Reese nodded, then dove back under the waves once more. He struggled to keep himself below the water long enough and had to kick vigorously at the surface in order to point his torso down so that he could install the netting over the football. Every time he placed it there, then attempted to swing the rope under the hull, the net would float off as soon as he let go.
He sat there, suspended in the water for a moment, and thought about his options. Eventually, his air ran out again, and he was forced back to the surface. Sputtering for air, he called up to Tony. "I haven't got it yet! Every time I let my hand off, the net tries to float away.
"Reese, you better hurry!"
"What for?" he asked. "Is the leak getting worse?"
"I don't know!" Tony shouted. He scrambled through the water that poured off the bow when it lifted up after a swell and pointed astern. "But I saw a shark fin back there!
Fear tightened its grip on Reese’s heart and squeezed a little. "Oh, you gotta be kidding me," Reese growled. "Give me the rope!"
"But I already tied it to the cleat—"
"Then untie it! The only way I’m gonna be able to do this is swim under the boat and bring it up the other side myself!" He frantically looked back down the length of Tiberia’s hull to spot the shark fin, but there was nothing there—just ocean swells as far as he could see. He’d never felt more exposed in all his life. "Hurry!"
Tony tossed the line over the deck into the water behind Reese. "There you go, it's all in now."
Reese looked up at him. "Wish me luck.” He dove back under the water before he heard Tony's response. Reese kicked and pushed his body down under the waves so he could attach the netting over the football. Once it was secure, he pulled the rope tight then kicked again.
He dove straight down under Tiberia’s smooth white hull and couldn't help but risk a glance over his shoulder as he went. The water was too dark to see anything beyond the curve of the hull. But he sensed he wasn’t alone.
If there was indeed a shark out there, he couldn’t do anything about it other than pray, and move us as quickly as possible to get the job done. With the line held tight in one hand, he used powerful kicks from his legs to thrust him under the boat. He played the line out as slowly as possible to keep it taut against the hull, then passed underneath the shadow of the boat and his world grew darker.
Just as he was about to pass up onto the starboard side of the hull, he saw a dark, sleek shape glide effortlessly underneath him. A big dark shape. Shocked, Reese couldn't help the outburst that escaped his lips which caused a stream of bubbles to cloud his vision. As he kicked furiously to get up the other side of the boat, the shark vanished. It was there for a split second, and with a lazy swish of its tail, had disappeared again into the shadowy deep.
Reese had never seen a shark that big before in the wild and knew that off the coast of Cape May great white sharks were not uncommon. He kicked again and burst from the surface close to the boat. The last kick propelled him up out of the water almost to his chest, and he was able to grab the metal railing at the bow as he kept the rope in his other hand tight against the hull. Tony scrambled over to help him, but Reese demanded he take the rope first. "Quick take this, pull it as tight as you can against the cleat. That's the only thing holding the ball in place!"
"But the shark—"
Reese tried to pull himself up out of the water, but his cold, fatigued muscles couldn't take the strain, so he clung to the railing like bait. "Don't worry about the shark, get that rope tied!"
Tony bent to the task, and a moment later returned to take Reese’s hands in his. "Hang on, I'll get you up—holy crap, that thing is huge!" Tony called out.
Libby screamed, from the back of the boat, and before Tony could get Reese out of the water, the machine gun mounted to the front of Intrepid opened up with its familiar tat-tat-tat-tat as Jo poured lead into the water in an attempt to hit the shark.
Reese, still dangling from Tiberia’s bow, waved her off as Tony pulled him aboard. "It's okay!" he screamed. "Stop shooting! You might hit the boat!" Jo paused, aimed the machine gun toward the sky, and collapsed on the deck next to it. "You okay?" she called out. "Ain’t never seen a fish that big before!"
Reese flopped over on the deck and lay on his back as he stared at the achingly blue sky and panted.
"That was close! You all right?" Tony asked.
