“I thought you said you liked his dumbass rules.”
“I said I like rules,” she replied, playing coy. “My rules. My very strict rules. And I like punishing guys who break my very strict rules.”
Brent grinned, his hands moving under her dress and grabbing her ass. He easily lifted her ninety-five-pound frame off the floor and pressed her against the door, so that she was face to face with him. “What rules are those?”
Leilani could already feel him becoming aroused, growing larger, as he held her against the door with his body weight, squeezing her butt with his big powerful hands.
Her knee jerked upward, fast and hard. She caught Brent right in the balls and completely by surprise. He fell back against the bench, his hands going to his groin as his knees buckled.
“My rules are simple,” she said, as Brent fell to his knees, his face only inches from her crotch. Leilani couldn’t resist herself. She grabbed Brent by the hair and pushed his face into her burning desire.
“Rule One,” she said, grinding her pelvis against the man’s face, “I get to do whatever I want to you, and you get to take it. I will be kicking and punching you in the balls again before this night’s over; learn to enjoy it. Rule Two, I get off first and more frequently.”
Pushing him back, she lifted his chin, so he could see her. She could see the desire in his eyes and knew he’d be putty in her hands.
“Rule Three, Brent. You get off when I’m ready to get you off, no sooner. If you don’t like my rules, that means the little taste you just got is all you’ll get tonight. Unless you count Rosy Palm helping you out. Do you like my rules?”
Though still in obvious pain, he nodded and reached for her dress again. She swatted his hands away. “We have work to do first. Now, go search that cabin.”
Opening the engine room door, she stepped down into it and looked around. There was another light switch beside the first one and she flicked it on. Two rows of bright fluorescent overhead lights came on in the smaller space on either side of the engine. Another differently colored engine sat off to the side of the big one. She figured it was a backup engine, or maybe powered a generator or something.
Crouching slightly, she moved toward the front of the boat, past the main engine, careful not to let her pretty blue dress snag on anything or get smeared with grease. Searching the many drawers and cubbyholes along the wall, she found her worries to be unfounded; the engine room and equipment were spotless.
Yvette knew the natural skills and abilities of all the Gang of Six. That was why Leilani always got the boats. Not only was she small enough to make a more thorough search, but she had a knack for how these boat people thought.
At the end were a bunch of electrical gadgets, thousands of wires and hoses, switches, and other machines. Her search was methodical and thorough, as she worked her way down the opposite side. Things weren’t always what they seemed. What might look like a solid panel could be hollow with a hoard of cash behind it.
Finding no such hiding place, she continued to the little shop area, where she went through every drawer and cabinet. The orderliness of everything was amazing, and she was impressed. She wasn’t disappointed that she hadn’t found anything. Leilani considered it a challenge. She just hadn’t found the hiding places yet.
She saved the lowest part of the boat for last. At least this one looked clean, she thought when she opened the hatch in the floor. She squatted and looked closer. It was spotless, just like the rest of the boat. And it was also very tight. But not too tight.
She stood and pulled her dress up over her head, folding it and placing it on a clean bench, with the boat’s key ring on top of it. She removed her sandals, then stepped down into the very bottom of the boat, completely naked. She’d need more flexibility, and there was bound to be some dirt down there.
She situated herself so she could crawl under the floor head-first, then started to snake her way through the bowels of the boat. Just ahead, there was light spilling in around the main engine, where the floor opened to the space above.
Finally, she found two hiding places, way back under the bigger engine, at what appeared at first to be a solid bulkhead. There wasn’t much light, but she felt around until she found a groove in the top of both panels that allowed her to pull them out. Each one contained a sturdy-looking plastic box.
Pulling the first box out, she found it locked. “Dammit,” she mumbled.
Then Leilani remembered the second key on the key ring. She lifted the box and shoved it through the opening next to the engine, then did the same with the second box. The opening on the other side of the engine was slightly wider and she was able to contort her body, turning like a snake, and climb up out of the bilge.
Retrieving the key ring, she squatted and tried it on the first box. The lock turned, and she opened it. A grin slowly spread across her face. Inside were neat stacks of bundled American currency. She closed the box and pulled the second one over.
Opening it, she gave out a low whistle. It had a bunch of different colored, small, leather binders. She recognized them as passports, each embossed with a different seal denoting the country of origin. On top of them was a big, shiny handgun.
Leilani sat back cross-legged on the rough planking and took out several of the document binders. She opened the first one, an American passport. The picture was of a handsome older man with sandy blond hair and very masculine features. His name was Rene Cook. The second one had the same man, pictured differently, and with a different name. The third had yet another name, but it was obviously the same guy in the picture.
Who the hell was this guy? Leilani wondered.
Unpleasant tasks were best done quickly, and with the brain set on auto-pilot. It wasn’t difficult, as the cliff was slightly downhill from where the bodies lay. But it was time-consuming, rolling them off the edge at a spot that would be clear of the rocks the gunman had found.
