A quick glance through the fog told her The Breton was not in the harbor. A part of her had hoped Shane had gotten control of Tex and that his boat and had passed them somehow, reaching port first.
Instead, as she got to the nearest dock, she saw a man waiting at the end closest to land. Gillian recognized him—the same white-haired guy who’d been working in the harbormaster’s office the day they first sailed into Main-à-Dieu—Ricky something-or-other. He waved as she killed the Zodiac engine and tied it to the pier; then he waited some more while she helped Jagger to his feet. Jag was wobbly but upright, so conditions were improving.
“Where’s your real boat?” Ricky held out a hand and pulled Jagger to the dock, then helped Gillian out. He might look on the far side of seventy and have a nasty-sounding cough, but the man’s grip was strong and steady. “Can’t believe you made it across the passage in that raft.”
“We ran into some trouble.” Gillian gave Jagger a warning look. No point in volunteering anything. Chances were good that everybody in Main-à-Dieu had heard the explosion when The Evangeline’s fuel tanks blew. But because of the fog, chances also were good that no one realized what had happened. “Our friend stayed to take care of it, so he’ll be in later.” At least she prayed that was true.
The man took off his baseball cap and scratched at the tuft of white hair that danced in the stiff wind like the tentacles of a geriatric medusa. “Old Chevy asked me to take you guys up to the lighthouse. Don’t much like goin’ up there—’specially after dark. Guess we better go inside and wait a while for your friend so I don’t have to do it twice.”
As much as she wanted to wait for Shane, Jagger needed Cleo and her nursing skills. “Thanks, but we really need to—”
“Won’t have to wait after all. That looks like him coming in…” The man stuck his cap back on his head and frowned. “No, that’s old Bill McCulloch’s boat, The Breton. He leased her out through the end of the month to a couple of folks came in ’bout the same time as you.”
Gillian’s heart thumped as she watched The Breton make its way past the second breakwater and head toward them, her focus honed on the pilothouse to see who was in charge—Tex or Shane. Its progress seemed impossibly slow, and the fog settled into an inconvenient line right over the window in front of the pilot.
Oh, thank God. Gillian closed her eyes and would’ve sunk to her knees with relief if she’d thought herself capable of getting back up. She couldn’t see Shane’s face, but she was pretty sure she recognized his silhouette. He’d pushed back his dive hood, but the guy piloting the boat sure looked to be wearing a drysuit. Neoprene wasn’t Tex’s style.
“Now, how did your friend get his hands on The Breton?” Rick mused. “Are those other guys friends of yours?”
Gillian shrugged. “Something like that.” Something like enemies. “Guess Shane had to leave The Evangeline out there.” Where it had probably finished sinking by now, joining the layers of other lost dreams at the bottom of the Atlantic.
As tired as she was, Gillian wanted nothing more than to run down the dock to meet Shane, to throw her arms around him, to kiss him until she was breathless. Instead, she crossed her arms and walked out to meet him with plans for a calm greeting and a quick explanation of the pending ride up to the lighthouse.
As soon as her gaze met his, though, she recognized pain and worry and something else, something that made him look away. Something that caused him to clench his jaw and tighten his fists. The same look he used to get before he’d finally told her about the diving accident that had almost destroyed him with guilt.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.” She stepped into him and slipped her arms around his waist. “Later, you’ll tell me what it is, and I’ll say it again. It doesn’t matter. As long as you’re safe.” Her one-sided hug stretched on for several seconds before she finally felt him relax and pull her against him. He smelled of the ocean. And blood.
“You’re hurt.” Gillian stepped back and noticed for the first time the darkening bruise next to his left eye, and the telltale red trickle down the side of his face.
“Not there. Here.” Shane held up his left arm and let out a hiss of pain. “I think Cleo has another bullet to dig out.”
Gillian’s breath caught. Not just a bullet. The whole underside of his arm was a mess of bloody flesh and shredded drysuit. She wasn’t sure even Cleo could handle that, but Gillian had learned not to underestimate their hostess.
