Dark Hunt: A Ryan Weller Thriller

by Evan Graver

  Wyn laughed and bumped his throttle, his clients urging him on. Ryan did the same, and Wyn backed down. They both laughed, and Ryan waved as he drove away.

  “It’s always some macho bullshit with you, isn’t it?” Emily asked.

  “What? A guy can’t have a little fun?”

  Emily just shook her head.

  When they were almost to El Bluff, Ryan turned the wheel left, cutting across the channel. He carefully monitored the depth sounder because he didn’t want to look like an idiot by running aground. He passed the green marker for the Escondido Channel and straightened the Defender to run between the navigational beacons. Seeing no other traffic on the water, he pushed the throttle to its stop and the small boat leaped onto plane and shot upriver. They made the ten-mile run to the breakers in a little over ten minutes.

  Idling into the ship graveyard, he pointed out the Galina and stopped the Defender alongside her. Emily tied the Defender’s bow line beside a wooden ladder someone had afixed to Galina’s stern railing. Emily climbed up the ladder before Ryan had shut off the Defender’s engines. He didn’t care about touring the ship because he’d had his fill of her, but he followed Emily as she made her way through the derelict.

  In the engine room, she snapped on a flashlight and shone it across the oily water sloshing in the hold. The noise of a generator and water pump made talking difficult.

  On the bow, she examined the pile of cigarettes beside the crane’s base and gave Ryan a recriminating glance. She’d never liked that he smoked and had asked him to quit multiple times. He shrugged and turned away, intent on getting this done as fast as possible and returning to work on Peggy Lynn.

  Ryan waited for her to finish her tour while lounging on the Defender. Emily finally came down the ladder and Ryan watched her carefully, although he pretended to be disinterested. She looked good in her tan shorts and a pink shirt, under which she wore a bikini top, the tie strings dangling down her back.

  “You ready?” Ryan asked, trying to take his mind off how much he wanted to kiss her.

  She held up a camera. “I’ve got photos of the crime scene.”

  “The only crime committed here was by those idiots who turned the ship loose.”

  “The tow cable broke and the tug was forced to abandon the ship.”

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. He would have liked to learn how the Galina got loose but started the Defender’s engines. Emily cast the lines off. “Can you idle through the fleet so we can look for the Explorer?”

  They toured the breaking yard, motoring past derelicts that looked well past their prime. Some had sunk and rested on the bottom with half their hulls underwater. At the end of the channel, marked by a row of buoys, he turned the Defender around and headed toward the main channel. She asked him to put in at the small dock in front of a rundown shack used as an office. Beyond it was a ship being broken apart. An army of workers swarmed over it with cutting torches, grinders, and jackhammers. A crane equipped with an electromagnet moved cut steel from piles beside the ship to waiting barges.

  She tied the boat to the dock, and Ryan accompanied her to the shack, where she showed the manager several pictures of the Explorer and the man who had supposedly captured her. He said he hadn’t seen either.

  Back at the Defender, they got in and headed down the channel. Thick green jungle encroached on both sides of the waterway. A troupe of howler monkeys swung from low hanging branches and perched on the railings of the defunct ships. At the main channel, he jammed the throttle forward.

  After a few minutes of silence, Emily said, “Greg told me you had to fend off pirates.”

  He shrugged. “It was just a bunch of poor Miskitos hoping for a big payday.”

  “What happened?”

  Ryan kept his eyes on the river ahead, watching for sunken limbs or other debris floating in the water, and debated about telling her the whole gruesome tale. “Why do you care?”

  “I was just asking.”

  Her asking about the attempted hijacking touched a nerve with him. “It was dangerous shit. Shit you said you didn’t want to be a part of, so if you really want to know, I’ll tell you about the guy who caught fire when the fuel tank on his boat exploded and I shot him in the head to put him out of his misery. Do you want to hear what his screams sounded like? Maybe you’d like to dream about those, too.”

