She dropped her arms and nodded toward the timer on the oven. “Five more minutes. Shall we get the table set?”
He released her and turned to remove two plates from the cupboard. His gaze shifted to the television screen where a colored band across the bottom announced a breaking news story. Even with the low volume, three words drew his attention—Prison break, Starke. Starke was two hours from Cedar Key.
When Allison started to speak, he held up a hand to silence her. Her gaze followed his to the screen, and she hurried to turn up the volume. A somber reporter stood in front of a white stone structure, dusk settling around him. The camera panned out, and another stone structure came into view, the two connected by an arch bearing the words Florida State Prison.
An hour earlier, two inmates had escaped. But not before killing two guards and leaving a third in critical condition. The name of the first prisoner meant nothing to him. It was some guy serving a life sentence for killing his ex-wife. When the reporter gave the name of the second, his blood froze in his veins. Edward “Bear” Stevens, serving a life sentence for second-degree murder related to a drug deal gone bad.
He turned at Allison’s sharp intake of air. The blood had drained from her face, and she suddenly looked on the verge of collapse.
“It’s him.” Her voice was paper-thin, her blue eyes wide. “He’s behind everything that’s happening.”
He pulled her firmly against his side. “Not necessarily. Stevens’s escape from prison could be coincidental.” His tone lacked conviction. Ninety-nine to one, she was right.
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and shook her head. Deep creases marked the space between her brows. “It’s no coincidence. He mentioned he’s running out of time.”
“Who? When?”
“My stalker, the night of the fire. When he called, he said, ‘I’m running out of time, which means you’re running out of time.’ I think Bear Stevens is the one who hid the paper. Even though he’s been in prison for the past nine years, he’s had someone on the outside working for him.”
Blake’s gut tightened with every word out of her mouth. He continued her line of thought, picking up where she had left off. “He knew he was going to be out soon, one way or another. Plan A was to get his conviction overturned. When that didn’t work, he decided to implement Plan B.”
Allison lifted fear-filled eyes to meet his. “And now he wants whatever he hid nine years ago. And he needs that paper to find it.”
“Which means we need to stay at the Harbour Master a little longer. It’s too hard to protect you here.” He glanced around him, uneasiness sifting over him. The doors were locked. So were all the windows. But that wouldn’t keep out someone who really wanted to get in.
The oven timer began to emit its persistent beeps. Allison pressed the button then reached for two oven mitts. “Let’s take this back to the hotel.”
“Good idea.” He was going to suggest the same thing. What had seemed perfectly safe ten minutes ago had suddenly become more of a risk than he was willing to take. In fact, nothing seemed safe short of keeping her shut up at the Harbour Master, surrounded by Cedar Key’s finest.
“What’s your schedule for tomorrow? Any charters?”
“One in the morning and one in the late afternoon, early evening.”
His chest clenched. “Early evening?”
“My sunset sail. It’s popular with the honeymooners. We head out at five and come back at seven. At least till daylight savings time ends this Sunday. Then it’ll be four to six.”
He frowned. “It’ll be dark when you get back.”
“Not totally, but almost.”
He would stick close by on both. He wasn’t working at The Market tomorrow, so he hadn’t asked anyone for help. For the morning charter, he would man the boat with her. For the evening one...well, honeymooners probably wouldn’t want an extra person tagging along. So he would follow at a distance, closing the gap as night drew nearer.
Allison put the hot casserole dish into its basket and sealed the salad bowl with some plastic wrap. As he waited for her to relock the back door, he held tightly to Brinks’s leash, eyes scanning the darkness. Nothing drew his attention. There was no sign of movement, no sound other than waves breaking a short distance away. Even Brinks appeared unconcerned, which offered some measure of comfort. Brinks had turned out to be more of a guard dog than he had given him credit for.
He settled into the golf cart next to Allison, the casserole between them, the salad in his lap and Brinks in the back. Allison turned the key and slanted a glance at him.
“You know, it sounds crazy, but I’m almost relieved.”
She pulled out onto First Street, and he waited for her to continue.
“I’m uneasy. Actually, I’m downright scared. But soon this is all going to be over. One way or another.”
He gave a sharp nod. She was right. Bear Stevens would probably lie low for a while. Then, if he was, in fact, associated with Allison’s stalker, he would make his way toward Cedar Key. He needed that sheet of paper. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get it. That someone hadn’t given up. And neither would Bear.
Blake’s jaw tightened. He needed to let Cedar Key PD in on what they had learned. All the agencies in the area would be alerted, but Bear had a direct connection to Allison. Sometime soon he would make his move. Blake had no doubt.
He only hoped they would be ready.
* * *
Allison stood at the helm, guiding Tranquility along its course paralleling the coast. A stiff sea breeze whistled past the sails and flattened the cloth brim of her hat against her forehead. Off the port bow, the last of the vibrant hues that stained the horizon were fading to navy. The seas were choppy, but her charter customers didn’t seem to mind. They were probably too wrapped up in each other to notice.