There was a bit of a blood slick around the men’s bodies as they floated close together in the water. It would dissipate quickly, and Charity had splashed water on the rocks to get rid of the blood where the gunman had bashed his brains out in the fall.
Charity stood and took one last look around. The men hadn’t brought anything with them aside from the clothes they wore. Between all four, they barely had ten dollars in their pockets. She left that and everything else on the bodies, but kept the big hunting knife and leather sheath.
The anchor lay on the ground beside her. A very short rope connected it to all four of the men’s ankles. She’d brought the line up from there, knotting it around the bodies at one-foot intervals, binding them together for all eternity. If there were crabs down there, she didn’t want a body part coming loose and drifting away.
She nudged the anchor with her foot, and it toppled off the edge of the rock. It went down quickly, taking the men’s bodies, feet first, on a six-hundred-foot descent to the bottom. A steady stream of pinkish air bubbles slowed after a few seconds, as water pressure squeezed the air out of the men’s lungs through severed tracheas.
Charity knew that between that and the lateral incisions she’d made in each man’s belly, most decomposition gasses would easily escape. If there were no crabs down there, eventually bacteria would leave nothing but their bones.
Leaving the grisly scene, Charity went up the steep trail to the clearing. She gathered up all of her and Savannah’s belongings and was about to start down the trail when Savannah appeared.
“What did you do with the bodies?”
It didn’t escape Charity’s attention that she’d said bodies, not men. Three of the men had still been alive when Savannah and Flo left. And Savannah’s attitude was now one of stone-cold indifference.
Charity nodded her head toward the cliff. “At the bottom.”
Savannah stepped over to the edge and looked down. “They’re six hundred feet closer to wh
ere they belong then.”
“Is Flo okay?”
“She’s on the boat with Woden.”
Charity studied the woman’s face. Her eyes, which earlier had been alive and sparkling, were now dull and inscrutable.
“You’ve experienced something like this before?” Charity asked, already knowing the answer. She herself had been set upon by scum a few times in the last two years — not since she’d been with Victor, though. It seemed that a woman alone on a boat was considered fair game to certain men. The four that Charity had killed were bent on doing harm to the two women, and maybe the girl. She harbored no qualms about ending their miserable lives.
“Once,” Savannah replied. “Nearly twice.” She looked toward the cliff. “I did what I had to do, as well.”
“We probably ought to get out of here,” Charity said, already wishing she were miles away.
Savannah turned and faced her. “Thanks,” she said. “Normally, my guard’s not down.”
“Nor mine,” Charity said, extending Savannah’s basket to her.
“You handle yourself very well.” Savannah took the basket and started down the trail.
“I spent some time in Israel,” Charity said, following her. “I learned their military’s fighting technique, Krav Maga.”
“Well, thanks,” Savannah said again.
“Turd fondlers like that deserve nothing less,” Charity said. “That’s what my friend Jesse calls them: turd fondlers. I think it’s appropriate.”
Savannah stopped dead in her tracks and turned around.
“What?” Charity asked.
“Jesse, from Marathon?”
“Well, an island near there,” Charity replied. “You know—”
Savannah turned and started down the trail again, faster this time. Charity hurried after her, then suddenly stopped when she realized who it was that Savannah had had an affair with in the Keys all those years ago.
No wonder the kid seemed familiar, she thought, as she again hurried after her friend.
“Savannah, wait!” she called out, when she reached the beach and saw the woman already trying to push her dinghy into the water. The fallen tide had left the three little boats high and dry.
“I need to go,” Savannah said nervously, shoving against the dinghy but making little headway.
“We’ll need to help each other,” Charity said. “Can we talk about this?”
“Talk about what?” Savannah asked, her breathing becoming labored as she strained to push the dinghy.
“Savannah!”
The woman stopped and sat on the starboard pontoon, exasperated.
“The guy in the Keys who you said might be Flo’s father?” Charity asked. “Was it Jesse McDermitt?”
Savannah nodded, her hands clasped between her thighs. Her mood and expression had changed yet again. No longer did she look confident and happy, nor cold and calculating. She just looked hurt.
“You know him?” Savannah asked.
Charity thought about her answer carefully. For weeks, she and Jesse had chased a man all over the Caribbean. Charity had killed men before that trip, but it had been in battlefield situations against a known enemy. She and Jesse, both civilians, had set out to find and kill a man. They’d discussed it daily during the hunt, his way of preparing her for what had to come. The man they were after had been responsible for the deaths of several people, including a man Charity had grown to care a great deal for. When the time came, Charity had killed Jason Smith with her own bare hands. And it felt good.
“We worked together a few times,” she replied. “Jesse was a transportation contractor for the same group I worked with. I never got to know him very well, but he’s one of the few people in the world I trust.”
“Ha,” Savannah said with a forced laugh. “You still probably know him better than I do.”
“A woman could do a lot worse.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” Savannah said. “I’ve had a lot worse. More than once.”
