Dead Reckoning

by Moore, Sandra K.

  Here, she felt safe. Here, she knew she was all right while everything she feared raged around them.

  He held her while she wept out the pain and confusion of the past weeks, the terror she had faced and the terror still in front of her. His broad hands stroked her back, his soothing murmurs washed over her ears. She heard her name and felt his own trembling. She felt his pulse beating in his neck against her cheek, his chest rising and falling like the inexorable tide.

  He held her when her tears dried and she pulled far enough away to find his lips, he held her when her hands raked through his hair, when her breath let go. He held her when his mouth strayed to the tender skin of her throat and her head tipped back. He held her when he laid her down on the long sofa’s lush seat. Outside the still-open curtains, she could see how the faraway stars gleamed and glittered; this way, they called, beacons of light in the great unknown darkness. This way. Then he held her when he showed her a heaven far more exquisite.

  Chapter 15

  Chris braced herself on her elbow and trailed her fingers down Connor’s chest. “I lied,” she said softly.

  “About what?” He reached up and pivoted the air-conditioning vent so it blew somewhere other than directly onto her bed, onto them.

  “About the first time not meaning anything.”

  “That’s not what you said. You said not to pretend it meant more than it did.” His arm, wrapped around her shoulders, pressed her closer. “What did it mean?”

  Chris felt the tears coming, and let them. Words caught in the back of her throat. With Natalie, yes, she could say something of what she felt. But with a man? This man? “A lot,” she finally managed.

  He stroked her face. “So you almost trust me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re still not talking about how you feel.” He drew her down and kissed her lightly. “It’s not easy, is it?”

  She shook her head, laid her cheek on his chest.

  He tightened his hold. “It just takes time.”

  “We don’t have much of that,” she reminded him.

  “We will if I come to Galveston.”

  “You still want to do that?” Hope flared, fearful and painful, in her chest.

  “Might as well. I’ll get fired for going off on this little jaunt, so I won’t have a job.” He shrugged, his shoulder flexing under her temple.

  “Would they do that?”

  “Probably. A career change wouldn’t hurt.”

  “So you want to leave the DEA.”

  She heard the weariness in his voice as he replied, “Imagine playing Whack-a-Mole with drug dealers. For every lowlife drug runner you take down, another pops up to take his place. The problem’s not the supply. It’s the demand.” He paused for a long moment. “Sean understood that before I did. The problem was he was the supply I was trying to shut down. We have to start choking off the demand at the source, with the kids.”

  “Your Spanish is good.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I bet Garza or Gus could set you up with a youth outreach agency down in Galveston.”

  His short chuckle was skeptical. “Like I’m good with kids.”

  “Hey!” She lifted up and glared at him. “You were damned good with that kid in the boatyard. Don’t underrate yourself. I’m serious,” she said firmly, suppressing a laugh at his look of incredulity. “You got him doing something different. And your experience with your brother counts for something, doesn’t it?”

  “Sean wasn’t a teenager.” But the hesitant speculation in his voice told her she’d gotten him thinking.

  “There’s just the matter of where you’re going to live,” she said.

  “Yeah, there is. I sold my house.”

  “Sold your house?”

  “I had to pay for all this somehow.” He waved his hand at Obsession. “I got lucky. I had an old house on a double lot in the Houston Heights. The people who bought the property are tearing down the house and putting up a huge Victorian.”

  Chris stared at him, trying to get her brain around his admission. “So you don’t have a place to live?”

  “Don’t look so shocked,” he said gently. “It’s just a house.”

  “Did you grow up there?”

  “There and other places. My folks moved back east after we graduated college, so Sean and I shared it until he took off.”

  “And it’s been your home since then.”

  “As much home as any place has been.”

  Chris lowered her head back to his chest, hearing deep inside his breath moving like the sea in a conch shell. The conversation moved her, frightened her, but she didn’t know why. Why should she care whether or not Connor had felt at home in his city house? He was obviously okay with it.

