“You won’t get an argument from me,” she said. “I just wish things could go a little faster. I want to get out of here before Josh’s friends show up.”
Suarez glanced up at her with a look that let her know he regretted snapping at her, just a little. “Don’t worry. We’ll be long gone.”
“Absolutely,” Dwyer agreed, a little too emphatically. He touched her face and kissed her forehead. Once upon a time she’d have been charmed by the gestures. Today she wanted to punch him.
“Good,” Angie said, walking toward Suarez, sipping her iced coffee.
Suarez sat in one of the two chairs in front of the wheel and the instrument array. Angie didn’t have the first clue how to pilot the ship, but she had a feeling she could figure it out if necessary. The wheel was literally nothing more than that — a metal steering wheel that stuck out of a black control box. Crazy to think that something so simple could guide the entire ship. It was more complicated than that, of course. But in truth, with the collision avoidance system built into the Antoinette’s computer guidance programming, plus radar, and people like Angie herself doing their jobs down in the engine room, a monkey could get the ship moving.
She leaned on the back of the empty chair and gazed out the windshield at the sea. It was barely mid-afternoon, but already the water had begun to darken. The sunlight hit it at a different angle as the day grew long.
Dwyer stood beside her, slipped an arm around her, and sipped his coffee.
“I’m with you, angel. I hope they hurry.”
But Angie had stopped listening. Stopped breathing. A low hiss of static came from the radio, a row of green and yellow lights flickering across its face. And right on top of it, out in the open, sat Josh’s lifeline, the personal locator beacon. It remained in its rubber holster, and she suspected that nobody had tried taking it out yet, just in case Josh had been telling the truth about it being rigged to go off automatically. The black and yellow plastic made it look like a nouveau walkie-talkie or a bulky cell phone.
Dwyer took her free hand, squeezed her fingers, trying to lend her comfort.
Angie looked up at him, stood on her toes and kissed his freckled nose, smiling as she began to breathe again.
Exhausted as she was, she had no intention of leaving the wheelhouse just yet. All she had to do was bide her time, and she’d get the chance to set off the beacon. And if the opportunity didn’t arise, she’d have to create one.
The door banged open, and all three of them turned to see Tupper standing in the doorway.
“Dude, what the hell are you doing up here? Last I checked, you’re the duty engineer at the moment,” Angie said.
Tupper didn’t spare her so much as a scowl. He looked genuinely spooked, even skittish, and large sweat stains had formed under his arms and at the neck of his T-shirt. For a second, Angie thought he’d seen the Feds closing in, but that was ridiculous. Suarez would have seen them coming on the radar.
“Mr. Dwyer,” Tupper said, “can you come down to the engine room?”
Dwyer and Suarez glanced at each other.
“You came all the way up here to ask that?” Suarez said. “You could’ve called from belowdecks, saved yourself a trip, and not left your post unattended.”
If Suarez expected some kind of explanation or apology, he didn’t get it.
“There’s something you need to hear,” Tupper said.
A flicker of alarm crossed Dwyer’s face. “Something wrong with the engines?”
“No. Nothing like that. Just … humor me, man.”
Again, the second and third mates exchanged a look. Then Suarez shrugged. “Go ahead. Miguel will be up in a little while.”
Dwyer drained the rest of his iced coffee and tossed the cup in a trash bin. He smiled at Angie as if to say, Damn, Tupper’s gone over the edge, and then he nodded toward the engineer.
“All right, Tup. Lead the way.”
They exited the wheelhouse, leaving Angie and Suarez alone. She knew she ought to go. Without Dwyer there, she had no reason to stay. But she might never get a better chance at the beacon. All she needed was for Suarez to be distracted for a few seconds. Immediately, she thought of several ways she could distract him, but most of them involved seduction, nudity, or sex to one degree or another, and she had too much self-respect to resort to something that would make her feel like a whore.
Think of something else, she told herself.
But nothing was coming to her.
38
Josh had torn the net off the Ping-Pong table and now lay stretched out on top of it. With the doors closed, the temperature in the rec room had gotten more than a little uncomfortable as the day wore on. Elevated by the Ping-Pong table, he was perfectly situated to catch every breeze that came through the open windows. He had shut the lights off and gotten a cold soda out of the machine, and he lay with the can pressed against his throbbing face, keeping his breathing steady, trying to let himself slip into a meditative state so that the passage of time wouldn’t drive him nuts.
It wasn’t working very well.
Angie had seemed frightened by the prospect of going to prison, but he had little confidence in the woman. When it came time to betray her captain, her crewmates, and the guy she’d been screwing, would she have the guts to do it? Josh wasn’t sure. If he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure of much these days. Despite his better judgment, he had let himself fall for Tori, all the while knowing that in order to do his job he would have to betray her. He would do whatever he could, short of becoming a criminal himself, to help her, but he knew that would mean nothing. She must hate him now, and that certainty tore him up inside. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling ashamed.
Meanwhile, all he could do was hope that Angie cared more about saving her own ass than she did about Dwyer. All she had to do was trigger the PLB. Not break him out, not even bring the beacon to him. If she could find it, she could signal Voss and have the FBI, Coast Guard, and ICE here in a couple of hours at most.
But that was a big “if.” And if she got caught, or the Rio brothers even suspected she was trying to help him, Angie would end up in the rec room with him.
“Shit.”
Josh rolled onto his side and swung his legs off the Ping-Pong table. With deep regret, he set down the soda can. It had started to lose some of its chill, but still his battered face throbbed painfully the instant he took the cold metal away. A couple of hours ago, it had been so swollen that it almost felt like the skin would split. In comparison, the pain didn’t seem quite so bad now.
He cracked the Mountain Dew can and took a long drink, gulping down half the can in seconds, then rested it on the table again. Quietly, he walked to the corner of the room and pressed his face to the louvered shutters, trying to get a glimpse of whoever had been posted as his latest guard.
At first he thought the door had been left unattended, but then he heard a low sigh and readjusted his position so that he had a slitted view of the walkway in front of the door. Anton Pinsky lay stretched out, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, five days’ stubble instead of a beard, and a tall plastic bottle of water by his head. Anton was a little guy, no more than five foot six, with eyes that always seemed to hint he’d rather be elsewhere.
Josh knew he could get past Anton. He had planned to wait until dark to try something stupid, but if Angie didn’t at least get some kind of word back to him in the next couple of hours, something stupid might have to be bumped up on his list of things to do.
39
Special Agent Rachael Voss stood on the deck of her squad’s seized drug boat and tried to tell herself that Josh Hart was still alive. She’d known agents who claimed to have a kind of sixth sense about such things, that they’d know if something had happened to their partner or their wife or child. It would have been a comfort to believe such a thing, but she’d always thought those people sounded like assholes when they spouted off about spiritual connections and psychic rapports and crap like that.