Beside Still Waters (Psalm 23 Mysteries)

by Debbie Viguié

  Jeremiah headed to the left and Cindy followed, shivering when her leg brushed by the body. They slogged forward several more yards and the fear of the water began to overtake her again as they left the dead man farther behind.

  “How much further?” Cindy asked.

  “We need to get another deck toward the top, possibly two before we can get free of the ship.”

  “Are we going to make it?” she gasped, her teeth beginning to chatter as the water swirled above her waist.

  “We’re going to try,” he said grimly, pushing on.

  “What killed that man?” she asked, fearfully.

  “A bullet wound. He was bleeding out slowly. There was no way he would have made it much farther in the shape he was in.”

  “So, I...I didn’t kill him?” she said, remembering the gush of blood.

  “No, I did, when I shot him earlier. His brain just hadn’t gotten the message yet,” he said, his voice gruff.

  She felt relief rush through her. And as her worry over that subsided her fear of dying there in the dark, underwater came rushing back.

  She told herself that they had defeated their captors and they could defeat this, too.

  It was getting harder to move, though, the water dragging at every step. It reminded her of when she had been a little kid and tried to run out of the pool. Her legs were burning with the effort of moving so quickly. But they didn’t have the luxury of making their way more slowly. She followed right behind Jeremiah, trusting him to help them avoid sudden openings since she could no longer see the walls they were walking on through the dark water. His penlight was shining just a couple of feet ahead of her, a beacon of light.

  Finally they found another passageway leading to a higher deck and were scrambling. The water was swirling ever higher and it was now at her chest. She kicked something with her foot and pain spiked up her leg.

  Jeremiah twisted to look at her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. It was a lie. She was beyond exhausted and she wasn’t sure how she was even standing upright. It had to be the adrenalin, she theorized, but how long did that stuff work before it wore off?

  God. God had to be keeping her alive, keeping her moving. Maybe He still had a plan, a work for her to do. She had to keep going, keep trying, even if it felt like her legs were too heavy to take another step or her heart was racing so fast it felt like it was going to burst out of her chest. Truth was, she was so exhausted that she was even starting to fight to stay awake, to keep going. But every time she nearly stopped, the fear would kick in, prodding her, reminding her. To stop moving was to die.

  “Do you need me to carry you?”

  “No, just get us out of here.”

  ~

  Just get us out of here.

  Cindy’s words rang in Jeremiah’s ears. She was placing so much faith and trust in him and she had no idea just how hopeless their situation actually was. His knowledge of these kinds of ships was so limited that he was little better than stumbling around in the dark.

  He cast the penlight back and forth, keeping it going, trying to find the path they needed. He would have thought there would have been someplace on the ship where you could access all the desks, a central stair location. If there was, so far he hadn’t found it. Of course, thanks to the water that was slowing them down more and more they probably weren’t traveling as far as one would have thought.

  He pushed forward, saying a prayer for safety, for strength. And he kept wondering where Kapono was. Why hadn’t they been picked up before they had been brought onboard this ship?

  It didn’t sit right with him. He let his mind puzzle over it to combat the creeping fear that he was going to fail and that Cindy was going to die in the middle of the ocean and it would somehow be his fault.

  A terrible suspicion dawned on him. What if Kapono was playing both sides? That would explain why no rescue had arrived. But if that were the case wouldn’t he have simply handed over the bank account number on the card after he got it from Cindy?

  Unless he was planning on ransoming the account information or he worked for a competitor. Dark thoughts swirled in Jeremiah’s mind even as the water swirled around his waist. He ran back through in his mind everything Kapono had said and done since picking him up at the airport.

  At least he knew for a fact that Mark had called someone on the Honolulu police force for help. But maybe Kapono had seized the opportunity to insinuate himself into the position of liaison. But for what purpose? Maybe he wanted to sell the account numbers to their owner but he didn’t actually know who they belonged to so he needed to discover the identity of the man behind Cindy’s kidnapping first.

  It made a terrible kind of sense. If it was true there was no help coming, not even when they made it to the surface. Jeremiah had woken up in the raft and had no idea how long they had been out to sea, how many miles from shore they were.

  One thing at a time, he cautioned himself. He didn’t need to figure out how they were going to swim back to shore or find a boat to pick them up. All he had to figure out now was how to get out of the ship. Then they had to swim to the surface. There were a lot of steps that had to be accomplished successfully before he could even begin to worry about being adrift. And step one wasn’t going well.

  The only thing going in their favor was how slowly the ship was sinking. If they did make it out they were going to need a fighting chance of getting to the surface with just the oxygen in their lungs. From what he could tell anything remotely useful on board the ship had already been stripped out. They were on their own.

  The ship began to tilt slightly, back toward being right side up. It wasn’t much but it was disconcerting, and if it kept going the ladders could become a real issue.

  The water rose, swirling around his chest and just under Cindy’s chin. They were running out of time. And then he saw a murky light shining in front of them. He pushed forward as fast as he could until he could make out portholes in the ship submerged under the water.

