Hot on the Hunt

by Melissa Cutler

  GPS tracking and video confirmation that Rory was the plane thief? Jackpot. As if reading her mind, John said, “Mind if we take a look at that tape?”

  Harry pocketed the cash and waved his smartphone at them. “You can do that in the air.”

  Chapter 8

  No doubt about it, the plane thief was Rory.

  After John had watched his fill of the security video, he’d passed the phone to Alicia with a simple, “It’s him.”

  Alicia hadn’t even known Rory had the skills to pilot a plane. But from what she could tell on the tiny screen of Harry’s smartphone by the way Rory ran a quick visual inspection of the Otter floatplane, then ferried it to open water and out of the camera’s view, he knew his way around a plane just fine.

  She watched the footage three times, stewing over the mess that had become of her operation, then walked the phone up to the cockpit and dropped it in the empty copilot chair. One thing was certain—it was time to stop kicking herself for not pulling the trigger on Rory when she’d had the chance. Instead, she needed to concentrate all her energy on righting her mistake.

  The plane they were presently riding in was the largest floatplane she’d been on, with six passenger seats broken into three rows, each seat hugging a window to maximize the view. Alicia knew from experience that the area they were flying over boasted a magnificent view of the great arcing chain of lush, green Caribbean islands sitting like jewels in a vibrant blue sea. Today, though, the view was only of storm clouds and rain, with the teeth-rattling turbulence to match.

  Given the deteriorating weather, she’d expected Rory to puddle jump to the next closest island. Maybe Virgin Gorda or St. Kitts, but instead, he pointed the stolen plane southwest. According to what they could see on the GPS receptor, he was hugging the Antilles, never deviating into open ocean. Maybe he didn’t know where to land and was hoping to find a cove that suited him, or maybe the plane didn’t have much gas. Whatever his thinking, Rory didn’t seem to be landing anytime soon.

  For the most part, Harry, John and Alicia sat in silence. Harry, with his hands and mind busy piloting the plane, and John and Alicia at a loss for what to do or say and busy keeping themselves from bouncing around too hard from the turbulence. They sat on opposite sides of the aisle, John in the row behind her.

  Whether it was her imagination or real, she felt his eyes on the back of her neck, assessing her every move and sound, and the way she looked. She was too stubborn to turn around and confirm the hunch.

  “You were right.”

  John’s voice was low, as though he didn’t want Harry privy to his words. Her heart started pounding at the sound of his voice and she knew it was going to take some time to adjust to the reality that he was a real live person, close enough that she could reach out and touch him, that she could hear his voice and know with absolute confidence that it wasn’t just another dream. She turned her head in his direction, not enough to see him, but for him to know she was listening.

  What was he doing? Was this a confession? An apology? “Right about what?”

  His clothes rustled softly as he moved into her line of sight and sat sideways in the chair across the aisle from her. Still, she kept her eyes on the faded blue carpet next to his boot.

  After a long pause during which the pressing weight of his steady gaze on her became almost too much to bear, he said, “You wanted to know how I found you and Rory this morning.”

  Oh. She tried to think back to what she would have been right about, but couldn’t get past the thumping of her heart or the sight of his hands in her periphery, sitting loosely on his thighs.

  “You were hunting me?”

  His hands shifted, his fingers weaving together between his knees. “Not hunting, but I was keeping tabs on you. I had an agreement with Logan that he’d update me whenever there was a new development involving you—when you moved, when you quit ICE, that sort of thing. Who knows now how much of it was lies, but he was telling me the truth this morning when he emailed me that Rory had escaped and you were missing.”

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that or if she even dared ask him why he’d done it. “I set everything up specifically so I wouldn’t appear to be missing. I had what I thought was an airtight alibi, but I underestimated how closely ICE was tracking me.” She lifted her focus from his hands and feet to his face and challenged his granite stare. “Or you.”

  Some emotion flared behind his eyes, but he shuttered it almost instantly. “Logan never let on to me that he had it out for you or that he thought you were dangerous. Not ever.”

  That was a consolation, if John was telling the truth, which her gut said he was. “Yet he told you where I’d be this morning?”

  “No. That was all me. Though there was a measure of luck involved.”

  “I don’t see how luck could be involved. You found me even before Logan did. How?”

  “Up until this morning, I was living on Jost Van Dyke Island, just north of St. Thomas. Given the timing and all the various options Rory had to get off Puerto Rico, the ferry to St. Thomas seemed like a good bet. Since it was close, I decided to start my search there. I saw you get out of a car and walk down the beach.”

  The faintest of chills washed through her. He’d been watching her for more than an hour. “Why didn’t you show yourself sooner?”

  There it was again. That flicker of some volatile emotion playing just behind his eyes. “Seeing you was...” He swallowed, his eyes narrowing. “I decided it was a cleaner, more manageable plan to stay out of sight and bide my time. Unlike Logan, I wasn’t after you. I was after Rory.”

