I nodded automatically and met his eyes without blinking. He seemed to find what he needed in my gaze because he kissed me hard enough that my heart rate rose commensurately, and my hands reached out to steady myself on his waist.
“Let’s do this,” he growled into my lips. I smiled at the ferocity of his tone and turned toward the water. Gabriel picked up the surfboard and carried it under one arm as he walked beside me to the edge of the lake. It took more concentration to walk on sand with the peg leg, but it was surprisingly stable.
In the distance we could hear a boat engine, and a few minutes later when we were both wet and shivering – me in the water, Gabriel on the board – Darius’s 1950s classic wooden party cruiser finally came into view.
“That’s it,” Gabriel said as I pushed off the ground and began to swim toward the Nachthexen. He lay on his stomach, paddling the board next to me.
I was a strong swimmer – I’d been a long-distance swimmer in high school and college. It was the one thing I could do to stay in shape during the long months of rehab after the leg came off. Sparky’s fin prosthetic made me even faster, and within a few minutes I wasn’t cold anymore.
As I swam, I occupied my brain with what we’d learned about Karpov. He was arrogant, enjoyed the finer things, and played a long game. In my head I pictured a sleekly modern yacht interior, with mirrored surfaces and blonde wood, or some combination of black, white, and chrome. He had invested in tech to exploit the masses, but he seemed to have gone old-school with storage of the potentially damning information he had on Quimby, so I thought Karpov would be the kind of guy who used a safe. Boats had lots of cleverly designed hiding spots, but a safe would have to be in a compartment in the center of the floor so the weight of it didn’t throw the yacht’s balance off kilter.
Gabriel reached through the water to tap me, and I looked up to see the party boat tied up alongside the Nachthexen. I could see Dallas standing on the wooden deck of Darius’s boat chatting with two young white guys who were, presumably, the crew of Karpov’s yacht. She laughed and played with her hair, and one of the guys leapt aboard the wooden boat. The other one said something and seemed to hesitate, but Dallas just smiled and beckoned to him before leading the way below decks. The first guy followed her like a baby duck. The second one looked around the yacht, then seemed to scan the lake for a few moments. Finally, he stepped aboard the party boat and dropped down out of sight.
Gabriel tapped my shoulder again, and we made directly for the stern of the yacht where a metal stepladder was affixed. Gabriel looped the collar of his board around one of the rails as I flipped up the fin on my swim leg and carefully pulled myself up the ladder. I moved slowly enough that I didn’t rock it, just in case someone else was still on board, and then shifted to balance the boat as Gabriel pulled his heavier frame out of the water. He dropped a small wet bag on the deck between us.
I opened the wet bag and pulled out our cell phones and a small, super-absorbent camping towel which I used to sop up as much of the water running off my wetsuit as I could. Neither of us wanted a trail leading down into the yacht to show where we’d been. Gabriel dried off quickly, and less than a minute later, we stepped into the main deck of the luxurious yacht.
And luxurious it was. The image of sleek modernity I’d had in my mind disappeared in a puff of glitter. The interior of the yacht looked like something a Russian oligarch had done for his mistress’s poodle. The sheer quantity of bling was nearly blinding.
“Good Lord,” Gabriel said under his breath. The British understatement of it nearly made me giggle, and I moved past the gold-colored crushed-velvet settee with exaggerated care. A short staircase led down under the foredeck where the plans had shown two double staterooms. The third one, near the engine compartment, was a single, so I ignored it and led the way to the one which we assumed was the master. The door was locked, which didn’t surprise me. I pulled a set of lock picks from the compartment Sparky had built into the peg of the dive leg, and Gabriel shone a light from his mini flashlight on the door handle. I felt him at my back as I worked, and it was comforting to know there was a set of eyes and ears behind me.
The lock was a fairly simple one meant to keep crewmen out of the master’s chamber, and I had it open in less than a minute. Gabriel shone his flashlight around the room briefly to determine it was empty, and then we slipped inside and closed the door softly behind us. I turned the button on the handle to lock it, just for good measure.