  She crossed her arms. “You don’t have to be an asshole.”

  Ryan ripped the throttle back to neutral and the Defender came off plane, drifting with the current. He jabbed his finger at her. “You can’t comprehend why I’m being an asshole? Let’s start with the fact that you called Floyd Landis and told him you were breaking up with me and I was to never call you again. You didn’t have the guts to say it to my face, and now you waltz in here like you’re doing your job.” He used his fingers to make air quotes around job. “You could have done everything from your desk a thousand miles away, yet here you are, out here in the sticks, mucking about.”

  It pleased him to see her looking thoroughly rebuked, and he turned back to the wheel, goosing the engines to straighten the boat between the channel’s marker buoys.

  “Thanks for making me regret that decision,” Emily shot back.

  “Screw you, Emily, and the horse you rode in on.”

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Ryan never let off the throttle as they approached the turn to the ferry channel to Bluefields. He threw the boat over hard, nearly pitching Emily from her seat. The starboard inflatable tube dipped below the surface. Ryan added power as they leaned into the apex. He brought the boat out of the turn and cruised to Bluefields. Not bothering to tie up, he just nosed the RIB into the weathered wood-and-concrete dock and told Emily to get the hell out.

  She happily obliged and gave him the middle finger once she was on the dock.

  Ryan stuck his tongue out as he backed the boat away and headed for Peggy Lynn. Before he was halfway across the Bay of Bluefields, his sat phone rang and he dropped the throttle to neutral to answer the call with a curt, “What do you want, Greg?”

  “I need you back at the Oasis.”

  “I have work to do, Dad.”

  “And you work for me.”

  “How many times do we have to go over this? I’m an independent—”

  Greg cut him off. “Don’t yell at me because you and Emily got into it.”

  Ryan took a deep breath and gritted his teeth. As he blew out, he tried to force out his anger. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  He hung up, turned the boat around, and drove back to the dock. How had he expected her to react when he’d yelled at her? Had he really thought she wouldn’t tell Shelly, or that she and Greg couldn’t see that he had upset her? Greg was right. He shouldn’t have been angry with him just because he was upset with himself for blowing up at Emily.

  “What a mess,” he muttered to himself.

  Ryan walked back to the hotel suite and took a beer from the fridge. After opening it and taking a long drink, he asked, “Can I talk to you for a minute, Em?”

  She rose and followed him out to the balcony. He leaned against the railing and looked east across the harbor. He could see the Defender riding easily along the dock. The ferry had come across from El Bluff, and people were disgorging from it. Another barge, loaded with cargo containers, floated along the commercial dock. A line of semi-tractors with skeletal trailers purposely built to carry the forty-foot steel cargo containers lined the street, waiting for a crane to lift the containers from the barge to the trailers. The town definitely needed a dedicated port for rail and truck transportation, to prevent dock hands and semi-trucks from crowding the town’s narrow streets.

  He turned from the harbor view to face Emily. “Look, I’m sorry about yelling at you out there. I just … I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I kinda deserved it. I should have talked to you instead of using Landis.”

  “I miss you,” he confessed.

 
She put a hand on his arm. He hoped she would say something similar, but instead she said, “I need your help.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Ryan closed his eyes, took a slow breath in, and let it out through puffed-up cheeks. Emily had just asked for his help rather than telling him that she missed him or that she loved him. It wasn’t what he had expected her to say, and part of him was deeply disappointed. All he had left to ask was, “With what?”

  “I’d like to talk to you and Greg at the same time.”

  Ryan agreed, and they stepped inside. He got another beer from the fridge and sat at the table with Greg, Shelly, and Emily.

  Emily removed a picture of the Explorer along with a picture of Masoud Sadiq from her briefcase and laid them on the table. “About six days ago, this guy stole this ship from Miragoâne, Haiti.”

  “Who is he?” Greg asked, picking up the picture.

  “He is, or was, a member of the Syrian Army.”

