Captain Rourke

by Helena Newbury

  “Well?” asked Hannah. “Is it real?”

  I grunted noncommittally. But my heart was beating faster, my eyes taking in the lines of the islands, the flow of the handwriting. If this was a fake, it was the best I’d ever seen. That prickle on the back of my neck expanded, crackling down my spine. I leaned closer, checking the details, wanting to believe but not wanting to be fooled.

  I knew how to check for sure. There’s a rock just off the coast of Cuba. A real nasty one, because it’s right where you’d swing by the western tip. It’s sunk plenty of ships so it’s well marked, but it only started to appear on maps after 1750. The Hawk sank in 1703 but most of the fake maps show the rock because the fakers don’t know any better.

  I checked. I double checked. The rock wasn’t there.

  I drew in a slow breath. Edwards put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close. C’mon, that’s crazy. Her? Three hundred years of people looking and she just stumbles across it?

  He was right. It was crazy. But….

  But the thing is, treasure doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if you’re an archeologist who’s spent his entire life looking for a lost pyramid: it’ll let you wander straight past and then show its secrets to some army patrol who come across it in a sandstorm. The wreck of the El Cazador was found by a fishermen who snagged it with their nets. A German U-boat was found by a ship laying undersea cables.

  My heart was thundering, now. And maybe, just maybe, the Hawk could be found by me. One last haul, before the sea finally took me.

  And then I remembered that that wasn’t my life anymore. I remembered what happened the last time I’d gone seeking my fortune.

  I rolled the cloth and handed it back to her.

  “Is it real?” she asked urgently. “Can you help me get what’s on board?”

  I met her eyes but I didn’t see what I expected. She looked desperate: this was beyond anything as simple as greed.

  I realized I was still holding the map, our hands connected by it, the edge of my palm just brushing her softer one. “It’s real,” I muttered. Looking into those eyes, it was hard to get the words out. “But I can’t help you.”

  “What? But you’re the best!”

  “Was the best.”

  “But it’s the Hawk!” she said, eyes wide. “You told me it was the big prize. You said everyone wanted to find it!”

  God, it sounded tempting. “Not me,” I lied. “I quit.”

  She fell silent, just staring up at me as if cheated. As if she was realizing she’d been wrong about me. I never said I was a damn hero!

  She swallowed and shoved the map back in her purse. “Okay, fine.” Her voice was tight. “Well, thank you for looking at it. I’ll find someone else.” She turned to leave.

  I couldn’t help but stare at her divine, denim-clad ass for a second. She had her hand on the doorknob before I spoke up. “Wait!”

  She stopped.

  “You can’t just go around the island telling people you’ve found the Hawk. The men around here....” I sighed. “They don’t just hunt treasure. They do whatever makes them a quick buck. Some run drugs or guns. Most of them have killed. They’ll kill you and take the map.” My chest tightened at the thought.

  She turned to look at me over her shoulder. God, the way her hair shone. It looked so soft…. “What do I do, then?”

  I sighed. “Go home. That map’ll bring you nothing but trouble. It’s too much money, the kind that drives men crazy.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t answer. Does she owe money to someone? Is that what it is? “Go to the government, then. Make it an official expedition, scientists instead of treasure hunters. You’ll still get a cut.”

  “How long will that take?”

  I shrugged. “Three, four months.”

  “No! I need to get there now!”

  I frowned. “Why? Why the hurry?” She shook her head, turning to go, but I could see how scared she was and it made me mad. Whatever was threatening her, I wanted to run my sword right through it. I grabbed her. “Tell me!”

  She looked down at where my hand gripped her arm. “Are you going to help me?” she asked in a choked voice.

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back to all that. Not after Edwards. “No,” I said at last.

  She wrenched her arm out of my grip. “Then I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  And before I could stop her, she was off my boat and running down the dock.

  8

  Hannah

  I spent a fitful night on my great-grandfather’s couch. When the dawn flooded through the windows I was already awake, shaky from nightmares of Katherine in pain. I’d left my dad all alone, looking after her. I should be there!