"Yeah…” Reese panted. "But I think I need to change my swimsuit…”
Chapter 15
Lavelle Homestead
Bee’s Landing Subdivision
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Spanner found Flynt on the way to the second house fire and told him about the shooting up the street. As soon as Darien heard the news, he knew the fires had been a diversion. Cursing himself for not seeing it sooner, he ran straight to Harriet's house. It was a shorter distance to cut through the woods and around the pond than it was to head to Lavelle's house first.
He paused in the driveway—the place had been ransacked. Darien barged in through the back door and stumbled over piles of supplies, pots, pans, chairs, and kitchen utensils that had been scattered around the entire first floor as if a bomb had gone off. "Harriet!"
His voice returned to him in the empty house.
Fearing the worst, he scrambled upstairs and threw open the door to their bedroom, but found it largely the same. Clothes had been tossed across the bed and the closet doors had been ripped off their tracks and left on the floor. The other bedrooms had been similarly tossed. Whoever had ransacked the first floor had been thorough.
He pulled back the curtain on one of the windows in Harriet's bedroom and looked across the street. A body lay in the front yard of Lavelle's house. Darien swore, then thundered down the stairs and out the front door. His mismatched work boots made a terrible racket as he ran down the driveway toward the street, and by the time he made it to Lavelle's front yard, he was wheezing like an old man.
He paused and rested his hands on his knees as he looked at the body. Someone had turned it over, if the blood stains on the grass were any indication of where the unfortunate wretch had originally fallen. He pulled the Desert Eagle from behind his waist and looked around. Darien couldn't hear anything—no birds chirping, no insects, nothing. The unnatural silence raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
He stepped over the body—a drug user, but not the same meth-head he'd originally encountered at the Westin house. He stepped forward toward the front door, his boots crunching the dry, bristly grass. His senses came alive, as he focused on the dark opening of the front door. His nose tingled with the residual acrid smoke from the fires, and the muscles of his back and shoulders twitched from hard use with the bucket line.
By the time he reached the front door he was almost breathing normally and cognizant enough to call out his presence before he entered the house. There was no telling what Lavelle might do if he just barged in with a gun drawn.
"Hello?" he called out. "Anybody here?"
Spanner chuffed up the driveway next to him. "There's nobody back at Harriet's house," he said, far too loud for Darien's liking.
They stepped inside the front door. "Cami? You in here?" Darien called out.
To his left, he found old man Price attempting to sit up on the floor. He was surrounded by spent shells and had a pistol in his hand. Darien lowered his own weapon and raised his empty hand. "Whoa there, old-timer—what happened? Where is everybody?"
"They took her," he growled as he flopped back to the floor and wheezed.
"Go check on him," Darien said to Spanner.
He stepped into the kitchen and kept his weapon down. A woman—one of the locals—lay sprawled on the floor and looked like someone had used her as a punching bag. A man he didn’t know but who looked familiar, stared up at him from his position near the woman’s head. He had bloody bandages in his hands and a confused look on his face.
“Relax,” Darien said as he holstered his pistol. “Not
here to fight. Where’s Cami?”
The man looked to Darien’s right. She sat slumped against the wall. Fresh tear tracks highlighted clean skin under the soot that had collected on her face while fighting the house fire. Her eyes, bloodshot and glistening, stared dully at the wrecked cabinets on the far side of the kitchen. She sat against the wall with her hands on the floor, palms up and empty. Next to her, a Glock lay abandoned on the tiles.
“What happened?” Darien asked. Lavelle didn’t reply, but the man did.
“They took her daughter…”
“No! Don’t tell me what I saw! They were coming for me—I heard them!” shrieked Harriet from outside.
The man with the bandages shook his head slowly. “She’s been like that since the raiders left. Mia’s out there on the patio trying to calm her down but…” He looked between Cami and the unconscious woman on the floor. “Wake up, Lizzy…” he muttered.