  Greg glanced at Ryan who shrugged and sipped his beer, then asked, “Why would he steal the ship?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Emily said. “I had the Explorer’s captain do a sketch of the pirate leader, and I asked my friend at Tampa PD to run his photo through their facial recog database to see if they got any hits. After a lot of legwork, they identified him. Then the FBI showed up and started asking me questions about why I was interested in him.”

  “What did they say?” Greg asked.

  “Nothing actually. It was my friend Kaya who told me he was a Syrian.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Greg said. “Tampa PD identified this guy from a sketch? I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Technically, they used data points from celebrities and matched nodals to the sketch.”

  Greg grinned. “That sounds really sketchy.”

  Ignoring his friend’s weak pun, Ryan asked, “So, what do you need help with?”

  Emily wiggled in her seat and spent a moment straightening her photos. “First, I’d like to get the ship back for the owner. He feels responsible for the men the pirates killed, and—”

  Ryan cut her off. “The pirates killed the crew?”

  “Everyone but the captain. He was badly wounded, but he managed to roll off the back of the ship to escape. Some Catholic missionaries patched him up and helped get him medivacked to the States.”

  “You think there’s something more to it than just theft?” Shelly asked.

  “This is probably wild conjecture on my part, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why Sadiq would want to steal a ship.” She paused and looked around the table, her gaze settling on Ryan. “I think he might be planning a terror attack.”

  “I’ve heard worse theories,” Greg said.

  “Hold up,” Ryan said. “That’s a pretty big jump, don’t you think?”

  Emily nodded. “I know it is. I’ve tried to get information on Sadiq from some of my sources, but it’s like a black hole. Nobody is talking about him or wants to admit he exists. The only reason I know he’s an actual person is because the FBI showed up and started asking questions.”

  “Do you think Ashlee can identify the ship with that program she built to help you find Mango’s sailboat?” Greg asked Ryan.

  Ryan shrugged. A serial killer had Mango Hulsey’s sailboat from its anchorage in Martinique, and Ryan and his former co-worker had spent hours flying in helicopters and airplanes, taking pictures of boats at sea, in anchorages, and at marinas. Ashlee Calvo had run the pictures through a bespoke computer program she’d developed, matching them against the top and side profiles of Mango’s boat.

  “Ward and Young subcontract a company who have their own satellite program,” Emily said. “They built it specifically to do what you’re talking about.”

  “So why don’t you use that?” Ryan asked.

  “My boss turned me down,” Emily said. “The board would rather pay the insurance claim than spend money on burgeoning technology. It’s expensive and time-consuming to search hundreds of square miles of ocean for a specific vessel, and I can’t cover every port, breaker, and anchorage in the Caribbean by myself.”

  “Then it’s case closed. We can all go about doing our jobs,” Ryan said. “I need to get back to Peggy Lynn. We have a dive rotation to keep.”

  “What if he’s planning a terrorist attack?” Emily asked.

  Ryan shook his head. “What if he isn’t?”

  “Why are you acting like such a jerk?” Emily asked. “The first time you came to my office, you were concerned about finding boats stolen by pirates, and you were willing to do whatever it took to stop them, including almost getting yourself killed by a drug lord in Mexico. What happened between then and now?”

  “Let’s just say I lost some of my wide-eyed optimism.” The truth was that if Ryan took this job, he’d never get to work on Peggy Lynn again, and while he sometimes found the work boring and the long days at sea hard work, it was better than being a carpenter for his father or one of Greg’s flunkies at his private military contracting business. If he walked away from the crew he’d put together and the work they did, he’d have to start all over again and build something new. He was getting older and thinking about his life, legacy, and future. Whatever he’d built with Dennis and the crew would pass to Travis and Stacey, and that pissed him off the most. He should be the one to inherit Peggy Lynn if Dennis was going to give her away.

  “Regardless of whether this guy is a terrorist or not, he’s a killer and that should be enough of a reason to search for him,” Emily said.

