Superior Storm (Lake Superior Mysteries) (24 page)

Angela looked at her
with hard eyes
.
“
Why did he have a gun?
”
she
asked
.

Jasmine shrugged. “I never knew about the ankle holster.”

Angela glared at her for a moment longer, and then turned to me.
“
You can help him. But i
f you find any more weapons on him, you just hand them carefully to me.” I was aware of her gun, very near my head. She had a strange look of satisfaction on her face. She looked like I felt just after I landed a big fish.

The boat was plunging ever more wildly. It was hard to keep my balance.

“I’m trained in first aid for this sort of thing,” said Jasmine. “Let me help.”

Angela gave her a funny look.
Jasmine cut her eyes
quickly
at me and then met Angela’s gaze
again
.

“Tell me what to do
,
Jasmine,” I said.
Angela gave a shrug.

“What do you see?
” asked Jasmine.
“
Where is he hit?”

Tony was conscious, but he wasn’t speaking.
His eyes were glassy and his breathing was labored.
I gently pulled his jacket aside. There was a lot of blood. Some of it seemed to originate fro
m his right shoulder. “Shoulder.
” I carefully explored
more
and found a long tear in his shirt and a gash
across
the right side
of his ribcage
where a bullet had plowed an ugly furrow through the skin without penetrating the body. “
Flesh wound on the right side of the ribs.
”

Tony seemed like he was trying to whisper to me, but couldn’t make the necessary noise. I leaned down with my ear to his lips. “High, right side of the chest,” he said, barely breathing the words. “Tell them I’ve got a lung wound.”
I explored the area. It was covered in blood,
from his shoulder,
but I could find no wound. Stone
grabbed my right arm, in front
of
my body, where Phil and Angela could not see. His grip was like iron. He pumped my arm twice
, looked meaningfully into my eyes
and then let go.

I made a show of looking further. “He’s hit in the chest too,” I said, pointing to his blood soaked shirt below the shoulder wound.
“
Maybe clipped in the top of the lung.”

Jasmine took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said. “We need clean cloths for bandages. Any dishtowels or anything?”

“I’ll get them,” said Leyla. Phil and Angela moved out of her way as she went to the galley cupboards. She brought
the dishtowels
forward and I took them. Following Jasmine’s instructions, I bound up Stone’s two wounds, plus his fake one. I was glad he was not hit in any vital spot, but his shoulder was an awful mess.
He probably didn’t have to fake the agony that he expressed as I worked on him.
It took me much longer than it might have, because the boat was bucking like a prize rodeo bull.

“Since he wasn’t hit low, we can give him a pain killer,” said Jasmine.
“
But not Aspirin or Advil – those thin the blood.
”
Under Angela’s watchful eyes, Leyla got a glass of water and some Tylenol.
Right before she brought it to me, Stone’s head slipped down to his
bloody shoulder
. I lifted his head
up again
. His eyes were still open, and he gave me a nanosecond wink, more imagined than seen. I supported his neck and held the glass while Leyla put the Tylenol in his mouth. He took it, and then blew a flimsy red bubble of blood out of his mouth. Angela saw it, and so did Jasmine.
Jasmine
said in a strange dispassionate voice,
“He’s hit in the lung
. He won’t last long without surgery.”

“He should have thought of that beforehand,” said Angela, which seemed a little hypocritical to me.
Jasmine looked at Angela. “Any need to keep up with this still?
These other two aren’t much of a threat, and I can’t do anything like this anyway.
”

Angela shrugged. “I guess not.”

“Good,” said Jasmine. “Then get me out of these stupid cuffs.”

Phil stepped over wordlessly, and cut Jasmine’s plastic’s handcuffs. She stood up and stretched, and then ran her fingers through her thick dark hair. She reached under her fleece, and pulled out a black
leather wallet, opened i
t and tossed it on the table. It was an FBI badge, accompanied by her photo ID. “Glad to be finally done with that,” she said to no one in particular.

Jasmine walked up to
Stone and grabbed his face in one hand, pinching his cheeks like an angry mother does to a naughty child.
She glared at
him
.
“Now, you Neanderthal SOB,
” she said in low, bitter voice,
“
I’m going to
enjoy watching you die slowly.”

I stared at her.
I could feel Leyla doing the same.
In the last five minutes
,
Jasmine had been an ordinary civilian
caught in horrible situation
, then an FBI agent
deliberately hunting her quarry
, and now
what? An agent turned bad, a criminal?

“What is this, Jasmine?” I asked.

“I’m quitting my job,” she said sweetly. “They just don’t know it yet. In fact, as far as they’ll ever know, I am about to die in the line of duty, along with Tony here.” She looked at me significantly. “They’ll probably give me a posthumous medal – which I will be alive to enjoy.”

“Jasmine,” said Angela. “Don’t talk
so
much.”

Jasmine shrugged. “What does it matter now? The only serious obstacle was him.” She jerked her thumb at Stone.

“We talked about this,” said Angela. “Just wait until tomorrow.”

