by C. L. Stone
“Can you talk to me?” Avery asked. “You do have to put up with her eventually, you know.”
“Dear, dear Avery.” He waved his hand as he talked. “Don’t let yourself be bewitched by her. Sure she has hair and eyes and lips and other girl things, but you have to remember, there’s a devil in there mixed under all that.”
“I just want some names,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you anymore.” Doyle picked up a packet and pulled out a single cigarette. He put it to his lips but didn’t light it. “I don’t speak crazy.”
“Avery,” I said, turning to him, “can you go fetch Blake? He’s the only one who can make him do anything.”
Avery moved to the doorway. “Wait here. I’ll go find him.”
Once Avery was gone, I stood near the door, trying to breathe in cleaner air from the hallway. I stood my ground, staring down Doyle.
He folded his arms over his chest, cigarette hanging from his lips, not blinking. It turned into something of a staring contest, each of us glaring at the other. My eyes were burning from the smoke, but there was no way I was giving in to him. It wasn’t pretty.
A few minutes later, there were footsteps in the hallway. Doyle didn’t flinch. I didn’t either.
“What’s going on in here?” Blake’s voice came to us before he entered. When he stepped into the room, he got between me and Doyle, turning on Doyle. “Can you tell me why I had to come up from the bottom of this ship to tell you to behave?”
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m not the one who shot you.” He leaned over enough so he could look around Blake and stare at me accusingly. “You do know that’s a sin, right? You’re going to hell.”
“Will you cut that out?” Blake asked. He shuffled until he was between me and Doyle again, blocking my view this time. “Just give me whatever she was asking for.”
“You don’t want to get in the middle of this. I was about to win. She was about to cry like a two year old when you stomp on its foot hard enough.”
“Why do you joke about things like that?” Blake asked. I leaned over so I could see what was going on. Blake pointed at Doyle, who was frowning. “You’re acting like a two year old. This is going to get tiresome if I have to come up here every time she needs to talk to you.”
“There’s an easy way to handle this,” Doyle said. “Fire her.”
“Doyle, don’t start. You knew she might come along.”
“And you’re in charge, not her.”
“She’s a co-lead now,” Blake said. “You’re going to have to listen to her. Get over it.”
“Tell me one good reason why I have to?”
“Do it or there won’t be any more cigarettes or Coke or pizza or...”
“The kitchen is full of those things,” Doyle said. “I’ve already checked.”
Blake planted his hands on the table, leaning in on Doyle and glaring at him. “Or you may find they’ve magically been thrown overboard unless a certain Doyle learns to get along.”
“You mean me, don’t you?” Doyle asked. “I’m that Doyle?”
Blake stood up again, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I seriously need my head examined. I don’t know why we keep having these arguments.”
“It’s because you love me like a brother,” Doyle said, plucking the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and putting it behind his ear. “And you refused to eat your vegetables as a kid. Your mom always said you should eat your greens or you’ll...grow hair in odd...break a nail...pointless arguments...plague...bad things happen. All the bad things.”
I could only stand back and smile at this back and forth between them. They were both crazy. When I wasn’t in the middle of it, Doyle was pretty funny. “I just want to know who we’re dealing with,” I said. “Names. Photos. Any criminal histories.”
“That’s how it always starts,” Doyle said. “You want just a name and then I end up held at gunpoint in a smelly car.”
“Just tell her what she wants to know, Doyle,” Blake said.
Doyle rolled his eyes and fiddled with his pack of cigarettes, pulling out another, despite the one already behind his ear. “Michelle runs a shelter for lost hoodlums.”
“I mean Nightingale,” I said. “Who is coming aboard? What do they do?”
“They’re rich people,” Doyle said. “They’re like all rich people. Spoiled brats.”
“Hey, hey,” Blake said. “I’m standing right here.”
“So?” Doyle asked. “Tell me you’re not spoiled?”
“You’re a spoiled brat and you’re not rich, so what’s your excuse?” Blake rolled his eyes and stepped away from the desk, starting to pace. “Just print up a roster with photos of each of the people coming onboard tomorrow.”
“I already did that for Ethan and security. Get it from them.”
“I’m asking you to do one more for Kayli and myself.”
Doyle wedged his cigarette between his knuckles and started typing at the keyboard in front of him. A few seconds later, a printer sounded behind him, somewhere I couldn’t see. He turned, ripped pages from it as they were spit out and when it was done, he whipped around and passed the wad of pages to Blake. Blake dropped a few, and had to bend over to pick some up.
“Now listen,” Doyle said, looking at me now. He partially stood, bending over his keyboard. He gestured for me to come closer.
I took a half step forward, warily. “What?”
“Closer,” he said, moving his fingers again.
Blake straightened out the stack of loose pages. I stepped in his space to get closer to Doyle. “Yes?”
“Two things,” he said. “You can go running around this ship pretending to be all bossy-pants all you want, but I only do two things. Number one, I listen. To everything. If you make a phone call, or whisper in a corner, or fart in a closet, I’ll be the one to hear it. So don’t fart too much. It’s distracting.”
