One of them laughed. He was the one who’d declared me alive, I thought, a big, muscular guy the color of mahogany. He looked like he could bite a metal bar and spit bullets. As rescuers went, not exactly comforting.
But I couldn’t help but be relieved that the whole survival thing had been taken out of my hands.
“Hola,” the big guy—apparently, Josue—said, and aimed his machine pistol somewhere in the direction of a number of my more important internal organs. “Is your name Joanne Baldwin?”
I frankly stared at him. “What?”
“Yes or no, mermaid. Joanne Baldwin?” He had an interesting accent to his English—thick, not quite Spanish, more lyrical and unpredictable. Close cousins, though. Portuguese, maybe. “If you’re not, I throw you back. I don’t have room for pets.”
“In that case I’m definitely Joanne.” I swallowed another cough. “Somebody told you to look for me. Who?”
“Why? Enemies would have left you sucking water, eh? Must have been friends.”
He had a point. I couldn’t imagine these guys doing anything without a profit motive, and I hadn’t pissed off anyone bad enough to make them spend a lot of money to kill me. Easy enough to just let me drown.
Wait . . . that meant it was someone who’d known I would be in the water.
“You didn’t come all the way out here to find me,” I said. Josue raised his eyebrows and smiled, not in a comforting sort of way.
“Came for the salvage on the ship that went down,” he said. “Stayed for the profits. You’re worth a lot of money, mermaid.”
“Alive, I guess.”
He shrugged. “Apparently.”
This ship was far from an honest sort of vessel. They’d picked up the maritime distress calls from the Grand Paradise—I assumed the captain had sent them—and of course the lifeboats would have transponders on them, probably sending out automated rescue calls. And in these waters, that would draw two kinds of vessels: well-meaning Good Samaritans, and the kind of ship I’d just been fished onto.
In other words, pirates. And somebody had co-opted them to search specifically for me.
“Look!” said one of the crew, stationed at the railing. He called for light, and the beam burned out into the water, turning it from black to a muddy, sullen blue. At first I didn’t see what he was looking at, and then I caught a glimpse of bobbing wood. A few bits of debris from the ship had followed the same currents I’d used. There was plenty of small, buoyant wreckage still around, though the debris cloud had long since dissipated and spread itself out over dozens of miles of open water. Not much of a grave for such an enormous vessel.
“Everybody get off?” the pirate captain asked me, and shoved me with the barrel of his gun when I delayed my answer. “Everybody in those little boats, yes?”
“You bet,” I said. “Everybody’s been rescued. Well, everybody but me, obviously.”
He seemed disappointed. I guessed he’d been hoping to fish out some rich Americans he could ransom back at a significant profit. I didn’t blame him; I didn’t look like a rich payday, regardless of what his patron had told him.
“How come you didn’t end up on a rescue boat, mermaid? You not fresh enough?”
A couple of his crewmates offered helpful commentary about how yummy I looked. Charming. I was starting to feel like today’s catch, still wiggling on the line.
I took a deep breath. That was a mistake; it resulted in more lung-wrenching coughing, and I spat up some more foam and mucus. “Let’s just say I missed my boat,” I said.
“What makes a woman stay behind when a boat is sinking?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question; he was showing off for his crew. “You have a kid on the ship?”
“No.”
“Money, then.” He flashed me a vulpine grin. “Always money.”
“Speaking of money, who hired you to find me?”
The laughter died out on the man’s face, and left it watchful and dangerous. “Don’t think I want to tell you that,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Why?” I was starting to believe I’d been better off with the sharks.
“Americans, they’re always talking about money. I give you money if you let me go. My family has money. I got important friends who will pay you. That sort of thing. They think they can buy their way out of anything.” He gazed at me for a long, cold few seconds. “You don’t offer nothing. That makes me nervous.”
“Maybe I’m poor.”
He snorted. “Even the poor offer. You don’t even try to make a deal.”
“Maybe I’m crazy.”
He showed me teeth. “Maybe. Maybe you just think we won’t hurt you ’cause you’re so pretty.”
“No,” I said, and held his gaze. “I’m sure you’d try like hell to hurt me, for any reason or none at all. I’m sure you’ve slit throats and raped and tortured if you felt like it. Probably just yesterday.”
That woke a lot of murmuring among the rest of the crew. I heard the slap of boots—more men arriving from other parts of the ship, drawn by the tinfoil smell of trouble in the air.
“Huh,” the captain said. “So what you got to stop me if I want to do the same to you?”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.” The tingle on my back that I’d felt as I was drowning had subsided, but the nerves were waking up, and I could feel the outline of the torch forming again, black and steady. I could feel the black well of power opening, ready to flood into me if I opened the door. “You guys know comic books? The Incredible Hulk?”
Josue looked blank. He looked around at the others.
“Bruce Banner,” one of the crew piped up. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.” In any group of people, no matter how hard-assed they might appear, there’s always a geek. I was just surprised that, in this company, he’d admitted it.
“It’s like that, only I don’t have to wait to turn green,” I said. “I’m trying to help you out here, gentlemen. Don’t push me, and I won’t push back, and we’ll all be just fine. Somebody’s paying you to keep me alive and in one piece. Let’s just all get along.”
The captain was no longer amused. “Shut up, bitch,” he said, and shoved the barrel of his pistol under my chin. “You don’t threaten me. Not on my own ship. I’m not being paid enough for that.”
I didn’t reach for power. It reached for me, a black tidal wave that pounded into me like surf to shore, immense and burning.
No! I rejected it, slammed the door shut and held it closed as the power thundered on the other side. I felt small and pitiful and ridiculously weak, and I knew I was only a second from death at the hands of these men, these pirates—but my other choice was worse.
“Sure,” I said. Josue hadn’t noticed a thing, from the outside; he thought he was still in control, not one heartbeat away from being a red stain on the deck. “You win.”
If he pushed that gun into me any deeper, we were going to be engaged. “I always do,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”
“Joanne Baldwin.”
“No. Who you are. You’re not afraid of me.”
“I just gave up.”
“Not because you’re afraid.” Josue was way too smart. It was a little creepy. Then he took it too far by saying, “I like women best when they’re afraid. They shut up more.”
“You’re a real charmer, did you know that?” He flashed me his pirate smile. “All right, so you’re going to put me in the hold. What then? You turn me over to whoever paid you to come get me?” I had an awful feeling I already knew who that would be, and his initials were Bad Bob Biringanine.
“Something like that,” Josue agreed. “Unless you plan to make me a better offer.”
“I’ll pay you twice what he’s paying you,” I said. I did want to get to Bad Bob. Just not as his helpless captive. Much better if I could hire myself a hard-bitten pirate crew and take the fight to him unexpectedly.
Josue slowly showed his teeth in a smile. He had two gold-plated incisors, both on the bottom, and it gave him a glam vampire look that must have been pretty effective in his line of work.