Dead Reckoning

by Moore, Sandra K.

  Get a grip, she thought, but when she reached, there was nothing to grab hold of.

  Except him.

  Nothing mattered except this, her mouth wet and demanding on his, her arms wrapped around him. Consumed. Yes, to consume and be consumed, to drown, lost in the heat and friction. To feel something—life, blood, breath, her back against the wall, her hands unzipping him, reaching in, grasping his hard length. Hearing him groan, feeling the cool air on her thighs, her dress pulled up, his hot hands searching, moving, parting her, stroking, yes, then pushing her hands away and levering against her.

  This, she thought, this. Nothing but this physical sensation, her body, his body, moving together, driving and climbing, arching up and then over, over, until suddenly she broke, crashing headlong, rushing and rushing, mindless, thoughtless, hearing herself cry out his name. Then he gasped, “Christina,” in her ear and drove deep, hands dragging at her hips as he shuddered against her, then finally giving out, spent, and slipping back down into the warmth that was them together.

  His arms tightened around her as he breathed hard on her neck, almost tickling. She burrowed deeper into him, wanting to cover herself in his scent, her hands clutching his shirt, feeling the hard muscle beneath the soft fabric. He raised his head and kissed her.

  McLellan’s tongue flickered gently against her lips, tasting her again as if for the first time. His lips found their way to her neck, and his hand roamed down to cup her bottom and keep her close. When he finally lifted his head, she saw in his eyes the same vulnerability she’d glimpsed so often before, the same gentleness—that old-fashioned regard—rimmed with passion and lust, and for a split second she thought he loved her.

  Oh God, she thought. I can’t do this now. No matter how much she wanted him. No matter how badly she needed to feel him close.

  Still, she captured his mouth again, giving as good as she got. Just another few minutes of his heat and strength filling her up, that’s all, she told herself. Just a few minutes, here in the arms of this man who loved seagulls and boats, who maybe even loved her. In this safe refuge, in the midst of this horrible storm of confusion and fear.

  Natalie. The money. Falks. The mole.

  Chris pulled away. “So much for waiting till Galveston,” she whispered, all her voice could manage.

  He nuzzled her neck. “Extenuating circumstances.”

  “Or bad judgment.”

  He slowly drew back. She saw his face darken with hurt, then anger. He abruptly released her, leaving her body feeling cold without him to warm her. McLellan turned his back on her to zip up. She shimmied her dress back into place and steeled herself against the tears rising in her throat.

  “Don’t open the door to anyone but me,” he snapped. “I’ll knock at eight for breakfast.”

  Then he wrenched open her door and left.

  Chris stared down at the antique compass sitting on the mahogany coffee table. Outside the salon’s partially drawn curtains, night had settled down hard on the marina, mist falling around the piers’ overhead lights. She checked her watch. Tomorrow’s noon deadline didn’t give her much time to search Obsession.

  Now she ran her fingers carefully over every glossy centimeter of the brass compass. It was hopeless, she knew. The compass was clean and empty. Guileless. A clue to Jerome Scintella’s missing thirty million dollars wasn’t here.

  Falks was wrong about the money and Natalie’s part in it. Anything could have happened—the courier who was supposed to deliver the money to Scintella could have stolen it and framed Nat, or Scintella could be using this as an excuse to get rid of his wife.

  But the point was, he thought he was right. And he was so convinced he was prepared to kill both Chris and Natalie if she didn’t come up with the money.

  Now, sitting cross-legged in the floor, Chris wiped her brow on her T-shirt sleeve and wondered where Smitty was. When she’d come aboard, she’d called for him, but there was no answer. After poking her head in every cabin except her locked one, she’d concluded he’d gone out.

  McLellan hadn’t followed her from the hotel as she’d expected. After he’d slammed her door, he’d stalked down the hallway to his adjoining room. While stripping off her dress, she’d heard his television blare. The door between their rooms remained closed. Chris ruthlessly clamped down on the pain she felt—the pain she’d caused—and concentrated on the task at hand.

