By now, I was fairly confident that I was on a boat. The way the floor rocked beneath me, the gentle sound of water lapping against the hull, and the distinct marine scent meant I could be nowhere else.
I was on a boat.
Just fucking great.
I kept crawling and reaching until I came to a piece of furniture. Groping the squishy swath of cotton draped over the edge of a long, flexible surface told me I was next to a bed. Putting both hands on top of it, I pulled myself up to a standing position and carefully walked around the bed, patting the top of it and wondering now if I was alone in the room.
“Hello?” I said quietly, careful not to be too loud lest whoever had put me on the boat should know that I’d woken up.
There was no answer.
Satisfied that I was alone, I stood a little taller and bravely took a step and a half towards what I assumed was a wall. I promptly took a nightstand to my thigh.
“Doh!” I breathed, bending over to rub the sharp pain out of my tender flesh. I was silently thankful for my height. If I’d been much shorter, the stand might have taken out another important piece of my anatomy. I felt around for a lamp but discovered nothing on the short piece of furniture.
I kept walking, arms extended, but more careful to feel around with my foot before stepping, and finally, my hand touched a wall. I slid my arm up and down, fingering the wallpapered panel, looking for a light switch or a door but coming up empty. I followed the wall around the perimeter of the room and then walked right into a hard, protruding sculpture hanging from a plaque on the wall.
I winced and rubbed my frontal lobe until the sharp pain subsided and was replaced, once again, with the dull throbbing I’d had before walking into it. With two hands, I felt the sculpture. It was cool and smooth. In the darkness, my hands quickly ran along the smooth, polished lines of a long animal muzzle with a protruding horn and a pair of ears.
Feeling around it, I kept going along the wall and seconds later discovered a light switch next to the edge of a doorjamb. With my spirit now buoyed by hope, my hand flicked on the light switch. But not so much as a flicker happened. Undeterred, my hand now slid down to the cool polished handle. I held my breath and slowly pressed down on it, but found it to be locked from the outside.
Fuck.
I was locked in a room on a boat.
Just fucking perfect.
But I wasn’t about to roll over and give up, because the fact of the matter was I didn’t have a choice. If I stayed where I was, whoever had put me in here, likely the people that had taken Pam, was coming back, and they certainly weren’t coming back to take me out for a beer.
I had to get out of here now. I’d have to kick the fucking door down. I felt the surface with my hands, wondering how flimsy it might be. It was hard to tell. I took a step back and sucked in a deep breath, but as I prepared to charge, the feeling of déjà vu suddenly washed over me as a recent memory flashed before my eyes.
Hello? Bull in a china shop? Nicolette Dominion’s sparkling, crystalline blue eyes flickered through my memory like an old movie. Only weeks prior, the feisty femme fatale had quietly stopped me from kicking down Cami Vergado’s apartment door. She’d grabbed my arm right before I’d been ready to kick and told me that things could be handled with a much lighter touch. And then, in an ungodly sexy fashion, she’d pulled two bobby pins from her hair. Step aside, sweetie.
The memory raised the long black Grecian hairs on my legs. Fuck, that woman had been hot.
I’d watched as she’d used her mouth to bend the pins and then had gone about picking the lock. It had only taken her a minute or two to open Cami’s door, and then she’d pressed the bobby pins into my hands. When she wasn’t looking, I’d tucked the bobby pins into the inner hatband of my fedora as a memento of the second woman to have taken my virginity. And now I kind of wondered if that hadn’t been fated to happen. Had fate known that I’d eventually succumb to this dilemma?
I popped the fedora off my head and felt around for the pins. And there they were, awaiting their extraction. I wondered if I could actually pick a lock in the depths of complete and utter darkness. Picking the lock in the light of day with Nico coaching me over my shoulder seemed just as dubious at this point. I wasn’t a locksmith, nor was I a professional cat burglar.
But, I had to try.
I got down on my haunches and checked the bends in the pins. Feeling confident that that was how Nico had used them, I proceeded to feel the door handle for a keyhole. Surprisingly enough, the keyhole wasn’t even a keyhole, but simply a small circle that one of the bobby pins slid easily into. I could feel the spring on the other side. It would literally be a matter of pressing the pin against the spring and turning the handle.
