All the Bridges Burning (Davis Groves Book 1)

by Neliza Drew

  Boots jumped onto the deck behind me. Heavy. They crossed to the cabin door. “Fuck.” The lock clicked. I turned toward it and the engine rumbled to life, mixing a fresh diesel smell to the briny aroma in the cabin. The boat rocked harder.

  I looked back over at the blonde. “Let’s get you some clothes at least.”

  She didn’t answer.

  I probably should have been more worried about being taken offshore by whoever was outside, but panic didn’t seem useful. I went back out into the cabin and found a sweatshirt that didn’t smell too bad and a pair of men’s pajama pants with a reel manufacturer’s logo on them. I went back to the girl and threaded her feet into the pajamas, pulled them up past the new-looking tattoo of a tiger paw on her upper thigh.

  She barely stirred as I pulled them up and knotted the tie. The sweatshirt, I draped over her like a blanket.

  I wasn’t sure if that meant she’d been drugged, had drugged herself, or if she was just a heavy sleeper. That last one seemed more like a myth than an actual thing to me, but maybe she hadn’t grown up like I had. Maybe she hadn’t spent her teen years listening out for subtle changes in her environment so she could react if she had to. Maybe she was just faking, hoping whoever I was I’d go away and not touch her anymore.

  I shuddered and tamped down all the other thoughts in my head.

  Except, aside from the rumbling engine under us and the mystery person outside, I had nothing else to think about. And being locked in a confined space, even one with light and food, seemed like a bad beginning to the day.

  I fought the urge to pace. I needed to think, to focus. Fear could be useful. Panic wasn’t. Had to remember that. Had to not think about the reasons why this girl might be naked.

  Survival first. Always.

  The lock jiggled and the door creaked open.

  I pulled out the revolver again, pushed aside the nagging voice in my head that suggested maybe it was time to stop screwing around with five- and six-shooters. Start carrying and practicing with something with more rounds. Except, I was likely only alive because Charley hadn’t had any more shots that night.

  I slipped out of the front berth, revolver out straight in a two-handed grip.

  He saw me, stumbled back, and raised his hands. “Oh fuck. Not again.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but didn’t lower the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Me? It’s my fucking boat! Who the hell are you?”

  “The boat’s owner’s dead.”

  “No, the fuckwit that asshole gave my boat to is dead. And if you’re in here planting more drugs or whatever, forget it. You’re gonna have to shoot me ’cause I ain’t doing more—”

  “You armed?”

  “What? No. I mean, I had a gun on here, but I figure you bastards took that.”

  “Turn around. Hands on the wall.” I took a step forward.

  He sighed and turned. Shoulders sagged like he’d given up.

  I frisked him cautiously, but thoroughly. Then stepped clear. “Turn around. Who are you?”

  “I told you.”

  Something clicked. Damn, I needed more sleep. “You’re Jimmy?”

  “Yeah. Who the hell are you? Act like a cop, but you ain’t a cop. Look familiar, though.”

  “Davis Groves.”

  “I thought I heard she was dead.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Maybe you’re lying.”

  “Maybe. But if I was going to make up a name, why the hell would I pick that one?”

  He shrugged. “Guess you gotta point. So, how come everyone says you’re dead?”

  “Wishful thinking? Who told you I was dead?”

  “Wasn’t so much told to me as I overheard it. Something Billy told Eric.”

  I fought the urge to pinch the spot between my eyes. Nothing made sense.

  “Look, if you aren’t gonna shoot me, you mind putting that thing away?”

  I studied his face. “Not until I know why you have a naked woman handcuffed to your bed.”

  “I what?” His voice went up two octaves.

  Behind me, sleeping beauty woke screaming.

  “Perfect.” I jerked my shoulder and winced.

  “What’s up with your shoulder?”

  “That’s your big question?” I motioned for him to move around me and walk to the bow.

  “What the hell’d you do, lady?” He stopped in the open doorway. “Rebecca? Ohmigod.”