If gilt-induced nausea was possible, I had it. The small room looked like Versailles and a jewelry box had a baby and dressed it up in purple velvet, and I had to put my hand on Gabriel’s shoulder for a moment to keep the room from spinning.
“Check the floor for storage compartments. I bet there’s a safe,” I whispered to Gabriel. I pulled out my cell phone was pleased to see full bars when I texted Jorge. He was at my apartment with Oscar, monitoring the satellite for communications. We’re in the master bedroom.
A moment later, Fiona texted. Darius has one of the guys helping him with his “engine problem.” Dallas is drinking with the other one. Only two on board.
I exhaled. “There were only two of them, and they’re still on the party boat,” I murmured to Gabriel.
He had rolled up a thick Chinese silk rug and was tugging on a brass ring inset into the decking beneath it. The lid to the compartment pulled up, and inside was the door to a floor safe. I allowed myself a righteous smirk until I realized there was no combination wheel on the safe. It surprised me given Karpov’s mistrust. Instead, the safe was locked with a digital combination.
“Shit.” Gabriel exhaled sharply. “Harder to crack.”
I texted Jorge. Digital combo.
He responded a second later. Use the multi-meter probe I gave you, open the app, and go 1-9 on each key.
Back in my apartment, as we’d gone through all the possible problems we might encounter, Jorge had given me a short cable that plugged into my super-spy phone. He downloaded a resistance-testing app and said he could turn my phone into a resistance multi-meter to open digital locks. I didn’t really understand it at all, but Alex had been listening in over Skype, and it was clear he’d been impressed with Jorge’s ingenuity. Apparently, the amount of current a lock battery drew varied according to whether the bits storing each number in the code were a 0 or a 1. By monitoring the multi-meter in my phone, Jorge could essentially spell out the correct key code until he got all six numbers, and all I had to do was hold the probe to the safe and punch numbers while I said them out loud. Gabriel opened a line to Jorge’s phone and put it on speaker so I could whisper the numbers.
It took six minutes to get all six numbers of the combination. Fiona occasionally texted updates on the party boat happenings, and it seemed that both of the Nachthexen’s crew members were quite happy to sample Darius’s excellent whiskey and Dallas’ considerable charm while one of them helped him fix the mechanical difficulty they’d manufactured.
The safe opened with a quiet snick, and Gabriel lifted the door carefully. Inside was a waterproof bag, which made sense for a boat, and inside that was a small case full of thumb drives and a packet of photographs. I opened the packet and was not startled to see images of Dane Quimby on a residential street wearing a black baseball cap and a dark jacket. The photos were obviously taken from a parked car by a camera able to shoot in low light. The pictures laid out a sequence of events – first, a full face shot of Quimby for identification, then his approach to a dark sedan. In the third photo, Quimby was pulling something out of his pocket, and in the fourth—”
“Shit!” I nearly dropped the photos when I realized what I was looking at. “Dane Quimby shot the driver of that car in the head.”
I handed the prints to Gabriel and took a shaky breath. Whatever dirt I’d been expecting, that was not it. The Dane Quimby I’d investigated for cheating on his wife wasn’t a killer, was he?
“When did he do it?” I asked, looking for a date on the pho
tos. Nothing was burned into the print, and I couldn’t tell the time of year from the image.
“There’s a license plate visible on the car. We’ll run the plate and find out who he shot.”
“I can’t believe I could have gotten a guy so wrong. He was a little desperate, and a jerk for sure, but I didn’t have him pegged as a killer,” I was whispering, but we were still on Gabriel’s speaker phone.
“Give me the plate,” said Jorge quietly.
Gabriel snapped a picture of the photograph and sent it to him. “Coming at you.”
All right you two – party’s winding down next door. Time to move. Fiona’s text came through the phone in a clear command.
“Signing off,” Gabriel answered quietly as I quickly packed my tools back into the dive leg. He tucked our phones and the photos into the dry bag, but I stopped him on the drives.
