She pushed aside his coat and slid her palms over his chest. Thin cotton, likely a T-shirt, stretched across the contours she knew so well. She centered her hand over his heart, then curled forward and pressed her mouth to the hollow at the base of his throat.
His pulse throbbed against her lips.
And the nightmare of the past year simply collapsed. She touched her tongue to his skin and laughed softly. “That would be crazy, Sloan. You’re the man I love. I would know you anywhere.”
The hum of machinery that had been droning in the background abruptly stopped. A low rumble resonated through the floor. Was that the ship’s engines starting up?
Erika felt Sloan tense. Her laughter quickly died. She slid higher on his lap, folding her arms behind his neck as she locked her ankles behind his back. One nightmare had ended, but there was another that was far from over. “Don’t go yet,” she whispered. “Please.”
“I have to.”
“Sloan—”
“I need to play this through. It’s the only way out for either of us.”
“But what will you do?”
He leaned to one side and patted the floor with his hand, as if he were searching for something. Metal scraped on metal. There was the soft snick of his switchblade closing. “You’ll be safe here as long as you keep quiet,” he said. “I’ll say you’re dead. No one except Wates would think of questioning my word, but I’ll secure the door behind me to make sure no one comes in.”
“You’re not answering me. We’re setting off, aren’t we? What’s going to happen once we’re out at sea?”
“Trust me, Riki. I’ll handle it.” He grasped her arms and tried to pull them from around his neck.
She laced her fingers together and hung on. “You’re posing as the middle man, aren’t you? Between Wates and his customers. That’s what it sounded like.”
“Riki—”
“Do you have backup?”
He reached behind his back to tug at her ankles. “I’ve been working this for a year. It’s all arranged.”
“Who are you working with? Is it the NYPD? The FBI? They know about the Stingers, right?”
“Same old Riki,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t your uncle have owned a deli or a flower shop instead of raising you around cops?”
“I can help you, Sloan. I’ll keep out of sight, but I can still watch your back.”
He gave up trying to pry her loose, put his arms around her and rose to his feet. He carried her a few steps until his toe thudded against the wooden crate where she’d sat earlier. “I don’t have time to explain. The best way for you to help me is to stay here and keep quiet, okay?”
“Sloan—”
“If I don’t go, we’ll both be dead.”
Logically, she knew that, yet she had just found him. How could she possibly survive if she lost him again?
“Riki, you have to let me go.”
Let him go? That’s what everyone had been telling her to do for a year.
There was a sharp rap on the door, as if someone had struck the metal with the butt of a gun. “Mr. Tanner?”
“Get lost, Leavish,” he called.
“Mr. Wates needs you on the bridge.”
“Yeah. I’ll be there when I’m done.”
“Mr. Tanner—”
“Hell, Leavish. You want to come in here and watch me zip up?”
Erika unhooked her legs from around Sloan’s hips. Her knees buckled again when her feet touched the floor. She caught his sleeves to keep from falling. It was jarring how easily Sloan could slip back into the role of Max.
Fabric rustled as he reached inside his coat. He took her hand and pressed something vaguely square into her right palm. “I don’t have any Dramamine, but nibble on this if you start feeling seasick. It might help.”
She closed her fingers and felt the crinkle of foil. He’d returned the Hershey’s bar he’d taken from her pocket. “Same old Sloan,” she murmured, her voice breaking.
He took her other hand, lifted it to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. “Wait for me, Riki B. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“I’ll wait for you forever if I have to, Sloan.” She turned her hand over and touched her fingertips to his face, memorizing the lines, the angles and the dips. “As long as you promise to come back.”
He cradled her face in his palms and spoke against her lips. “I will, Riki. I swear it on my love for you. Nothing on this earth is going to keep us apart again.”
The first kiss had made her giddy. This one left her weak. It was swift and savage and bittersweet. She could taste the goodbye.
No, not yet. Please.