But I had to be prepared for whatever I saw on the outside. My adrenaline pulsed in my veins. I sucked in a deep breath and pressed the pin against the spring while simultaneously pulling down the door handle. I felt the lock click and I pulled the door open. A tiny sliver of blinding sunlight poured through the crack, forcing my eyes to shut and me to close the door. Settling back in my crouched position, I lifted my hat to replace the pins.
Back in the dark, I sucked in a deep breath and then let it out, slowly.
It was go time.
I pressed down on the door handle and pulled it towards me just a crack. My eyes were narrowed by the light. I’d no sooner pulled the door open a fraction of an inch than the force of a bear shoved it open all the way. As I rose, the door slammed against me and threw me backwards into the room, sending my hat flying.
18
Before I even had a chance to recover from the force of the door, a gorilla of a man hammered me across the head with a right hook, slamming me backwards onto the bed. The light that now poured into the previously pitch-black room shone around his head like a halo, casting a shadow across my attacker’s face.
He jumped to the side of the bed and rained down another blow to my head, the bed beneath me cushioning the impact. I let out a yowl as his rock-hard knuckles struck my Brillo-y jaw. “Enjoy your little nap, sleeping beauty?”
I grimaced. “A pillow would’ve been nice.” The words tasted metallic as I spat them out. Around me, the air carried a tinny sound, as if someone had rung a bell with my head inside of it.
He sneered at me, and as he reared back to deliver his fourth blow, my adrenaline kicked in and lifted the fog I’d been in. I raised my leg and shot a front kick into his chest, which caused his punch to come up short and gave me enough room to spring to my feet.
The big, burly man came at me fast, but I ducked into a double-leg takedown thanks to my single year of high school wrestling. With him on the floor and me finally on top, I smiled as I blasted him in the face to give him a taste of his own medicine. He smiled back. His mouth was only spotted with teeth, but I was fairly confident the missing ones weren’t of my doing.
He let me get off two more punches before he rolled me off him like a dented can of Bush’s baked beans. But before I could get my six-foot-four-inch frame vertical, he was on his feet, his stealth and speed shocking me. He pulled my left arm into an armlock behind my back and grabbed a hold of my hair, holding me up on my tiptoes. Apparently his mother hadn’t let him quit wrestling after the first year.
I knew my efforts to get away were now fruitless as he tiptoed me out of the room. So in one last act of defiance, I swept my fedora off the bed as we left the room and popped it back on my head.
Note to self: renew gym membership.
He forced me out into the corridor, where he grunted at me, “You got a date with the boss.”
“The boss? Cliché much?” I adjusted my hat. “Unless you mean the Boss. In that case, wow, yeah, I’m in.”
Mr. Big and Burly didn’t even crack a smile. Instead, he released the grip he had on my hair and pulled a .45 Magnum he’d had holstered under his arm, pointing it at my skull.
“Right,” I said, swallowing back the bile that had risen into my thro
at.
As my eyes adjusted to daylight, I could finally look around. It seemed I was in the lower level of a fancy boat. Though by the sheer size and poshness of the lower level, I had a feeling that boat was an understatement. Perhaps yacht was more accurate.
My attacker’s face was now visible too. He was square-jawed, with bulbous black eyes and a wide nose that was not properly centered. His face was scarred in numerous places, from what I could only assume was years of experience in bar brawls. He shoved me forward, keeping his gun trained on me.
That was when I heard a familiar tune, heavy on the violin, and then Macdonald Carey’s somber voice delivering his signature line: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives…
My breath hitched in my throat and my heart froze. That was Pam’s favorite soap opera. She’d recorded it on the television in my apartment and had forced me to watch countless episodes with her. I glanced up the corridor. There were several closed doors, and one open one. The light was on behind the open door. I was sure the sound of the television was coming from in there.
Mr. Big and Burly pushed me towards the room. “That way,” he grunted, giving me another shove with the heel of his army boot.
