The Ocean Dark

23

FBI Special Agent Joshua Hart sat in a chair in the level-three rec room, waiting for the captain to arrive and wishing for an ice pack for his face. Gabe Rio had only hit him three or four times, but the man could throw a punch. The left side of Josh’s face throbbed, and if he made any kind of expression at all, it ached like hell. His nose had to be broken, but right now it just felt swollen. Adrenaline wasn’t helping. His heartbeat sped along, pumping blood, making the throbbing in his cheek and mouth that much worse.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself. He used his tongue to probe his teeth, making sure they were all intact. He didn’t find any loose or broken, so he had that going for him.

The thought made him laugh, softly, and that sent a fresh shot of pain through his face.

Then he thought of Tori, and the pain worsened. What must she be thinking now? The moment they had met, he had felt the powerful connection between them, and the more he learned about her, the more he admired her. Secretive as she was, still he had gleaned some bits of an ugly past. But Tori had put that past behind her, whittling away the bits of her that had allowed her to be a victim until all that was left was the strength at her core.

From the outset, there had been a sexual frisson between them. Josh had reminded himself a thousand times what the rules were, and what Voss would say. He had flirted and joked but kept a wall between himself and Tori, until at last he had stopped caring about the rules and the vast amounts of shit he’d end up taking from his partner.

But he’d also stopped thinking about what it would mean for Tori, and that made him feel like an utter prick. If there was anything he could do to make it up to her, he would. First, though, he had to make sure the Rio brothers didn’t kill his ass and throw him overboard.

At least the chair was comfortable. He’d been sitting in it ever since Boggs had hustled him into the room with a slap on the back of the head and a promise to return with the captain. Josh wasn’t looking forward to that. Boggs had already hated him, even before tonight, just for the connection he had made with Tori. Not that the gorilla had any particular interest in her — his focus was Angie Tyree — but Boggs was that kind of guy. Suspicious of men who didn’t treat women like shit, jealous and hateful toward men around whom women were comfortable.

The guy had kinks galore. He’d been itching to hand out a beating to someone ever since the day they set sail. Now he would get the chance.

Tupper and Valente had accompanied Boggs and Josh up to the rec room, and they were probably the ones guarding the doors right now. Josh knew he ought to have at least made an attempt at escaping, but really, there would be no point. Hand to hand, he could probably have taken the loutish Tupper, and Valente seemed a decent enough guy that he’d probably hesitate, giving Josh an opportunity to take him down, too. But Boggs would be out there, and though the room had two doors, there would be no telling which exit Boggs might be covering. And even if he picked the right one, managed to get past one man, the captain would be along shortly, and no one on the crew would let Josh pass. Not even Tori.

No. Better to wait for a time when they weren’t paying so much attention. Let them ruminate a bit, realize that they were out at sea and he had nowhere to run, no way to escape. When they let their guard down, he could get a signal out.

He just had to hold on. Keep calm. Stay in control.

And get some ice for his face.

Glancing around, he saw the soda machine on the wall beyond the Ping-Pong table and got up, hoping that someone had bothered to refill the machine. The machine had been bypassed so it didn’t cost anything to get a soda out of it, and they kept it stocked from the Antoinette’s supplies. Already anticipating the feeling of an icy Coke can held against his swollen face, he made his way around the Ping-Pong table.

That’s where he was standing when the starboard side door swung open and the captain stepped in, with Hank Boggs lumbering behind him.

Gabe Rio froze, staring at him.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing?” Boggs asked.

Josh didn’t bother to shrug. “Getting a Coke.” He tapped the button, the mechanism inside groaned, and the familiar red can clanked down into the machine’s dispensary tray.

As he picked up the Coke, Boggs stormed across the room and slapped it out of his hand. Josh gritted his teeth, desperately wanting to throw a punch, crush his larynx, but reminded himself he had nowhere to go. He had to bide his time.

Still, it was hard to remember that when Boggs grabbed the back of his neck and propelled him across the room, then practically slammed him back into the chair.

“You wanted a Coke, huh?” Boggs asked. “You’re a fucking comedian.”

Now Josh did shrug. “I like Coke.”

Boggs reached down and grabbed him by the neck, starting to choke him. All Josh could see was the big man’s sweat and grease-stained shirt and his greasy face and his flaring nostrils. Then he heard the captain’s voice.

“Chief. Back off. That’s not what we want.”

The chief engineer’s eyes filled with deep, almost childlike regret, but he let go of Josh’s throat and took a step back. Then another. He retreated to the door and stood there, arms crossed, his stare making silent promises of pain yet to come.

Gabe strode over to the Coke machine, tapped the button, and brought Josh a fresh can. Maybe the guy was actually trying to behave rationally, but Josh thought these two were just a natural good cop/bad cop team. He and his partner, Rachael Voss, had played the game a thousand times. With Boggs and Gabe, though, it wasn’t a game; it was who they were.

