“Incoming communications?” she asked.
The agent glanced toward the wheelhouse. “Nothing except what we expect. Immigration and Customs has a couple of boats in the water, and we’ve got three Coast Guard ships on course to rendezvous with us at those same coordinates. We’ll be there just after sunrise, but they’re a few hours behind us. And then we wait.”
“I’m so sick of waiting.”
“Me, too,” Pavarotti said. “We’re sure this beacon is gonna work, right? We can track it wherever they go?”
Voss had been over that very subject dozens of times with Chauncey and with Josh. The satellite phone would only be good if Josh could call them on it, and keep up the call. They had needed something that could act as a continuous tracking signal. The FBI’s own tech guys had shrugged off the query, claiming they didn’t have anything that could be easily hidden on the Antoinette, somewhere Josh would be able to get to it. What they offered was a tracking device the size of a land mine.
Then Voss had talked to a friend who worked as an outfitter in Alaska and spent most of his time in isolated, inhospitable areas with no cell phone signal, and he’d told her about the personal locator beacon, which operated like a reverse-GPS, sending an emergency signal that could be picked up and followed, whether in the outback or on the ocean. The idea that the FBI’s techs would be ignorant about the existence of PLBs made her nuts. The things were available to the general public, but the FBI didn’t know about them? It made her wonder what else they didn’t know about that might save her life someday.
“It’ll work,” she told Pavarotti.
She didn’t see any reason to go into the one thing that really scared her about the PLB. Once Josh turned it on, there was the distinct possibility that the signal would interfere with the Antoinette’s instruments, which could lead them to seek out the competing signal on board.
Once the beacon went off, they’d be in a race to reach the container ship before the Rio brothers figured out they had an agent on board. If Josh’s cover was blown, then even when the ICE and Coast Guard and FBI moved in, things were likely to get very ugly. Josh could end up a hostage, or dead.
Voss took a sip of her piña colada. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take watch.”
Pavarotti stood his ground. “Not going to happen. I’ve already had a few hours’ rack time anyway. It’s your turn. I’ll wake you at dawn. You’re not doing Josh any favors if you’re—”
“All right,” she said. “I get it. Will it shut you up if I go down and pretend to sleep?”
“For now.”
Voss rolled her eyes. “Fine. It’ll be worth it.” She took her piña colada with her as she left.
Pavarotti smiled. “Night, Rachael.”
She bristled. Chauncey had wanted to know if Voss and Josh Hart were sleeping together, and she’d taken some satisfaction in being able to say no. But he’d never asked her if she was screwing Pavarotti, and for that she was glad. She didn’t like to lie.
For his part, Pavarotti apparently thought a single sex-filled, post-case victory celebration made him her lover, made it okay for him to use her given name. And it was okay … in bed. But on the job, things were different. Soon she would have to make absolutely certain she had disabused him of that notion. Six years earlier, her younger brother Ethan had developed cancer that spread rapidly through his body and killed him forty-seven days after its discovery. Since then, there was only one man in the world she cared for, and right now he was out in the middle of the Caribbean with people who might well kill him if they learned his identity.
Belowdecks, she lay down on a rack and closed her eyes, knowing she would never be able to sleep.
And yet, somehow, she did.
25
In the morning, Tori’s quarters still smelled like the food Josh had cooked her. It wasn’t just the food, though. The room still had the slightest trace of sex in the air.
She propped open her door and sat on her rack, drinking warm pomegranate juice and staring out at the lightening sky. Dawn came early in the islands, but she thought there must be at least an hour before sunrise. She needed it desperately. Not just daylight, but strong coffee and the heat of a Caribbean morning. Her eyes burned, her thoughts were soft and muddy, and her bones ached, but she knew the sunshine would help.
She tried not to think about Josh, both because she didn’t want to worry about him, and because she despised the resentment that surged up inside her when she did. Tori hated the position he had put her in, hated him for making love to her, and for how wonderful he had made her feel. Awful dreams had chased her down into sleep for the scant hours she had spent with her head on the pillow, and now whenever she closed her eyes she imagined him in a bloody heap, neck twisted at an impossible angle, or floating bloated and blue-skinned on the waves. She wanted to scream at him, but she hoped Gabe and Boggs hadn’t killed him, either.
Remnants of her dreams lingered. She’d woken with clenched fists and the feeling that she had to fight off hands that were reaching for her, trying to restrain her. Self-analysis had never been her favorite pastime, but she didn’t need a psych degree to recognize the origins of those feelings. The FBI was lurking somewhere close, just beyond their perceptions, and they didn’t even have their vital cargo. If they returned to Miami without the guns, they might all lose their jobs — though the job wasn’t really what troubled her. She might have just sailed home, but Gabe Rio wasn’t about to do that, which meant that though they were out on the open sea, they were trapped by circumstance. Tori could feel her muscles constrict at the thought.
They needed to be swift, and lucky.
Tori reached up to rub her itchy eyes, and when she lowered her hand, Dwyer was standing in her open doorway, silhouetted in the pre-dawn light, his red hair limned with a golden glow.
Startled, she spilled her pomegranate juice.
“Shit,” she whispered, setting her glass on the floor. “What’s going on?”
Though shadow covered his face, Tori could make out a strange expression on Dwyer’s face. The young guy — she was trying to stop thinking of him as a kid — looked confused and a little antsy. She’d known addicts in her life, and they always seemed lost and desperate when they were craving. Dwyer had a bit of that in him now, though she had a feeling drugs weren’t responsible.
“Captain wants you up top,” he said. He glanced back out the door, looking at something out on the water, in the distance. “We’re here.”
Tori slipped on a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes, then grabbed a face cloth from a shelf in the corner of the room and wiped the juice off the back of her hand.
“Why do you look so worried?”
Dwyer’s soft, dark laugh took her by surprise.
“Aside from the total clusterfuck this thing is turning out to be, y’mean?”
“Yeah. Aside from that.”
Instead of answering he stepped backward, out onto the deck, and once more glanced out over the water, toward something she couldn’t see. “Come and have a look. See if you don’t wanna click your heels and wake up home in bed.”
With his face now washed in the glimmer of imminent morning, Dwyer seemed almost an apparition. The dark water behind him had a kind of haze upon it, a strange condition of the light, like the gauzy texture of the world right before a twilight summer storm.
Tori didn’t want to go out there. Her mind started to manufacture reasons — she needed to change, needed to shower, needed to pee — but except for putting on clean clothes, she’d have to leave her quarters for any of those things.