  But if I flew home now, she had no hope. I had to get to the Hawk!

  I stumbled through to the study to think. I couldn’t go to the government: that would take months and Katherine had less than a week. I had to go to one of the other treasure hunters...or criminals, as Rourke had described them. Like the three who’d grabbed me in McKinley’s. The idea of putting my faith in men like that was terrifying. But what choice did I have? I just want to be back in Nebraska. I’m the wrong person for this!

  I let out a sob of frustration and fell into a chair. The vibration dislodged one of the oil paintings that was propped up against the wall and it slid to the floor. I sighed, bent down and picked it up—

  And found myself looking at Katherine’s face.

  No... not Katherine. But the resemblance was uncanny. The woman had the same blonde hair and blue eyes, the same cheekbones. There was another painting alongside the first and, out of curiosity, I picked it up, too. A different woman but the same hair and eyes.

  I dug through Bertrand’s notes until I found a catalog of sorts, matching the paintings to names. They were my ancestors...my female ancestors. Why had Bertrand been collecting paintings of them? Why had he needed to find out what they looked like?

  A sudden chill went through me.

  I gathered the paintings and separated them into two piles: women who’d died from the mystery disease and women it had skipped over. And I saw what Bertrand had seen: the disease was far from random.

  Every woman with blonde hair and blue eyes had died. Every. One.

  Every woman with some other combination had lived.

  It was genetic...and now I knew exactly which women would be affected. I let out a moan of horror as I ran through my mental images of my cousins. Five of the seven women had blonde hair and blue eyes. Three were roughly Katherine’s age and the other two would reach it within a few years. And at least two of the women already had kids of their own: I remembered the Facebook photos of little girls, most of them blonde. My heart felt as if someone was crushing it in my chest. I didn’t know who I felt sorrier for: the blonde cousins who’d die or the brown-haired ones who’d live to see the disease steal their blonde daughters from them.

  This wasn’t just about Katherine, anymore. I’d known the other women in our family were at risk but now I could actually think of names and faces. Harriet would die. Gwen. Paula and Lindsey. Chrissie! Oh God, Chrissie! I wanted to throw up. Chrissie was three years old, a giggling, mischievous firework of a child with big blue eyes and golden curls. She’d be dead by twenty-five.

  I stood up. Screw being scared. My family needed me. I had to go find another treasure hunter.

  I dug my washbag out of my suitcase and had a quick shower. Pulled on a fresh blouse and jeans. I checked the mirror in the bathroom, ran a hand through my hair—

  Oh Jesus. I froze and stared.

  There was one blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman I’d forgotten about and I was looking right at her. I’d been so worried about Katherine and my cousins, I hadn’t even considered myself. I was older than Katherine so I’d just assumed the disease had missed me the way it had missed my mom and my grandmother. But now I knew: it would hit me.

 
My stomach knotted. Bertrand’s notes were clear: the older you were when the disease hit, the faster it progressed. Katherine had roughly a week. When it hit me, I might only have days.

  The room spun and tilted around me. I took a long, shaky breath. I am going to die. The knowledge soaked into me like ice water. I am going to die.

  I opened my mouth to call for Katherine. For my dad. For a friend. For anyone. And then I remembered I was thousands of miles from the nearest person I knew. The only sound in the house was my own panicked breathing.

  The pain would be horrific, maybe even worse than Katherine’s since the disease would hit me faster. And Katherine had gone through it with her family and boyfriend around her, in a hospital filled with doctors. If I collapsed right now, here in Nassau, there wasn’t anyone to help me. No one would even find me. Hot tears burned at the backs of my eyes. I can’t do this! I have to fly home!

  But if I left now….

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I thought of Katherine and her boyfriend, about the wedding they’d never have and the children they’d never raise. I thought about all of my cousins, about Chrissie, watching her mom die and knowing that was to be her fate.