  She wrenched her face to the window and stared at the gray beyond the plane’s wing. She’d spent twenty months visualizing John’s betrayal. Every sleepless night, she reconstructed the events leading up to that day, to that moment during their final mission in Panama when Rory stood in front of her, aimed his Ruger at her chest and pulled the trigger. All while John was out of position, off radio, totally unaccounted for while his best friend tried to kill her.

  Both men had been taken into custody immediately, she was told after the fact. But while she hadn’t read transcripts or seen video of John’s interrogations and interviews because those hadn’t been allowed by the judge into evidence in Rory’s trial, Rory had been adamant about John’s involvement. Because she didn’t see how he had anything to gain from insisting on it, she’d believed him.

  Of course she had. Because John had let Rory’s accusations stand. He let her believe in his guilt without fighting for her. They had but that one brief encounter two months after the shooting, when she was fragile after a discouraging physical therapy appointment in which she’d learned how far she’d fallen physically, when she believed, despairingly, that there was no pushing past the physical and mental pain of what had happened because there was no end to it. There was just pain and loneliness and disability.

  And he let her believe that.

  Until today, she’d believed it with a fervor—because the alternative was too much to carry. Because if she’d allowed herself to consider that Rory had been lying about John, that her instincts, as well as those of their other black ops crewmates, Ryan and Diego, were wrong about John, then how would she ever forgive herself for doubting him? How could John ever forgive her?

  No, she wouldn’t beg forgiveness, even if she had been wrong. Because that was yielding her power to a man, a move that had nearly killed her in the past. Even if John was innocent, they could never go back to what they were. She had a plan for herself, and John didn’t fit into it. There was no space for love in the world of black market assassins.

  She returned her focus to him, not his face but his body, no longer caring if he knew she studied him the way he hadn’t stopped studying her since the plane took off. He’d always been ripped, in peak physical shape, but there was a har
d angularity to his body now. Every inch of him was muscle and steel and virility.

  No softness at all or hint of the gentleman who used to whisper her call sign as if it was a term of endearment. He’d called her Phoenix even when they were alone. Because she was resilient and strong, he used to murmur in bed. Like the bird, and like the desert city she grew up in. Like the sun. No man she’d slept with could pillow talk like John. He’d elevated it into an art and she’d been hypnotized by his charm, those sweet words and even sweeter moves that seemed to have given way to a cold, hard warrior.

  She allowed her gaze to rise up to the lips that were the window to his emotions and so, so talented at turning her boneless and carefree. At least they remained unchanged. She missed a lot about her former life, but she especially missed being kissed by John. Every kind of kiss, from the ravishing, up-against-a-wall, I’ll die without you kind of way that he’d proved again today he was a master at, to the slow, tender kisses that made her feel as cherished as a rare jewel.

  A pang of longing and loneliness hit her right in the heart.

  “You’re staring at my mouth.”

  She raised her gaze higher, to his dark, unyielding eyes. “It’s the only part of the old John you have left.”

  “Would that be a compliment or criticism?”

  A criticism. But she didn’t need to let on how much she’d missed him, despite everything. “Take it as you will.”

  He leaned closer, his hand propped on her seat back. “It that an invitation?”

  Her attention lowered, returning to that one familiar part of him. But far from being soft and sweet, a hint of a sardonic smile teased the edges of his lips. She longed to press her lips to his and erase the defensiveness and bitterness from them. “You don’t want that from me. You’re just trying to make me squirm.”

  “What I want and what’s good for me are rarely the same. And I’d never mistake you for the kind of woman who squirmed when her back was to the wall.”

  She couldn’t decide if he meant to plant that image in her head or if it was a Freudian slip, but imagining her back against the wall, with John and those lips ready to take what they wanted, sent a low-down heat sliding into her belly. She turned her head toward the seat back and brushed her closed lips against his knuckles. He gripped the fabric harder.

  “I’ve got you now, you bastard!” Harry’s voice boomed through the cabin.

  John and Alicia pulled apart, breathing hard, and turned their attention straight ahead.

  “What have you got?” John said, his voice showing only the slightest strain.

  Harry tapped the GPS display. “Martinique. That’s where he landed.”

  “Guess I’d better brush up on my French,” John muttered, squinting at the blips on the GPS screen.

  Martinique. Interesting choice. She could pull a few facts and stats out of her head about the French-owned island, but she didn’t know much about it beyond that it exported sugarcane, sported an active volcano that was responsible for what many had dubbed the worst volcanic disaster of the twentieth century and, despite that, was a popular destination for rich European tourists. She wondered if Rory knew enough about Caribbean geography to make the decision deliberately or if random factors like the deteriorating weather or low fuel had mandated a landing. For all they knew, Rory wasn’t even aware of which island he was seeking refuge on.

  Twenty minutes later, they started their descent through the clouds, first to check if the authorities had beaten them there, then to follow the GPS’s coordinates and get a visual on the stolen plane before landing somewhere nearby and backtracking on foot. Harry explained that all the planes in his fleet were amphibian, meaning they could touch down safely on both water and land. They had no idea if Rory was aware of that, but the GPS did show that he’d landed on the southern coast of the island.

