Hot on the Hunt

by Melissa Cutler

  Always the sidekick. How dare she slap him in the face with one of the deep, secret parts of himself he’d shared with her after they’d made love. It wasn’t even a valid argument. Green Beret snipers always worked in pairs, with each able to perform both jobs of spotter and shooter with deadly, world-class accuracy. Just because John had been the spotter more times than not didn’t mean he was any less skilled than Rory. And she couldn’t be talking about their stint on ICE’s black ops team. A team could only have one leader, and that hadn’t been Alicia, either, so he wasn’t sure how she got off separating her experience in black ops with his.

  And there he went, arguing the point as if he was trying to convince himself. He smacked his forehead, royally pissed at his stupid, middle-child insecurities rearing their ugly heads. While the lingering, unjustified sensation of being less than compared to the rest of the team had taken a turn for the justified after the entire crew assumed the worst of him on the turn of a dime, exile had forced him to rely only on himself. He was stronger, faster and more lethal than he ever had been in the group or as Rory’s sniper partner.

  He pushed the throttle to the max, careening into the open ocean until St. Thomas was nothing but a shadow behind him. St. Croix was forty miles south, not too much of a stretch on the Caribbean’s relatively calm waters. This was a well-traveled boat route for ferries and locals, and despite it being hurricane season with one such predicted storm a day or two away, he spotted cruise ships, luxury yachts and even the occasional water skiers and kayakers.

  After thirty minutes of travel, he no longer needed binoculars to keep tabs on Rory’s location. In another twenty minutes, the nose of John’s boat raced alongside the back of his, and in no time flat, they were careening neck and neck toward the green hills rising on St. Croix in the distance.

  Time to step up his efforts. Bracing for impact, he slammed the side of his boat into Rory’s. The blow knocked Rory’s boat off course, but didn’t slow him down. John had to crank the wheel to stay even with him. He couldn’t see how it was possible to damage Rory’s boat enough to stop it without doing the same to his. He needed a new strategy.

  When they were neck and neck again, John climbed onto the captain’s chair. With a hand on the windshield for balance, he crouched with one foot on the chair and the other on the rail. He maneuvered the boat so close to Rory’s that the hulls knocked, then he pushed off, throwing himself over the edge.

  Chapter 3

  While John was airborne, Rory noticed what he was doing and jerked the wheel left. John’s hands closed over the metal bar atop the rail, but he didn’t make it on board. His body slammed against the side of the hull and the pull of the water on his legs nearly sucked him under, the boat was moving so fast.

  His hands slipped on the wet metal. With the wake and the water pressure, he slid along the rail to the rear corner of the boat.

  The next thing he knew, Rory was over him, stomping on his right hand with his bare foot as the boat sped on. John tried to swing his leg up to catch on the bottom rung of the ladder, but Rory’s assault was too much. John lost his grip with his right hand and swung out, perilously close to the nearest of the two motors.

  With a shaky, smarting right hand, John moved his grip to a lower rung on the ladder so Rory couldn’t stomp on him anymore, then reached for his gun. The trouble was, Rory had started prying off the ladder with a metal gaffe. John barely had time to grab the frayed end of the parasailing rope dangling off the back before the ladder separated from the boat and flew backward. Blinking sea spray from his eyes, John wrapped the rope around his wrist and tried to line up a nonfatal shot of Rory with his gun while Rory grabbed the fillet knife and sawed at the rope.

  A loud bleat shocked them both. Rory whipped his head around to see a large luxury liner bearing down on them, still far enough away for Rory to change course. He lunged for the wheel and John seized his chance to climb aboard. Replacing his gun in its holster, he rallied his grip and core strength to hoist himself hand over hand until, with a growl of effort, he fell to the floor of the boat. Rory cranked the wheel right, out of the yacht’s trajectory, and set the course toward St. Croix once more.

  John wiped the back of his hand across his face, as if it wasn’t as soaked through as the rest of him. “Rory, you bastard. Stop the boat.”

  Rory turned and faced him, but he left the boat racing over the water at an impossible speed. “Not a chance. What the hell are you doing in the islands?”