  “What about your boss?” Ryan asked. “Is he going to give you time off work to chase this ship?”

  Emily’s shoulders dropped. “I don’t think he will.”

  “Do you want to hand this investigation to us?” Greg asked.

  “No. I’d like to be involved in it. I just need help because my employer has decided not to pursue this case.”

  “Whose jurisdiction do the murders fall under?” Ryan asked.

  “Technically, they were in Haitian waters aboard a U.S. flagged vessel, so it should be a joint investigation between the Haitian National Police and the FBI,” Emily said.

  “Maybe that’s what the FBI was doing asking you about Sadiq,” Shelly suggested.

  Emily sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. Ryan could read the defeat on her face. This conversation wasn’t going the way she had hoped it would. In that moment, the disappointment in her eyes swayed him. This was an opportunity to work with her again, and he should be jumping all over it.

  “Let’s do this,” he said, wanting to offer an olive branch to her. “We’ll call Landis and have him poke the bear and see what shakes out with Sadiq.”

  “You mean shake the tree and see what falls out,” Greg corrected.

  “Before you boys go off half-cocked again, let’s use the satellites and find the ship,” Shelly reasoned. “You find the ship, you find Sadiq and turn him over to the FBI.”

  “That settles it,” Greg said. “Ryan, you run point on this thing and help Emily.”

  “No offense, boss,” Ryan said, “but I have a job on the Peggy Lynn. We’re raising your sunken ship.”

  “I’ve got a hundred divers that can do that job, but only one guy I trust to do this. And that’s you, my friend.”

  Ryan stood. “Can I speak to you in private, Greg?”

  In the master bedroom, Ryan closed the door behind him and sat on the bed across from Greg who was doing a wheelie.

  “What’s really going on?” Greg said. “This isn’t like you.”

  Ryan sighed and closed his eyes. Greg had always been there for him, and he deserved to know the truth. He focused on his friend when he opened his eyes. “This afternoon, Dennis told me he and Grandpa are retiring after this job. He’s giving the boat to Travis and Stacey.”

  “Aw, man, I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “That’s only half of it,” Ryan added. “Travis told me that I need to choose
between being a member of the crew or working for you. He said they need unit cohesion, and I’m not providing it by running off to do other jobs.”

  Greg nodded and let his front wheels drop with a thud. “What are you going to do?”

  “I guess with Dennis giving them the boat and you needing me to go forth and produce miracles, I have my answer.”

  “Which is?”

  Ryan flopped back on the bed; his arms spread. He stared at the water spot around the ceiling fan, a tan stain against the white paint. He enjoyed doing salvage jobs and working with the crew, and he always figured that when Dennis retired, he would offer the boat to him at a cheap price so he could keep working. Now things had gone pear-shaped, and if he helped Emily, his days as a commercial diver on Peggy Lynn would be over. He’d need to move on to the next thing in his life, whatever that may be. Based on Emily being more concerned about needing his help rather than missing him, he knew his future didn’t include her, and that sucked as much as losing the salvage boat.

  But she’d been right about one thing: he had charged into more than one situation because someone needed justice. The men killed aboard the Everglades Explorer needed a champion, someone to defend their rights and punish their killer. Life had ground his wide-eyed optimism into hard-scrabbled truths. One of them was that he was good at finding men and ships and bringing justice to those who deserved it. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, he liked having a gun in his hand, and going after Sadiq put one there again. Scuba diving pitted him against the elements, but hunting deserving prey was the ultimate game, and he’d become hooked on it a long time ago.

  Greg interrupted his thoughts. “I think you need to help Emily find this ship. It’ll be good for both of you. If nothing else, you can clear the air of all the sexual tension.”

  Ryan sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong with you? That woman doesn’t want me.”

  “You guys keep tap dancing around each other like you’re made of eggshells. Just tell her how you feel.”

  “I did.”