  I opened my eyes, took a deep breath, and set off for McKinley’s.

  I wasn’t sure if McKinley’s would be open: it was still only mid-morning. But it seemed to be the sort of place that was open whenever its patrons needed it...and they needed breakfast. There were benches outside and men were working their way through huge platefuls of bacon and eggs. The bartender frowned as I walked up. “You okay?”

  I shook my head. “I just need to ask you some stuff—”

  But he put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a worried look. “When did you last eat?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, shaking his hand off. I didn’t have time for breakfast and I was too stressed to eat. But even as I thought it, my stomach rumbled noisily and I swayed, light-headed. Come to think of it, when had I eaten? Not since before my flight: about forty hours ago, now. I’d been too worried about Katherine.

  The bartender took one look at my confused expression and pushed me down onto a bench. “Wait there!” he scolded. He strode away muttering. Moments later, he returned with a mug of tea and a plate piled high with slices of thick, rough-cut bacon, salty and perfect, slices of crunchy fried bread, and two eggs with golden yolks dripping down over everything.

  “I can’t eat all that,” I said. And then ate it. My body knew what I needed, even if I didn’t. As I ate, I could see the bartender watching over me from the doorway. Because of Rourke.

  Something in my chest tightened, just at the thought of him. Why didn’t he help me? When he’d saved me in McKinley’s, I thought I’d seen something in him, some desire to do the right thing. I’d even had some romantic notion of a captain being...honorable. Well, he’d shown me how stupid that was. There was no honor in this place.

  When I pushed my empty plate away, I felt better. The bartender came over and sat down opposite me. He waved away my thanks and the money I offered. “What do you need to know?” he asked.

  “Who are the best treasure hunters?”

  He crossed his arms. “The best one’s Captain Rourke.” That loyalty, again. That respect Rourke commanded.

  “Other than Rourke.”

  The bartender studied me for a long time, then sighed. “The most successful is Grant Ratcher. Runs a big boat and a big crew. But you don’t want to be messing with him.”

  The way he said it sent a warning chill down my spine. And I noticed he didn’t call him Captain Ratcher, despite him still having a crew and Rourke being on his own.

  “If you’ve got any other option,” the bartender told me, “I’d take it.”

  But I didn’t. I got Ratcher’s address, thanked him again, and set off.

  Ratcher’s villa was high in the hills, a sprawling place with terraces and balconies, reached via a long, winding driveway.

  I pressed the buzzer beside the gates. A camera panned to focus on me and a man’s voice muttered, “Yeah?”

  “Hannah Barnes, to see Mr. Ratcher.”

  There was a pause. The camera’s glass eye stayed on me for a moment. Then there was a buzz and the gates unlocked.

  A tanned guy with no shirt on, his chest a mass of twisting snake tattoos, led me through the huge house and out to a veranda at the back. A rabble of men, ten or more, chattered and cursed. It was barely past noon but there was already a pile of crumpled beer cans around them. A suckling pig was being turned on a spit over a fire.

  The man turning it was big. Not as tall as Rourke but much wider, heavy muscles smothered with fat. Where Rourke was tanned, he was pasty, his white tank top disappearing into his pale shoulders where the straps cut deep into the soft flesh. His neck and back were bright pink and scarred from repeated sunburn.

  The man leading me coughed to announce his presence but the big man turned the spit another three times before he bothered to turn around. His head was bald on top and shaved smooth on the sides and back, revealing a bumpy, uneven scalp. His head seemed to flow into his shoulders with no visible neck and it made him seem shorter and squatter, even though he was taller than me.

  “Hannah,” he said, grinning. That unsettled me, for some reason. With Rourke, it would have been Miss Barnes, the first time we met. And something about the way Ratcher said it made my skin crawl. He almost smacked his lips and I writhed: I didn’t want my name in his mouth.

  Don’t be stupid. You need him. I forced myself to smile.