  She tugged the compass from its housing and looked inside. As empty as it had been the day it arrived. She reseated the compass on its gimbals and watched the beautiful dial orient itself.

  Natalie was a dead woman. Chris was a dead woman.

  She backed onto the sofa and sat quietly for a moment. No money. No nothing. Her gaze wandered over the salon’s new windows, the freshly sewn curtains, the pretty beige carpet McLellan and Smitty had so carefully laid, the new galley appliances. So much work. All for nothing if she couldn’t find Falks’s thirty million dollars.

  The brass compass, which she’d spent hours polishing until her hands blackened with tarnish and the metal gleamed golden, winked in the lamplight. No map, no compass, could possibly help her now. She didn’t even know which direction to turn for help. The compass dial pointed, unwavering, south.

  She’d always known what to do before, from the time they’d gotten lost playing settler—Chris pulling Natalie in their red wagon into the wilder trails of their grandfather’s property—to her decision to keep living at the estate during most of college. Natalie hadn’t wanted to live there alone with the old man, and though it’d been difficult to stay, Chris had. At least until she’d moved in with a boyfriend for one semester. But by then, Natalie had been getting old enough to have lots of friends and lots of things to do. Chris’s presence in the mausoleum their grandfather called home had been less important, and the timing had been right.

  But what was “right” now? As Chris closed the lid, she let tears of frustration tumble down her cheeks. New carpet smell filled her nostrils and churned her stomach. She tipped her head back, stretched her aching neck muscles.

  There was no place aboard that much cash could possibly lie undetected. Chris had seen the yacht stripped to its bones and found nothing out of place, so there was no point in tearing down wall panels and sniffing around the bilges for bundles of bills. But Falks clearly believed the money was on the yacht and wouldn’t take “it’s not here, you idiot” for an answer.

  If she wanted to save her sister, she needed to think outside the box.

  She froze.

  The box.

  Chris scrambled off the sofa. The transponder was too small to house anything of value, but it might hold a clue. She ran down to Hortense’s engine room. Inside, she grabbed the craft knife from the tool chest and ratcheted the blade out. She hacked through the remaining sealant that held the black box to the floor.

  The box was a bit too large for a standard transponder—the size of a cigarette pack—but at the same time it was way too small to hold thirty million dollars. Still, it was her only hope. A key, a code, something could be concealed in it. The sealant creaked and snapped as it gave up its seal.

  Chris held the smooth, rectangular box in her hands. Heavy. Was it still giving off a signal? Who was listening to it? She thought hard for a moment, then popped the wires out of the clips that secured them to the floor. No need to take a chance on letting the listener know she’d found out the box’s purpose. She’d leave the wires connected to the device and doing their job.

  She put the box on the workbench and studied it. Heavy-duty black plastic of some kind, built to be waterproof and withstand a pounding. She shook it like a child testing a Christmas present, but it offered no clues. A seam ran around the unwired end, as if it had a lid. Maybe she could pry it open. A long-necked screwdriver wedged into the seam, but no amount of levering cracked it. She’d have to cut it open.

  Chris clamped the box onto the table so the lid hung off. She fished around in the tool chest until she found the
jigsaw. It took her only a few seconds to load up a new blade, then plug the saw into the AC outlet.

  Rattling her teeth as she held it, the jigsaw spewed thin shavings across the workbench and onto her arms. Suddenly the blade caught, hung in the thick plastic. She released the trigger and took a deep breath.

  Calm down. Don’t drive so hard. Easy does it.

  She bent down and fit the blade in the cut, then pulled the trigger. The saw went more quickly this time, shearing through clean now that she gave the blade time to do its work. The plastic bent back from the pressure she applied until the box was open enough. The saw ground down to silence. Hands shaking, she set the jigsaw aside.

  She gripped the lid’s edge and bent it further away. The flashlight’s beam shone into the darkness, illuminating the wires and electronic chip of a transponder that faithfully broadcast its location.

  But there was nothing else. Nothing at all.

