Too Far Gone

by Marliss Melton

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain in his head, Sean began to squirm. Priority number one was to get the handcuffs off. He couldn’t even feel his fingers anymore.

  Rolling onto his left side, he spied a spool of what looked like wire, shoved into the corner of the little hold, giving off a dull gleam. Wriggling toward it and craning his neck to reach it, Sean managed to bite the end that poked out. Stiff with rust, it’d probably been used to mend broken crab pots. He turned his head to pull on it, then let go and bit it again. Within seconds, he’d freed a length long enough to grab with his hands, provided he rolled the other way.

  Houdini might have relished this.

  Sean hated it. He rolled over. His arms, revived by the blood pushing its way into collapsed capillaries, burned as if on fire, reminding him of the time he’d been attacked by thousands of red ants while lying in hiding just outside a village in Ramadi.

  Only this was worse.

  Ignoring as best he could the fiery pain that seared his arms and shot deep into his fingertips, Sean worked the end of the wire into the lock of the cuffs that kept him helpless.

  Sweat drenched him, matting his shorts and T-shirt to his body as he fought to concentrate. With every beat of his heart, a hammer seemed to slam into the side of his head. Nausea and dizziness welled up, forcing him to pause in his labors, to breathe, in and out, all the while aware that the waves on which the boat rode were getting higher. And that meant just one thing: They were moving into deeper water.

  With a quiet click, the handcuffs suddenly gave way.

  Yes! As they clattered to the bottom of the hold, Sean shook his arms out, swallowing a moan of agony mixed with relief. He bent to investigate the situation with his feet, only to curse at his discovery. His ankles were bound separately and knotted multiple times by someone who tied knots for a living.

  But provided he had enough time, he was certain he could free himself.

  Following many minutes of frustration while gritting his teeth against his pounding headache, Sean managed to loosen the rope’s grip around his right ankle, perhaps enough to free it if he kicked his shoe off. The other remained firmly trapped.

  He set to work loosening it also, his head pounding so ferociously, he was forced to stop to still his pounding heart and breathe deeply.

  The sudden cessation of the boat’s engines made his pulse rocket right back into overdrive. He bent to work on the ropes more frantically.

  But it was too late. Hearing voices approach, he lay prostrate, pulled his arms beneath him, and grabbed the handcuffs. Cool, fresh air rushed in as the hatch was lifted. Slitting his eyes, Sean made out two burly, bearded men bending over him, backdropped by a night sky.

  “He’s still out,” declared one rough voice. “You get the anchor. I’ll get him.”

  Praying the rope wouldn’t tighten up as they moved him, Sean suffered bumps and bruises as he was heaved from the enclosure and dragged toward the side of the boat. He fought to keep the tension out of his body, praying neither man noticed that he now clutched, rather than wore, the handcuffs.

  As the man dragging him fought to lift him over the ship’s railing, Sean peeked at his environs through his lashes. Starlight bounced off sloshing water. The beacon of a lighthouse told him in which direction the shore lay. He had one hell of a swim ahead of him, and that was a best-case scenario.

  “On the count of three,” growled the man, who’d managed to prop Sean in a modified sitting position. He shifted his hold, positioning to shove him backward off the railing.

  Poised to somersault over the bow rake into the water, Sean drew a slow, deep breath as the man began to count, “One. Two. Three!”

  Propelled backward into thin air, Sean’s feet swung up and over his head. With a mighty splash, both he and the anchor struck the warm water simultaneously. For two brief seconds, Sean remained near the surface, where he quickly shucked his shoes. But then the slack rope went taut, and he was yanked straight down.

  Fast.

  Wriggling his right foot free, he kicked instinctively toward the surface.

  Of course, that got him nowhere. It also sapped his strength.

  Ceasing his struggles, he bent to claw at the rope still looped around his left leg. Down he sank into the darkness. Recollections of a training exercise in BUDs, Basic Underwater Demolition training, flashed through his head. His instructors had disconnected his breathing tubes and tied them into knots. It had been his job to fend off his attackers and unravel his breathing tubes, both at the same time.