“Ugh,” I said, groaning. “Really?”
The palm of his hand caught the back of my head. It wasn’t rough, more like an attention-seeking move. “Don’t interrupt me,” he said. He put the cigarette behind his other ear and then continued to wave his hand as he spoke. “Can’t you count? I said two things. Number two... shit. I forgot number two.”
“Don’t do that to her,” Blake said. “And your number two is you smoke too much.”
“No, that’s not it,” Doyle said, removing his hand from me, scratching at his chin. “Seriously, I forgot what it was.”
“You don’t work in the morning?”
“Yes, but not what I wanted to say.”
“You’re not allowed to drink because then you become even more of an ass.”
“Will you stop stating the obvious?” Doyle threw his hands up and then sat back in his chair. “Forget it. Important information you both should know, and I can’t even remember because you two want to horse around like...like gorillas or rabbits or whatever stupid animal.” He waved me off. “Just remember, I listen and...number two.”
Whatever that was.
I nodded slowly, afraid to say anything and repeat the cycle of back and forth chaos between them. Maybe I’d been a little too optimistic about all of this.
“So we’ll have Corey do other things besides listening,” Blake said. “Gotcha.” He turned to me, the papers sorted in his fingers, and nodded toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
Doyle harrumphed, picked up his cigarette box and started fiddling with it. He dumped it upside down, noted it to be empty, and tossed it behind himself before reaching for another pack, oblivious to the two still behind his ears.
I stepped out into the hallway, coughing as fresh air hit my lungs. I was beginning to wonder if I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I couldn’t stand it for long.
Blake closed the door, turned, and popped me on my back, causing me to cough again. “He really needs to get an air cleaner.”
“He’s going to die at thirty from lung cancer,” I said.<
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“He doesn’t listen to that,” Blake said. “He complains. He gets so little pleasure out of life as it is.”
“Wonder why,” I said. I pointed to the papers he held. “Okay, show me what’s what.”
“Follow me,” he said. “I don’t want any staff overhearing.”
I wondered how much time I had with Blake, and realized I hadn’t yet mentioned to the guys about him being onboard, too. I wasn’t totally sure they didn’t know, since they seemed to be aware of more things about Ethan and his company than I’d realized.
Blake hurried down steps, and through corridors. This time we went down further into the ship, and the doors had changed from ornate, to plain, white painted wood—or appeared to be wood and instead was aluminum or another metal—and the carpet was a solid beige. He stopped at one door that was unmarked and opened it, stepping aside to let me in.
The room was another a storage room with a tile floor and bare white walls. He flicked the switch, and a single, uncovered lightbulb lit up overhead. There was a cot in the corner, and another couple of folding tables set up in a space, with a stool nearby. There were shelves of sheets, blankets and other linens and pillows all sorted and folded neatly. The shelves had been pushed aside to make room for the tables and cot, making some of the items inaccessible.
“What’s going to happen when the maids need more linen?” I asked.
“These are summer linens,” he said. “They won’t be in use until next season. They’ve got the winter set out now.” He scooted the stool over with his knee and then dropped the stack of papers Doyle had given him onto the table. The table was covered with notebooks, schematics of the ship, a tablet, a cell phone, a jar with pencils and pens, and a couple of binders that were open. The binders looked to be schedules of the ship workers, maps of the surrounding water. He spread out the papers he’d gotten, revealing pictures, names and other info. “Come over here and check out who we’ve got.”
I stepped beside him, at first dazzled by the number of faces on the pages. The photos appeared to be all headshots, though a little fancier than what you’d see on a driver’s license. Company ID photos?
Blake fiddled with the sleeves of his shirt, unrolling and then re-rolling the material. He looked at a particular set of pages, each with three people on them. “All of these people are coming onboard, but if you want to focus on the Nightingale group, you want these six people.”
I stepped closer to look at the six. Two women and four men. One of the women had sharp eyes and her hair pulled back in a tight bun. The other was older, curly hair, frowning at the camera. The men varied from over sixty to one younger man with glasses, who could have been our age. “They are all CEOs?”
“Memorize them,” he said. “You’ll have to pick them out of a crowd.”
I sighed, gazing at them and their names: Smith, Jones, etc. I tried to memorize but I was a little tired and worn down to put much effort. I got distracted by the large list of other people coming on board. “How many people are we talking about? I mean that are coming onboard tomorrow?”
“A little under a thousand people. That’s not including the crew already on board and the crew that will be boarding with everyone.”
Uh oh. That’s a lot of people. “And six are from Nightingale. How many CEOs or whatever does Nightingale have?
“They are board members. There’s these six, old Mr. Murdock, Ethan Murdock, although he’s mostly absentee, a secretary who is staying behind to hold down the fort, and two more who are out of the country.” He tapped his finger over one of the men’s faces. “Since the old Murdock was on the board, we can only assume one of them is involved in the money disappearance, maybe two, maybe more.”