“Cleo’s gonna be a busy woman.” She kept her voice light. “Come on. Mr. Ricky, the guy from the harbormaster’s office, is going to drive us to the lighthouse.”
“That should be interesting.” Shane held his left arm tight against him and walked beside her to the harbor-office parking lot. Ricky and Jagger had gone ahead and stopped next to a silver sedan, and Gillian was relieved to see it was a four door. She didn’t think anyone besides herself—and she was iffy—could climb into a backseat.
“Interesting how? The lighthouse is going to be interesting?” Gillian looked over at him, concerned that he was going into shock. No telling how much blood he’d lost.
“We’ll talk about it when we get there.” He focused on the ground and didn’t seem inclined to talk more, but Gillian had one more question that needed answering.
“Is Tex dead?”
Shane sighed. “I don’t have a fucking clue.”
Both Shane and Jagger remained silent on the drive to the lighthouse, which took more than a half hour, partly because Ricky drove like a snail and partly because of the fog. Gillian suspected their progress sans fog wouldn’t have gone any faster.
“So you’ve known Chevy and Cleo a long time?” Gillian tried to keep a semblance of conversation going from the backseat. Jagger sat up front, and Shane had slumped down next to her, his long legs pressing into the back of the passenger seat.
She saw Ricky glance at her in the rearview mirror. “Most of my life. Main-à-Dieu’s a small town. We like it that way.” He pronounced the town manadoo, and she understood why he liked it. Same reason she loved Levy County.
“Cleo and my wife, Keitha, are cousins,” he said. “We were more surprised than if a nor’easter had blown through in June when she married Chevy McKnight, the ornery old bastard.” The last words, he delivered with a great deal of affection. “’Course those two, well, they march to their own drummer, eh?”
“You have no idea,” Shane mumbled.
Gillian frowned at him before turning back to Ricky. “They’re a little eccentric, but I like them.”
And she did. It was ironic how Tex and his psychotic boss, who might or might not be the secretary of state, had brought together this disparate group of strangers who’d otherwise never have met, and yet, somehow, they’d become friends. If they made it through this, Gillian knew the friendships would last. They might be forged out of fear or coercion, but they were real. And some of them were more than friendships. What she felt for Shane was real, too.
The sedan slowed and then stopped at the path that led to the lighthouse. “Chevy told me not to drive through the gate. He also said you should wait on this side for Cleo to let you in.” Ricky shook his head. “I don’t even want to know what he’s up to, but I’d do what he says.”
“No worries about that.” Shane opened his car door and slid out. Gillian watched him a couple of seconds before opening her own door. If he had an issue with Chevy and Cleo McKnight, she hoped he kept it to himself. They needed the couple, eccentric or not.
As soon as Jagger’s door slammed shut and they were all out of his path, Ricky floored the sedan and drove away, his taillights disappearing quickly on the foggy mountain road.
“There you are; we were getting worried. Hold on a minute.” Cleo walked up the path toward them, jingling a set of keys. She wore dark jeans that were a few inches too short but somehow worked with her sturdy boots, and a bib apron was tied over her red sweater. “Glad you got up here before full dark set in.”
S
he unlocked a metal box attached to the inside of the gate and flipped a switch. “I’m turning off the electricity to the gate so you won’t get zapped when you come through. But…” She pointed to a spot about a foot off the ground.
Leaning over, Gillian finally saw a thin silver wire. “Is that a booby trap?”
“A tripwire,” Cleo said. “Goes all the way around the property. So make sure you step over it and don’t set it off.”
Jagger and Shane had also leaned over to look. “What happens if we set it off?” Jagger asked.
Cleo didn’t answer at first. “Well, some lights will flash on,” she finally said. “An alarm will go off. The lighthouse beacon will start turning. And Chevy will barrel out shooting first and asking questions as an afterthought.”
Holy cow. “Is this because of our situation?” Gillian hoped so, because this truly went beyond eccentric and into paranoid-delusional territory. Then again, the man did believe in aliens.
Cleo laughed. “Oh, no, the security system is always set up. We just don’t always turn it on.”
