I Have a Secret (A Sloane Monroe Novel, Book Three) (4 page)

“Hey lady, you can’t be in here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.  “Do you want me to leave?”  I slipped off Giovanni’s suit jacket and bent over an empty chair by the door giving him a front row seat to my rear view mirror.  “I’m just so bored, and I saw you in here, and well—I thought you could tell me where I could go to have a good time.”

His eyes widened like he’d just been given the keys to a brand new Ferrari.  “What did you, umm, have in mind?”

I approached him and ran my fingers down the sides of my body, starting at my shoulders and working my way down to my waist and then rested them on my hips. 

He swallowed—hard. 

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Toby.”

I straddled the chair he sat in and lowered my body down until it rested on his lap.  I pushed my face forward until it was level with his, leaned in and whispered, “What about you, Toby?  Are you…busy?”  

A bead of sweat trickled down his face as he tried his best to keep his eyes centered on me without looking down.  After a few moments of consideration, he kicked the chair the other guy slept in and said, “Hey douche bag, wake up.”

Douche Bag shouted an expletive and then rubbed his eyes.  Once he got all the sand out and the view in front of him came into focus he said, “What the hell is she doing in here?  Ma’am, I mean, lady—this room is restricted to the crew only.”  He looked back at Toby.  “What were you thinking?”

Toby snapped his head back and laughed.  “Dude, I’ll give you a hundred bucks to take a hike for twenty minutes.”

The other boy looked at him like he didn’t understand why he said twenty when he only needed ten.  He milled the moral dilemma around in his head and then got up and strolled out the door.  Before it shut, he poked his head back in.  “Twenty minutes—no more.  Make it fast.”

I slid off Toby and went to the door and locked it.  When I turned back around he had his shirt off and was going for the belt on his pants at a rate faster than any heartbeat I’d ever heard in my lifetime.

I swirled my finger in the air.  “No…no…no…not so fast.” 

“What do you mean?  I thought you wanted to…?”

“These cameras,” I said.  “Do you ever see things you shouldn’t?” 

Toby laughed.  “All the time.”

“I want to see something first,” I said.  “Will you show me?”

“What’s it worth to you?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I do something for you, you do something for me.”

“Such as?” I said.

He indicated to my dress with his chin.  “Take it off.”

I took a moment to consider what he was asking and how far I was willing to go to get what I wanted.  I’d been in a lot of compromising positions before, but nothing like the one I was in now.  He requested my dress, not my bra and panties, so I rationalized it was no different than strutting around in my bikini on deck.  With one hand I undid the back zipper and let my dress puddle around me on the ground.  I stepped out of it and looked him in the eye.  “Now will you show me?”

His eyes sparkled with anticipation.  “What did you umm…have in mind?”

I crossed the room, touching different screens as I walked like I was lighting up letters on
Wheel of Fortune. 
“Can I just pick one?” I said. 

He looked at his watch and sighed.

“We’ll hurry,” I said.  “Promise.  This is just so exciting!”

I selected a screen that displayed the various decks.  “How does this work?” I said.  “What if you wanted to look at one in particular instead of all of them in a rotation?”

“That’s easy.”  He pushed some buttons on the keyboard in front of him and brought up the deck on level two.

“I was on level five tonight, and I’d love to see what was going on when I wasn’t looking.”

“Level five…let’s see here.”  He pushed a couple more buttons and the level five camera sparked on. 

“What time?”

“Around nine,” I said. 

“Which side?”

“The one by the dance floor.”

When the screen refreshed I saw Doug, alive and staring out into a sea of nothing.

“All right, I showed you how it works; can we get back to you and me now?  I wanna get the rest of those clothes off.”

“In just a minute,” I said.  “I want to see where this guy goes.”

He groaned.  “Why do you care?”

I’d already fibbed more than a drug dealer in an interrogation room, what was one more?

“One of the women at the party was going around telling everyone she got it on with some guy out on the deck, and I wondered if it was true or not.”

Toby stood up.  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?  Voyeurism—I like it!”

I tilted my head and smiled.  “How about we fast forward to the good part?” I said.  “Then we can get back to
us.”

He grabbed the remote, and the screen moved forward.  After several minutes Doug’s eyes shifted to the side and he spoke to a shadowy person shielded under a dark cloak. 

Toby slowed things down until the recording played at regular speed and then stood up for a closer look at the coming attraction.  “Hey, I bet this is it.”

Somehow I didn’t think so.  The expression on Doug’s face was not of a person prepared to enter the throes of passion—he looked scared. 

“Wait a minute,” I said.  “Go back.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”  

He reversed until I told him to stop. 

I put my finger on the screen.  “What’s that person holding in their hand?”

He shrugged.  “This doesn’t zoom, it just records.”

I bent over the screen to get a closer look.  The person talking to Doug held something in his right hand, but in black and white, it was too fuzzy to see.  A knife?

“Play it again,” I said.

Toby clicked the button, and we watched the person move toward Doug and then raise his hand and swing it down.  Doug hunched over.  Blood that appeared black on the monitor, oozed from his white button-up shirt.  Toby threw his hand over his mouth and backed up until he tripped and fell over his chair.  “This can’t be happening.  There’s no way.  How did I miss this?”