Darien left the man to his work and stepped through a comfortable family room into a screened-in porch. He found Harriet pacing in front of large windows, one hand at her mouth as she mumbled to herself. Her hair was dishevelled—a most unusual look on her—and she only wore one pink sandal—the other lay under an overturned lounge chair in the corner.
“Harriet,” Darien said as he stepped down into the exterior room.
She turned to him and her eyes lit up. She ran over and collapsed into his arms and started a fresh round of crying. He wrapped his arms around her and inhaled the fresh scent of vanilla from her hair as she sobbed into his sweaty, soot-covered shoulder.
“I’ve been trying to calm her down,” explained a younger brunette with a round face. “I need to check on my kids again, if you’ve got her?”
Darien nodded. “I’ll handle this.” He waited for the other woman to head back inside, then he held Harriet at arm’s length. “What’s going on? What happened?”
Harriet wiped at her eyes and sniffed. “Oh, it was simply dreadful!” She pushed him away and resumed pacing in front of the screened-in windows. “I was sitting there alone in my house and saw the smoke. When I saw more and more people rush down the road to help with the fire, I felt more and more alone…so…” She looked at him and shrugged one pretty, bare shoulder. He loved the way she did that—it made the sun dress she wore lift in the most appealing fashion.
Darien frowned. He wasn’t there to ogle Harriet. “What happened?”
“I came over here to see if I could help with Mr. Price,” she said matter-of-factly. “By the time I’d gotten here, there was just Amber taking care of him. The others were getting ready to go help with the fire—well, Mia Stevens wasn’t, she was about to take her kids upstairs—“
Darien put his hands on his hips and exhaled in a desperate attempt to keep control over his rising impatience. “What happened…?”
Harriet waved off his irritation with a flick of her wrist. “I came out here to get some fresh air—I can’t abide the smell of lavender and for some reason the whole house simply reeks of it—“
“Harriet!” Darien barked.
She quailed. “Okay! While I was out here, I heard some shouting, then gunshots. I got scared, so I flipped over that chair,” she said as she pointed—and refused to look—at the upturned lounge chair in the corner, “and hid behind it.” She looked at him, pleading for forgiveness. “I didn’t know what else to do—I was so scared, and you weren’t here—“
He tried to smile but worried the expression came off as more of a grimace. “You did fine, Harriet, just fine. Go on…”
“Well…” she said as she played with her hair and attempted to pull it into a decent ponytail. “There was a scuffle inside and I heard several men screaming about finding me. They were after ‘the HOA woman.’ Then I heard a girl scream and more gunshots, and then…” She wrapped her arms around herself and stopped pacing. She stared at the back yard and all the lush greenery that appeared a shade too dark, on the edge of the seasonal change.
“Two men burst from the kitchen onto the deck—I don’t even think they looked in the patio here or they’d have been sure to see me.” She glanced at the door. “The lounge chair didn’t really cover me all that well…”
“It worked just fine,” Darien said as he gently put his hands on her arms from behind. “What did they do?”
“They dragged Amber with them—she was struggling, but the skinny one…the one who tried…when you and I first met…”
Darien narrowed his eyes. “That little punk I hit when I first saw you in the Westin house?”
She nodded, chewing on her lower lip. “I thought I was going to wet myself,” she said, as she smoothed her dress with her hands splayed out. “But he was too busy with Amber and the other guy. That one was complaining about not finding the HOA woman they’d been sent to get…”
“Did he say a name? There’s more than one woman in the HOA...” Darien suggested.
“No one said my name. They were looking for me, Darien—and when they couldn’t find me, they took…oh, that poor girl, this is all my fault!” She stood there, hugging herself, trembling, on the verge of tears once more.
“I knew I should have killed that little—” began Darien.
“Why didn’t you?” asked Cami Lavelle from behind him. She’d appeared like a wraith, and he almost drew his pistol in surprise.