When we passed by the room, I peered inside, catching a glimpse of a petite blonde woman, chained to the bed with her hands and ankles bound. I was surprised when Big and Burly pulled me to a stop in front of her door.
“Pam?”
The woman’s head swiveled, giving me a chance to see her face. Indeed it was Pam, but she barely looked like the woman I’d laid eyes on the day before. Now her face was battered and bruised. Her right eye was swollen shut. I was sure it would be black by morning time. My heart sank seeing her like that. No matter what our issues were, no matter what she’d done to me, Pam didn’t deserve that.
Her left eye widened and her jaw dropped when she realized it was me. She sucked in her breath. “Danny!” she breathed. She tried to get up but fell backwards. That was when I realized her neck was chained to the bed too. “Oh my God, they got you too? Danny! I’m so sorry, I thought I was going with the hotel man. I didn’t know it wasn’t him!” Genuine tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Are you alright?” I asked, surprised that Big and Burly hadn’t shoved me along.
“No, I’m not alright! Th-that man hit me!”
I glanced back at Mr. Big and Burly, seething at him. “This guy?”
“N-no, not him. A different guy.”
I stared at her swollen face and swallowed hard, trying to shove down the rage I felt. “Who hit you, Pam?”
“That man that grabbed me. He had a ponytail.” She sobbed. “Oh, Danny, they’re gonna kill me and feed me to the sharks. I heard them talking.”
My spine stiffened. “No, they won’t, Pam. I won’t let them.”
She sobbed harder. “But, Danny! They want money! I told them you don’t have much money, but they seemed sure.”
“I’ll figure something out, Pam,” I promised. As much as I hated Pam, I hated seeing her chained up and battered even more. Pam might be a cheater, but she didn’t deserve to be tortured. She had a family that would be devastated to lose her. And suddenly I felt a giant amount of guilt and remorse for being so cavalier with her life earlier. Maybe it was because I hadn’t really believed the sincerity of these people, or maybe it was just me being childish about the woman who had caused me so much embarrassment and pain, but not once had I stopped to consider her family. Not once had I stopped to think about her mother or her brothers or the little sister that idolized Pam, and me for that matter. Cara would’ve been crushed to know how I hadn’t come to her sister’s rescue when I had the chance. No, she thought better of me than that. And I’d let her down. I’d let my parents down. And as much as I didn’t really care about her, I’d let Pam down. What kind of a man had I become?
“Time’s up,” grunted the man with the gun behind me.
“Danny! Don’t leave me! Please, Danny!” screamed Pam as Big and Burly shoved me down the hallway past her door.
“I’m not leaving you, Pam. Alright? Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out. I’m gonna get us out of this.”
“Dannnnnnny!”
19
I stumbled as I was shoved forward up a flight of spiral stairs. At the top, I landed in the yacht’s saloon. It was a large space with a sofa, a television, and a small round dinner table. Through the windows, I could see the horizon in all directions, and I discovered there wasn’t a speck of green for as far as the eye could see in any direction. As far as I knew, Paradise Isle could be a thousand miles away.
Fuck.
Big and Burly kept his gun trained on me. “Take a right,” he grunted.
I turned, and we walked through a short corridor into the yacht’s galley kitchen.
In the galley, he gestured towards another flight of stairs with his gun.
“I didn’t realize it was gonna be leg day,” I said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs and looking up as my stomach began to grumble, reminding me that I hadn’t had any breakfast. “Hey, man, we wouldn’t happen to be having this conversation with your boss over breakfast, would we? I haven’t had anything to eat this morning.”
“Zip it, wiseass,” barked the man.
I grinned. “I’ll take that as a no?”
Big and Burly’s gun shot out and cracked me against the side of my skull. “Upstairs. Now.”
Rubbing my head and now seething as I walked up the stairs, I cursed the man under my breath. I took my time, nervous as to what I might discover at the top of the stairs. At the landing, I found the yacht’s control room was to my left, and to my right, a man sat behind a polished mahogany desk, drumming his fingers on a desk calendar. Two square-shouldered sentries stood on either side of him.