Charity sat on the side of her own dinghy. “Same here. More times than I care to admit. Look, I’m not going to say anything to anyone. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever see him again. The Keys aren’t real high on the list of places that Rene and I want to visit.”
Savannah looked up the hill. “Those guys will float back up, you know.”
“No, they won’t.”
“They will,” Savannah insisted. “They’ll get bloated and even an anchor won’t—”
“They won’t bloat. I took care of that.”
“You mean you—”
“I provided a means for any gas buildup to escape,” Charity interrupted matter-of-factly. “They’ll never be seen again.”
Savannah shuddered. “You said that was what you used to do?”
“Why don’t we continue this later?” Charity asked. “We still have six hours of daylight. This anchorage is a little too crowded for my taste.”
Rubbing her face vigorously, Savannah pushed her hair back over her head. Finally, she stood and looked at the ugly boat anchored near her own. “I agree,” she said. “Sea Biscuit might catch something. What does your boat draw?”
“Five-and-a-half feet,” Charity replied, standing and moving around to the other side of Savannah’s dinghy.
“Bond Cay is out, then. But High Cay is only about an hour’s run on the outside.”
“Less than that, if the wind’s good,” Charity said, as the two women started to drag Savannah’s boat to the water.
“What do we do about their boat and dinghy?” Savannah asked, once they got Charity’s dinghy in the water.
“Leave them,” Charity said. “There isn’t anything on them that either of us could possibly need.”
“Someone will find it, eventually.”
They returned to Charity’s little dinghy and started dragging it to the water.
“And what?” Charity asked. “How many stranded derelicts have you seen in your time on the water?”
“Point taken,” Savannah said as she stepped into her dinghy and started the engine.
The wind was light, and five knots was all Charity could get out of Wind Dancer on the short hop to High Cay. Savannah’s boat, being a trawler, wasn’t dependent on wind and she slowly pulled ahead. When Charity finally entered the anchorage, Sea Biscuit was there, riding sedately at anchor.
Dropping the hook about a hundred yards astern of Savannah’s boat in fifteen feet of water, Charity backed down hard, digging the anchor’s flukes into the sandy bottom on the lee side of the island.
Another boat was anchored about half a mile farther south. Charity inspected it through her binoculars. It was a sailing catamaran. She could see kids jumping from the two stern platforms and playing in the water.
“Gabby!” Savannah shouted. Charity didn’t bother to correct her. “I have wine.”
The morning broke with gray clouds and strong winds. Charity rose from her bunk and opened the overhead hatch to look outside. Wind Dancer was pointed the other way. The tide was rising, and the current had shifted. Sea Biscuit was now behind her, hidden by Dancer’s dodger and Bimini top.
Last night, she’d stayed aboard Sea Biscuit until nearly midnight and drank far too much wine. Now her head hurt, but she’d felt that Savannah needed it after what they’d been through.
At first, nothing was said about what happened at the blue hole, nor had Jesse been mentioned, though Charity could tell that both things weighed heavily on Savannah’s mind. Instead, they talked about other things: places they’d been and what they’d seen. The wine helped them both open more easily to the other.
Charity dressed while she thought back on all that Savannah had told her the night before. After Flo had gone to bed, Savannah suggested they go up and sit on the bridge. There, over another bottle of wine, Savannah told Charity about her
trip to the Keys with her sister, and how she’d met Jesse when he intervened to help their captain fight off several would-be kidnappers.
“Yeah,” Charity remembered telling her, “that part of the man hasn’t changed. The last time I saw him, just a few months ago, he was recovering something that had been stolen from a woman he didn’t even know.”
Savannah had gone on to tell her that she’d run into Jesse again, very recently. She explained that she had returned to Marathon for the first time in nine years, to claim her sister’s body. She had been honest and forthright with Charity about how her sister had been killed. It was obvious that the circumstances of her sister’s death had compounded the pain of losing her. Savannah said that she’d heard later that most of the people responsible had been killed in a gun battle near Fort Myers.
At the time, Charity thought that Jesse being involved in the gunfight seemed out of character. But now, in the cold light of a gray dawn, she realized that was just what a man like him would do — only he’d take steps to ensure he wouldn’t be seen or caught. Much like the men at the blue hole, Charity surmised that the men in Fort Myers undoubtedly deserved everything they got and then some.
Going to the coffee maker, she set it up and switched it on. Then she reached up and slid the main hatch open and climbed the steps to the cockpit. Sea Biscuit was gone.
The wind whipped at Charity’s clothes and hair as she stood on the deck and looked all around the anchorage. The catamaran was still there, but there wasn’t another boat in sight.
Conditions were good for sailing. The wind was a steady twenty knots and seas hadn’t built to anything appreciable yet. Charity and Savannah had both known the weather was coming and they both knew that this morning would be the worst of it. Most trawler skippers would stay put during the slightest blow. But the deeper keel of a sailboat and the way it worked with the wind and waves, meant that even though it was threatening a light rain, it would be a good day for Wind Dancer.
Enduring Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 4) Page 5