The rumble in the floor got louder. There was another series of raps on the door.
And suddenly, Erika was holding nothing but shadows.
The ship stopped moving after five hours. Erika assumed it was five hours. She was usually good at estimating time, but it felt as if they’d been moving for five years. Cautiously, she lifted her head from between her knees and blotted her forehead on her sleeve.
How far had they traveled? The fact that they had gone anywhere without colliding with something was beyond her, but perhaps the fog had burned off with the sunrise. It would have to be late morning by now. She deduced the storm of the night before must have cleared, since the sea was relatively calm, apart from the occasional swell that treated her to a slow-motion, gut-churning, roller-coaster shrug.
The crate she was sitting on shifted uphill. Erika sank her nails into the wooden sides and inhaled shallowly through her nose until the floor and her stomach settled back into place. The Hershey’s bar was long gone, but it had served its purpose. She’d kept it down through sheer stubbornness—she didn’t want to waste perfectly good chocolate.
She pushed herself to her feet. She wavered a little until she got her balance, then inched her way to the door and groped for the wheel that served as its handle.
During the lulls in the swells, she’d explored every inch of this storeroom. She hadn’t found a porthole or any other exit. There was a grate in the ceiling beside the left wall that probably led to the ventilation system, but it would have been too small for her to get through, even if she’d had some tool to unfasten the screws. She hadn’t found a light switch, either. It had to be outside the door.
Damn the man. Couldn’t Sloan have turned on the light before he’d left? Okay, it might have been hard to explain to Leavish why a corpse would need a light. But would it have killed him to have given her some straight answers about what was going on? It wasn’t as if she was about to rush out there and try to interfere…
She leaned her shoulder against the door. Well, yes, that was exactly what she would do if she could. She would be out of this room like a shot if Sloan hadn’t locked her in. That was the primary reason he’d done it.
Sloan knew she couldn’t help being wired this way. She’d been an impressionable ten-year-old when she’d gone to live with her Uncle Hector. He’d put her to work polishing glasses at the Cherry on Top so that he could keep an eye on her after school. From her seat behind the bar, she’d grown up listening to the stories of men like Sloan and his friends. That’s what had inspired her to become a P.I., so she could have the challenge of solving crimes without having to put up with the police department bureaucracy the cops always complained about.
But whether the investigating was private or taxpayer-funded, nothing was ever a hundred-percent certain. No matter how much planning went into an undercover sting, stuff often went wrong. It never hurt to have an ace in the hole. She could have been Sloan’s ace. Instead, he was still pulling this super-macho protectiveness thing that had always driven her nuts.
She rubbed her hand over her face, muffling her laugh against her palm. What was she doing? How could she be annoyed with him? She loved him. She was overjoyed to know he was alive. Her heart was still staggering from the emotions he’d released.
Yet now that the emotions were out, it was i
mpossible to cram them back inside. All this time, she’d tortured herself with guilt. She’d believed her final argument with Sloan and her inability to commit had precipitated his death. But no, he’d been alive all along and had stayed away by choice. By choice. She wanted an explanation. He owed her that much, didn’t he?
She gave the door handle a twist, but naturally it didn’t move. Muttering a curse, she flattened her palms against the door and dropped her forehead to the back of her hand.
Damn, she was a mess. It wasn’t only the ship that had been giving her a roller-coaster ride. Her mood had been swinging from one extreme to another.
What she and Sloan had between them was solid. She had absolute faith in their love.
But the euphoria of their reunion had dimmed somewhat beneath the misery she’d endured over the past five hours. Sure, she was in love. She was also exhausted, seasick and worried out of her mind, so it was understandable that she would be getting a tad cranky.
A man’s voice drifted from somewhere down the corridor. Erika quickly put her ear to the door. The voice had sounded like Leavish’s.
“I still can’t see why Tanner couldn’t clean up his own mess.”