  “Natalie won’t want to live here with you,” he said abruptly.

  “How do you know?” she asked, a little annoyed that he’d guessed what she’d secretly been thinking. “She’s always liked living with me.”

  “She won’t be the same woman you knew six months ago,” he went on. “Sean wasn’t the same man.”

  “It sounds like your brother was gone a lot longer than Nat,” she pointed out, letting her fingertips play across his collarbone.

  He sighed. “Sean started leaving long before he stepped out the front door for the last time. It took me a while—years—to understand that he got to make his own choices, and it wasn’t my job to judge them.” When Chris raised her head to protest, he added, “The only thing I get to do is figure out what I want for myself. Everyone else gets to go their own way. Even if the path looks to me like it’s leading straight to hell.”

  Chris leaned away, propped herself on her elbow again. “But you tried to talk him out of his drug involvement, didn’t you?”

  His gorgeous eyes darkened with what looked like defeat or wisdom or acceptance. “It didn’t help. He needed to do what he did, just like Natalie needed to go marry someone she didn’t know. Just like she needs you now to come rescue her and you need to go do that.” His voice dropped, as if afraid to say the words. “Like you always have.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That you have a choice.”

  Chris irritably rolled onto her back, then pulled the sheet over her breasts. “But you’ve taken that choice away, haven’t you?”

  “Christina, it’s so damned dangerous.”

  “She’s in over her head,” Chris said stubbornly.

  “So are you,” he whispered. “Aren’t you where you want to be? Trying to help her again?”

  “That’s different.”

  Connor pivoted to his side and draped his heavy arm over her waist. “All I’m asking you to do is keep an open mind about your sister when she comes home. In my experience, they keep making the same decision over and over.”

  “I’d be naive to expect anything different,” Chris said, ignoring how naive she feared she could sometimes be.

  “Naive is okay,” he said, leaning down to kiss her shoulder. “Willfully blind is something else.”

  “Willfully blind is something I can’t afford right now.”

  Connor slowly peeled the sheet down. “No, we can’t. That’s why I want to come to Galveston with you. So you and I can see how things might turn out.” He paused his visual exploration. “You’ll have to help me find a place to stay. You know the area and I don’t.”

  She shrugged, liking how his mouth felt on her skin, especially when it traveled southwest a few inches and lingered. When he raised his head and she remembered they were having a conversation, she said, “I know of a place offhand. Cheap. Kind of small. Landlady can be a pain.”

  His lips tickled her breastbone. “As long as it’s near you, I can handle it.”

  “How about your old cabin?” she asked. He stopped what he was doing to meet her gaze. “Until we decide you should move into mine.”

  “Are you sure you want me?”

  “Are you sure you want me?”

&n
bsp; Her uncertainty must have shown in her face because he caught hold of her wrists and rolled on top of her. “What do you think?” he whispered, pressing in until she gasped. “Because I think I’m already home.”

  Chris woke by degrees. Cool air blew over her bare shoulder where the sheet didn’t reach. She opened one eye. Light filled the porthole windows, at the wrong angle for morning. All was quiet but for the steady hum of the air-conditioning unit.

  Alone. She knew without looking that Connor wasn’t in bed anymore. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. She’d slept hard and awakened feeling five miles into a ten-mile hangover. The bedside clock read three in the afternoon. Connor was probably at the hospital to see Jacquie. She rolled onto his side of the bed, wrapped her arms around his pillow, buried her face in it. His scent belonged here, she thought, breathing it in.

  She smiled against the fabric, thinking about his promise to come to Galveston after the trip, see how things went. If last night was any indication, she thought as she rolled onto her back and stretched, things would go just fine.

  God, that man was good with his mouth.

  She shivered, then dragged herself out of bed. In half an hour, she was showered, clothed, and ready to head to the hospital, where she planned to argue heatedly for them to keep to the current plan and take Obsession down to Isladonata. She intended to be there when Natalie was rescued.