  He stopped and Cindy looked down. He took a deep breath and then dove under the water. The latch on the window still worked, but there was too much water pressure on either side to allow it to swing open. His only chance was to break the glass which was already under a terrific strain.

  He pulled the gun out of his pocket. He wished it was a Glock 17 which was designed so it could be fired underwater. What he had, though, was a Sig Sauer P239 which meant he’d be able to fire it, but only once. He was going to have to make the shot count.

  He positioned the gun about six inches away from the glass and pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded outward, punching through the glass, shattering it. The casing didn’t eject, jammed into the slide. He had expected that. He took the gun and smashed the lingering bits of glass clear from the porthole frame. He looked at it closely. The opening was two feet wide. It was wide enough for Cindy to get through, but not him.

  He surfaced and Cindy gave a cry of relief. He looked at her. She was pale and shaking and there was terror in her eyes. The water was even higher now and she was struggling to keep her head above water.

  “You’re going to go down, out the porthole, and then swim clear of the ship and up to the surface. You’ll have to be careful to get out from under it. We should have you going out the top side, but I’m not sure we can cross over to it in time,” he said.

  “I’ll follow you,” she said resolutely.

  He shook his head. “I could never get my shoulders through, it’s too narrow. But you could make it.”

  “Not without you.”

  He picked her up so that her head was higher above water. It was rising much faster now. She put his arms around his neck and hung on, eyes pleading with him.

  ~

  Cindy couldn’t believe what Jeremiah was saying to her. He couldn’t be serious. How did he think she could go and leave him behind? After all that they had been through together, all that they had survived. They had to both make it out of here alive. Anythin
g else was insanity and she wouldn’t hear it.

  “It’s the only way,” Jeremiah said with a gasp.

  “No! I can’t leave you. We’ll make it, there has to be a way. We’ll keep walking, we have to find our way out. I won’t leave.”

  “You have to,” he insisted, struggling to get the words out around the water that was beginning to rush into his mouth. “I’ll keep trying to go up. But this is the best...chance.”

  She took a last breath of air before the water rose above her lips and shook her head wildly. She didn’t want to leave him. How could she after all this?

  And in her mind she saw her sister, dead, eyes frozen open. And the image morphed instead into Jeremiah. She hit his chest with her fists and pointed onward, but he shook his head.

  Then he grabbed her around the waist and twisted her around. She struggled, but he was too strong. Then he was shoving her out the porthole, pushing until her legs were clear.

  As soon as she was out she spun around, staring at him through the porthole. He gave her a small, sad smile and then sank from her sight.

  18

  Cindy wanted to scream, but her lungs were already burning for air. She stared into the porthole, but it had grown too dark and she couldn’t see anything.

  Her lungs ached harder and her legs began to kick almost involuntarily. She bumped her head against the side of the ship and then shook it to clear her vision. Then she turned and saw pale light above her. She kicked for all she was worth and got free of the ship and then she began clawing upward with arms too. She began to blow tiny bubbles out of her mouth, desperate to expel the carbon dioxide that was building up.

  She was getting weaker. Her body had already been wracked by exhaustion and deprivation. She realized she couldn’t make it much longer. The surface seemed so far away. She flailed wildly. She started to lose her vision.

  And then, just as her lungs felt like they were going to burst, she broke the surface. She gulped in a huge lungful of air and then let it out in one terrible scream.

  The sun was rising on the horizon. A new day was dawning. A day without Jeremiah. She screamed again, hearing the sound as though it were being ripped out of her body. She thrashed in the water, panicking, as her mind began to process where she was and not just what had happened.

  She was treading water in the ocean. She twisted her head around, looking for the land. She finally saw it, but it was so far away it might as well have not been there at all.

  Jeremiah’s dead and I will be, too.

  Several yards away from her there was a disturbance in the water and then a fin broke the surface. She stared in consternation. Just when things couldn’t possibly get worse they always seemed to.

  What was she supposed to do to survive a shark attack? All she could think about were admonitions she had heard on the news not to ‘look like a seal’. Well, she had no idea if she looked like a seal, but she did know that she was wearing the black dress still, and that it was mushrooming around her in the water.

  This can’t be happening.

  Punch them in the nose. She had heard that someone did that and lived. But that meant the shark had to be really close, and you had to be swinging towards all those teeth. And she could barely keep herself at the surface of the water.

  She should flip onto her back, float for a while and save her energy, but then she couldn’t watch the fin that was slowly circling. Was it getting closer or was she imagining it?

  No, it definitely was getting closer, and now it was turning toward her. She screamed again, and prepared to hit at whatever came at her. But how could she know how big it was, how far the nose was from the fin? She tried to see if she could see a shadow moving in the water, but with the way the sun was angled, she couldn’t.

  “Please, God, save me!” she screamed her prayer to the heavens.

  And then the fin shot upward and the entire creature leaped out of the water and then slammed back down into it a moment later.

  A dolphin. It was a dolphin and not a shark.