“Give me those. They’re small enough to store in the leg.”
He opened the little case they were stored in and dropped three drives into my hand. Then he closed the safe and rolled the rug back over it as I screwed the stopper back onto the shaft of my peg leg.
We made it back onto the deck of the yacht and had just eased ourselves into the water when the sounds of male voices came up from below decks on the party boat. Gabriel untied the surfboard using the side of the yacht to shield him from view and managed to push off toward the front just as the two crewmen emerged. I ducked under the water and swam back toward shore.
When I finally came up for air, I was fifty feet away from the yacht and, I hoped, invisible in the inky water. I could just make out the outline of Gabriel, still pretty close to the boat, as he paddled toward shore north of where we’d gone in. Good. He’d be less likely to be spotted bowside, and I appreciated that he didn’t put himself at risk just to escort me back to the beach.
The party boat chugged away from the yacht, and I sent a silent salute to Dallas and Darius for their masterful distraction of the two crewmen. Whatever the conversation had been below decks, it did the trick and didn’t seem to have raised any suspicions. I looked forward to the debrief back in Chicago, when Dane Quimby was safely in jail and the targets had been removed from Gabriel’s and my backs.
I swam hard, and thoughts of warming up against the naked body of my handsome man kept my brain occupied the whole, shivery way back. I didn’t even flinch at the possessive I’d added to “handsome man,” though I shied away from anything that smacked of the word “future.” I was getting the idea that I might have to rethink that someday.
I paused at the edge of the lake to flip the fin up on my peg leg and wring out my hair, and I caught the barest flicker of motion in the trees near the lighthouse. Could Gabriel have made it to the beach and walked back already, or was Fiona waiting for us to report in?
We’d left towels folded on the beach, and I dried my face and then flipped my hair over to squeeze out as much water as I could. I had the towel draped around my shoulders when I stood upright, and a feeling of disquiet hit me squarely between the shoulder blades. I turned to see what was behind me, but the beach was empty. I wrapped the towel tightly around my shoulders and started a fast walk back to the protection of the lighthouse where I wouldn’t feel so much like prey in someone’s gunsights.
I stepped up to the deck and had just started to unzip my wetsuit in anticipation of warm, dry clothes when an unpleasantly familiar voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Well, look at the trash that just washed up on my shore.”
45
Shane
“I’d like to think I will die a heroic death, but it’s more likely I’ll trip over my dog and choke on a spoonful of Nutella.” – Shane, P.I.
Dane Quimby emerged from the shadow of the building. He held a type of handgun that I couldn’t name because I’d never bothered to learn the differences between them. The business end was pointed at me though, and his finger was on the trigger in a tired echo of our last encounter. I might have sighed at the predictability of it if the circumstances hadn’t been so dire.
The other piece of unassailable information to hit my brain was the expression of satisfaction on Quimby’s face. He was going to kill me, and he looked forward to doing it. Unfortunately, the photos I’d seen confirmed he was capable of it.
“Oh, don’t let me stop you from stripping off the wetsuit. You were off to such a promising start,” he said with a leer.
I swiftly zipped the suit closed and glared at him. “Put the gun down, Dane.”
Statements like “what the actual fuck do you think you’re doing?” and “why are you here?” surged through my brain, but I didn’t really want to know the answers to those questions, nor did I want to provoke him to come up with them, so I crossed my arms in front of my chest to keep from shivering and glared at him.
“Yeah, no, I’m not going to do that,” he said, as though he’d given it thought.
I really didn’t like Dane Quimby, but when he’d accosted us in the park and gotten us arrested along with him, he’d been more annoying than chilling. Now his voice, his sneer, and the leering look in his eyes made my skin crawl.
His gaze roved over my body in a way that made me feel like I’d just been slimed. “Take it off,” he jerked his head at the wetsuit.
“Yeah, no, I’m not going to do that,” I retorted, but in a way that made it clear I hadn’t even considered the possibility.
