be ready for news on Finn.
“You are absolutely not fine.” Cole’s got a hand under my elbow, steering me into a chair.
Over his shoulder I see Malik standing by the window with his phone in his hand and his jaw set, watching me with the flat assessing stillness he gets when he’s reading a scene.
“When’s the last time anyone looked at your hands?
Your hands are bleeding through, Josie.”
“The paramedic wrapped them. I pulled it loose.”
“Let’s get them rebandaged.”
“I’m fine,” I snap and then rub at my temple. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little out of it.”
Cole nods and crouches in front of me so we’re eye to eye. “Talk to me. What do we know about Finn?”
“He’s still in surgery. Gunshot to the chest. They took him about three hours ago and nobody’s come out.” My voice gives. “That’s all I have.”
Cole’s jaw tightens. He nods and doesn’t attempt to fill the silence with anything stupid, and I love him for it.
But then it occurs to me… they were set to sting Mikhail. “What happened to your operation?”
“No one showed up,” he gusts out as he rises and then lowers himself into the chair across from me.
“The tip was a setup,” I say, now all the pieces coming together. “It must have been Connie.”
“Connie?” he asks, brows knitting.
Shit. How do I explain Connie and The Quartermaster being blow apart, and Finn being a smuggler?
I can’t.
Luckily, Malik walks up. His hand comes to my shoulder. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“I need you to walk me through tonight. As much as you can. I know the timing’s terrible and I’m not going to push you past what you’ve got in you.
But I’ve got a man in custody, I’ve got a destroyed vessel in the strait, and I’ve got you sitting here covered in blood.
I need to understand what’s going on before the FBI gets in this room and starts understanding it for me. ”
My mind races, because while I need to give a statement to Malik and eventually the FBI, I can’t say anything that will put Finn and Marcus in jeopardy.
Think, Josie.
Think.
Okay, I’m a witness to Voronin’s right-hand man, Mikhail Sokolov, moving trafficked women. Once I make that connection, and if Mikhail flips on Voronin, the case is sealed. It’s a huge win for the FBI.
I’m the important one here.
I can call the shots because they need me.
My eyes cut between Malik and Cole, but they settle on Malik because he’s the boss. “I need to know if I talk to you in confidence, does it stay between us.”
“Josie… we were hired by the FBI—”