Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) (33 page)

Oh shit.

Caldwell huffed out a soft breath, a quiet protest, trying to get Oren’s attention. The agent obviously saw it too and thought it a bad idea. Oren tried to elbow the kid but he brushed off the gesture, adjusting his grip on the stool.

Oren steadied his breathing. They were all going to get shot.

4:27pm, 107° F

Booker hated the water. He always had. He could swim; it wasn’t that. He hated the bottomlessness of it, the sensation of drifting with no solidity. He hated the sound of his pulse in his ears and the loud rush of breath when he broke the surface. Plus he hated getting his knives wet. Still, his dislike of the water paled in comparison to the eruption of loathing within him when Dani had told him what was on the boat.

He saw her in his mind, wet and covered in another man’s blood. Her breast.

The shiver that ran through him almost made him gulp water and Booker shut the thought down. There would be plenty of time to fully explore the memory later.

He had a job to do.

For obvious reasons Booker wasn’t a religious man or even a spiritual one, but he did have an animal’s faith in the rightness of
life. He believed he was lucky, that more often than not he was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. Take Florida, for example. He hated it. He hated wearing shorts; he hated seeing Dani being touched by another man; he hated swimming. A less optimistic man might feel that life conspired against him, throwing all those loathsome things at him at once, but not Booker. He understood the purpose of hate.

When acknowledged and understood, there was no deadlier weapon.

And of all the things he’d hated so far on this trip, nothing came close to how much he hated what was happening on that boat.

Juan didn’t see him when he climbed off the ladder. Not at first. As Booker stepped around the clutter on deck to reach the wheelhouse, he saw why. Juan sat perched on the edge of the captain’s seat, his pants around his knees, talking on his phone to someone named Vincente, while his eyes roamed over a small girl standing in front of him. Booker assumed it was a girl. The dirty little shorts didn’t give much of a clue but one side of her black hair hung in a tattered pigtail.

Juan smiled as he ended the call. He must have caught movement from the corner of his eye because he jumped to his feet, knocking the little girl down as he struggled to get his pants up. Booker held up his hands and smiled.

“It’s okay! It’s okay! Don’t shoot.” He stepped closer and leaned against a deck chest, his arm draped over a thick coil of rope. “Dani sent me. About the kids.”

He watched Juan scowl, thinking, and then relax. “What did she want?”

“To give you this.”

Juan never saw the metal hook that Booker pulled from the coil of rope.

It didn’t take long to get him in place. Booker had been careful not to hit him in the temple. He just wanted to stun the little man, not kill him. Not yet. With both hands tied over his head on the canopy of the wheelhouse, his clothes stripped off and his filthy underwear shoved into his mouth to silence his cries, Juan looked just about ready to be woken up.

But first things first.

Booker crouched down to be face-to-face with the dark-eyed girl. She didn’t look afraid. He wasn’t entirely sure she knew he was there.

“Do you speak English?”

She stared into his eyes and he saw her focus. She nodded.

“Where are the others?”

She turned to look at the trap door fastened with the open padlock. Booker nodded, removed the lock, and opened the hatch.

He knew that smell. If it smelled less of salt water and more of dogs, it would have smelled exactly as he remembered it.

“Come on out. Come on.”

He helped one tiny person after another out of the hold. Some could barely walk. None spoke. Booker saw the way they clung to each other, holding each other up as they breathed in the hot, fresh air, squinting against the lowering sun. When the hold was empty, he shut the hatch. Twenty-five pairs of eyes stared at him.

“I’m not sure how I’m going to get you off this boat. I don’t see any reason to lie to you. We’ll look for life rafts in a minute. Maybe life preservers. We’ll figure that out, okay? But first there’s this.” He looked from face to face. “When you get to shore, when the police find you and send you home, you’re going to talk to counselors and doctors and people who will tell you how to feel about this. No matter what they say though, you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night frightened, remembering what’s happened to you up to now.”

He stood and drew the serrated blade from his waistband. “I want you to watch this. All of it. Afterwards you can tell the police or not, whatever you feel comfortable with, but watch all of this. And months from now, when you wake up frightened, reliving all they’ve done to you, you tell yourself the rest of the story. You tell it all the way to the end, okay?”

He turned to Juan, tapping him on the cheek to wake him. Juan blinked, shaking his head, trying to focus. When he saw Booker, saw that he was naked and tied, he panicked, twisting and screaming out from behind his filthy gag. When he saw the knife, his bladder gave way.

Booker looked over his shoulder. Twenty-five sets of eyes saw everything.

He smiled. “Let’s get started.”

4:40pm, 107° F

Oren couldn’t believe they were going to try something. He had to be misunderstanding what he saw. Bermingham and Ned were armed and nervous. Dani had a screwdriver, the kid a chair. Oren knew the shotgun sat loaded and ready on the other side of the bar but from where he sat, it might as well be across the inlet. He glanced down at Caldwell, who gave him a worried look.

The two Canadians stood at the doorway to the deck, squinting into the setting sun. Oren had stared at that scene for twenty years. At this time of day, all they were going to get was retina burn.

Ned shook his head. “You’re right. We’ve got to call it. It’s got to be over a hundred and ten on that boat. We’ve got to get them off.”

Choo-Choo made a cluck of disapproval. “Don’t like your boy-ass baked?”

“Shut up,” Bermingham snapped, but the blond ignored him.

“I’d think the heat would keep them tender, make them more malleable. Let’s not pretend you like to diddle children because you like their feisty spirits.”

Bermingham pointed his weapon at Choo-Choo. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

Ned pushed his arm down. “Ignore him. We don’t have time for this. They’ve got no phones. If Vincente’s waiting for a signal from them, we’re running out of time. Let’s call it.”

Bermingham swore again and pulled out his phone with his free hand. He walked while he dialed. “Yeah, Taxi Eight-Fourteen. Abort the minnow. Repeat, abort the minnow. We have word the target is hot, twenty-five souls still aboard. Go now. Use extreme caution. The target may be hot.” He banged the phone against his forehead. “And for fuck’s sake, hurry up.”

He shoved his phone back into his pocket. Oren heard the kid suck in a breath and saw the instant Bermingham made his mistake. Without looking he stepped just inches away from Dani’s arm, his toe brushing the edge of the screwdriver. Oren didn’t think she even opened her eyes; she moved too quickly for him to tell. All he saw was the screwdriver disappearing into the top of the Canadian’s foot hard and fast, more of the long metal vanishing from sight than should have been possible. Oren knew what that meant.

She had nailed his foot to the barroom floor.

He screamed and jerked but she leveraged herself on the spike to snap her legs up and out, nailing Bermingham in the crotch. Dani was nothing but legs, kicking and swinging, hitting any inch of flesh she could reach as the blond kid swung the barstool hard and heavy, knocking the bigger man off his free foot, his trapped foot causing his knee to twist at an unnatural angle. Bermingham’s gun flew, Ned shouted, and Oren surprised himself with the revival of his old “leaping behind the bar” skills. He had the shotgun up and out and aimed at Ned. The kid had Bermingham’s gun pointed the same direction.

The whole scene had taken only seconds.

Bermingham clutched his leg, trying to right himself. Dani grabbed the barstool from the kid, swinging the heavy oak seat like it weighed nothing. Funny, Oren thought, adrenaline making his ears ring, he’d never noticed just how toned Dani’s arms were.