His eyes narrowed, and the sneer was replaced by a scowl. He took a step forward as he raised the gun level with my head. “You’ll do what I say.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me?” I scoffed, with a ridiculous amount of bravado given the circumstances.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” he snarled, taking another step closer. I had a solid five inches on him in height, but his gym-buff body probably weighed at least twenty pounds more than mine did, which would count in a tackle.
“I thought I did,” I said, edging around so my back was to the lighthouse. It wasn’t the best defensive position in which to put myself, but it would force Dane to turn his back to the beach, and I sincerely hoped that Gabriel was on it somewhere heading this way.
He snorted. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’re in trouble, and you’re trying to find a way out. I can help you, Dane.” I had no intention of helping the jerk out of his troubles, but I was stalling for time.
“You mean like you helped yourself to my money?” He took another step closer. The gun was close now, too close to miss a shot, but too far to grab.
“I don’t have your money. Your wife hired me to catch you cheating on her – that’s my job. I’m a P.I. who catches cheaters. She’s the one who has your money. She took it and ran to Canada.”
I really wasn’t throwing Denise under the bus, because Dane was going to jail. I just wanted to stay alive long enough to see it happen. I promised myself a panty dance party when it did.
“You catch guys by fucking them? Is that it? You trap them into sleeping with you, and then their wives take them for everything they’ve got?” He was snarling like a pissed-off wolverine, and I half expected rabid mouth-froth. “Well, I didn’t get to sample the goods before I got screwed, so I’m going to say it again. Take off the fucking wetsuit before I cut it off.”
“With what? Your sharp tongue? You’re not going to rape me, Dane. You’re not a rapist. You’re an asshole, but all the women you sleep with seem to want to sleep with you, so that just makes you an inconceivably lucky asshole.”
“Why are you up here? What were you doing in the lake?” he growled.
He wasn’t arguing for rape, so I had that going for me. But where the hell was Gabriel, and how did Van Hayden manage to lose Quimby in Chicago?
“Diving shipwrecks. It’s my hobby,” I said evenly as I tried to surreptitiously scan the beach for any sort of movement that could indicate the presence of an ally.
“You were on Karpov’s boat.” He
was back to snarling, and I didn’t appreciate that the gun was still aimed directly at my right eye.
“Who’s Karpov?”
He waved the gun at me in a gesture designed to make me wet my pants. It didn’t work. My pants were already wet, and I was getting properly cold. “Did you go out there to meet him? No, he wouldn’t care about you. He likes pretty blond men.”
“You mean like you?” I asked sweetly. It was a mistake, and I knew it the minute the words left my mouth. Toxic masculinity went hand-in-hand with homophobia, and I’d just poked the wolverine with a long, sharp stick.
He shifted his aim two inches to the right and pulled the trigger, and I felt splinters of wood embed themselves in my cheek even as the boom of gunfire rang in my ears.
“Next time, I won’t miss.”
“I don’t think you did this time,” I said, as I pulled an inch-long bit of wood out of my skin. “Shit.” It hurt, and I was pissed, because it was going to leave a mark. “What do you want, Dane?”
“I want to know why you’re here?”
Finally, I saw something move in the darkness behind Dane. It was all I could do not to exhale in relief. The question was, would Gabriel risk a tackle from behind, which meant crossing a driftwood-littered bit of beach in the dark, or would he call out a distraction so I could disarm Dane myself?
“You’re about to be two-for-two, Quimby. Drop the gun,” Gabriel called out as he stepped forward from the line of trees. I tensed, ready to disarm.
But Dane didn’t swivel around like I’d expected him to. He hunched his shoulders and narrowed his gaze at me as he yelled to Gabriel. “If you were armed, I’d be dead by now.”
“Perhaps,” Gabriel said, still moving at the same, seemingly unconcerned pace. His gaze was fixed on Dane’s shoulders, and despite his casual air, I knew Gabriel was watching for the slightest twitch that would give away Dane’s next move.
Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1) Page 28