“I have to see for myself,” Marcello said. He took the helm of his boat and headed toward the resort as fast as he could.
Soulless and Gwen had to wait until the man who sold the boats showed up. He did so twenty-four minutes later than the stated opening time that was listed on the door of his office. He was a fat man with a red nose who smelled of booze.
The guy seemed disappointed when Soulless didn’t want to haggle over the price he had listed for the skiff Gwen had chosen. After preparing the boat by fueling it and checking the motor, the boat was theirs.
“We’ll tie her up at the stern and tow her behind us,” Gwen told Soulless. “It will slow us down, but we’ll still reach the island I have in mind by the afternoon.”
Soulless watched as Gwen secured the tow lines to the cleats and made sure they had proper tension. She tied them off using bowline knots. When the task was completed, they were ready to go, but stopped to grab food from a place that served breakfast to tourists. It was the typical American cuisine of bacon and eggs but was on a sandwich using brioche bread.
They brought the sandwiches back to the boat, but only enough for themselves. Before sitting down to eat, Soulless checked on Elliot and the hooker, Seneca.
They were as he had left them, bound, gagged, and looking miserable.
“Don’t worry you two. It will all be over in a few hours.”
After eating, Gwen took the helm and was careful in how she pulled away from the dock because of the skiff they were towing. She had no problems and once again they were headed out to sea.
“It’s them,” Marcello said. He had been using the lens on his zoom camera to read the name of the boat. While doing so, he had spotted Soulless and Gwen.
One of Marcello’s men was with him. His name was Aldo. Aldo was the karate enthusiast who took on Henry and lost. There was a bruise on his throat where Henry had struck him. He pointed at the rear of Gwen’s boat.
“It looks like they bought a skiff. I wonder why.”
“I don’t care why, but I’m glad they did. It will slow them down.” Marcello took out his phone. “It’s time to call Tanner.”
Tanner was east of Soulless and Marcello, but more to the south as he checked the waters around several small islands for Gwen’s boat. When he received word from Marcello that Soulless and Gwen were headed south from the resort, he asked Marcello how he knew.
“I got a call from someone who owes me a favor.”
“How sure are they that this is the right boat?”
“It’s them, and they’re towing a boat behind them, a small one.”
“All right. I’ll check it out.”
“Tanner.”
“What?”
“Don’t forget that the reward money is mine.”
“I don’t care about that. I only want to get my hands on Soulless.”
Marcello smiled as he hung up with Tanner.
“He has no idea we’re nearby,” he told Aldo. Marcello picked up the grenade launcher. “I’m going to blow his ass right out of the water.”
On Gwen’s boat, Seneca had managed to slide her gag down so she could talk. While speaking Italian, she told Elliot to hold still then she leaned toward him with her teeth bared, as if she were going to bite him. Instead, she managed to grab a corner of his gag with her teeth and lower it so he could talk as well.
“I don’t speak Italian,” Elliot said. Seneca was white, but he had noticed that she had Asian features, especially the eyes. He switched to Japanese and asked Seneca if she understood him, she answered in Japanese as her face lit up in a smile.
“My grandparents were Japanese, my mother’s people. I’ve spoken it my whole life. What is happening here?”
Elliot told her who Soulless and Gwen were. Seneca had heard about the search for fugitives but believed that they were on the Italian mainland.
“They’ve been holding me hostage for weeks,” Elliot said. “But I know the police are looking for them. And so is someone else, a man named Tanner.”
“They plan to kill us?”
“Yes,” Elliot said, and then he had an odd thought. Hooker or not, Seneca was a beautiful woman. He’d always been tongue-tied when talking to women like her in the past, but he felt none of that, nor had he felt it when he’d met Gwen in Clear Valley. Why was it he could converse with women when his life was in danger, but not when things were calm and there were no threats? It was a crazy observation to make, and a hell of a time to ponder it, but it was true.
Seneca was crying, and she spoke in Italian.
“What did you say?” Elliot asked.
“I said I’ve been wasting my life. I was going to be a mother, have a family. Instead, I walk the streets and sell myself to support a drug habit. My grandmother raised me to be better than this.” She closed her eyes and spoke in her native Italian. “God, if you get me out of this, I swear I’ll turn my life around.”
“What’s going on down here?”
That question had been asked by Gwen. She was coming down the stairs. When she saw they had managed to lower their gags, she looked angry, but then shrugged.
“What the hell. You could scream your heads off and no one would hear you out here on the water.”
“Gwen.”
“What is it, Elliot?”
“If you don’t want to give me something to drink, at least give Seneca some water. It’s getting hot down here.”
Gwen stared at him for a moment. After removing a bottle of water from the refrigerator, she took off the cap and held it near Seneca. Seneca tipped her head back and opened her mouth, and Gwen gave her water. There was still some left, so she gave it to Elliot.
After swallowing the first drink he’d had in over twenty hours, Elliot felt better.
“You’re not going to thank me?” Gwen asked him.