  Fighting back tears of despair, she flipped the clamp open to release the black box from the work table. Why couldn’t it have been filled with gold coins or a priceless artifact or something else suitably valuable? Anything she could fob off on Falks as being worth the money he insisted Natalie had stolen.

  As she ran a bead of black quick-cure sealant around the box top she’d created, she tried to reconcile Falks’s “facts” and what she knew to be true about her sister. Natalie had inherited nearly that much money from their grandfather, so it wasn’t as if she needed it. That one shoplifting arrest when she was fourteen had netted Natalie the attention she’d so desperately wanted from their grandfather, and Nat had done her community service to pay for it. Theft and deception weren’t Natalie’s way.

  Chris pressed the top into the sealant. She really needed to hold it down until the sealant set up, but she had to go talk to Smitty. Or if she couldn’t find Smitty, McLellan.

  The thought of waking McLellan and telling him about Falks made her stomach tighten. God, he’d be pissed she hadn’t told him earlier. Unless, of course, he was on Jerome Scintella’s payroll.

  Don’t go down that road, she ordered herself. Falks had warned her not to tell McLellan about his little after-dinner visit but maybe that was to make her trust the mole.

  Or maybe Connor has always told you the truth.

  “And maybe I was stupid to have sex with him tonight,” she said aloud. Much as she’d needed it. Irritated by that thought, she turned the box on its head and reached for a wrench to weigh it down. And paused.

  There, on the box’s black bottom, just within the ridge of white sealant that had held the box to the floor, was a fingerprint. Smudged, but a fingerprint. She carefully pressed her own thumb on the box’s clean top, held it for several seconds, then moved it. No print. Whoever had left his fingerprint had probably had residue of some kind on his hands when he mounted the box. She’d had that happen before, walked around all day sticking to every object she picked up because she’d gotten something on her fingers.

  Something like drying paint.

  She peeled back the top again and pointed the flashlight inside. The box’s bottom was clear, nothing electronic attached to it. Good.

  With more methodical patience than she’d had before, she reclamped the box and fired up the jigsaw. The blade bit slowly through the plastic, carved the bottom cleanly away without chewing up the wiring. It took only moments to apply the black sealant to the clean-cut edge and refasten the transponder to the floor, just as it had been. With it mounted in the shadows, behind the chest, whoever had put it there would have a hard time seeing it had been tampered with.

  Chris put away her tools, then swept the shards and trimmings into the waste can. “A clean tool area is a happy tool area,” she muttered, “especially when it hides what you’ve been up to.”

  Overhead in the salon, footsteps. Smitty was back. And from the sounds of it, moving furniture.

  She tilted the fingerprinted box bottom to the overhead fluorescent light. The print shone and glittered like a badge. But whose was it? McLellan’s? Smitty’s?

  Shit. She’d meant to call Gus from the hotel where she could have privacy but Falks’s little visit had screwed her brains. Now that Smitty was back, he could easily overhear her conversation. That phone call would have to wait.

  Inside her cabin, she carefully locked the door before going to her bed’s head. Feeling along the headboard, she found the indentation she was looking for and pressed. A hidden hatch popped open.

  Like many oceangoing sailors, one of Obsession’s previous owners had carried a firearm aboard. An American caught armed on someone else’s coastline could find himself imprisoned in an unforgiving country, so some sailors created little cubbyholes to hide their weapons. Chris had once been aboard a luxury ocean-going sailboat whose master stateroom had a full-width false wall that concealed a small arsenal, including several long-range rifles and an Uzi.

  Obsession’s armory had just enough room for the plastic oblong carrying the precious fingerprint and one gun. She slotted the plastic piece into the cubbyhole.

  Now, to deal with Falks.

  She closed the hatch and headed up to the salon, taking the steps two at a time.

  “Hey, Smitty, I—” Chris stopped short at the edge of the salon.

  A man lay on his back across the mahogany table, his legs hanging off the aft end, his arms at disjointed angles. Blood dribbled from what should have been the man’s head. Flecks of blood and what might have been bone or cartilage spattered the carpet, smeared his blond hair.

