Missing Person

by Matt Lincoln

  Rachel pushed the door open a little further, praying that no one would be looking her way as she wedged herself through the narrow space, scooting toward the shadows cast by a large set of boilers by the door. There was just enough space between them and the wall for her to squeeze into hiding.

  She peered out from between the two bulky canisters. She was in the yacht’s engine room, as evidenced by all the machinery scattered about the place, pipes weaving in and out of the walls, the massive engine rumbling right in the center of everything. It was hot down there, and she began to sweat within her wetsuit, her grip on her gun going from cold and stiff to slick in a matter of seconds. She counted six people in the room, which was far more than she felt confident taking on with just the two of them, but none of them were Ward or her daughter, and her stomach took off with her heart, racing for her feet. There was another door on the far side of the room, closed tight. Maybe Malia was there.

  Ward’s goons were clustered in the center of the room, seated on crates, chatting with each other, and at least three of them had visible firearms while several more had knives on their belts, and one even had a length of metal pipe leaning against the box he sat on.

  Graham still had the door cracked open, peering at Rachel as she waited for the signal. Rachel motioned for her to enter, a finger held to her lips to indicate silence. Rachel wiggled to the far side of her hiding space behind the boilers as Graham slipped through the door, quietly eased it shut, and joined her there. There was just barely enough room for the both of them.

  “What’s the plan?” Graham asked, tilting her mouth right up to Rachel’s ear so she could whisper as quietly as she could.

  Rachel kept her eyes on the goons in the center of the room to make sure no one turned and suddenly spotted the two of them behind the boilers.

  “Try to get to the other side of the room,” she murmured. “If we can hit them hard and fast from two directions, maybe we can take out enough of them that we won’t get overwhelmed.”

  It was a long shot since there wasn’t a lot of cover aside from their current spot, but it was the only thing Rachel could think of. They didn’t have a lot of time to craft a better plan because every moment they waited was another moment they might be discovered.

  Graham nodded, inching back the way she came to get ready to move. Was there a light switch they could hit? Rachel craned her neck to look for it beside the door, but she didn’t want to blind herself as well. She took a deep breath and sucked in her gut to squeeze toward the rounded edge of the boiler, marking out the path she would take the best she could.

  She stepped free of the heavy metal boilers and crouched slowly so that any sharp movements wouldn’t catch the eyes of the crew in the center of the room. She aimed for a series of three pipes rising out of the floor that would hopefully have space behind them to hide her. She would not distract herself by looking over at what Graham was doing. The marshal was an adult. She could look out for herself. Rachel kept one eye on the pipes and one eye on the chatting crew as she crept across the floor, certain that they would spot her before she reached cover. The lights in the room were bright, and she was barely within the shadows of the wall. She might as well be waving a neon sign above her head while shouting.

  When disaster struck, because, of course, it did, it wasn’t Rachel’s or Graham’s fault. It came from above.

  Gunshots.

  The six people in the room shot to their feet, grabbing weapons and looking around wildly for the source. Rachel and Graham were both out in the open when it happened, and they were spotted in an instant. It was almost comical, really. Both sides froze like rabbits in a field when they spotted each other, and there was a long moment of silence as they stared at each other, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Rachel was the first to move. She fired twice, her aim haphazard as she dove for those metal pipes, hoping to find cover behind them. The blasts were deafening within the confined space, and her ears immediately began to ring. She hit the ground and rolled, aiming for the area behind the pipes, but she hit the unyielding metal instead. There was only a foot of space behind there. Not nearly enough.

  She backpedaled, hunting around for better cover, losing time as the goons scrambled to gather themselves and their weapons. She heard a gun fire and cringed, but it was just Graham, and one of the men spun from the impact, blood spraying from his shoulder.

  There. Rachel spotted a large metal cabinet against the far wall. If she could get to it and tip it over, she might buy herself some cover. She fired again, aiming for the man drawing a pistol from his belt, and she struck him in the leg. He bellowed as he went down, clutching the side of his thigh. But she’d barely grazed him, and he wouldn’t be down for long.