Tex had been right when he called this place a fortified lighthouse. Once they’d all passed the tripwire test and made it to the lighthouse’s single entrance, they found a steel security door Gillian didn’t remember seeing before. So Chevy had done some extra fortification.
Once inside, Cleo locked the security door and the main door. “Can’t be too careful. Let’s go upstairs now. Chevy has a surprise…” She got a good look at Shane and Jagger for the first time, her sharp eyes resting on Jagger’s face, then his shoulder, then Shane’s head, then his arm. “Before the surprise, looks like I need to put on my nurse’s hat. Second floor, boys. You know the way.”
Jagger gave Cleo a one-armed hug as he passed her, but Shane simply treated her to a hard look. What was up with him? Gillian hugged Cleo and mouthed a “thank you” before following them up the spiral stairs. It was a long climb, because neither man was moving very fast.
“Gillie, why don’t you go up to the third level and get these gentlemen some dry clothes?” Walking into what Cleo called her first-aid room, the older woman pointed Jagger to an armchair and steered Shane to a long wooden table. Last time Gillian had seen that table, Jagger had been laid out on it, getting a bullet removed.
A shard of guilt sliced through her. So many people had been hurt because of her, and yet she’d gone unscathed, at least physically. If she could’ve taken Shane’s place, she’d be there.
Speaking of whom, he had halted inside the door and leaned against the doorjamb, still giving Cleo the stink eye. “Hop up here, Shane,” Cleo said. “You’re going first.” She pulled out a pair of scissors and turned to look at Gillian. “Clothes?”
Gillian reluctantly edged past Shane to go back into the round central hallway where the spiral staircase led upward. She gave him a “play nice” look, but he ignored her. So she took her time going up the stairs, pausing halfway up to listen.
“I know you’ve got a few things to say, but you don’t know the whole story,” Cleo said. “So get your ass on the table and I’ll tell it to you.”
There was a pause, and then Cleo stuck her head out the door and raised her eyebrows at Gillian.
Right. Clothes.
Gillian climbed to the third floor and hung a right into the small bedroom she’d been sharing with Shane. Fatigue threatened to overwhelm her again. It seemed like a week since she and Shane had done the deepwater dive, not less than twelve hours. And what the heck was going on with Shane?
After retrieving running pants and a loose-fitting sweatshirt for him, the only thing she thought might go over his injured arm without hurting, she walked across the landing to Jagger’s room. He was as messy as Shane was neat; a virtual tsunami of clothes covered every surface except the floor—probably protected only because Jagger had limited space in his hiking pack.
She picked out the least-wrinkled pants and long-sleeved tee and grabbed his iPod on the way out. His phone, like hers and Shane’s, had been on The Evangeline. It probably lay in a bazillion pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic, waiting for some far-future diver to find it and wonder at its cultural significance.
Gillian returned to the stairs but heard voices coming from the lantern room above them. She’d assumed Chevy wasn’t home since Cleo had met them at the gate, but she definitely heard his voice—and another one, vaguely familiar, that she couldn’t place.
Climbing the stairs, she’d only planned to go far enough to eavesdrop, which seemed to have become her new hobby. She obviously wasn’t as quiet as she thought, though, because halfway up, Chevy’s voice rang out. “Might as well come on up instead’a standing there and breathing heavy.”
“I was not breathing…heavy.” Gillian stopped breathing at all when she rounded the top step and walked into the softly lit lantern room ringed by its wall of windows. Tonight, they showed only the black night sky. The scenery lay in the center of the room, duct-taped to a wooden chair. Son of Tex had a bruised face, a bloody smudge on his forehead, one eye swollen almost shut, and the other glaring at her as if she’d been the one beating on him.
Next to him stood Chevy, his deeply lined face grim and angry.
“Hi there, Gillie.”
Speechless, Gillian spun to see who’d spoke to her from behind the staircase. In the shadows, on the cushioned armchair that Cleo had described as her favorite, sat Harley.
CHAPTER 30
Shane kicked a chair out of his way en route to Cleo’s “exam table.” He wasn’t really mad at her so much as he was mad, period. They’d finally gotten somewhere with this dive and Chevy had screwed everything up playing cowboy. Jagger looked like death warmed over. Harley was missing. And his fucking arm hurt.