Darien grimaced at the sudden appearance of Lavelle, and also at her appearance. Her long red hair had been in a ponytail when she’d worked the fire, but now some of it had come loose and hung in random clumps and soot stained wisps. Her face, dark with soot and striped by tear tracks looked as if she’d applied war-paint. Her eyes though, he’d never seen such cold, hard eyes on a woman before—not even his ex. Lavelle was out for blood, pure and simple and she hefted the Glock like she was ready to use it.
“Whoa…Cami…let’s put the gun down and talk,” Darien said, careful to keep both his hands up—and empty.
She stepped past him like an automaton and didn’t so much as glance in his direction. All her focus was reserved for Harriet, who shrank like a wilted flower into the corner and trembled. “Why didn’t you fight them?” Lavelle demanded.
“I…I was scared—” Harriet whimpered.
Lavelle scoffed, but the sound seemed to come from a long way away, and was nothing like her normal, cheerful voice. “You watched them take my daughter…and they came for you.”
“B-b-but…” Harriet stuttered, her eyes locked on the barrel of the Glock Lavelle held in one hand, aimed at her face.
“Whoa, Cami—” Darien began, hands still up.
“You let them take my daughter…she’s only 19 years old…and you let them take her. And you knew them…” The pistol wavered in her grip. Lavelle had her finger on the trigger.
“Cami…” Darien said, hands outstretched and palms up, in an attempt to draw her attention off Harriet.
She swung the pistol around until it aimed at his face. Darien swallowed and took a step back. “Well, that worked,” he said under his breath. “Look—” he began, his eyes on that finger, curled around the trigger as the gun wavered in his face.
“You look,” Lavelle growled. “You had the chance to kill that piece of filth. You could have saved all this trouble, and instead you let that…that…animal join your team. Your crew,” she spat. “And now they’ve taken my daughter…because he’s working for the other monster you brought into our lives…” She shifted position and gripped the pistol with two hands.
“Cami...” he began, spreading his arms wide to show he was totally helpless before her.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right here and now.”
Darien swallowed and ignored the bead of sweat that trickled down the side of his face. “Because your daughter wouldn’t want that.”
Lavelle blinked, and the fury evaporated from her eyes. She stared at him for a long, long moment, then looked down and lowered the pistol. When she looked up again, her bloodshot eyes glis
tened. She nodded. “You’re right,” she said in a hoarse whisper. She holstered the weapon and adjusted her shirt, then meticulously scooped up all the loose hair around her face and repaired her ponytail as she stared into the house over Darien’s shoulder. She pulled her red, sooty hair back in a severe yank and tied it off.
He’d never seen such determination and deadly seriousness on a woman’s face before. She was preparing to go to war. “Cami, I—”
She glanced at him, and the simple movement of her eyes—that tight, focused glare silenced him, and the words died in his throat. “Whatever this is between us,” she said deliberately, “this leadership thing we have. That is the only thing keeping you alive right now. I have to make sure the neighborhood stays safe, too, thanks to you. If it weren’t for that, you’d be in that ditch at the front of the neighborhood where you belong. You and all your friends.” She brushed past him and stepped into the house.
Darien exhaled and lowered his arms. The kidnapping of her daughter had snapped something in Lavelle. She seemed more like a machine than the woman he’d known the past few days. He’d never seen such a transformation take place, even among the hardened criminals he’d associated with most of his adult life. Darien watched her leave, and a part of him was grateful the angel of death had decided to walk away.
He looked at Harriet, who trembled like a leaf in autumn, but refused to move from her sanctuary in the corner of the patio. “I’m s-scared…” she whispered.
Darien wiped his face with his hands. “Me too,” he murmured.
Chapter 16
Lavelle Homestead
Bee’s Landing Subdivision
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Cami stepped back into the house, filled with an anger so intense, her entire body hummed with fury. Every step she took sent little vibrations of rage up her legs to her torso, which radiated out to her arms and head, tingling over every square inch of her being. The world had ended—collapsed in a spray of foam and waves and pain—and still there were people who preyed on others and brought death and misery wherever they went.
Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow Page 12