  The other goons got their weapons out and began to return fire, half of them focused on Rachel and the other half on Graham. Bullets zipped around her, and Rachel knew that it wouldn’t be hard to hit her in this confined space. She had to move quickly.

  She reached the metal cabinet and stretched for the top, but a bullet zinged against the metal by her hand, and she jerked back. She steeled her nerves, knowing that she was too stationary and thus an easy target, and lunged for the cabinet again. She got her hands on the corner and heaved at an angle so that when it fell, it landed on its side rather than its face, leaving her just enough space to crouch behind, safe from the bullets for the moment. The cabinet doors sprang open as the whole thing hit the ground, and its contents spilled out, wires and boxes and tools, creating a great clamor as they scattered across the floor.

  Rachel crouched behind the cabinet, panting, as she took stock. Amazingly, she was uninjured, but she’d lost line of sight on the majority of the room. She had twelve bullets, and she’d used four—there’d only been space within the dry bag for the two guns and the radio, nothing else. Who knew how many bullets her assailants had? She could hear them pinging off the cabinet, leaving the occasional dent in the metal.

  She took a deep breath and popped up, bracing her arms against the top of the cabinet as she located a target and fired, ducking back down before she could see if she hit as the other immediately shot back at her. She couldn’t see where Graham had gone in that short amount of time.

  She tried again, and her bullet ricocheted off the engine behind the goons. She flinched, waiting for something catastrophic to happen, but it didn’t seem like she’d hit anything important. The man with the metal pipe was advancing cautiously toward her hiding spot, and she had to duck down again before she could shoot him because his friends were providing plenty of cover fire.

  She didn’t like being pinned down like this. There were walls on two sides of her and bullets out in front, leaving the way she’d come the only avenue of escape, and even that would leave her horrendously exposed. She needed to get Jace and Lex down here. Four on six were at least slightly better odds.

  She waited until a break in the fire and popped up again, trying to hit the man advancing toward her with the pipe. He was close enough now that it wasn’t hard. She struck his chest, and he staggered back but didn’t fall, his grunt of pain giving way to a vicious grin as no blood sprouted across his front. Damn, where the hell had these guys gotten bulletproof vests? Ward was barely out of jail. He shouldn’t have this amount of money and influence.

  Seven shots. She was burning through them far too quickly.

  Rachel hid herself just as the man she’d shot started moving again, swinging his metal pipe almost lackadaisically. She pressed herself against the cabinet, breathing heavily, feeling each thud of a bullet against the metal. She fumbled for the radio on her belt, struggling to tug it free with her trembling fingers and the gun in one hand. She ripped it free and brought it to her mouth, jamming her thumb against the button to call its matched pair.

  “Jace!” she said as soon as she heard the click that meant he’d picked up. She tried not to yell. She didn’t want Ward’s goons knowing she had reinforcements coming. It was a hard thing,
and her voice was high and tight with stress. “We need--!”

  That man appeared around the end of the cabinet, leering down at her, and her words cut off abruptly as he swung his pipe in a vicious arc at her head. Rachel flung herself to the side, ramming into the wall, narrowly dodging out of the way of the pipe’s path. The crash it made when it hit the ground was tremendous. The radio flew from her hand as she hit the wall and clattered away, out of reach. Hopefully, Jace had gotten the message.

  She could only pray he arrived quickly, but she had other things to worry about at that moment. The man reached down and seized the front of her wetsuit, hauling her up and throwing her over the cabinet toward the center of the room like she was a sack of potatoes or a bale of hay.

  Rachel yelped as she flew through the air with no sense of up or down, no way to turn her crash landing into a roll, no way of knowing if she was going to be shot at any moment. She hit the ground shoulder-first and flipped over painfully, limbs akimbo, somehow still holding onto her gun. She rolled a couple of times, the world a blur around her, and only came to a stop when she bumped into something hard, round protrusions digging into her back.