“Sit up here and stop acting like a brat.” Cleo patted the table, and Shane used his right arm to leverage himself up. That left arm wasn’t going anywhere. He’d held it stiff against his side for so long, he wasn’t sure he could move it.
After taking a look at his temple and declaring he’d live, Cleo took out a pair of scissors and cut the sleeve out of his drysuit—make that his fucking expensive drysuit—at the elbow. The neoprene splashed reddish-brown droplets of blood when it hit the white tile.
“I’m gonna cut this away at the shoulder and across the top,” she said as she worked the scissors. “Keep your arm still until I’m ready to pull your sleeve away from the bottom. Then we’ll see what we’re dealing with, eh?”
“We’re dealing with a guy who’s just undone everything we’ve accomplished in the last month,” he snapped. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”
She seemed impassive as she cut away the fabric of his suit’s upper sleeve, then sliced across the top so that only the fabric remaining was clamped to his side by his injured arm. She set the scissors on the edge of the table and picked up a stack of white bandages, probably for him to bleed all over.
When she looked up, her eyes were hard and angry. “And just what do you think you’ve accomplished in the last month, Shane Burke? You’ve still ended up at our door with your troubles, all because Chevy wouldn’t say “no” to his old friend Charlie. Without us, you’d have had no idea where to dive. No safe place to stay. And your friend Harley would probably end up dead.”
Harley? Shane frowned at her, trying to remember if they’d even mentioned Harley’s name when they were filling them in on the situation.
She nodded. “That’s right. Chevy saw the guy you call Tex leave The Breton this morning after you went out, so he went aboard to do some snooping around on your behalf.” She waved a pair of tongs an inch from his nose. “You hear that? On your behalf. When he found that Garrison man hitting your friend Harley, well, what would you want him to do? Sit down for tea? Have a little talk?”
She turned and pointed the tongs at Jagger, who’d risen and gotten halfway to the door. “Your friend will still be upstairs when you get rebandaged, so plant your ass back in that chair, Calvin.”
S
hane exchanged a shocked look with Jagger. If Cleo knew to call him Calvin, that definitely meant Harley was nearby.
“Will he be okay?” Shane swallowed down a lump of crow. “And I’m sorry. He did the right thing.” Garrison must be Son of Tex.
“Um-hm. Hold out your left arm and get ready to scream.”
Holy fucking son of a bitch. Despite clamping his jaw shut, Shane couldn’t stop a deep moan from escaping when Cleo ripped off the blood-soaked sleeve of neoprene. Its waterproof lining, despite being shredded by the bullet, had held in a surprising amount of blood, at least if the flood of crimson dripping off his arm was any indication.
The room swam in a film of gray so heavy it looked like the fog had spread inside the lighthouse.
“Whoa, now,” Cleo said from a distance. “Lie back before you faint on me.”
Faint was such an undignified word. Pass out or lose consciousness was much more manly. Shane let Cleo lower him onto his back on the table and only let a few tears slip out when she held his left arm aloft.
“This isn’t too bad.” She poured what felt like pure rubbing alcohol on the wound, and Shane gritted his teeth, fixing his gaze on a ceiling tile, determined not to make another pitiful whining sound. “Bullet just shaved off the bottom layer of subcutaneous fat.”
Shane narrowed his eyes and hazarded a look at her. He did not have subcutaneous fat. Much. Apparently he had a lot less of it now on his left arm. “How do you know it didn’t hit an artery—there are arteries in there.”
Cleo shook her head. “What babies men are. Good Lord, I always told Chevy if men had to give birth, the world’s population problem would clear up just like that.” Apparently finished torturing the wound with alcohol, she brought out a thick pack and some tape and began bandaging. “If that bullet had hit an inch higher and nicked the brachial artery, you’d have bled to death about”—she paused in her wrapping and looked at the ceiling, counting under her breath—“fifteen seconds after being hit.”
Lovely, Dark, and Deep (The Collectors) Page 27