  She was sobbing and shaking and she was aware that her legs were slowing down. She needed to flip onto her back, had to.

  A roaring sound filled her ears and slowly she became aware of it. It seemed to be coming from behind her. Then she heard a shout. She turned her head and saw a boat headed her way with someone waving frantically. She didn’t have the strength to lift her arm to wave. She wasn’t even sure if she had the strength to keep treading water until they reached her.

  The boat slowed as it moved closer and frustration filled her. They needed to go faster, not slower. She couldn’t hold on any longer. Then she saw Kapono, standing on the edge of the boat.

  He dove into the water, and swam to her, and grabbed her around the chest, holding her up as the boat maneuvered closer. Then he swam the couple remaining feet, dragging her with him and there were many hands that lifted her out of the water and laid her down on the deck.

  “Where’s Jeremiah?” Kapono asked.

  The only answer she could give was another scream.

  Someone was beside her checking her over. “It’s okay,” he was murmuring over and over again. She registered that he seemed to be some sort of medic. How could she tell him that nothing would ever be okay again?

  She didn’t know how they had found her, and she was grateful that they had, but it felt like her soul was lying with Jeremiah in a watery grave far below.

  “She’s in shock,” she heard the medic tell someone.

  “Of course she is,” she heard Kapono answer.

  The boat rocked up and down. She felt like she was going to be sick. “I want to sit up,” she finally said.

  “You’d be better off laying down,” the medic said.

  She shook her head and he slowly helped her to a sitting position. Her head was spinning and she wanted to curl into a ball and sleep. She didn’t want to throw up, though. Of course, what could there possibly be in her system to expel?

  “Water,” she said.

  Someone handed her a bottle of water but her hand was shaking too hard to hold it. Then Kapono knelt down next to her and held it for her, tipping it slowly into her mouth. The first attempt left her sputtering and choking, but the second attempt she got some of it down. She nodded when she was done.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Jeremiah...he had a tracker on him. Then, we heard you screaming while we were searching for you. Can you tell me what happened?” Kapono asked after he had put the water away.

  She shuddered and closed her eyes. She was going to have to talk about it and she knew that the sooner she did, the more likely they could catch the people who were responsible.

  “The owner of the yacht, Pearl of the Deep, is behind everything. He called himself Mr. Black, but I don’t think that’s his real name.”

  “That’s okay, we caught him,” Kapono assured her. “He’s in jail downtown as we speak and he won’t be getting out for a long, long time.”

  She shuddered, grateful, at least, for that much.

  “Man overboard!”

  She jerked as she heard someone shouting. Everyone scrambled to the side of the boat, looking out at the ocean. Had someone fallen in? she wondered. That seemed strange. Whatever was going on, though, everyone seemed to be getting more and more agitated.

  She twisted her head to see what was going on.

  They were lifting someone into the boat. Then they set him down and she craned her neck to see who it was.

  Someone moved out of the way and her heart stopped and then restarted.

  It was Jeremiah.

  ~

  Jeremiah sat gasping on the bottom of the boat, relieved to see that Cindy was already there. He had been so worried that she wouldn’t make it. He gave her a smile and she just stared at him like she’d seen a ghost. Then she seemed to come alive and she crawled over to him and threw her arms around him.

  He held her close and thanked G-d that they were both alive. It was a mira
cle, nothing less.

  “You escaped?” she asked wonderingly.

  “I found the next passageway about thirty feet from the porthole. There were still a few pockets of air in there and then I found the one that led me out.” It had been a little more complicated than that, but there was no reason to share the details. It was enough that they were both alive.

  Finally she pulled away and Kapono handed him a bottle of water. He took it gratefully, but glared at the big detective.

  “What kept you?” Jeremiah asked Kapono.

  The detective grimaced. “The navy. By the time we figured out where you were they were about to blow the ship and they wouldn’t let us get any closer. In the minute it took me to explain the situation to them the explosives had already gone off. We assumed the worst.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “I was beginning to think I had misjudged you.”

  “Nah. I got your back, bruddah.”

  “Good to know,” Jeremiah said as he drank down the bottle of water.

  He turned to say something to Cindy but she was curled up on the floor next to him asleep. He touched her cheek briefly then turned back to Kapono.

  “She should see a doctor.”

  He nodded. “Our medic was checking her out.” He turned and indicated another man.

  “Apart from the obvious dehydration and exhaustion she’s got some nasty cuts, but she should be okay.”

  Jeremiah nodded, grateful to hear that.

  “The guy behind all this?”

  “Caught him at his yacht along with several of his gang. We also found Manny in that alley and arrested him.”

  “Figured you would,” Jeremiah said.

  “You gave me quite a scare.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “I’ll take another water.”

  Once they made it back to shore they transported Cindy and Jeremiah to the hospital. After being checked out he was released right away, but they admitted Cindy and immediately set her up on IV drips to help her body regain the fluids it had lost. Her cuts were cleaned and she was also given a boatload of antibiotics just to be on the safe side.