“Who are you?” the captain asked.

Josh opened the Coke, took a sip, happy to have it. He held the can up to his swollen face, not worried about letting them see his pain. Pretending to be a tough guy wouldn’t get him anywhere, and the cold metal soothed him.

“FBI.”

Gabe took a deep breath, then nodded. He seemed troubled, and Josh knew he wasn’t the only source of the captain’s problems.

“I figured as much,” Gabe said.

“Can I ask you a question, Captain?”

“Go ahead.”

“How did you know?”

“You said you had a reference from Jorge Guarino,” the captain said. “That you served time with him, shared a cell. I guess that worked when you applied for the job with Viscaya, but the higher-ups don’t pay much attention to who hires on in the lower ranks. Apparently they didn’t know Jorge didn’t speak a damn word of English.”

Josh took a breath as that sank in. “I’m guessing Jorge spoke Portuguese?”

Gabe Rio nodded. The picture became clear. Miguel had suspected something, and had tried speaking Portuguese to him while they were out checking on the Mariposa. When Josh didn’t understand, he knew the Jorge Guarino connection had been a deception.

“You done with your questions now?” Gabe asked.

“I do have one more.”

“Get it over with.”

At the door, Hank Boggs curled his lip and rolled his eyes. If Gabe Rio had seen him make that face, Josh had a feeling Boggs would’ve regretted it.

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking,” Josh went on, holding the cold Coke can against his face again, trying to numb the swollen flesh. “Whoever hit the Mariposa—”

“Devils, according to the man you found on the boat.”

Josh stared at the captain. “You don’t believe that.”

Gabe sat down in the chair across from him, settled in, comfortably in command of the room and the situation. “No. I don’t.”

“So someone stormed that boat in force, killed the crew. But if they had time to stash the guns on that island, they knew they were being followed, knew an attack was coming. Why give them that kind of advance warning? Nothing about this makes sense.”

Gabe’s eyes were dark, blank. “Was there a question in there?”

“Just wondering if you have any idea who else is out here after those guns.”

“You really think I’m going to have that conversation with you?” the captain replied. It didn’t matter. Josh could see the answer in the way he narrowed his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. And it had been clear, out on the Mariposa with Miguel and Dwyer, that none of them had a clue what was going on.

“Guess not,” Josh said, taking a sip of his Coke. The metal wasn’t as cool now, but it hadn’t done much to numb his face anyway. “So what now? You think they’re still there? ’Cause I’m figuring whoever killed your friends on that fishing boat is probably long gone with the guns by now.”

Gabe leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Let’s talk about you, Agent …?”

“Just Josh is fine.”

The captain nodded, smiling bitterly. “Right. Undercover. How could I forget? So, Josh, you’ve got people waiting, boats, but so far they’re not on our radar. I’ll keep looking, and I’m sure they’ll float into view sooner or later. What I’m wondering is which it will be. What’s the status of your backup?”

“On their way,” Josh said, keeping his eyes hard, trying to match the cold, cruel gaze of Gabriel Rio.

“Bullshit. They wouldn’t move until they were sure we had the guns. Until you called them on your satellite phone to tell them. You haven’t done that yet because we don’t have the guns. And from what I know, leaving an agent out here alone isn’t the way you people operate, so I’m guessing you’ve got something other than the sat-phone for them to track us by. Some kind of homing signal. So where is it?”

“You give the FBI too much credit,” Josh said.

Gabe smiled. “I don’t think so.”

The captain stood, turned to Boggs, and bowed his head, gesturing toward Josh with a courtly flourish of his hand.

“Chief Boggs, you may proceed.”

Josh shot out of the chair, charging at the chief engineer. He whipped the Coke can at Boggs’s face, brown liquid arcing across the room, splashing the man’s T-shirt as he raised his hands to defend himself. Gabe cursed in Spanish, something about his mother, but Josh’s focus wasn’t on the captain. Boggs was the one standing between him and the door.

The engineer darted his head to one side and the Coke can sailed past his face, grazing his ear. And then, finally, Boggs started switching from defense to offense. He shifted his body, pivoted his hips, and got ready to swing a fist. But Josh had bought himself the moment he needed. He lowered his head and drove a shoulder into Boggs’s chest, pistoning his legs, putting all of his weight behind the hit. Boggs slammed against the door with a grunt and a loud thump that had to be his skull bouncing off metal.

As Boggs tried to get a grip on his head or throat, Josh drove one knee up, crushing his balls. The little scream that came out of Boggs’s mouth gave him no pleasure; it was just the mark of a job well done. He kept his shoulder down, kept his face buried, hidden from Boggs’s hands as the engineer tried to grasp him, then attempted to shove him away. He ought to have been pummeling Josh by now, but Boggs’s entire body needed time to reset after the knee between his legs. Josh had counted on that.