  She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the stars from her eyes. She needed to see, dammit; she needed to do something because she knew without looking that she was right in the middle of all those goons, and who knew what they would do to her?

  A boot ground into her gun hand, the pressure increasing until she had no choice but to release the pistol grip before her fingers were crushed against it. She yanked her hand back, losing quite a bit of skin, and the boot kicked her gun away, far out of reach.

  “Looks like you're in a spot of trouble,” a woman said, voice suave and self-assured and more than a little smug.

  Rachel groaned and turned her head to look up at the woman above her, pain sparking across her entire body. The woman was tall and curly-haired, her skin a light brown against her dark jean jacket and v-neck shirt. She grinned down at Rachel. It was a sharp expression, filled with the promise of Rachel’s upcoming failure.

  Rachel refused to fail. Not when she was this close. She got her elbows underneath her and tried to rise, ribs protesting, but the woman kicked her in the stomach before she made any real progress. All her air left Rachel in a rush, puffing free of her lips as agony exploded through her midsection, and she collapsed to the ground again, wheezing. Where was Graham? Where were Jace and Lex? And where was her damned daughter?

  She tried to rise again, but there was a disconnect between her brain and her limbs, the pain a firewall between the two. The woman crouched down beside her, still grinning, and her fingers were gentle as she brushed a strand of hair out of Rachel’s face.

  “I will say that I admire your tenacity,” she crooned.

  Rachel bit back a groan. This woman better not be about to launch into a supervillain monologue. Rachel wasn’t sure she could handle that, especially since she had no idea who the hell this woman even was.

  “Where’s Ward? Where’s my daughter?” she ground out through gritted teeth. It was hard to sound threatening while lying on her side with no weapons and pain barking at all her synapses, but she certainly tried.

  “Not here, darling,” the woman said, patting Rachel’s cheek. She kept speaking, but Rachel could no longer hear her words. The world had gone black and white and fuzzy around the edges, and the constant rumble of the engines turned to a roar within her ears, blotting everything else out.

  Not here.

  Malia wasn’t here.

  And then Rachel was falling, spiraling down into darkness, and she didn’t know if she would ever come out the other side.

  28

  Lex and I raced through the yacht, down the stairs, across the body-littered hall, and down the next set of steps. We skidded to a very brief halt on the main floor of the yacht, just long enough to check our forward momentum, turn around, and find the staircase that would take us down to Rachel’s location. Lex took the lead for the last stretch as we barrelled down the steps so fast that it was difficult to keep my footing.

  Lex slammed into the door at the bottom and bounced off it like she forgot that she had to turn the handle to get it to open. It took her a second to recover, but then she seized the knob, twisted it, and threw the door open, gun raised but static until we took stock of the situation within.

  There wasn’t much time to take anything in because everyone inside exploded into action the moment we entered. Rachel was on the ground, I saw that much, with a woman kneeling over her, but as the woman’s head turned at the sound of our entrance, Rachel lunged at her, springing up from the ground as if launched from a diving board. She got her hands around the woman’s neck and bore her to the floor, landing on top, yelling incoherently as she began to pound at the woman’s face. The woman barely managed to get her arms up to ward the blows off.

  Graham was also on the ground—I caught a glimpse of her as Lex and I split and raced into the room in opposite directions as bullets bit the surrounding air—but the man and woman guarding Graham turned away from her at our entrance, guns aimed our way, allowing Graham space to move. She dove forward instead of back, wrapping her arms around the man’s knees and bringing him down with her.

  A bulky man with a metal pipe rushed toward me, face grim and serious, and I groaned inwardly, not looking forward to a repeat of the baseball bat fight. There were too many allies in the room, so I didn’t want to shoot and risk hitting one of them in the chaos, so I kept the pipe man between the enemy shooters and me, using him as a human shield.