  But she’d have to plot the course first. Always be prepared. She pulled the nightstand drawer open to get the handheld GPS.

  It was gone.

  Connor.

  Maybe he’d simply taken the GPS to the hospital with him, she told herself. Maybe he’d just carried it upstairs, played around with it a while to get acquainted with it. Maybe—

  Maybe you’re just fooling yourself and he’s gone to kill Scintella now.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” she said aloud. “It takes time to set up a raid.” Right. What she needed was a plan. “Call a cab, get to the hospital, see if he’s there.”

  While she waited for the cab to arrive, she quickly searched the salon, galley and pilothouse. There were signs he’d eaten (clean dishes in the drainer) and signs he’d made some calls (the fruit bowl shoved aside and the ballpoint pen uncapped next to the notepad, the pad indented with his handwriting). No GPS.

  She grabbed a No. 2 pencil from the pencil cup and used the old sketch trick to see the numbers he’d written on the pad. With trembling hands she dialed the number on her cell.

  “Tampa Bay,” a harried-sounding male tenor said.

  “Tampa Bay what?” Chris asked. “What do you guys do?”

  “Impound yard, lady. You gotta claim?”

  “No, wrong number. Thanks.”

  On the shore, a car horn honked. Her cab was waiting. She stuck the paper into her purse with her cell phone. Stepping outside, into sunshine, her now-dry Keds soaked up the dock’s heat. It felt good—hot and familiar. What wasn’t familiar was the woman walking slowly toward her, dressed in yesterday’s red shirt and white shorts, her wrinkled red scarf wrapped elegantly around her head, hiding the bandage, and her arm in a sling.

  “What are you doing?” Chris shouted as she jogged toward Jacquie.

  “Russ took off after leaving me some not-so-subtle hints he and Connor are going to the island alone,” she said when Chris reached her.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “The hell I shouldn’t.”

  Chris measured the hard glint in Jacquie’s tired eyes and pulled the note paper from her purse. “Connor called an impound yard.”

  “What’s the number?”

  Chris hit redial on her cell and handed it Jacquie. While Jacquie talked to the yard, Chris settled up with the cabbie in the parking lot. As he drove off, she hoped they wouldn’t end up needing him.

  “Thank you for your help,” Jacquie was saying as Chris returned. She savagely punched End and handed the phone back. “They’ve commandeered a seized drug running boat, the bastards.”

  Chris chucked the phone into her purse and they turned back toward Obsession. “Is that legal?”

  “Connor pulled some strings to do it.”

  “When?”

  “Four hours ago. They showed up at the impound yard and took possession of something called a Baja Outlaw.”

  “That’s a Cigarette boat.” Big boat, powerful engines, no mufflers.

  “Fast?”

  “About as fast as you can get.” Chris worriedly slipped her hair from its ponytail, then wound it back up again. “Connor’s still hiding this from the DEA.”

  “The boy’s stubbornness is going to get him killed.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Inside Obsession, Jacquie settled on the salon sofa. “How far out are we from Isladonata?”

  Chris stepped into the pilothouse to retrieve the chart from the chart table’s under-desk storage area and paused. Something was missing. She scanned the helm. It took several moments, but her brain finally ticked over and realized what was wrong.

  The engine keys were gone.

  “Shit.” She raced upstairs to the flybridge helm. Nothing there, either.

  “He’s taken the engine keys,” she called to Jacquie as she reentered the coach house.

  “He really doesn’t want us tagging along.”

  “Well, he’ll have to try harder than that,” Chris snapped, trying not to be furious.

  “Why?”

  “You can jump-start a diesel engine with a freakin’ screwdriver.”

  Jacquie’s brows shot up. “He’s underestimated you, girlfriend.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first. I’m going to get my sister, dammit.”

  “You and me faking our way onto the island? Damn right we’ll get her.”

