Dead Reckoning. Sandra K. Moore

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      “Clothes?”

      Chris shrugged. “She likes giving me designer clothes.”

      Smitty grunted. “Expensive hobby.”

      “She can afford it.” Chris irritably swept her feet from the sofa to the floor and grabbed her coffee cup. Damn shakes were back. And she had work to do. But she still had questions. “So do you think Jerome’s ticked off about an Italian dress?”

      “Maybe she’s sending you something valuable—like a document. Something incriminating.” Garza glanced at Smitty. “You know the way Scintella works. Could he have left a paper trail and his wife got hold of something?”

      “Maybe,” Smitty conceded. “He’s not the brightest bulb in the candelabra.”

      “Natalie could have dug something up to use against him,” Chris mused. “She’s scared, but she understands power.” She had, after all, wrapped their grandfather around her little finger.

      Garza grunted. “Scintella’s not the kind of man you want to manipulate.”

      Chris tried to tamp down the fresh fear rising through her stomach. “What if Falks wasn’t sent by Scintella? What if he’s just a random stalker?”

      “He’s Scintella’s man.” Smitty crossed his lean, muscled arms. “I’ll be here 24/7.”

      “But what does that mean for my sister?” Fear pierced her chest, making it hard to breathe. “If Jerome knows…”

      Garza’s scar throbbed red above his ear. “Anything could happen, Ms. Hampton.” His gaze, when it met hers, lay heavy with the weight of his experience. He finds missing people, she remembered. How many had he found dead? How many mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had he been forced to face?

      Natalie could die, his gaze said. But it said more than that. Natalie could already be dead.

      “I have to call her. She gave me a special number where I could reach her.”

      Chris grabbed her cell from the table but before she could hit the speed dial, Garza said, “What reason are you going to give her for calling?”

      Chris paused. He had a point. Why would she call in the middle of the night? Just to chat? Because she couldn’t sleep? The penalty for making Jerome even more suspicious was too high to pay just to assuage her anxiety.

      “I’ll wait,” Chris said through her frustration. “Until morning.”

      “Don’t mention the package,” Garza ordered. “If she’s managed to ship something on the sly, let’s not tip off Scintella.”

      “This is going to turn into a waiting game, isn’t it?” Chris asked. “Waiting to call Natalie, waiting for the package, waiting to get under way.”

      Garza’s half smile was sympathetic. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t get easier. But you have plenty to do in the meantime.”

      “McLellan will arrive on Monday morning,” Smitty added.

      “Can he help us work?” Chris asked, dragging her attention back to the task in front of her. First things first.

      Smitty abruptly grinned his charming, lopsided grin. “You’ll see for yourself.”

      “I hope so. We’ve got to launch in thirteen days,” she said, feeling her nerves prick the skin, itching to get things done, and done fast. “Time’s wasting.”

      Outside, faint peach light colored the sky, and the resident green monk parrots, so social, so busy, had already begun to chatter up the dawn.

      Late Monday afternoon, Chris lay on a catwalk stretched inches over oily bilge water, a rough-drawn map of Obsession’s hull in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She didn’t much care for poking around in the bilge, but necessity was a mother and there was no getting around it. Every through-hull—every hole in the boat that fed water into or out of the boat, through the hull—needed to be watertight. The last thing she needed was a hose to give way at sea.

      She’d already suffered one setback. Bright and early this morning, Dave had had to confess the air compressor on his spray-painting equipment had failed. No hull painting, he’d said, until the new compressor came in on Thursday morning. And the other boatyards were booked up because it was prime boating season. It was one of the ironies of pleasure boating: no one wanted to fix up their boats until it was weather-fit to use them, which meant they lost half the season to repairs.

      But not repairs like the kind she was going to have to do now.

      At least Natalie had called yesterday. Three minutes away from the bodyguard she called Igor was all Natalie could grab. While in a public pay toilet, no less. The disposable cell phones she’d bought were extremely handy. Chris just prayed she didn’t get caught with one.

      First things first.

      The bilge’s overhead lamps cast dim vee’s along the catwalk. Glad I’m not claustrophobic, she thought as she shimmied on her stomach a little farther forward toward the hardest-to-reach through-hull fitting. Damp mustiness filled her nostrils, made her skin clammy despite the growing morning heat. Around her, color-coded wiring and grimy hoses snaked along the hull. A few feet of belly-crawling brought her even with the fitting she was looking for.

      The through-hull, placed several feet away on the starboard side, looked pretty rough from the catwalk. The flashlight picked out minute cracks in the hose that fed seawater into the engines’ cooling systems. The clamps securing the hose in place showed specks of rust, too. Chris wiggled off the catwalk and balanced herself over the bilge to get close to the fitting. One good yank and the clamp snapped. Another yank and the hose popped off the through-hull barb. She looked at the crumbling heavy-duty rubber. Were all the hoses this bad?

      “Captain Chris?”

      A man’s deep voice drifted through Obsession’s dimly lit bowels.

      Her stomach clenched until she realized Eugene Falks wouldn’t be casually calling her name. No, this had to be a workman or something. She’d seen the revolver Smitty wore in his shoulder holster this morning and the way his gaze constantly flicked from door to window while he tore out the salon carpet. Nobody was going to get past Smitty upstairs while she lay prone down here.

      She leaned against the hull wall to lever herself back onto the catwalk. Nearly there, her hand slipped from the hull and plunged into the bilge. The flashlight clattered, then splashed next to her and went out.

      “Dammit.” She fished the dead flashlight out of the filthy bilge water, trying not to use her imagination when her fingers touched solid, shifting objects near the bottom. God only knew what was down there.

      “Chris?”

      The man was close by, inside the engine room, and still calling her name. She crawled backward to the open crawl space door. Going ass-first into the engine room wouldn’t be much of a greeting for the workman, but what the hey. He could learn to call before showing up.

      She wriggled her butt through the hatch, got to her knees, straightened and said sharply, “What is it?”

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