  He pretended this was training all over again. But the pressure in his ears increased as he sank deeper, deeper, making little headway on the coils that gripped his left ankle. Overhead, he detected the whir of the boat’s propellers as it moved leisurely away.

  The air in Sean’s lungs dwindled. But as long as he pretended this was just a training exercise, he made progress, slipping each loop of the rope over his heel, one at a time. Then, with just a few loops remaining, he whirled like a dervish and freed himself, striking out for the surface.

  He never let himself think he wouldn’t make it. Failure was not an option. Ever.

  With his lungs convulsing and burning, he felt the pressure of the deep subside. To avoid the bends, he forced himself not to rise too quickly. Then, with his last ounce of strength, he burst from his watery prison to gasp in air—sweet, glorious, beautiful air that he swore he’d never take for granted again.

  Flipping onto his back, he floated on the swells of the Atlantic as the pounding in his head mushroomed into pain so debilitating that it threatened to rob him of consciousness. Fighting to keep his awareness, he floated lifelessly on the swells. He hadn’t come this far to black out now and drown.

  Slitting his eyes, he stared up into a sky bedecked with stars and considered how close he’d come to dying. It wouldn’t be so bad to be with Patrick again, but Ellie, whom he’d left in police custody, needed him now more than ever. The law was in cahoots with the Centurions. And the Centurions were trying to frame him for murder.

  If ever there was a time to die, this was not it.

  And so, with a deep breath of resolve, Sean craned his neck to eye the lights twinkling on the distant shore. Summoning his energy reserve, he rolled into a modified combat swimmer’s stroke, one that kept his thudding head as stabilized as possible, and scissor-kicked in that direction.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vinny held the phone to his ear with a hand that had a distinct tremor in it. A Navy SEAL corpsman’s hands were not supposed to tremble, but the emotions whipping through him weren’t your basic run-of-the-mill, scared-shitless type of feelings that he suffered on dangerous missions. The confusion, anger, and disillusionment were new for him.

  He was calling Commander Montgomery to tell him the bad news, that Chief Harlan had been arrested in Savannah, Georgia, for illegal possession of a concealed weapon. That in itself wasn’t so bad, but adding that Sean had supposedly fled the police and was now considered a dangerous fugitive was definitely worse.

  The CO didn’t immediately buy it. “Are you sure this is our Sean Harlan?” he asked. Because it was utterly out of character for Sean to do something as stupid as run from the law, even when the stakes were fairly high. But, then again, according to Lia, the stakes were probably higher than anyone realized.

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure,” Vinny replied. “It’s all over the local news down there. I just got online and watched a broadcast. He was with that woman, Ellie Stuart, down in Savannah looking for her boys when the police picked him up.”

  “I know where he was,” interrupted the CO. “I signed his leave chit.” He sounded awfully grim. “Thanks for letting me know,” he bit out. “I’ll look into it.”

  “Sir, there’s more,” Vinny said, glancing down the hallway toward his bedroom, where Lia was packing her suitcase. “My fiancée swears that Sean’s been framed by a group of men called the Centurions. She th
inks that they were the ones who kidnapped Ellie Stuart’s kids, and now they’re making it look like Sean did it.”

  The commander’s silence didn’t reassure him any. “I’ll call Hannah Lindstrom,” decided the CO. “Maybe she knows what the hell is going on.”

  His duty done, Vinny put the receiver down. He took one last look at the news article he’d found online—navy seal wanted in connection with boys’ abduction—and pushed back the desk chair.

  He did not want Lia involved in this, not even when she swore she was going to Savannah to be Ellie Stuart’s advocate. Not when Sean had made it perfectly clear that Ophelia was bottom on his list of people he respected.

  Drawing up short at their open door, Vinny watched Lia zip her brightly colored suits into a garment bag. As she glanced his way, he caught that stubborn gleam in her turquoise eyes. That look told him plainly she was going, anyway, despite his clearly stated wishes.