  She jerked against the cuffs and scrambled backward against the wall of the compartment, eyes wide. “Jimmy?” The fear didn’t leave her, but confusion crowded in and sat next to it.

  “You okay?” I asked. Stupid question. I’d have lied had she asked me, but it was the first thing that came to mind.

  Her jaw worked, but nothing came out.

  “Jimmy, sit.”

  She moved her knees to her chest. He sat.

  “You got a set of keys for those cuffs?”

  He shook his head, eyes pleading with me. “They ain’t mine. I didn’t do this. Tell her I didn’t do this.”

  Her face said she didn’t want that to be true but wasn’t sure. Which only meant she didn’t know how she’d ended up in such a situation.

  I knew that feeling. I didn’t like it. Didn’t like witnessing it even more than I didn’t like feeling it. It took a lot of focus to fight through the sound of Ryan’s concern in my head.

  I stared at the cuffs. Pushed aside a memory of wearing them in court at eleven. Of running into the desert at thirteen.

  I looked at her hands, looked at her face. Tried to figure out how to make everything right and started rummaging in my bag for something to pick the locks with. I could feel her eyes watching me. Could feel her questions charging the air between us.

  Something jingled at the bottom of a side pocket I’d long forgotten.

  I smiled and pulled out a handcuff key. “Think this’ll work?”

  She looked as afraid as relieved.

  Jimmy just looked dumbfounded. “Why the hell do you have that?”

  “Took it off a drunk cop at a party. Guess I forgot to give it back.” I handed the key to Jimmy and watched him release her. The skin on his hands was rough, calloused, but his touch was gentle, cautious, like he knew she was scared and didn’t want to add to it.

  I put the gun in my bag.

  She looked up at me as she pulled the sweatshirt on. “What the hell are you?”

  I shrugged and ignored the short stabbing pain when I did that. “Paralegal.”

  Her face stayed wary.

  “Bachelor party. I handcuffed him to a giant urn. Even drunk he’s smart enough not to break antiques. One of his buddies unhooked him later and drove him home.”

  She squinted and sat up, rubbing her wrists. “Do I know you?”

  “No. I’m Davis. I’m not dead.”

  She tilted her head at me.

  “It comes up. A lot.”

  Jimmy nodded in agreement. She looked like she thought I was nuts, but wasn’t pushing it.

  Jimmy looked out one of the small cabin windows, not so much a porthole as a starboard ellipse. “I gotta go steer before we run aground.”

  “You left the engine running? This doesn’t have some kind of autopilot?”

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “Idling. We’ve been drifting.”

  I knew why he hadn’t cut the engine. He hadn’t wanted to alert whoever he thought he’d trapped. I still didn’t know why he thought taking his prey out to sea was preferable to dealing with them onshore, but then I wasn’t exactly a boat person.

  He put a hand out toward Rebecca. “Whatever they did to you, I’m sorry.”

  Even if he turned out to be a threat, it might be good to give him a little rope. I let him go and leaned in the doorway. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.”

  She nodded. Swallowed. “I should be stronger than this.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  Her eyes met mine. “You are. Or you f
ake it well.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  She wasn’t listening. “I was supposed to find her. Alive. Bring her home. That was my job. That’s what her parents paid me for.”

  “You’re an investigator?”

  She nodded and looked at her hands, studied the bruising on her wrists. “It’s not like I’m some movie sleuth or anything. My uncle hired me in high school. Taught me his business. I got licensed, fully, last year. Six months ago he had a heart attack and decided to retire.”

  I watched a channel marker pass the Plexiglas opposite her head.

  “I’m good at what I do. You don’t have to believe me, but I am. I’m just not… This isn’t what I do. I follow the occasional cheating spouse and all, but mostly I sit at a computer. I figure out if small companies are getting ripped off and by whom. I locate old documents for little old ladies doing genealogy research. I find hidden assets for lawsuit cases, partnerships gone south.” She had a genteel accent that made “south” sound elegant. Not quite the mumble of the rural Carolinas, not the drawl of Savannah. Certainly not the country-fried brogue of nearby Downeast.