“Thank you?” Elliot said. “You’re as crazy as Soulless is, do you know that? You’re planning to kill me, to end my life, and you expect me to thank you because you finally gave me a drink of water?”
Gwen threw the empty bottle at him, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and turned to head back up to the deck. “You’re ungrateful.”
Elliot watched her go. When he turned to Seneca, he saw she was staring at him. He spoke to her in Japanese again.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I didn’t understand what you were saying, but I understood the tone. You’re brave to talk to her that way. She might have hurt you.”
“Brave?” Elliot laughed. “I’m not brave. And I wouldn’t be in this mess if I had any sense.”
Seneca leaned over until her head was resting on Elliot’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m glad not to be alone.”
“I know what you mean,” Elliot said. “And listen. They don’t know that we can talk to each other. They know I don’t speak Italian, but they don’t know we both speak Japanese. If we get an opportunity to do something or escape, we’ll talk to each other in Japanese. Okay?”
“Escape how?”
“I don’t know, but just be ready.”
Henry’s young eyes spotted Gwen’s boat first, when it was just a dot in the distance. Tanner confirmed that it was a boat when he zoomed in on it by using the scope on his sniper rifle. He could also make out the skiff it was towing.
Durand increased their speed. “I’ll put you in rifle range of them.”
“Do that,” Tanner said. “I won’t be anywhere near accurate with my shots because of the motion of the water. But I can still cause them damage, and we’ll be out of the range of their handguns.”
“There!” Aldo said. He had spotted the boat Tanner was on as it increased its pace to catch up to Soulless.
“We’ve got him,” Marcello said. “He can’t outrun us.”
Marcello’s boat was light and fast, and what some called a cigarette boat. One of his men used it often to make runs between Italy and Turkey when picking up heroin. On those twelve-h
undred-mile trips, they had to stop once for fuel, but could travel close to ninety miles an hour because of the boat’s five outboard motors. The less fuel it had in its tank, the faster it could go.
Tanner’s boat was going about forty miles an hour, while Gwen was only going about ten, as a safety precaution while towing the skiff. If he wanted to, Marcello could literally run rings around either boat with ease.
“Someone is coming up on us fast on our starboard side,” Tanner said. He brought the rifle up and attempted to use it to see who was on the boat, but the rocking of the vessel made it too difficult. “Slow us down, Jacques. I think that may be trouble headed toward us.”
“What about Soulless?”
“As long as they’re towing that boat, we’ll have no problem catching up to them.”
Soulless had spotted the two vessels at their rear. He brought up a pair of binoculars, but they weren’t powerful enough to make out details.
“Who do you think that is?” Gwen asked.
“It could be nothing… or maybe Tanner.”
“Here?”
“He would come after me. The nurse had that much right.”
“And what about the other boat, the one coming up fast?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. How far away are we from this island you told me about?”
Gwen pointed ahead. “It’s right there.”
When Soulless looked, he saw what appeared to be no more than a hill and a clump of trees sitting up out of the water maybe three miles away.
“That’s it?”
“I told you it was tiny. It’s just what we need. But I was hoping for privacy.”
“Get there as fast as you can. If that is Tanner, I’d rather fight him on land.”
Soulless headed for the stairs that led below deck.
“Where are you going?” Gwen asked.
“I’m going to bring the nurse and the hooker up here. They’ll make for handy shields.”
Marcello shouted an order to his man, Aldo. “Get us closer! I have to be closer to use the grenade launcher. It has a range of four hundred meters.”
Aldo had taken the helm so Marcello could fire the grenade launcher. He pushed the engines to their maximum speed. It made the boat rock wildly. Marcello nearly lost his balance and tumbled overboard.
“Slow down!”
“You told me to get closer. Faster gets us closer.”
“But I can’t aim for shit bouncing around like that. Slow it down, move in, and I’ll send Tanner to hell.”
Something put a crack in the windshield, then another. “Shit,” Aldo said. “He’s firing at us.”
Marcello laughed. “I bet he’s realized what I’m holding. A little closer Aldo. A little more… a little more… and …yes!”
Marcello launched a grenade and the huge projectile sailed across the space between the two boats, headed directly for the one containing Tanner.
A geyser of water filled the air and came down to drench Tanner, Henry, and Jacques. Marcello’s grenade fell short by less than ten feet. He’d forgotten to include the speed and movement of Tanner’s boat into his calculations. The grenade hit the water where Tanner had been a moment before.
Tanner shook his head to clear water from his eyes as he prepared to fire the rifle again. Marcello’s boat had been coming straight at them but had turned sideways after getting closer. Over on the other boat, Marcello had grasped the sides of the launcher, pulled down, expelled the spent casing, and reloaded. Tanner couldn’t let him get off another shot. He had made a mental note to himself to practice shooting from a moving boat in the future. He didn’t know how much he might improve with practice, since the up and down motion of the boat, along with its forward momentum, and the swell of the sea made accuracy nearly impossible.