She was right about them—honeymooners, spending their first week of life together in Cedar Key. The new bride was currently tucked under the young man’s arm, snuggled against his side. She tilted her head up to smile at him, and he responded with a short kiss.
Allison sighed. These romantic sunset cruises used to send an acute sense of loneliness shooting through her. Actually, they still did. But now the loneliness was tempered with hope. For the first time since losing Tom, she was actually entertaining thoughts of something deeper than friendship.
She turned to glance behind her. As expected, Blake was holding his position about twenty yards off her stern, a distance which had gradually decreased as daylight faded to night. She was running a little late. But in another twenty minutes, she would be safely secured to the dock.
Up ahead, a green light flashed off the starboard bow, the beacon marking the entrance to the main shipping channel. On her nautical charts, it was simply called flashing green four second. For her, it marked the final stretch before home, the point at which she stopped paralleling the coast and pointed the bow toward Cedar Cove.
Her eyes widened as realization slammed into her. Flashing green four second, abbreviated Fl G4S. There was a G4 on the paper, too, but she had read the next symbol as a 5. Was it really an S? And what about the R45? Was it supposed to be R4S, referring to a four-second red beacon? Then R2.55 was really R2.5S, a two-and-a-half-second red beacon.
Excitement surged through her, and her heart began to pound. Had she really cracked the code? All the hours studying the numbers, racking her brain, praying the mysterious characters would somehow make sense, and she figured the whole thing out without even thinking about it?
Well, not the whole thing. There were still the other numbers—87, 165 and 282. What did those represent? Measurements? Degrees on a compass?
She cast another glance at the Sea Ray in her wake. As soon as she could get rid of her charter customers, she and Blake would put their heads together and solve this thin
g.
The final leg from Seahorse Key to Cedar Cove seemed to stretch into forever. Finally, she eased up to the dock and tied off to one of the cleats there. Terrance sat on the deck of his boat, nursing a beer as he watched her work. The moment she looked his way, he averted his eyes. What was his problem? He’d never been superfriendly, but lately he seemed really put out with her. Or put out with the world.
Moments later, Blake motored into a slip and tied off. By the time the young couple headed up the dock toward their car, he was making his way toward her, Brinks several feet in front of him, straining at the leash.
She knelt on the cockpit seat to greet the dog, then smiled up at Blake. He was frowning.
“It’s dark. There’s no almost to it. We need to get you back to Harbour Master as quickly as possible.”
“Not yet. I have something to show you.”
His frown deepened. “Can’t it wait till morning?”
“It can, but I can’t.” She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “I think I might have figured it out.”
Some of her own excitement seemed to rub off on Blake. But his was underscored with worry. “Why don’t we discuss it in your room?”
“I need my nautical charts.” She had a Raymarine chart plotter at the helm. But she would do this the old-fashioned way—with a paper chart, a pencil and a parallel ruler.
He hesitated a moment longer, then stepped onto her boat. Once below, she pulled a chart book and spiral-bound notebook from a shelf above the nav station.
Blake followed her to the dining area. “I thought we already decided the numbers couldn’t be coordinates.”
She laid the chart and tools on the table and slid to the back of the U-shaped bench. “They’re not coordinates—at least not latitude and longitude.” She picked up the pencil and scrawled some symbols on a sheet of paper she had torn from the spiral notebook. “Read this.”
“R45 87, G45 165, R2.55 282.” He looked up from the page. “It doesn’t make any more sense than it did the last time I looked at it.”
“You’re reading it wrong. We’ve all been reading it wrong. These fives are Ss.”
Blake’s gaze dropped back to the page. Finally, he frowned. “I still don’t see it.”
She slid the chart in front of him and pointed at one red elongated teardrop shape, then another and another.
His eyes widened. “Red four second, green four second and red two and a half second. They’re beacon designations.”
“And I’m thinking the other numbers are degrees on a compass. If we go 87 degrees from all the red four-second beacons, 165 degrees from the green four-second beacons, and 282 degrees from the red two-and-a-half-second beacons, I’m guessing there’s going to be one point where three lines cross over an island. Or maybe the degrees are the directions the beacons are from the island, rather than the other way around.”
As she talked, she laid the parallel ruler over the compass rose on the bottom of the chart and turned it until it crossed the 165-degree line. Once she had the other portion positioned over the beacon near Atsena Otie, she penciled a dark line. She did the same with every beacon in the vicinity of Cedar Key. There were over a dozen, lining both the main shipping channel and the Northwest Channel, along with a couple of outlying ones. She carefully measured out the appropriate degrees, until haphazard lines crisscrossed the chart. But there was only one point where three lines intersected—a spoil area along the Northwest Channel.
Blake pointed to the chart. “Bingo.”
“X marks the spot. There’s something there that Bear Stevens wants really bad.”
“Bad enough to have someone ransack your house, put a knife to your throat and set your porch on fire.”
His words doused a bit of the excitement she was feeling, reminding her of the danger she was in, even more imminent now that Bear was free.
“We need backup.”