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

There were several long moments of silence in the cabin, while the storm beat upon the outside of the vessel.
The boat shuddered. Leyla shook herself. “We’ve lost the engine.
We need to put out a sea-anchor to straighten us out to the waves and slow our drift, or we’ll be battered to pieces.”

“Not so fast,” said Phil.
He pointed at Stone,
who had closed his eyes and was trying to brace himself from bouncing around and aggravating his wounds.
“He said
they
were FBI.”

“Phil,” said Angela in a sarcastic and pained voice, “try not to be such an idiot. We
knew
he was FBI. Jasmine was too. She gave him to us.”

Phil
was suspicious, but perhaps not overly bright
. “Okay, but what if
Borden
was working with them, you
know, wearing wire or something?
”

“A
wire
, out here?” asked Jasmine incredulously. “
A
wire is a short-range transmitter. You have to be within half a mile.
There’s no one within two dozen miles of us. Besides, he wasn’t cooperating with the FBI –
I’m
FBI, remember? I’d know.”

“Maybe he was working with Stone, not you.”

“Tony was my partner. We would have worked it together.”

“You didn’t work
this
together with him, did you?” asked Angela. “Are you sure he had no suspicions of you?”

“Doesn’t matter now, does it? We’ve taken care of him. But if it makes you feel better, search Borden and Bennett. In fact,
I’ll
do it.”

Jasmine thrust me roughly against the closed door that led to the bow cabin. “Stay still,
pastor
,” she said in a mocking voi
ce. She patted me down lightly.

“Clean,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief.
When I took off my jacket, I
had hidden Tony’s knife in my shoe, underneath my foot.

Angela searched Leyla,
somewhat half-heartedly
. “She’s clean too.”

“Okay,” said Leyla. “We need to get that sea anchor out, right away.”

“No,” said Angela. “We need to keep
on
. Put up the sail again.”

“That’s very dangerous,” said Leyla. “We could capsize, founder, all sorts of things.”

“So make it safer,” snapped Angela. “Can’t you just put part of it out? What do they call that, ‘shortening the sail?’”

Leyla’s shoulders
slumped
. “We could do that I guess. But it’s still pretty dangerous to carry
any
sail in this storm.”

“Do it,” said Angela. “And get us back on course to that GPS point.”

“
I need one other person to help me,” said Leyla.

I could see they didn’t like it. If one of them went, it shortened the odds below deck, though I had no idea how I would take out one person armed with a gun, let alone two. But if I went up with Leyla, they wo
uld have only one hostage below, a man they thought might already by dying.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “There’s nowhere to go, and you’ll kill
Tony
and us if we try anything. We’ve seen that you’ll use those guns.”

Angela chewed her lip for a minute. “One of us could go,” said Jasmine. “But that leaves one of us cold and wet and slow. Why be more uncomfortable than we have to?
Borden
is right, what are they gonna do?”

“Okay, go,” said Angela.
“When you are done, Leyla comes in and Borden stays out to steer.”

I took my jacket
from the galley counter. There were two holes in it from when Phil fired his gun.

We staggered up the stairs, and stepped into the cockpit, pulling the doors shut after us.

The wind roared
like a thousand tortured souls
and plucked a deadly threnody from the rigging.
The dodger offered little protection anymore
,
and t
he spray and rain were constant. It
was
l
ike being doused with ice water every five seconds.
Actually, we
were
being do
u
sed with ice water every five seconds.
It was full dark, but I caught glimpses of the wild and angry waves. They were heaving twenty feet and more, creating an ever
-
changing violent landscape of hills and valleys. I had to hold on to the rails to keep my footing.

“How did you
manage out here?” I shouted. “This is insane!”

“It’s easier when we are under way,” Leyla shouted back.
“
The dodger gives more protection then
, and the waves are more
predictable
.”

We both strapped life vests on. As
Leyla directed, we freed the appropriate lines. She swung the starboard one around a
winch roller
as I handed her the
handle. She began to crank. The rope tightened
and then stopped.

“It’s not working,” she called. “It’s hung up on something.”

She tried again, to no avail.

“How important is this?” I asked, squinting through the deluge.

“Probably life or death.”

“Okay,” I said. My head was throbbing and my shin was aching. I was freezing once more, and
icy
water had
seeped behind the life vest into
the bullet holes in my jacket.
I took a breath, grabbed the
cable
life-line,
and put my foot on the cockpit bench.

“Jonah!” shouted Leyla. “What are you doing?”

“
Going to fix it,” I bellowed back.

We star
ed at each other
for
a moment, water streaming down our faces.
“You said life or death.”

Her shoulders slumped in
resignation
. “Let’s at least rig a
rope
,” she said.

We found a rope and secured one end of it to one of the cleats in the cockpit. I spent the next three minutes trying to tie a bowline around my waist. I had almost no feeling left in my fingers. When I was finally secure, Leyla pulled on it to check it. It held. She pulled again and I stumbled into her arms.
We held each other tightly for a long moment.

“I love you
,
Jonah,” she said into my ear. “Be careful.”