I had a pretty good idea.  I continued to watch what appeared to be a knife stab Doug again and again until he didn’t move anymore.  The cloaked person then tried to lift Doug but couldn’t at first.  The person rested a moment, looked around and then tried again.  The second time Doug’s body flopped halfway over the railing.  He made no movement of any kind.  A couple more heave-ho’s and Doug’s body plummeted over the side, tumbling to the water below.  The cloaked person then threw the knife in after him.  And Doug was gone.   

I slipped back into my dress while Toby stumbled over to the phone and dialed.  “This is Toby in the surveillance room.  I need to talk to the captain.”  There was some chatter on the other end of the line and then Toby said, “I don’t care if he’s asleep.  Wake him up—now!”

I sat in a plain room with white paneling on all four walls and looked out the six foot windows at the lush green mountains of Jamaica.  Mountains I’d hoped to explore, along with a nice, wet hike up Dunn’s River Falls in my skivvies.  Sadly, it was not to be.  At the moment I was stuck with a bunch of men whose only interest was my role in the mysterious events that took place the night before. 

The captain, upon learning a man had gone overboard, turned the ship around.  He muttered something about how it was their obligation to return to the site and do a search and rescue.  Because of the timestamp on the video surveillance camera, it didn’t take long to make it back to the exact spot, but of course, there was no sign of Doug anywhere.  And at that point, all kinds of red tape came into play.  The way Giovanni explained it to me, because we were on the high seas and not on American soil or in American waters, it was hard to say what type of investigation would take place, and since the ship departed from a US port, special maritime jurisdiction applied.  The only problem was, it often took a lot of finagling before anyone got anywhere.

“Jamaica can wait.  This can’t,” the captain said.  “Now…I want you to tell me again how you ended up in my surveillance room and why you wanted to see that footage.”

He said the word my like a polygamist referenced one of his many wives. 

“We’ve been over this,” I said.  “Twice.  My story won’t be any different now than it was fifteen minutes ago.  I’ve told you everything.”

“I still don’t think you’re giving me all of it.  So let’s go over it again,” the captain said.

Giovanni, who sat back in the chair next to me with his arms crossed, leaned forward and chimed in.  “I’ve allowed this to go on long enough.  We have both complied with your repeated requests and your questions.  Any further questioning is unnecessary at this point.  We’ve done nothing wrong, and you have neither the right to question us or the authority to detain us any longer.”

The captain bent over Giovanni’s chair until he was mere inches from his face.  “We’ll sit here all day, but you
will
tell me whatever part of the story you two have left out.”

I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say: I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Giovanni remained calm.  He pushed the captain away from him with his hand and said, “I need to make a call.”

The captain threw his hands in the air.  “This isn’t jail.  You don’t get your one phone call.  My boat, my rules.”

Giovanni looked at me and said, “Say nothing more.” 

So I didn’t.  And aside from my stomach’s disapproval of me skipping a nutritious breakfast, we sat in silence for the next twenty minutes. 

When it was clear the captain’s patience was spent, he said, “You two are behaving like you’re waiting to get a lollipop from your mommy.  Stop wasting my time.  You’re not getting a phone call.”

In unison we shrugged our shoulders and continued to offer up the silent treatment.  If he was going to ruin our day, the least we could do was return the favor.  While we put up a united front, I played a mental list of songs inside my head to pass the time starting with Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” and ending with Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”  By then, the captains face was so red it looked like one of his blood vessels was about to burst from his body, shoot across the room and smack both of us in the face multiple times.  

With a great deal of reluctance, the captain looked at Giovanni and gestured to a phone on a desk.   Giovanni clutched it in his hand and made his one phone call.  He paused a moment and waited for the call to go through and then said, “Agent Luciana, please.”

The captain’s brow raised, but he said nothing.

Another pause and then, “How are you, Carlo?  Yes, we’ve had a great time.  I need your help with something.”

From there, the details were explained to Carlo in a different language which I perceived to be Italian, and then Giovanni handed the phone to the captain.  “He would like to speak with you.”

The captain rolled his eyes, snatched the phone and positioned it over his ear.  “Captain Manning here.  Who’s this?”

Those were the only words he got in before going mute for the next two minutes.  Before he ended the call he said, “Yes, I understand.”  The phone was placed back on the receiver and the captain turned to Giovanni and frowned.  “You could have told me your brother was FBI.” 

Giovanni smirked. “You didn’t ask.”

“Your brother has assured me the two of you will cooperate under his supervision if anything else is needed now or at any time in the future.”

What the captain didn’t know was Lucio answered to Giovanni.

“And?” I said.

The captain gritted his teeth.  “I want to know your whereabouts for the remainder of time you’re on my boat, and I can assure you both, I will be watching.  But for now, you’re free to go.”

I smiled.  Maybe I’d get the chance to climb the river after all. 

Trista lay on the bed in her cabin curled up in the fetal position.  When I walked in to check on her, she shot up and wrapped a blanket around herself.  Her eyes were puffy, and her makeup, smeared.  “So you saw him…go overboard?”

I nodded.  “I’m so sorry.  I wish I could have told you something else.”

She closed her eyes.  “I can’t believe anyone could do such a thing.  Doug was the kindest person.  He wouldn’t hurt anyone.  Why would someone want to kill him?  It doesn’t make sense.”