  Chris quelled the hope that flared in her at Jacquie’s decisiveness. Girl Power. Girls and Glocks and Rugers, she corrected herself.

  She set the antique compass to one side and spread the chart over the coffee table. “Will the Coasties work with Connor if he’s not on an official raid?” She tried to keep her voice calm, ignored the deep ache she felt from yet another of his betrayals, no matter how well-intentioned.

  “Doubtful. He might call them in after the bust.”

  “If he shows up without me and without someone in uniform, Natalie won’t know to trust him.”

  “They’re planning on arresting Jerome Scintella and his gang,” Jacquie pointed out as she leaned forward to look at the map. “Natalie won’t have to trust them.”

  “And if things go wrong?”

  “My bet’s on Connor and Russ. Connor’s probably going to have backup we don’t know about.”

  “His backup before was Smitty and you know where that got him.” Correction. Where it got me.

  Then she heard herself say, “He’s not going to arrest Scintella. He’s going to kill him.” And the logical conclusion of that path was that their talk of living in Galveston had been nothing more than his attempt to persuade her he wasn’t going to murder Jerome Scintella. So she wouldn’t try to stop him.

  Jacquie looked up from her perusal of the chart, eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that?”

  “Why else wouldn’t he make this official?”

  “That’s not Connor,” Jacquie said flatly. “He’d never do that.”

  “Have you talked with him about his brother?”

  “I was there. I worked that sting operation.” Her level gaze, just this side of hostile, met Chris’s. “Yes, I’ve talked to him about his brother.”

  “No. I mean talked to him. Has he told you how he feels about what happened? What he wants to do?” Has he looked at you with that terrible inevitability, as if he had no other choice than to spill a man’s blood?

  Jacquie’s face went still, as if Chris had said more than either of them had intended. “He’s a good agent. He wants justice.”

  “I don’t care what he wants,” Chris lied, “as long as Natalie comes out alive.”

  “He�
��ll get your sister out all right. His conscience won’t let him do anything else.”

  Sudden tears stung Chris’s eyes. How much she wanted to believe that. How afraid she was to take that chance.

  “You have him wrong, Chris,” Jacquie said, chin lifted. “He won’t feel worthy of his badge—or you—if he doesn’t save her. It’ll be his brother all over again, except worse.”

  “How could it possibly be worse?” Chris asked, feeling a fierce tug at the idea of Natalie’s being hurt or killed.

  “Sean had gone down a long road without Connor. Family can be like that. After a few years of absence and silence, you start wondering not just what they’re doing but who they are. You wake up one day and they’re strangers. Then you wonder if you ever knew them at all.” She was silent for a long moment, and Chris didn’t know if Jacquie was talking about how she saw her own family, or maybe how her family saw her.

  “But Connor knows you,” Jacquie continued, the faintest tremor in her voice. “And he knows if he loses Natalie in this raid, he stands a very good chance of losing you. It’s one thing to lose your past and someone you don’t know anymore. But losing your future?”

  “You love him,” Chris said suddenly, her heart clogging her throat.

  “And it has never done me any good whatsoever.” Jacquie absently tapped the chart with her fingertips. “He’s never looked at me twice.” She raised a brow at Chris. “You have nothing to worry about where I’m concerned.”

  “But I’ve got a lot to worry about with him,” Chris said. “Not the least of which is that he stole my GPS.”

  “So that and a fast boat gives him what? A hell of a good head start?”

  Chris shook her head. “The GPS he stole has decoy lat-longs programmed in it. They’re going to the wrong island.”

  Isladonata rested, an emerald on a topaz bed. In the dawn, mist blanketed the coastal forest that abruptly ended at sheer cliffs on three of the island’s faces. As Chris guided Obsession southwest to the island’s southern face, she raised the binoculars. The treetops sloped down, toward what looked like might be a lagoon. Two buoys, green on the left, red on the right. Bingo.