Dead Reckoning. Sandra K. Moore

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      “Oh, God, Nat.”

      “I have to get off the phone before he comes outside. We have to move again.”

      “Move again? What do you mean?”

      Natalie’s breath hitched as she inhaled. “He won’t stay in one place for more than one night. I never know until he comes home and then we pack up and go. Or sometimes he just calls and I have to go meet him.”

      “What the hell does he think’s going to happen?”

      “I don’t know. But I hate this! I hate living out of a suitcase.” A loud sniff sounded. “Look, it’s been long enough for me to have a cigarette. I have to go back inside.”

      “Answer my question, Natalie. Do you want to come home?”

      “You don’t understand. Jerome will never let me leave.”

      No, Chris thought. There was always a plan. There was always a way of getting out of places you didn’t want to be. It just sometimes took brainpower and usually needed guts.

      Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

      Chris’s voice was calm as she said, “Fuck Jerome. I’ll come get you.”

      Chapter 2

      “What you’re proposing, Ms. Hampton, is suicide.”

      Chris lifted her chin, annoyed by Antonio Garza’s pronouncement. As a private investigator, he was there to inform, not to advise. “What I’m proposing is saving my sister from an abusive husband.”

      She surveyed Garza’s small conference room where she sat with her friend, Gus Perkins, Antonio Garza and an innocuous-looking man who’d been introduced to her as Special Agent Smith of the DEA. “The fact her husband is an extremely dangerous drug smuggler is news, but it doesn’t mean I’m giving up.”

      She clasped her hands together on the conference table’s edge and willed them to stop trembling. The shoulder squeeze Gus gave her felt affectionate, supportive. As well it should, all the years she’d taken sailing lessons from him after he retired from the Houston Police Department. She trusted him, at first with her safety on the water—he had never let her down—and now with this.

      When Gus had told her his old partner had become a P.I. based in Galveston, she’d hoped to get some information about Jerome Scintella before she headed out after Natalie. Did he, for example, have a history of violence? Have an arrest record? Own a gun?

      “Extremely dangerous drug smuggler” pretty much had all of that covered.

      Suddenly she wasn’t just talking to a P.I. about snatching her sister. The minute Gus and Antonio Garza heard Jerome’s name, they’d been on the phone to old contacts at the DEA. Hence Special Agent Smith, who reminded her of the boy who used to live next door.

      “It’s clear we can’t take him in Rome.” Smith rose, tall and lean, to pace to the window. He braced his arm in the window casing as he said, almost to himself, “With Scintella so jumpy, moving around every night, it’ll be next to impossible to get a fix on him.”

      “That’s why I’m proposing my ‘suicide’ mission,” Chris retorted. “Natalie’s too hemmed in by her bodyguard to ditch him, so I couldn’t go to Rome myself and have any chance of getting her.”

      “And you think taking your motor yacht to this private island improves your odds?” Smith asked the window. “It’ll be covered up with armed guards.”

      “It’s a very long shot. And dangerous.” The private investigator’s deep brown eyes were soft with concern, as though he was practiced at cautioning others. Given that Garza specialized in finding missing children, Chris suspected he might be.

      “I knew it was going to be difficult before you told me about Jerome,” she said. “But I can’t just let this chance go by without acting on it.” Smith’s longish blond hair raked his collar as he turned to look at her. She continued, “Natalie phoned again this morning and said she’d sweet-talked Jerome into telling her the island’s name. She’s not sure if Isladonata is in U.S. waters. I checked the charts but didn’t find it. Maybe Isladonata is a nickname. I’ll ask around the transient cruising people in my marina and on the newsgroups to see if they know anything.”

      “So she’s able to get some information from him.” Smith’s words sounded almost like an accusation.

      “Every question she asks is a risk,” Chris retorted. “Jerome gets more suspicious of everyone around him every day. I don’t like asking her to stretch that envelope.”

      Smith sighed and returned to the table. His white shirt, tucked carelessly into snug jeans, both set off his tan and made him look more like a horse trainer than a DEA agent. “I hope I don’t sound like I’m asking you to do that,” he said as he dropped back into his chair. “It’s good she’s able to find out a few things for us. It’ll help us find Scintella.”

      And get her out, Chris thought.

      “But,” his tenor deepened slightly, “there’s no guarantee she’ll take the chance of leaving even if you show up with your boat. No telling what orders the bodyguard will have been given by Scintella.”

      Chris’s stomach clenched with fear. Would Jerome order Natalie’s bodyguard to kill her if she strayed? God, why would he not? He seemed to see Natalie as a possession, not a wife.

      “How were you planning on finding Isladonata?” Smith asked.

      “All I need is a fifty-square-mile window. In theory, I could track other boats or choppers from the mainland and project which island they land at, then dead reckon my way in.” Though her chances of actually succeeding, she knew from having been in the Gulf of Mexico, were incredibly slim. Too much water, too many islands, too little time.

      “Navigation by the seat of the pants is risky,” Gus said.

      Smith nodded. “It’d be better if your sister could get us the exact location.”

      Chris studied her hands, resting so still and lost on the wood tabletop’s vast, empty expanse. “I’m sure it would. But I don’t like asking her to take that chance.”

      “Understood,” Smith replied softly.

      She looked up to find him staring at her. He was handsome in a vague way, as though the artist painting him had left him unfinished. It showed in the way his hair roughly brushed his neck, in the slight unevenness of his lips. His eyes, she realized absently, were the color of her own.

      “And your yacht can make that trip?” he asked.

      “Obsession’s not a true blue-water boat, so she can’t take on an ocean,” Chris admitted. “But she’ll handle the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean just fine. An old ship’s log I found aboard said she made two trips down and back in the seventies.”

      Gus snorted. “The seventies? A little time has passed, hasn’t it?”

      “I tore down and rebuilt both engines myself,” Chris replied. “She’ll СКАЧАТЬ