“Quit whining, Leavish.” Footsteps rang through the floor, approaching fast. “Wates wants us to get rid of the loose ends now before the transfer.”
“Well, you better do the lifting, Floyd. I threw my back out getting Dick overboard.”
Erika grasped the situation instantly. Wates must have sent Leavish and that other man, Floyd, to get rid of her body.
Well, she’d wanted to get out of this room. One way or another, that was about to happen.
She moved to the side of the door that had the hinges and flattened herself against the wall. This time, she would definitely have the element of surprise in her favor. These men expected to find a corpse, not a desperate, pissed-off woman with ten years of self-defense training.
Something clunked against the door handle. “Why’d Tanner padlock it?”
“I think it got messy,” Leavish said. “He used his knife.”
“Ah, hell.”
“Yeah. These are new jeans.”
“Move over, I’ve got a key.” There was a scraping creak as the door swung inward.
Erika held her breath as the door came within a millimeter of striking her breasts. Shifting her weight to the balls of her feet, she blinked at the light that came in from the corridor, praying her eyes would adjust fast. She knew she would only have one crack at this. She had to make it count.
“I can’t see anything. Where’s the light switch?”
“I’ll get it,” Leavish said.
Yellow light flooded from a bulb in the ceiling. An instant later, a stocky blond man in a plaid shirt walked into the room.
Erika slipped out from behind the door, pivoted on one foot and whipped her trailing foot directly at the blond man’s head. She shifted her balance just before she made contact, straightening her leg to deliver her entire momentum into the kick. The sole of her boot hit the side of his jaw with a dull crunch.
She didn’t wait to watch him fall. From the corner of her eye she saw movement in the doorway. She dove to the side, grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it shut.
The thick metal panel caught Leavish full in the face and bounced open again. He screamed and lifted his hands to his nose. Erika lunged past him to the corridor, whirled and delivered a kick to the back of his knees.
Leavish tripped over the raised threshold and tumbled into the room, clearing the doorway by less than an inch.
Erika caught the door and yanked it shut, then re-hooked the padlock and snapped it closed.
Then she braced her hands on her thighs, leaned over and gulped in a few lungfuls of air. Real fights weren’t anything like the drawn-out slugfests in the movies. That whole brutal encounter couldn’t have taken more than four seconds. Nevertheless, she felt totally drained. It hadn’t done her blisters any good, either.
But she was alive and had just reduced the odds against her and Sloan by two.
The door vibrated with a sudden thud. At first she thought Leavish or his companion had managed to crawl over to hit it, but then she realized the vibration had come from the hull of the ship. There was a second, deeper clunk, a lull, and then a distant, popping sound.
Gunfire?
She straightened up and scanned the corridor. Yes, that was gunfire. Whatever sting Sloan had arranged must be going down right now. Where was he? Was he safe? Something must have already gone wrong if he’d let these men come down here to get her.
“Open the door!”
Erika jumped backward. She spotted a switch on the wall beside the doorframe and flicked it off.
“Hey!”
There was another string of pops. The sensible, rational thing to do would be to find a safe place to hide until it was all over, but Sloan was out there, so she wasn’t about to stay here. She closed her eyes, picturing the route that would lead to the deck. Without further thought, she hiked up her skirt and ran.
She didn’t get there as fast as she would have liked. Twice she had to duck behind bulkheads to avoid being seen. By the time she saw daylight, the gunfire had tapered off. Fresh air swept through the hold, carrying with it the chugging roar of helicopters. A voice shouted commands through a loudspeaker, the words distorted by volume and distance, yet still recognizable.
“Put down your weapons. You are surrounded.”
Erika raced up the staircase. Her first view of the deck brought tears to her eyes. Some of it was a reaction to the sunshine that glared from every metal surface, dazzling her light-deprived retinas. Yet the bulk of the tears were from relief. Great, sobbing hunks of it.