“Well, hello, Daniel. Finally, we meet.”
He was younger than I’d expected, perhaps only in his early thirties. He had a round face with chubby cheeks mostly hidden behind a thick, brown full beard that made it difficult to tell where his neck ended and his face began. He wore dark round wire-rimmed glasses and had flyaway brown hair that bristled on top as if it had been rubbed against a balloon. The little Harry Potter lookalike was stocky, leaning towards fat.
“Harry,” I said quirking a smile. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I’ve read all your books.” I took a step forward to shake the man’s hand. “Okay, I lied, I only saw the movies, but you were excellent in them.”
The narrow slit in the man’s mustache and beard combo curved into a smile. “Such a sense of humor. That’s good. Really, really good.” He walked around his desk to lean his girthy butt up against the edge. “And do you know why that’s good, Daniel?”
I shrugged. “Helps to pick up the ladies, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, I’m sure it helps. I mean, you managed to convince Ms. Calcara to marry you. And she is certainly one Grade A piece of meat.”
I pursed my lips. Pam was mine to disrespect, not his. Hearing him refer to her as a piece of meat, heated my blood.
He seemed to notice my failed poker face. “Ohhhh,” he drawled. “So Daniel’s not as over Ms. Calcara as he’d like us to believe, huh, Smitty?”
“Nope, guess not,” grunted Big and Burly.
The testosterone in my blood boiled now. Joke time was over. I took a step forward to point threateningly at the squat man. “You better not lay another hand on her.”
Big and Burly and the two men stationed on either side of the desk all lurched forward to protect their boss.
Harry Potter held up a hand to stop them, and they froze in place. “Yeah? All of a sudden I’m not allowed to lay a hand on her, but only yesterday you gave me permission to feed her to the sharks?” Harry shook his head, chiding me. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. No, the reason that it’s so lucky that you’ve got a sense of humor is because you’re gonna need it.”
“Am I?”
“You certainly are. Because here’s what’s about to ha
ppen. Look out there.” He pointed out his office window, which looked out over the starboard side of the boat. “You see that little dot out there?”
I squinted, following his pointed finger. The blinding sun reflected off the water, making it difficult to see anything but its reflection. I could barely make out something floating in the waves. “Maybe.”
“Okay, well, that tiny dot out there is a boat. Boat might even be an exaggeration. It’s little more than a piece of aluminum, really. But it’s my gift to you.”
“Okay?” I asked, tipping my head sideways, wondering where he was going with this.
“What’s going to happen is, in about one minute, I’m going to have Smitty here escort you off this yacht and into the ocean.”
Like, in the ocean? I sucked on my split bottom lip, hoping the bleeding had stopped while my heart shot up into my throat. Pam and I had seen Open Water together, and it’d scared the shit out of both of us. Of course I’d never admitted to her that I was as freaked out as she was, but I’d had just as many nightmares as she’d had. Perhaps this was my penance for telling the kidnapper that he had my permission to feed Pam to the sharks. I swallowed hard but remained silent.
Harry lifted one of his dark brows. “Are you listening?”
I let out a breath but nodded.
“Okay. So, the fellas and I are letting you off here, and you’re going to do one of two things. Either you’re going to die—which, as a side note, is completely fine with me. You haven’t exactly been the model negotiator.”
Shifting my stance, I rolled my eyes. “Get on with it.”
“Right. Or, two, you’re going to swim to that boat out there. Of course, if it were me, I’d choose the latter.”
“If it were you, you’d sink to the bottom of the ocean like a fucking tub of mashed potatoes.”
Harry’s eyes pinched together. That one had stung. “As I was saying… if you actually make it to the boat, you’re going to board it, and then you’ll find your way back to Paradise Isle. When you get there, you’re going to wire seven million dollars into this account.” He took two steps towards me and handed me a card with some numbers written on it. “And don’t worry, the account is untraceable. Then, once I’ve successfully received the deposit, I will drop the lovely Ms. Calcara off at the nearest port of entry and she can jet away to safety.”
Drunk on a Boat Page 8