  Hurt put pressure on his chest. She’d never not taken his wishes into consideration before. “So you’re leaving, anyway,” he accused, jamming his hands into the pockets of his BDUs.

  With a sigh, she turned and faced him. “I told you, Vinny, this story is big. I can’t just sit by and wait for some other journalist to jump on it. Besides, Sean’s your friend. Don’t you want me defending him?”

  “You’re just going to take on these Centurions—whoever the hell they are—alone? Think about it, Lia. In order to have had Sean arrested, they had to have paid off the police. If they can make Sean disappear, they sure as hell can make you disappear.”

  “Wrong,” she countered, her beautiful face glowing with the self-assurance she used to lack. “They won’t dare come after me, because if they do, it’ll be obvious that they’re behind the kidnapping. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a shower and get to bed. I have to get up at four in the morning to catch a plane.”

  “You were going to go with or without my permission,” Vinny accused.

  Lia’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I need your permission now to do my job?” she retorted hotly.

  “When it takes you away from me, yes. When it puts you in danger, yes,” he countered, his Italian temper coming to an equally quick boil.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Lia said as she attacked the buttons on her blouse. “Right now, my career comes first.”

  Her words felt like cold water dousing him from head to foot. “Over me,” he said, his heart contracting painfully. He sent her a pleading look, longing for her to withdraw her statement.

  She hesitated, her blouse halfway undone. But then, averting her gaze, she turned wordlessly away, went into the bathroom, and shut and locked the door.

  Awash with sorrow, Vinny sagged against the doorframe. So, they’d come to their first big hurdle, and it had tripped them both flat. How were they going to get through the rest of their lives, especially when they were both so young with so much living ahead of them? Sure, Lia deserved to become the next Diane Sawyer, but at the expense of their relationship?

  He took one last look at the locked door, then turned and headed blindly down the hall. He needed to talk to Senior Chief about what had happened to Sean. If Lia thought she was going to fly down South to expose the biggest cover-up of the century, maybe Vinny and Solomon ought to get on board with that and see how two Navy SEALs could help their brother.

  If he wasn’t already beyond help.

  Sean roused to semiconsciousness. Was he dreaming, or was this real? A crab scuttled across his field of vision, its tiny claws making scrabbling sounds on the damp sand. The roar of the ocean told him he was sprawled on the beach. He could feel sand lodged in every crevice of his body, but this wasn’t Basic Underwater Demolition training or even Hell Week.

  This was worse. He tried to get up, but his limbs were so cold, so weak, they wouldn’t cooperate. And when he lifted his head to look around, pain knifed through his skull.

  Through a haze of windblown sand, he thought he saw a figure jogging toward him. Friend or foe? he wondered, regarding her with helpless suspicion.

  In the pale pink light of dawn, he saw that she wore her dark hair in a ponytail, workout sweats, and sneakers. As she hurried toward him, he rolled gingerly onto his side—the best he could do—to greet her.

  “Do you need help, sir?” she called, huffing up to him. “You’ve got a nasty gash on your head,” she observed, exhaling warm, minty breath on his face as she sank to one knee beside him. He noticed she was pretty but not especially young.

  “Concussion,” he guessed. It hurt just to talk.

  “You could use sutures,” she commented, eyeing the wound more closely. Her swift appraisal took in his stockinged feet, his soaked and sandy clothing, and the marks on his wrists. “When I saw you, I thought maybe you were dead,” she added.

  He had nothing to say to that. He felt about as close to dead a man could get.

  With a sudden inhalation, she pulled away from him. “You’re the man on the news,” she exclaimed with consternation. “The Navy SEAL.”

  Sean grimaced. Great. He really needed this—to be turned in to the cops by some helpful citizen. “You believe everything the media tells you, ma’am?” he gritted. Slitting his eyes, he watched the thoughts ebb and flow on her intelligent-looking face.

  “No,” she said at last, definitively.

  “Good, ’cause I’m not a bad guy, and I need help. ’Course, you could always just leave me here.”