Men and women in Coast Guard uniforms were everywhere. So were people in dark-blue windbreakers with FBI emblazoned across the backs. Flack-jacketed sharpshooters were poised in the open doorway of a helicopter that hovered above the main hatch. At least two more helicopters hung in the air beyond the sides of the ship. Past the railing at the edge of the deck she glimpsed the shape of another ship bobbing on the swells, smaller than this freighter yet crawling with more uniforms.
It was going to be all right. It was over. Thank God.
“Stop right there, ma’am,” someone shouted from behind her. “Hands above your head.”
“Don’t shoot!” Erika clasped her hands on top of her head and turned around. “I’m on your side.”
One of the FBI men was pointing a pistol at her chest. With his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his expression was the blank game face of any on-duty cop. He spoke into a transmitter that curved around his jaw. “It looks like I found the hostage.”
Hostage? Sloan must have been able to get a message out. Erika started forward. “Where’s Sloan? Detective Sloan Morrissey? Is he all right?”
He motioned with the gun. “Stay where you are, ma’am.”
She stopped and glanced around fast, still struggling to cope with the influx of light. She spotted several men lying facedown on the deck near a large funnel-shaped air shaft, their hands fastened behind their backs with plastic bundling ties. She didn’t recognize any of them, but judging by the way they were dressed, they could have been some of the men she’d seen inside the storage shed.
“What’s your name?”
“Erika Balough,” she said, returning her gaze to the FBI agent. “I’m a private investigator. I was knocked out and brought here against my will and for God’s sake, point that pistol at someone who needs it.”
He spoke into the microphone again, his gun not wavering. “The description matches, but Hutchison isn’t with her. Ma’am, where is Special Agent Hutchison?”
“Who?”
“Floyd Hutchison. Five-ten. Blond hair. He was sent to secure your safety.”
“Floyd…” She dropped her hands. “Oh, my God. Was he working with you, too? I knocked him out. He’s locked in the hold with—”
Her words caught in her throat. Past t
he FBI agent’s head, she saw two figures running along the opposite side of the deck. The one in front was a gray-haired man wearing a cashmere sweater and tan slacks. That had to be Wates. A tall, raven-haired man was pursuing him, his black raincoat flapping behind him with each stride like the wings of a dark angel. “Sloan,” she whispered.
The helicopter with the sharpshooters that had been hovering above the open hatch swooped past her head and angled toward the running men. The loudspeaker beneath its fuselage crackled above the din. “Stop where you are!”
Erika sprang forward. “No!”
The FBI agent caught her arm before she could go past him. “Ma’am, the area isn’t secured. For your own safety, you have to—”
“Tell them not to shoot!” she yelled. “Don’t you see who that is?”
From the front of the ship, a second helicopter veered toward Wates and Sloan. A spate of automatic weapon fire struck a hatch cover, ricocheting from the metal in a trail of sparks.
“No!” Erika snatched the agent’s headset from his head and shouted into the microphone. “Hold your fire! That’s Detective Morrissey!”
It happened with the slow-motion horror of a nightmare that just wouldn’t end. Wates reached the railing at the edge of the deck and turned, his black pistol in his hands, at the same moment Sloan dove for him. The two men grappled for the weapon. Gunfire tracked across the deck at their feet, sending up more sparks and a orange-red haze of rust.
Erika threw away the headset. The racket from the helicopters would have drowned out a cannon.
Wates jerked from the impact as bullets slammed into his back. He let go of Sloan and crumpled like a deflating balloon.
Sloan staggered backward. His hips hit the railing. The ship rolled into a swell and he went over the side.
“No!” Erika screamed. She sprinted across the deck. “Sloan!”
But she was too late.
Sloan was gone.
Again.
Chapter 7
Music throbbed from the speakers in the corners of the bar. Hector was playing his Rolling Stones collection tonight. The vintage red patrol-car light in the window was keeping the beat as Mick sang about time being on his side. Erika found the song ironically fitting. “He is coming back to me, Uncle Hector.”
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