  Buried in the man’s face was the brass compass.

  “Smitty.” The word was so faint she was barely aware she said it. Was he breathing? Somehow still alive?

  She ran to him, reached for his arm to check his pulse.

  The man’s hand was skeletal, flesh pulled taut over bare bone. The compass dial pointed south. Then she saw the biker boots, the white shirt splashed with blood.

  Eugene Falks.

  Chapter 11

  “Good God, Chris, what have you done?”

  Chris rose and turned to the aft door. Smitty had paused in the doorway, half out of his lightweight jacket. Behind him, McLellan’s silhouette.

  “I was checking for a pulse.”

  McLellan shoved past Smitty and strode to the dead man, felt his skin, glanced at the blood pooled on the carpet. “You check the flybridge,” he barked to Smitty.

  Then he turned his remote gaze on Chris. “Where were you just now?”

  “In my cabin.”

  He grabbed her arm and pulled her to the stairs, drawing his gun from his shoulder holster as he went. She tried to wrench away but his grip didn’t loosen. “Let go of me!”

  McLellan didn’t speak. He manhandled her through the lower passageway and into her cabin. After a cursory glance around the room and into her private bathroom, he shoved her onto the bed.

  “Don’t move!” he ordered.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Stay put!” He slammed the door as he left.

  What, was she under arrest in her own cabin? On her own yacht? She’d be damned if she just sat down and obeyed some swaggering man’s orders. At the sound of McLellan’s cabin door closing, Chris angrily jumped off the bed.

  She had the doorknob half turned when she heard the starboard engine room door bang shut. In a moment, the port engine room clanged. Chris released the doorknob. Seconds later, the forepeak cabin door creaked open, then after a moment clicked closed. Her blood chilled.

  He was looking for the killer.

  Because Eugene Falks had been murdered during the few minutes it’d taken her to clean up the engine room work space and then stash the fingerprint in her hidey-hole. While she’d worked, over her head, a man had been murdered in her salon.

  In her home.

  McLellan’s feet pounded back up the steps. Raised voices, heated arguing. McLellan and Smitty. Either of them could have done it, she realized. Either could’ve been close enough to the yacht to have ki
lled Falks and left, then returned as if for the first time.

  Chris slid her nightstand drawer open. The Ruger lay right where she’d put it, next to a handheld GPS she’d been playing with, plugging in the lat-longs Natalie had given her. On impulse, she opened the hidey-hole and tucked the Ruger inside next to the plastic square containing the fingerprint.

  Had she not stopped to hide the print, she might have interrupted the murderer. He might have killed her, too.

  She’d just closed up the hidden compartment when her cabin door opened. McLellan, fierce and inevitable as a thunderhead, strode in, shut the door, locked it. Her heart pounded. The man who’d held her so desperately just hours before wasn’t here; this was someone else, etched with rage. She took a step back from him, out of reach.

  McLellan paced the room twice, breathing hard, then stopped to glare at her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “About what?”

  “Don’t bullshit me. What were you doing here tonight?”

  “You think I killed Falks?”

  His face went still. “You recognize the dead man?”

  “I sprayed his face with a fire extinguisher at close range when he attacked me,” she snarled. “Yes, I know the dead man.”

  “Not much left of his face now.”

  She shuddered. Falks’s fingers, so long and bony, rose in her mind—clutching the cabinet’s edge as he stalked her, clinging to the aft deck railing before he dropped to the ground, casually flicking ash from his cigarette. She should feel relief, she thought abstractedly, but all she felt was horror.

  When the monster threatening you was murdered, what greater monster lurked behind him, waiting?

  “I recognized his hands.” Chris clamped her own hands together to keep them still. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Whether you did or didn’t, we’ve got a helluva mess to clean up now.” He raked his hand through his hair, not looking at her. “Russ and Jacquie are on their way over. We got lucky. Russ has some New Orleans contacts. They’ll take care of the investigation.”