  He bore an angry flesh wound on his thigh where John had grazed him with a bullet, but it had clotted and he didn’t seem any worse for wear.

  John, on the other hand, felt as if he’d been locked in a washing machine during the spin cycle. He rolled his shoulders and flexed his hand. “I had it on good authority that Alicia was going to kill you.”

  Rory let out a wheezy laugh. “And you thought you’d beat her to it? Nah, I bet you two are working together, am I right? You always were her lovesick whipping boy.”

  Okay, wow. Rory knew about John and Alicia’s affair. That changed things. Intimate relationships between members of an ops team weren’t exactly endorsed by ICE or their team leader, and he and Alicia had worked hard to be discreet. But somehow Rory had figured it out, which meant that John needed to rethink what Rory’s motives were for shooting Alicia and broadcasting for all the world that John was his accomplice. Was it to twist the proverbial knife he’d stabbed John with? Why else would Rory shoot John’s lover? Even after all this time, it didn’t make any sense.

  Looking into the face of the man John had once considered his brother, John felt his blood start to boil. Whatever Rory’s motivation, he’d tried to kill Alicia. Whatever muck he’d made of John’s life, he tried to kill the woman John loved. Another flex of his right hand told him all he needed to know—none of his bones were broken and he was in top shape to brawl.

  He flew at Rory and landed a satisfying blow to his gut with a left hook chaser that knocked Rory into the steering wheel. Rory pushed off with a fist meant for John’s cheek, but the boat zigged right.

  John gave Rory a shove, sending him stumbling toward the rear of the boat. “You don’t get to talk about Alicia like that. You don’t deserve—” He swallowed back his next words. Rory might know they were lovers, but no way would John give him even an inkling of how very much he’d cared about her.

  Rory bounced back swinging, this time catching John with a blow to the chin. He absorbed the pain and grabbed Rory’s neck, yanking his torso down to John’s waiting knee. Damn, it felt cathartic, this fight. Letting Rory experience a fraction of the pain Alicia must have felt at Rory’s hand.

  John tried to back up a step, but Rory locked his arms around his middle and pedaled forward, pushing John to the steering console. His midback hit hard against the rim of the console, knocking the wind out of him. Any moment, U.S. authorities were going to descend on them. It was inevitable. Rory was a violent offender and a traitor. They knew he’d escaped, and John, Alicia and Rory had made enough of a commotion on St. Thomas that officials were going to pick up their trail in no time flat.

  He needed to get Rory subdued and take control of the boat, stat. But Rory had a whole lot of fight left in him. He let fly with a fast hook, but John blocked with his elbow and sent his fist into Rory’s wounded thigh. The blare of a warning horn sounded from off the bow and John played the sucker by looking. A massive barge snaked by their boat with only feet to spare. While John was distracted, Rory caught him with an uppercut that made contact with John’s jaw. He staggered back and wasn’t sure, for a split second, if only he was pitching sideways or if the whole boat was.

  By the time he decided the boat was jumping a wake at a dangerous angle, he was toppling overboard. He flailed his arms as he careened toward the water, but didn’t come in contact with anything but air. He plunged into the water.

  He
came up spluttering and gasping for breath. The speedboat was moving fast toward St. Croix and overhead, a helicopter hovered. His first thought was that the navy or police had found him, but after blinking water from his eyes he took a closer look. It was a private chopper and Alicia was in the passenger seat. She leaned over the edge of the open passenger doorway, her hair waving wildly in the wind created by the rotors.

  “You okay?” she called.

  He had to admire her wit, hiring an aerial tour pilot for a private island hopping escort. That was a smart move.

  “Yeah.” Sort of. The only damage was to his pride, and that wound stung like an SOB.

  Alicia turned her body and looked back toward St. Thomas. In her hand, John glimpsed a flash of metal. Her gun. Which meant she hadn’t exactly hired the pilot to take her to St. Croix. She’d used force, digging herself even deeper into a criminal hole. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that jazz. The question was, why had she put herself in such a desperate position? It’d been a miracle that she’d survived the gunshot wound Rory had inflicted on her, so why was she squandering her second chance at life with vengeance? It didn’t add up.