  He swung at me as soon as he got close, a great, glittering arc that made the air sing. I narrowly ducked it, drawing my utility knife with my off-hand. I slashed at his chest as I straightened, ripping a long line in his shirt, though the blade skittered off the Kevlar underneath. Where the hell had he gotten that?

  I stayed close to him, within reach of his pipe, so he couldn’t use it with any efficacy. He let go of the pipe with one hand and snapped his fist toward my head, but the blow was slow and well telegraphed, making it easy for me to throw up my knife hand, block it, and then place my gun right against his knee and pull the trigger.

  His scream was piercing as he dropped, the pipe falling from his other hand to clatter against the floor. All attention turned to me, and the room froze for a second as if someone had snapped a picture and trapped us in it.

  The moment didn’t last long, though. The split-second distraction allowed the woman Rachel was wailing on to flip her off and take control, and two of the people trading blows with Graham and Lex peeled off and raced toward me, guns raised and firing.

  I dove to the side even as a line of fire clipped my right arm, and I managed to turn my fall into a somersault, knowing I wouldn’t be a hard target to hit in such a confined space. My feet hit the ground, and I forced myself to spin, still crouched, one knee braced against the floor for balance. My gun rose in time with the spin, and I aimed for where I thought the men’s path would place, squeezing the trigger before I was even sure that they were there. I hit one of them in the shoulder and missed the other, who immediately started to return fire until Graham slammed into him from the side. The two of them went down, and Graham slammed his head against the ground twice until he went limp.

  Blood streaming from his shoulder, the other man raised his gun but hesitated while he thought about who he should shoot first, his gun stuck between the two of us. I got him first, nailing his thigh so that he collapsed to one knee. I surged forward and kicked his gun away before he could think to use it. And with that, he seemed to deflate, defeated.

  I cast around, adrenaline high, searching for the next threat, but everyone near me was downed, bleeding, or unconscious. The woman tangling with Rachel was the last one left, the two of them clear across the room from the rest of us. As I started toward them, the woman brought her leg up in an impressive circle and nailed Rachel in the face, knocking her into a limbless spin and dropping her to the ground where
she lay, dazed, struggling to get her hands and knees under her. The woman pulled a small pistol from the back of her belt and pointed it at Rachel’s head.

  “Sorry, darling,” she said as I raised my gun and took aim, terrified that I would be too slow, terrified that I would miss.

  When the shot went off, it took me a long time to figure out who had fired it. There was no cinema-worthy wisp of smoke rising from my gun, and I had felt the kick, but Rachel was still moving, still trying to rise, so who had fired?

  The woman turned toward us slowly, a shocked expression on her face as her pistol slipped from her fingers and thudded to the ground. Her now empty hand rose to her temple, and the tips of her fingers came away red. She opened her mouth and tried to form some final word, but she couldn’t get it out before she fell to her knees and then pitched forward onto her face and lay still.

  I looked around wildly and saw Lex standing there, arms outstretched, gun trembling, her face frozen in shock. She didn’t move even as the seconds stretched on. Just stood there and stared at what she’d done, arms raised and gun at the ready.

  “Check on Rachel,” I said to Graham, and then I rushed to Lex’s side, tucking my gun and knife away.

  I placed my hand on top of the gun and gently pushed, but Lex’s muscles resisted me, and I could feel the way they trembled.

  “Hey,” I said, looking right into her face, though her eyes stared right through me. “Hey. Lex. I need you to come back. Lex.”

  The sound of her name stressed with emphasis, and the gentle but relentless pressure of my hand on hers finally snapped her out of it. She blinked, and I was able to lower the gun, pushing it down to her side, though she didn’t release her tight grip on it. She released a sharp, shuddering breath, and I was close enough that it puffed across my face, and her eyes finally focused on me, immediately growing wet.

  “Jace,” she said, voice shaking. “I—what did I--?”

  “What you had to,” I interrupted. “You saved Rachel’s life.”