  “You aren’t local.”

  She shook her head. “Virginia. Small town a hundred miles from D.C. My name’s Rebecca, but I guess you figured that out.”

  I nodded. “The missing girl?”

  “Melissa Armstrong. Junior. Her mom went to high school with mine. ‘Can’t Lil’ Becky find her? Talk some sense into her? Woman to woman?’” She snorted and fought it turning to tears.

  “The first mistake.”

  Her head snapped to me, her face etched with terror.

  “He killed her.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I may have broken into a house and seen an email I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “Eric Wright.” She said.

  I decided to play dumb. “The commissioner?”

  “The con artist. I told you. I’m good at what I do, at financial stuff, computer stuff. I found out Melissa’d been hanging out with all these little drug addict teens. I thought, okay. I figured I’d talk to her. Try to get her to come home. Maybe she listens. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe I just call her mom and leave it to her. I’m not like whatever you are. I don’t have a gun or handcuff keys or…” Her gaze caught on my hands.

  I opened my mouth to correct her and stopped.

  “Either way. I found her. Took me only a few days to find her. Left her phone on. Mom gave me permission to track. Ended up accidentally figuring out half her route on my way. Still…”

  I watched the open ocean out the window. I wanted to know where the hell we were going, but hoped it could wait. “Route?”

  “Yeah, she’s been up and down the coast a few times in the past month. Anyway, I see her with a girl looked kind of like you, actually, another with an ugly tattoo on her neck, and a dorky guy in a Wright’s shirt. They all pile out of a pickup truck at the Dairy Queen. Munchies, I guess. So, I decide to follow them. Like I do with the cheaters, except then I have a tracking device. Makes it easier.”

  I nodded. Tom occasionally caught one of those. Usually husbands, oddly, wanting to keep track of or get leverage on a trophy wife. They signed papers giving Tom permission to track their second vehicle and he did.

  “They come over to the docks. Get on a boat a little smaller than this one, load up some cases of cheap beer, and take off. So, I wait. I walk around, check out the boardwalk, a few of the shops with windows facing the slip. I run into Jimmy.” She smiled. “We had coffee. He seemed nice.” She stopped smiling, looked unsure.

  I said nothing.

  “Two hours later, they come back. The two girls get off. No Melissa. The girls get in the truck. Drive off. The guy takes a while longer.”

  “You said ‘dorky.’ He have freckles? A little soft around the middle?”

  She nodded. “He gets some fuel from the dockmaster, takes off again. I wait another couple hours or so, but nothing. By then it’s dark, and since the restaurants are all closed up a cop comes by wondering if I’m lost or something.”

  “Cop?”

  “Yeah, wasn’t even a city guy. Sheriff’s office. Asked who I was, what I was doing out on the docks by my lonesome.” She made a face. “He seemed too nosy. I told him I was a tourist out for a walk. He suggested — strongly — that I might like to get some supper out at a chain restaurant on the far end of town. Seemed to think I’d want to join him.”

  “Well, you’re a cute blonde.”

  “Dude was creepy. I think he followed me. At least west as far as the beach bridge. Course, there aren’t that many hotels in Morehead and Newport. All he had to do, if he wanted, was wait until I’d bypassed the turn and find my rental later. It’s what I’d do.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or worried, but she did seem good at her job. “This guy have a name?”

  “Murphy.”

  I filed that away and turned off the alarm bells in my head.

  “I got back to my hotel room that night, fired up my laptop to work on another case and find this email. Melissa. Dead and naked.”

  “The first mistake.”

  She opened her mouth a few seconds before she spoke again. “Was I naked when you found me?”

  I hesitated. “I hope you don’t mind. I put the pajama pants on you.”

  She looked down like she’d just noticed her outfit. “Thank you.”

  I nodded and swallowed.