  While Harry concentrated on the plane’s descent, John busied himself with guns and other defensive tools from his sports bag, offering Alicia a backup .22 to replace the weapon Logan had lifted from her ankle. The tension and desire that had, earlier in the flight, sucked all the air from the narrow cabin was forgotten as she and John took positions at windows on the left side of the plane, ready to search for not only the stolen plane and Rory, but any signs that the U.S. government had picked up his trail, too.

  Harry began a low, slow flight around the island’s edge to make sure they were free from worrying about tangling with U.S. authorities, starting at the eastern edge of the island where the green volcano reached into the clouds above them. Despite the GPS locator’s insistence that the plane had touched down on the south side, she kept her eyes peeled for Rory, too, because she knew better than to trust a machine on blind faith. There was nothing saying Rory hadn’t found the GPS and deliberately led them on a wild-goose chase.

  The first major harbor they flew past was, according to John, that of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s capital that perched on the Caribbean Sea like any number of European coastal villages in Alicia’s memory—with cobblestones and whitewashed houses jammed together in disorganized splendor. Except this time there was the distinctive tropical flavor of palm trees and panga boats and an outdoor marketplace with cart after cart of large, gorgeous offerings of tropical fruit. The harbor was packed with boats of all sizes and even a smattering of floatplanes, but no Rory and no military activity whatsoever.

  They continued around the west, then the southern side of the island, where the landscape was dominated by sprawling resorts and gated communities of massive estates that Alicia assumed were vacation homes for the world’s millionaires and billionaires.

  John was the first to spot the plane floating in a shallow inlet on the Caravelle Peninsula, rocking in the choppy surf, exactly where the GPS showed it to be. Only then did Alicia release the breath she’d been holding. They saw no sign of Rory, not that they were expecting to see him waving up at them from the pilot’s seat or from the nearby beach.

  “Don’t land here, and don’t slow down,” John said, dropping into the copilot’s chair. “If our quarry’s still nearby, he’ll bolt if he senses someone’s on his tail.”

  Alicia angled her head for a last look behind them as they flew past. “It looks like he tied it to a mooring buoy, then swam to shore. Maybe he’s planning on returning.”

  The swim in the salt water must have been excruciating for Rory’s gunshot wound, or at least Alicia could hope.

  Harry huffed. “This whole area will be battling hurricane force conditions in the next couple days. My plane will be destroyed if we don’t get it out of there.”

  “Then that’s what we need to do,” Alicia said.

  In the next cove, Harry brought the plane down. With the wind and rough surf, the landing had Alicia visualizing emergency evacuation procedures for sinking planes, but thankfully it didn’t come to that. There were no mooring buoys in this deserted cove, so Harry ran the boat aground and staked a rope from the plane into the dry sand. It would probably hold if the wind didn’t worsen or change directions, but leaving the plane like that for any length of time would be a huge gamble.

  “Harry, you stay with this plane. Inside it, in case Rory’s nearby and comes to investigate. John and I need to make sure the area’s safe before we call for a tow.”

  “Like hell I will. I’m coming with you. That’s my plane he took and he has to answer to me.”

  Before she could think better of it, Alicia turned to Harry and unbuttoned her shirt low enough that the tops of her bra cups showed. So did the puckered, jagged scar in the center of her chest that still looked angry and damaging. The mark of her vengeance. She didn’t look at John because she couldn’t stand to see how the scar affected him. But she felt his stare. “Rory Alderman might have stolen your plane, but he did this to me. And this is what he has to answer for. Trust me when I tell you that he won’t be getting away
with anything.”

  Harry nodded and looked as though, for the first time, he understood the kind of dangerous criminal they were dealing with. He held up his hunting rifle. “You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m coming after you.”

  The inlet Rory landed in was bordered on the side closest to the mooring buoy by a thick, unstable-looking rock jetty and the other by a white sand beach that was the backyard of several closed beachfront bars and what looked like a time-share complex. No one was on the beach, and no time-share employees, locals or tourists were in sight as far as Alicia could see in any direction. Shielding her face from the bits of sand flying in the wind, she followed John along the tree line. It hadn’t started raining yet, but she could smell it coming in the thick, damp air.

  The plane looked empty. The side door was unlatched and swung open and closed with the rhythm of the waves. She stopped at the base of the jetty, the toe of her boot inches from three red-brown drops. “I’ve got blood here.”

  She scanned the length of the jetty, picking out a dozen other blood drops. Rory’s leg had to be killing him. Because of that, he couldn’t have gone far without transportation, unless he stole a car from the time-share, convinced some unsuspecting local to give him a ride, or flagged down a cab, which didn’t seem likely because not a single car had passed on the frontage road the whole time they’d been there. She also doubted he’d stolen a car. That had been a risky, high-profile move on St. Croix that Alicia would bet he wouldn’t try again unless he had no other options because whoever he stole it from would likely report it, creating yet another trail for any number of the people and organizations hunting him to follow.