Boggs tried pushing away from the door, wanting to get Josh away from him, to give himself space to fight. Josh dug in, drove himself forward again, and this time when Boggs hit the door, Josh started throwing punches to his gut, rapid-fire, half a dozen blows to the solar plexus.

Unable to breathe, the big man went down. Josh moved aside to let him fall, heard Boggs starting to retch, knew the smell of vomit would follow in a moment, and reached out to grab the door handle.

Seven seconds, maybe eight. Too long.

Metal glinted in his peripheral vision. Josh barely registered it before he felt the gun barrel strike his skull. He staggered sideways into the wall, knocking down an old framed movie poster: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. His vision blurred and he felt all the strength go out of him as he slid to the floor. He tasted blood on his lips a second before feeling the warmth of it trickling down his face from where Gabe had hit him with the gun.

Josh blinked, his vision clearing.

Gabe Rio had a world-weary wisdom and a relaxed air that made him an easy man to work for, and to respect — or would have, if he hadn’t been a smuggler of guns and drugs. Tonight all of that amiable nature had been stripped away.

The captain aimed the pistol from five feet away, smart enough to know that a pistol was a ranged weapon, that if he got too close it could be used against him. The dark hole in the barrel seemed to wink at Josh, as though imminent death were some kind of joke.

On the floor by the door, Hank Boggs moaned, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. The puddle of vomit in front of him had already begun to reek. His eyes were closed and he breathed through his clenched teeth.

“That was stupid,” Gabe said.

Josh leaned his head against the wall, still disoriented, and wondered how badly he was bleeding. “I had two choices. Try to avoid a beating, or just sit and take it. I’ve never been good with sitting and taking it.”

Gabe sighed, raised the barrel of the gun a few inches, steadied his aim. “You ever study the Spanish Inquisition?”

Frowning painfully at the weird segue, Josh gave a small shrug. “Not in depth.”

“The Inquisitors would get it into their heads that someone was a witch and they would torture them for a confession. If they confessed, they were executed as witches. Only if they died without confessing did the Inquisitors believe they were not witches, and by then it didn’t matter anymore.”

With the knock to the head he’d just gotten, the pain in his face, and the blood dribbling down his cheek, Josh didn’t feel like being a smart-ass anymore. Still, he almost thanked the captain for the history lesson. He wanted to pretend he didn’t know where Gabe was headed with this line of thought, but that would have been a lie.

“You’re going to tell us where the beacon is,” the captain went on. “You don’t want to tell us, we hurt you. If you keep pretending there isn’t some kind of tracking device on board my ship, we hurt you. Deny it exists, and the only way I’m going to believe you is if you die without telling me where it is. By which point, you being here won’t be an issue anymore.”

The gun barrel did not waver. Nor did Gabe Rio’s furious gaze. Josh had some doubts that the man would actually kill an FBI agent aboard his ship, knowing that capture might be imminent. But he didn’t want to test those doubts.

Boggs started to climb wretchedly to his feet. His chest rose and fell as he continued to catch his breath, and he focused watery, raging eyes on Josh.

Gabe Rio might not kill him, but Hank Boggs would do it just for fun. Death ranked number one on his list of Things to Avoid, followed closely by torture.

Josh opened his hands in surrender. “It’s attached to the back of the stove down in the galley.”

Gabe didn’t smile. “Was that so hard?”

A dozen retorts crossed Josh’s mind and he rejected them all. His mouth had gotten him in trouble in the past, but those lessons had been valuable. He might piss people off with a sharp tongue, but he wasn’t about to taunt the man with the gun in his hand.

“You don’t want to mess with it, though,” Josh said. “If you try to shut it down or detach it from the back of the stove, you’ll automatically send a distress signal, and the cavalry will come running.”

“Bullshit,” Boggs sniffed.

But the captain didn’t look so sure. “You’re lying.” Josh shrugged.

“Better for me if you don’t believe me.”

“Captain,” Boggs began.

Gabe turned to the chief and nodded. “I want to check it out. Make sure he’s telling the truth. If you want to have a little payback while I’m gone, I wouldn’t blame you. But try not to break him, Hank. I may need him later.”

Boggs didn’t even look up at the captain. Instead he stared at Josh with bloodshot eyes and nodded slowly.

“Yes, sir. He can bleed, though?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Make him bleed.”

The captain slid the pistol into the rear waistband of his pants and went out the door. Someone moved outside, one of the men guarding the room. Then the door closed, and the pain began.

It couldn’t have been called an interrogation. Boggs never asked any questions.