Shit.
McKenna ducked behind the closest Nissan as the stowaway fired again. Heard the bullet strike steel behind her, ricochet; she saw sparks. Another shot, and another, the stowaway coming closer, keeping her pinned as he closed the distance.
Gotta move.
Stealthily as she could, McKenna crept away from her makeshift cover, pulled off her headlamp and held it in her hand, tried to keep her head low and out of sight in the dim light.
Before she’d gone twenty feet, she knew she was made.
“Stop,” the stowaway said, his voice unreasonably calm. “Give me your flashlight, or I’ll shoot you right there.”
McKenna didn’t turn around. Exhaled a long breath. “Hell, you’re going to kill me anyway,” she said. Then she reached back and chucked the headlamp away, threw a strike down the length of the hull, and ducked away quickly, bracing for the shot.
But the shot didn’t come.
Instead, McKenna heard a wheeze, the air punched out of the stowaway’s lungs. Heard the clatter as the pistol fell to the deck, the splash as it slid into the bilge water. Then another splash, bigger, as the stowaway fell himself.
Slowly, McKenna stood. Stayed low, searched the darkness, caught the vague shape of a figure in the glow of the hold’s emergency lights. Court Harrington. He’d lost his own headlamp, she saw, but he’d brought his laptop with him. And he’d used it, she surmised, to neutralize the stowaway pretty damn hard.
“Captain Rhodes?” Harrington called out. “You okay?”
McKenna checked herself. No bullet holes. “You saved my life, Harrington,” she said. “I think at this point, you can call me McKenna again.”
79
“I found him in the infirmary,” the skipper told Harrington as he helped her haul the unconscious stowaway up the cargo deck to the bulkhead. “Guess he moved out of that first nest once you found him, barricaded himself away where he thought we’d never look.”
Harrington grunted, feeling the exertion. The stowaway wasn’t big, but it was no easy task dragging him up to the listing deck, not with his ribs still taped up like he was a mummy. “Sure,” he said. “So who is this guy?”
“No idea. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
With his free hand, Harrington gripped a Nissan’s mirror and pulled himself forward. Whoever the guy was, Harrington was pretty damn grateful he wasn’t much of a shot. The sneaky bastard had spun and fired wild, missed him by ten feet, but he’d thrown himself to the deck anyway, nearly cracked his laptop. It was a damned painful maneuver, besides, and when he’d stood up again, both the skipper and the shooter were way down at the portside hull, continuing their grudge match.
“Why was he so hell-bent on killing you, anyway?” Harrington asked. “You say something to piss him off?”
The skipper looked at him sideways, smiled just a little. Kept climbing. “That’s what I can’t figure out,” she said. “I guess he was just mad that I found him.”
Harrington glanced over at her. They’d almost reached the bulkhead door, almost time to call the Coast Guard, and hand this joker off.
There was more to this story, he figured. Nobody just stowed away on a shipwreck for weeks without a damn good reason.
And Harrington was a curious guy.
So he helped the skipper lug the unconscious stowaway to the bulkhead door, stood guard over the guy as McKenna ventured topside to call in the Coast Guard. Waited as the Coast Guard took the man into custody, two big, burly rescue swimmer types. They braced the stowaway on each side, and carried him upstairs to the helicopter.
Harrington followed. Joined the crew on the weather deck and regaled them with his story, told them all how he’d had a question for the captain about the pumps, how he’d followed her inside the ship, heard her voice in the cargo stairway, and followed her down. Played himself off as dumb and clueless when it came to the attack, held up his laptop, the screen cracked, and told them they were all lucky the guy’s skull wasn’t thicker.
And then, when the Coast Guard flew away, and the crew dispersed back to their pumps, Harrington ventured inside the ship again, and down the central corridor to the infirmary. He found the cabinet with which the stowaway had blocked the door, the sick bed where he’d slept, the piles of garbage he’d accumulated. And then, hidden in a medicine cabinet beside the stowaway’s sick bed, he found the briefcase.
It was slim, stainless-steel, a few nicks and scratches on its sides. It looked like something from a spy movie, something totally out of place in the infirmary, hell, on this ship. It was undoubtedly what the stowaway had been guarding.
Harrington knew he should tell the skipper about what he’d found. She was the captain, after all, and whatever was inside the briefcase—it was locked, he discovered—was important enough to kill over.
This was the kind of thing the captain would want to know about.
But Harrington knew McKenna pretty well, and he knew she liked to play by the rules. He knew that if he gave her the briefcase, she would feel obliged to hand it over to the authorities. And he was curious. What would possess a man to hide out on a shipwreck for days—weeks—without telling anyone? What kind of secret could make someone so desperate? This was a mystery, and he wanted to solve it himself.
The Lion was a shipwreck, Harrington reasoned. By maritime law, everything aboard was the property of the Gale Force. It wouldn’t hurt to investigate the briefcase a little more.
So Harrington took the briefcase from the medicine locker, carried it out of the infirmary and back through the accommodations and out to the deck of the Lion. Stashed the briefcase with his sleeping bag and a couple of empty fuel canisters, and set off to find Captain Rhodes again.
This was probably a bad idea, but damn it, life was a gamble. And Harrington figured gambling was precisely why he was here.
80
By the middle of the next morning, the Pacific Lion had leveled out.
On Harrington’s instruction, the crew had killed the forward pump when the list hit fifteen percent, just before darkness fell. The skipper had sent Ridley back to the tug, kept Matt and Stacey on the first deck to babysit the last pump. She’d tried to send Harrington back, too.
“I’d rather stay, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “This is crunch time. I need to be here.”
The captain made to argue, then seemed to think better of it. “I guess you’re right. If anything’s going haywire, it’s happening tonight.”
“It’s not going haywire,” Harrington told her. She didn’t look convinced.
They’d found a platform in the access stairway on cargo deck seven, midway from the surface to the Jonases on deck one, close enough to the open air that the radios still picked up a little reception, and they could holler down to Matt and Stacey for status reports. They’d brought down their sleeping bags, some food, and the last of the Red Bull. Harrington had bundled his sleeping bag so the skipper wouldn’t notice the briefcase inside.
He needn’t have worried. The captain was spent. She’d wrapped herself up in her sleeping bag, made a cursory attempt at conversation, lay her head back on the wall of the stairwell, and passed out cold, finally asleep.
Harrington had watched her for a moment, studied her face as she slept. He’d missed her, he realized. More than he’d expected to. He’d pushed her away when she’d fallen for him, sure; he was young then. She’d surprised him. He wasn’t planning for commitment.