  “The navy’s coming,” she called.

  Not unexpected, but he still needed to get away before U.S. authorities found him. They’d already accused him of being Rory’s accomplice after Rory’s initial arrest, but though one criminal’s claims alone hadn’t been enough proof of John’s guilt to charge him with a crime, finding him there and Rory gone might be the corroborating evidence the Feds had been waiting for to put John away for life.

  He hated to ask for help, not from her. Anyone but Alicia. She already thought him as less of a man. The sidekick. Never the alpha. Damn it all to hell. “Throw down a rope.”

  Her attention swung to Rory’s boat. Even from that distance, he could see it in her eyes, the disdain for John, her desperation to get to Rory. Unbelievable. She was going to leave him there in the middle of the ocean, tens of miles from shore or the nearest boat.

  Anger at her and Rory and the entire rotten farce that had become his life made him snap. He smacked the water, shouting, “Don’t do it, Phoenix.”

  Ignoring him, she nudged the pilot’s shoulder. He couldn’t hear her for the thunder of the rotors, but he watched her mouth the word go.

  Just like that, she was gone.

  The Caribbean Sea had never felt so vast. John tipped his chin up and looked at the clouds. His boat was miles away, the U.S. Navy was bound to catch up with him and try to pin him with orchestrating Rory’s escape, and he’d had no choice but to beg Alicia not to abandon him. Triple ouch.

  Most of the time, he relished being the perpetual underdog. His whole life he’d been a scrapper, but he’d used it to his advantage. In warfare and black ops combat, it was rarely a bad thing to be underestimated by the enemy. But sometimes, clawing for a seat at the table sucked. Today, it sucked.

  His only hope of getting through the next hour without becoming shark bait or getting arrested was to get the attention of one of the yachts or sea kayakers passing by. Treading water, he turned in a slow circle, assessing his options. The navy was maybe only five or ten minutes back. In the distance, a modest luxury yacht cruised his way, coming from St. Croix, blasting reggae music and with sunbathing, barely clothed women adorning its deck.

  One thing John loved about his HK45 was that water didn’t jam it up. He raised the gun overhead and squeezed off a round to get their attention, hoping they’d process the sound as an emergency flare gun instead of a lethal weapon, then tucked the gun out of view and waved his arms high, saying a silent prayer that the boaters were feeling charitable.

  * * *

  “You know how you can guarantee I won’t kill you?”

  The pilot’s eyes were wide with terror and bugging out of his beet-red face as he gave a spastic shake of his head.

  The real answer was Because I would never kill a civilian—ever. But honesty like that wasn’t exactly an A-1 coercion technique. Alicia burrowed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his neck. Her finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger, but it didn’t need to be. The metal on his skin was convincing enough that she meant business.

  “Because you’re going to hover over that field, no funny business, and I’m going to jump out. And then you don’t ever have to see me again. Sound like a plan?”

  He nodded, right on cue. Holding the helicopter pilot by gunpoint hadn’t been her first choice, but money hadn’t worked as a bribe and she couldn’t take the chance of Rory making it to St. Croix—or, worse, disappearing—before she got a read on him.

  She hadn’t wanted to abandon John in the water, either, but what choice did she have? She’d unleashed a vicious criminal and now it was her duty to stop him at the sacrifice of everything else. Not only her duty to herself, but to the planet. Wasn’t that a disquieting thought? In the twenty months since she’d been shot, she’d barely thought of anyone but herself. That’s the way rehab and physical therapy worked. If you weren’t thinking about yourself 24/7, thinking about healing and regaining your strength until it was almost an obsession, then you weren’t doing it right.

  She jiggled her gun against the pilot’s skin. “But if you try to be a hero or do something stupid, the deal’s off and I shoot. Got it?”

  Another nod.