  He knew the second she made up her mind. “I’ll help,” she decided. “Do you think you can walk?”

  He groaned at the thought. “Maybe.”

  “You’ll have to,” she said. “I can’t drive my car out on the beach.”

  In the maze of shadowed corridors beneath the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Skyler finally located Father Joseph’s office. The old priest had retired years ago, but he still volunteered his time as a counselor, which was why she discovered him in front of his bookshelf, scanning reference material.

  At her knock, he turned to greet her. Regarding her through thick spectacles, he obviously didn’t recognize her immediately, but as he waved her into the office, his face lit up with pleasure. “Why, Skyler,” he said, “what a lovely surprise.”

  They’d crossed paths from time to time at Hospice House, but since the priest’s retirement, she’d ceased to see him at Mass. “It’s been a while,” she admitted.

  “How’s your mother?” he asked gravely, taking her hand.

  Skyler swallowed down her grief. “She had a lucid moment recently,” she said with a forced smile. “That’s why I’m here, actually. It was something that she said.”

  The priest darted a look at the door. “Please,” he said, urging her toward the chairs. “Take a seat.”

  As he closed the door to afford them privacy, she eased into one of the chairs arranged in a circle. Father Joseph was well known for his work with families in crisis. The irony of that did not escape her as he took a seat across from her and pinned her with his sharp eyes. “Poor Skyler,” he said, “you’ve endured much sorrow for such a young woman. How can I be of help?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if you can,” she tentatively began. “My mother gave this to me when I was ten,” she explained, pulling the key out from under her sweater. At his sudden stillness, the flash of recognition on his face, her heart beat faster. “It goes to something, doesn’t it? She said you knew.”

  The priest touched a hand to his chin. His eyes glazed with worry. “You’ve heard of Pandora’s box, have you not?” he warily replied.

  “Of course. When it was opened, it released all the evils of mankind,” Skyler answered with a shiver of apprehension. “Why?”

  Instead of answering, he got up, crossed to the shelves she’d found him standing at, bent to open the cabinet beneath, and rummaged within it. At last, he pulled out a medium-sized metal box, and brought it to her.

  “When your mother gave me this,” whispered the priest as he kneeled to put the
box down, “she called it Pandora’s box. She said it was never to be opened by any hand but hers.”

  “But she gave me the key,” Skyler reasoned, both curious and frightened to discover its contents.

  “Then use it,” the priest offered with a shrug, “if that’s what you feel your mother wants.”

  Skyler slipped the key from her neck and inserted it in the box with shaking fingers. The lock released with a click. With her heart in her throat, she lifted the lid, half expecting demons to come shrieking out. Instead, she found herself regarding half a dozen journals, not unlike her mother’s garden journal.

  Slanting a look of surprise at the priest, Skyler lifted out the one on top and riffled through it, noting the date: 1998, just ten years ago. She began to read.

  Owen’s guest tonight was a Russian embezzler by the name of Semion Mogilevich. I believe he’s wanted by the FBI. He ate his dinner with a knife. Then he and Owen retreated to the study where I overheard Owen offer use of his shipping port at the harbor where, of course, no one dares to regulate the goods that come and go.

  Skyler closed the journal hastily and reached for another. The year was 1992. Owen has been selling all our shares in AT&T stock, tipped off by a friend on the board of directors that it is about to plummet.

  The humming in Skyler’s ears was the sound of her blood racing. It came as no surprise to read that her father was neck-deep in smuggling and insider trading. She’d long suspected charities like the homeless shelter and Hospice House were used to cloak more nefarious deeds. These journals proved it.

  And suddenly Skyler knew why her mother had wanted her to have them. This is the key to your future, she’d said.

  It was the key to freedom!

  As the priest moved discreetly toward his desk, she skimmed the other journals, overwhelmed by the detailed testimony her mother had compiled, by the sheer amount of damning information at her disposal. No wonder Matilda had hidden these journals in a box and given them to the priest to protect. Her husband would have killed her if he knew. . . .