Before the words were out of her mouth, Blake was reaching for his phone. He scrolled through his contacts, looking for Hunter no doubt. The two of them had become close in recent weeks.
He put the phone to his ear and waited a span of two or three rings.
“Allison figured it out.” He wouldn’t need to preface the conversation with unnecessary details. Hunter had been involved from the start. “We don’t know what he’s after, but we know where.”
After a brief pause, warmth filled his eyes, along with approval and maybe even a little pride. “Yeah, she’s a smart lady.”
Her heart swelled. What he thought of her mattered. A lot.
“We want to head out first thing in the morning. Bear Stevens is out, and he’s probably on his way here, even as we speak. So we’ll need backup, whoever’s on duty, as many as you can spare.”
Within a few minutes, arrangements had been made, and Blake dropped the phone into his shirt pocket. “He’s getting a hold of Chief Sandlin right now.”
“Good.” She slid to the edge of the bench and stood, suddenly anxious to be back in the safety of her room at Harbour Master Suites. If her intruder had any idea she had solved the code, she wouldn’t even make it back.
Blake stood, too, but instead of heading through the galley and up the companionway steps, he slid both arms around her waist and pulled her close.
“You know what this means. In a few more hours, this will all be over. You’ll have your life back.”
A weight lifted from her shoulders, a burden that had been such a constant companion over the past few weeks, she had forgotten what it felt like to be free.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “It’s a good feeling. Although I have to admit, it’s been kind of nice having you as my personal bodyguard.”
“It’s been nice being your personal bodyguard. But now that my job is coming to an end, there goes my excuse to keep hanging around.” He was joking, but there was uncertainty behind the words.
And though she had tried not to think about it, she had had the same thoughts. While he was so wrapped up in trying to solve the case and see to her safety, there had been no time to think about the life he had left behind.
“If you need an excuse, I could probably come up with one. Or I could just tell you an excuse isn’t necessary.” She searched his eyes. “At least on my end.”
His arms around her tightened. “When it comes to staying in Cedar Key, I have all the excuse I need, standing right here. I left Dallas looking for direction in my life, some way out of the funk I had been in for the past eighteen months. The last thing I expected to do was fall in love.”
Her heart began to pound. Blake was staying. For good. And he was staying because he loved her. And she loved him. It was futile to fight it.
Before she could voice all she was feeling, Brinks began to paw at her with the same urgency she had felt then forgotten the moment Blake pulled her into his arms. She laughed, then dropped an arm from Blake’s neck to pet the dog.
“I think he’s jealous. Either that, or he’s reminding us we really need to go.”
“Smart dog. We really do need to get you back to Harbour Master.”
She swept up the chart book and clutched it to her chest. “I’m taking this with me. And this, too, unless you have one.” She picked up her compass.
“Not a handheld.”
She headed toward the companionway steps, then turned to face Blake. “On second thought, you should keep everything with you. It’ll be safer that way.”
Blake took the charts and compass and handed her Brinks’s leash. Always eager for a walk, Brinks was the first one on deck. He immediately stood at attention, a low growl rumbling in his throat.
Allison froze halfway up. A figure stood on the dock, right next to her boat. Panic shot up her spine, then instantly dissipated. It was only Terrance.
She stepped into
the cockpit, Blake right behind her. But a touch of uneasiness lingered. Something was wrong. That ultracool, beach bum persona that he always emitted was gone. Instead, he stood straight and stiff, weight equally distributed between both feet. And he didn’t have his beer. Terrance never hung out around the docks without a beer in his hand.
Alarms went off in Allison’s head. The only way off the boat was the dock where Terrance stood. She spun to face Blake, silently seeking direction.
Blake obviously felt it, too. His eyes were narrowed, his posture stiff. “Hello, Terrance. What can we do for you?”
“Step onto the dock nice and easy.” Terrance’s words sent tendrils of unease sliding through her. The tough-guy timbre was there. But so was something else—an icy hardness.
She turned to face him.
And looked straight into the barrel of a pistol.
TWELVE
Brinks’s low growl erupted into frenzied barking, and he lunged toward the dock. The leash stopped him two feet shy of sinking his razor-sharp teeth into Terrance’s leg.
Terrance took a step back. “Tie up the dog if you don’t want a bullet through his head.”
Allison dropped to her knees and, with shaking fingers, began tying the end of Brinks’s leash to a cleat. While she worked, Blake’s mind whirled. Terrance was the intruder? The one who had been terrorizing her for the past four weeks? The idea just didn’t compute.
Then again, maybe it did. According to Allison, Terrance had always come across as surly and rough, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. But over the past month, that chip had grown, and he had gotten increasingly more moody.
And it was no wonder. For four weeks, he had been trying to get his hands on that paper. He had ransacked Allison’s house, searched her boat, put a knife to her throat and set her house on fire to force her to give him what he wanted. And he had been thwarted at every turn. With each obstacle, his anger had built, not into a blinding rage, but a cold fury, which was much more dangerous.
So how did Bear Stevens fit into all this? Or did he? Was the timing of his prison break simply coincidence?
Shattered Haven Page 16