“How do you know it isn’t all of them?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like how their nonprofit works. There’s too many fees. The board members are paid way too much, some of the highest paychecks ever for a nonprofit. Hardly any of the income actually goes out. You could give them an F rating if you were going to compare them to other charities.” He tapped at the photo of the younger man with glasses, dark hair, green eyes. “However, this one writes reports with ideas about changing how their system works, to redistribute the money more evenly. He reviews the charities they distribute money to, what little they do, and talks about which ones seem the most effective. From what I gather, he seems to be a really good analyst. His ideas get rejected at board meetings. I’m not even sure why they hired him if they aren’t going to listen.”
“So you think he’s a good guy?” I asked.
“He might be,” Blake said. He smoothed his palm over his cheek as he looked at the papers. The coarse stubble made the tiniest of scratching sounds at the movement. “I’m going to hope, at least. I really want to talk to him. This cruise will be a good opportunity for that.”
Even six people would be a lot to keep track of on this ship, with over a thousand other people walking around. I blew out a slow breath between my lips, folded my arms over my chest and leaned slightly against the table, looking at Blake. “What was your plan?”
He lowered his palm to the table, using it as support as he leaned into me. “Waltz in there all nice and pretty. Pretend we have a lot of money to throw around.”
“Which one of us does,” I said with a smirk.
He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “Little darling, you finish this job, I won’t be the only one.”
I looked down, scratching absently at my arm. I didn’t want to talk about what Raven said, and I hadn’t thought of if I really would reject the money when it came down to it. “So we pretend we’ve got money we want to invest in the charity?”
“No,” he said. “We imply the money isn’t exactly clean, except we do it carefully. Say it vaguely enough, the innocent won’t pick up on it, but those who are interested in helping us launder our money will come to us.”
“Sounds risky.”
“If we have Doyle listening to everything, the best thing we can do is to encourage them to talk. In the meantime, you can have your boys digging into their cell phones and laptops while they’re on board. They tail us for protection and we all do our best to get on their good side and get familiar.”
“What do we do if we find out what’s going on? What if one or more of them is stealing the money from the charity? What then?”
He held up a hand, counting off on his fingers. “One: find out who will help us with dirty money. Anyone willing to help us is probably our target. Two: find out how they do it by getting the details. Three: if they offer to handle dirty money, then we wait, make them wonder. Four: and this is the tricky part, we convince them we’ve found an even better place to put their own dirty cash, most likely an investment they’ll see even more profit from. Once we’ve convinced them and secure the money, we’ll give them false cash reports on their earnings until we can figure out what to do next.”
“Sounds like a long job,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to do all that in five days.”
“We can probably get numbers one through three and a start on four,” he said. “Start with one. We go from there. If that’s all we get through now, then that’s all we get. Some info will be better than none.”
“And how do we get them off the board after?”
He shrugged. “It’s one of those unpredictable things. We’ll know better once we get more familiar with Nightingale. Force them into retirement. Pull them out of the company, into something overseas and then deal with it then. Whatever we can get away with and not draw attention to the Murdock Corporation. Once they are away from the company, we can call cops on them, whatever we need to do.”
I breathed in deeply, looking at the six we were going to focus on, and then at the hundreds of others that would be coming aboard tomorrow. “What about the rest of them?”
“Doyle will pick up what he can, hopefully giving us another lead to work on once we’re done with Nightingale. If we stretch ourselves too thi
n, we won’t get much accomplished, even with your friends helping.”
I raked my fingers through my hair, combing through it while looking at the stack of papers. This was one company among possibly hundreds. This might not be the only list of companies and people we’d be looking at. I hadn’t really thought of how long this job would take. For a ten percent split of billions of dollars, it wasn’t like I could expect to work for a week and walk away. This wasn’t a job I’d be able to leave for a while.
I wondered about Axel and the others, if I was pulling them away from their homes and work to follow me around. I thought about Wil, who might pop in not only while we were gone, but while we were even further away if it required us to go overseas. Did I want to commit months of my life to this, leaving my brother behind?
“What’s wrong?” Blake asked. I picked my head up, surprised to find he was standing much closer than he had been a moment ago. “Why do you look like that?”
I drew in a long breath, letting it out slowly, and stared at the papers, refusing to look at his face. “There’s a lot to do. We might not get through this anytime soon.”
Blake moved forward, leaning again slightly against the table, his head hovering close to mine. He lowered his voice, talking quietly. “Listen, Kayli, I don’t know what you’re used to.” He touched his palm toward his heart. “Let me tell you about me, though. I didn’t just stumble across the drugs when you came around and decided to hop in. Helping people out is kind of my thing. It’s not always a quick week or two and then it’s over. Sometimes it’s months of research, practice, and a whole lot of patience.”
“I’m not really the patient type,” I said.
“When it means the difference between getting killed or succeeding, you’ll walk a few extra steps.” The gold flecks in his eyes softened as his gaze shifted from my chin to my forehead and then to my hair. “I may go along with whatever your pretty little heart desires, but I’m not about to let you walk into a death trap. You’d ruin that beautiful face.”
It made me uncomfortable since I felt like a slob in the clothes, so I backed away, turned and started toward the wall to give myself some space.