  “What can we do for you?” He was still grinning, being nothing but friendly, but it felt as if he was patronizing me. To my surprise, his accent wasn’t American. He was British, some London accent I’d only heard in movies. Movies about bad neighborhoods and gangsters, that slow, sing-song dialect that can turn vicious and cruel in an instant.

  I swallowed. “I want to hire you. Or do a deal with you—I don’t know how this works. I’ve found the map to The Hawk.”

  The chatter around me stopped.

  “Have you?” asked Ratcher thoughtfully. “Have you, now?”

  I was keeping my eyes on him but I could feel everyone turn to look at me. I suddenly felt like a deer that had wandered into a pack of wolves.

  “Can I see it?” asked Ratcher. He stepped closer, his bulk blocking out the sun. His size was intimidating: he might be fat, but there was still a lot of muscle there.

  “I took a picture,” I told him. And passed him my phone.

  He lifted it up to his face and peered at it, his already small eyes made smaller by his squinting, His lower lip flopped over his upper as he concentrated. “Where’s the rest?” he asked.

  I swallowed nervously. I wasn’t stupid: if I just gave him the map, he’d disappear with it and I’d never get the cure. I had to make him take me with him, even though that meant going out there, on the vast, open sea. That’s why I’d very carefully covered the key part of the map with a blank sheet of paper before I’d photographed it. “You’ll see the rest when we’re on the way.” I lifted my chin and tried to look confident. “Not before.”

  Ratcher stared at me incredulously. The hush around us deepened. I tensed, wondering if I was about to be hit by one of his ham-sized hands.

  But then he burst out laughing: a big, ugly laugh that smelled of beer. He shook his head and pointed at me: you rascal! “No, no, very good! Very smart.” He winked at me but his eyes weren’t jolly: they were dead and cold. “Where’s Fredericks?” When he didn’t get an instant response, he yelled loud enough to make everyone jump. “Fredericks!”

  A thin man with soft blond curls pushed timidly through the crowd. Ratcher shoved the phone in his face. “Is this real?”

  Fredericks pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at the screen, zooming and scrolling. He must be Ratcher’s tame historian.

  Eventually, Fredericks looked up and nodded. Immediately, a ripple of excitement passed through the men. They started whispering and cursing, al
ready muttering about how they were going to spend the money.

  Ratcher called over a squat Hispanic man, a diving expert, to start figuring out what equipment would be needed. He’d surrounded himself with people who filled in for his lack of knowledge. What did he bring to the table? They had a muttered conversation, then Ratcher turned to me. “We’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll take care of the costs of the operation. You supply the map. We split what we find fifty-fifty. Deal?” He stuck out a pale, flabby hand.

  I stared at it. Fifty-fifty? Was that good? I had no idea what was normal. But I didn’t care about the treasure anyway. Hell, they could keep all of it, as long as I got the cure. But I wasn’t going to tell him that, not until that “curious stone” was in my hands. If Ratcher knew this was life-or-death for me, he’d have a frightening amount of power over me.

  I took his hand and shook it. “Deal.”

  Ratcher turned to his men. “Alright. We move today, in case some other wanker’s got wind of this. I want everyone geared up and ready to go by sundown.”

  The dive expert cursed.

  Ratcher whirled to face him. “You got a problem with that?”

  The man jerked back. “No!”

  And suddenly I saw what Ratcher brought to the table: fear. His crew stayed for the money but he ruled by terror, not respect.

  Ratcher turned to me. “We’ll stop off at your place, so you can get your pajamas.” He smirked as he said it, his eyes running over my breasts. “Then we’ll go. My ship’s down there: the Pitbull.”

  I looked where he was pointing but I already knew what I’d see: I remembered the name of the big, white, high-tech boat. Now I knew why that crewman I met hadn’t respected Rourke. He was loyal to a different captain. And I remembered how his eyes had crawled over me.

  This is a bad idea.

  But what choice did I have?

  Ratcher thrust a can of beer into my hand and clinked it with one of his own. I gave him a nervous smile and took a tentative gulp.