His weapon was reloaded as well; he sent all five rounds from the sniper rifle at Marcello. The first two whizzed by far in front of him, the third placed another crack in the windshield, but the fourth round struck Aldo in the side, passed through his heart and killed him. Tanner wasn’t sure if the fifth round accomplished anything, but it no longer mattered.
When Aldo died, he fell against the throttle and revved the five outboard motors. The boat’s speed increased, and Marcello was knocked off balance—just as he was firing the grenade launcher. The grenade hit the deck of his own craft and exploded, ripping a hole in the boat that had rend it into two pieces. Marcello, although severely injured, was alive. That ended when he rolled into the water and across the path of the still rotating propellers of the outboard motors. Blue water turned red and what was left of the boat was swallowed by the sea.
That’s got to be Tanner, Elliot thought, after he had viewed the destruction of Marcello’s boat. He was up on deck along with Seneca and free of the cuffs. Soulless had a gun out and promised to shoot him if he didn’t stay in front of him to act as a human shield. Gwen had given the same order to Seneca.
“Whoever was in that speed boat is dead,” Gwen said, “But we’re almost at the island, just a few more minutes.”
“We need more speed,” Soulless said. He took out a knife and cut through the ropes that acted as tow lines for the skiff. Had he been more experienced around boats, he would have known that a simple tug of each line would have freed the knots.
With the skiff no longer a hinderance, Gwen was able to go faster.
After they dealt with Marcello, Jacques had brought their boat within two hundred yards of Gwen’s boat. The distance made it unlikely that the handguns Soulless and Gwen had would be effective at that range. That was not true of the sniper rifle.
Tanner was using the rifle’s scope and could make out faces. He caught glimpses of Soulless, but the man was keeping Elliot in front of him as a shield. A look at Gwen revealed that there was a second woman aboard the boat. She too was being used as a human shield.
Henry was looking through the binoculars. “I wonder who the other woman is. She looks terrified.”
“I can’t get a clean shot,” Tanner said, “Not with the boats rocking.”
Jacques laughed. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve found him. Soulless can’t outrun us and there’s nowhere to hide. We’ve got him.”
Elliot was praying Tanner wasn’t under the impression that he was an accomplice of Soulless and decide to shoot him. When Seneca shouted to him in Japanese from the other end of the boat, it took him a moment to realize what she was saying.
“Be ready to leap overboard when I shout the word, jump.”
“Are you sure we should do that?”
“If we’re not on the boat, they won’t have hostages.”
“They might try to shoot us.”
“I know, but they could do that anyway.”
Soulless looked perplexed as he listened to Elliot and Seneca converse. He called to Gwen. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re speaking Chinese or something.”
Soulless shouted at Elliot. “Stop talking!”
Elliot ignored him and called over to Seneca. “Let’s do it. Let’s jump. You say when.”
Seneca smiled. “All right, one, two, three, jump!”
Soulless was about to shove his gun against Elliot’s ribs when Elliot spun away from him, took two running steps, and leapt overboard. Seneca jumped too, but Gwen had fired at her. The bullet hit Seneca in the side as she was in the middle of her leap. Seneca released a scream and hit the water hard.
“Down! Get down!” Soulless shouted to Gwen.
Not a second later, a bullet passed through the space where Soulless had been standing, as Tanner no longer had to be concerned about hitting a hostage.
Tanner fired that single shot after watching Elliot and Seneca take their leaps into the sea. He paused because he could no longer see Soulless or Gwen. However, he could see their boat, and it became the target of his weapon.
“I’m going to sink them,” he said, then proceeded to blow holes in the boat at the waterline. As
he was doing that, Jacques had brought them in closer, and he and Henry joined in, by using their handguns. If Soulless or Gwen raised their heads or came into view, they would become the new targets.
Gwen’s boat took on water at a disastrous pace that the automatic bilge pump hadn’t been designed to handle. The boat was going down, and it would take Soulless and Gwen with it.
Soulless had laid flat on the deck and had hunkered down in front of a bench with padded seats that also doubled as a place to stow gear. He remembered there were items stored beneath the bench’s seat and hoped that they would be enough to stop a bullet from getting through and hitting him.
He could see Gwen across the deck, lying near the helm. She had her head down with her arms crossed over it, as if that could stop a bullet.
When Gwen realized they were taking on water, she lifted her head and shouted to Soulless.
“We have to get below!”
Below? Where the water was accumulating? That made no sense to Soulless, but he watched as Gwen wriggled on her elbows and knees toward the hatch that led to the galley. When the boat listed to starboard, Gwen tumbled headfirst into the opening and was out of sight. The boat was sinking fast. They were hundreds of feet from the spot where Elliot and Seneca had jumped overboard, but still some distance from the island.
“She’s going down,” Henry said. They had stopped shooting and were waiting to catch sight of Soulless or Gwen. They saw neither of them, and the boat would be submerged in less than a minute.
Tanner stripped off his clothes until he was only wearing a pair of black boxers. “I’m going in the water to look for Soulless. You two start searching for Elliot Lipson and the woman.”
Soulless (A Tanner Novel Book 43) Page 27