  “I shouldn’t have let him get that close. I did so much research on Wright. I don’t know why. It was just a hunch from seeing that shirt. A lot of people around here have those. But then I found out it was his boat. And the more I looked at that email of Melissa, it looked like the picture had been taken on a boat. Maybe. I figured out enough of his schedule to bump into him. Flirt with him. Get a date with him.”

  “He did this?” My blood boiled, then ran icy.

  She shook her head. “He was charming. Knew nothing about a Melissa Armstrong. Said he didn’t know much about the kids who hung out on his boats. That he leased them back to the original owners. They used them for fishing and some of them even lived on them. Dodged all my questions about how he could afford to do that, how he kept the plant in business. A natural politician, that one. But he wasn’t that interested. Kept thinking I was a journalist, looking to get his name in print.”

  I kept my opinions on his character to myself. I angled to see what else she’d learned. “Drugs? I’ve heard he’s running them off the coast.”

  “He’s importing cheap fish. Bypassing all the FDA and safety regulations. Easy enough to do. And there are a lot of countries getting into aquaculture now. Some of them, Americans are turned off by. Bad reputations. He’s selling that stuff as local.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t the FDA kind of impotent these days?” Something Nik had told me rattled around in my head.

  She nodded. “The bigger problem is consumer backlash.”

  “That enough to kill over?” I knew it was, even as I asked it.

  She nodded. “Overfishing, algae blooms, price wars. It’s hard to believe that’s all that’s coming in on those boats from China and Mexico, though.”

  “You think Melissa found something out?”

  “Melissa wasn’t the angel her mom thought. She and her boyfriend had a case of counterfeit bags they stole off a truck in D.C. Hell, that’s honestly how I tracked her after she wised up and dumped the cell phone. The two of them had been selling the things for dope money until they landed here.”

  I thought about the purses in Lane’s room. “They recent fakes?”

  “Good quality, too. Like the kind you can get busted for, not the kind you can claim is just a lookalike.”

  “The boyfriend’s name?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Rich little asshole. Had everything he could ever have wanted. He wanted to be a ‘big ballin’ criminal’ like that stupid music he listened to.”

  I didn’t point out that the
two of us were only a few years older. “The name?”

  “Anderson Wallace.”

  I felt bile churn in stomach. I pictured Andy’s dead face and felt regret. And remorse. At the time, Andy’d pissed me off. He’d brought something dangerous to Charley and nearly killed her. It hit me that he’d just been a stupid kid.

  She looked at her hands, her wrists, and the stained sweatshirt. Her eyes followed the ugly pants to her painted toes and up into my face. “Did he… Did they rape me?”

  I thought about how I’d found her. I thought about how I’d found Charley more than a decade before. I thought about the morning I’d woken in my dorm room with a splitting headache and the taste of coffee still on my tongue under the bile and the morning breath. “I don’t know.”

  She bit her lip, but didn’t say anything.

  Chapter forty-three

  Jimmy cut the engine as we came out on deck. He looked around. Nervous.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I feel like I’m being watched.” He shivered.

  “What the hell are we doing out here?”

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “I been locked up five days. Need to catch something, I wanna keep eatin’.”

  “Locked up?”

  “Damn assholes left something on my boat. Got pinched on some petty drug shit. Cops had a warrant, which means somebody set me up.”

  I looked over at Rebecca. “You been here how long?”

  “I had dinner — alone — on Thursday night. Had a drink at the hotel bar. Talked for a bit with a cute guy about my age. Said he went to the college down in Wilmington. Was up visiting his sister. I had planned to go back to my room. Get some sleep. I woke up here hours later. In the dark.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  Something passed over her eyes. “Someone came in. It was too dark to make out who, but he was male. He gave me a glass of water. The next time I woke up, you were here.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Hungry. Itchy. Cold.”

  I considered Charley’s various withdrawal symptoms over the years, but she was too much of an experimenter for any single thing to stand out.

  I looked back at Jimmy. “The drugs weren’t yours, were they?”