  “Take it down as far as you can without landing.” She didn’t need marks left from the chopper’s landing skids. Her footprints would be evidence enough of her presence on the island. With any luck, the pilot would return to St. Thomas and shake off his flight under duress. Maybe he wouldn’t even call the police. Yeah, right.

  Jumping out of a helicopter into a soggy field in the middle of St. Croix’s wilderness wasn’t ideal, but the airport was on the west side of the island—miles from any one of the harbors Rory was almost certain to have chosen as a landing point on the east side and way too central a location for her to disembark at. After a sweep of the coastline, she’d spotted Rory’s speedboat drifting in the calm waters near a secluded high-end resort, with Rory nowhere to be seen.

  If she’d been in his position, she would’ve done the very same thing because the resort’s remote location tucked into the lush green tropics of the northeast shore meant fewer witnesses had noticed him drive up and jump out. Plus, the resort sported a whole parking lot full of cars ripe for the stealing.

  Contrary to St. Thomas’s Let’s-help-the-tourists-spend-their-money-fast! vibe, this was a sleepy island of wealthy, older vacationers who liked their tennis games at the club in the morning and their naps in their beach hammocks in the afternoon, thank you very much. An escaped convict couldn’t hide here long—at least, that’s what Alicia was counting on.

  Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t hide out here long, either, so it was a good thing that she didn’t plan to. The idea was to locate Rory, execute him and vanish before the vacationers had woken from their naps. The closest, best place to make a clean break with the helicopter and its frightened pilot was a field two kilometers from the resort.

  She poked the pilot in the neck with her gun once more for good measure. “Hold it steady now.” She yanked his radio wire from its socket and tossed it out the door opening, then his earphones. No sense giving him a chance to call the police the moment she jumped, even if she’d never said directly why she needed him to get her to St. Croix or what she planned to do while there.

  She tucked two one-hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket to cover replacing the equipment she’d destroyed, secured the computer bag she’d retrieved from her rental car across her shoulders, then walked to the edge of the doorway. He’d done a great job getting low. She had maybe a two-meter jump. No problem.

  On the ground, she ran out from under the helicopter’s shadow and sought cover beneath the tree canopy. She watched the helicopter rise and head off, not back toward St.
Thomas, but in the direction of the St. Croix airport. Just terrific. With the navy on its way to the island, she had ten, maybe fifteen minutes to vanish before the U.S. authorities he was most likely on his way to notify descended on the resort.

  Cursing at the messiness of it all and how screwed up her vengeance plan had gotten, she made a break for the hotel. What she really needed was a quiet place to log on to her computer. Maybe that was less glamorous than stealing a car and scouring every inch of the island, but Alicia could cover a lot more ground that way, so to speak.

  She could tap into the local police phone line and radio and let the police and civilians do the grunt work. If what she’d seen on St. Thomas as the helicopter lifted off was any indication, St. Croix’s main town of Christiansted would be crawling with police and soldiers, too, so the less visible she was, the better.

  In the resort’s parking lot, she scanned for a sign of Rory or any indication that he’d been through. She didn’t expect a top-rate operative like him to leave a trail, and he didn’t surprise her with one. She jimmied open the door of a rusty, early 1990s model American-made sedan—the kind that only took the touch of a screwdriver to the engine’s solenoid starter to jumpstart and so were, statistically, the favorite choice of auto thieves the world over—that probably belonged to one of the resort’s employees.

  With another look around, she pulled the driver’s door closed, but it caught on something and bounced back open. Her gaze shot sideways to see a man’s black boot propped on the bottom of the door frame.

  Squelching a gasp, she pulled her gun and twisted to aim at him, but the man was faster. Cold metal of a gun muzzle jabbed at her neck. Didn’t karma have an ironic sense of humor?

  “Not the best idea, Phoenix.”

  There were only a handful of men in the world who called her that, and none of them owned that smug, smooth voice. She followed the boot in the doorway up past a pair of black cargo pants, black leather belt and gray T-shirt concealing a lean, fit build to the smirking face of a man who looked a few years older than her thirty-two. It was going to take some effort and strategy to best him and escape, but she had no doubt that she would.