by Mark Stone
Her eyes, sunken in, seemed to brighten a little when she saw Kate come in.
"Thank God," the woman said, her voice scratchy and low. "I was afraid you had been, that your fiancé was—”
"We're fine," Kate answered, her voice firm and distant enough to keep out the worry she was feeling about Chloe's condition. She sat in a green chair at the foot of the hospital bed and placed a hand on the railing. "I need to be honest with you though, Chloe. Anchor isn't my fiancé. He's my partner."
The word stuck in her throat as it drifted out into the world. Calling someone like Anchor her partner, someone who had no training and, in her opinion, had done a lot to endanger his first mission with her, was akin to treason. It was easier and infinitely more understandable than the truth though. So that was what she went with.
"Your partner?" Chloe asked, her eyes narrowing.
Kate took a deep breath, steadying herself for what was sure to be the steady stream of questions that would come after she explained herself. "My real name is Katherine Cross. I'm a detective, Chloe. I've investigating the string of bank robberies that have been going on in the city."
"Bank robberies?" Chloe asked. "Right. I heard about those. The Wonderful Gang, right?"
"The Willful Guild, but yes," Kate answered. "I think the people in your bakery, the ones dressed all in black, were them."
"What?" Chloe asked, jutting upward so suddenly that it pulled at one of the tubes sticking into her palm, running it right out.
"Dammit," Kate said, standing and moving toward the woman. Clear liquid dripped out of the tube and onto the floor, and a trickle of blood fell down Chloe's palm. "Stay still. I'll get a nurse."
"Screw a nurse!" Chloe said, her voice louder than it had been before. "I heard about those people on the news. They're dangerous, and now you're telling me they were in my bakery? What the hell for? Did they want to rob me? I don't make that much money." She shook her head. "I don't make near that much money."
"It's not about robbing you, Chloe," Kate said, still looking down at the woman's palm and trickle of blood running down it. "The guild have been taking people, plucking them up and forcing them to help them commit their robberies."
"Yeah," Chloe answered. "I saw that. There was one woman; she had a sniper rife trained on her forehead. It was terrifying."
"Yes, it was," Kate agreed. "It has to stop." She looked back up at Chloe pensively. "Especially considering—”
"Oh God," Chloe interjected, her eyes wide. "They weren't after my money, were they? You think they were after me."
"I'm sorry," Kate said. “The ironic part is, I think if you wouldn’t have been so selfless and thrown yourself in front of that knife for Patrick, they’d have taken you right then and there. I’m betting he stabbed you by accident and panicked. Of course, that won’t stop them from coming back for you.”
"Why?" Chloe balked. "I'm nothing. I'm nobody. I'm barely a small business owner." She rolled her eyes. "I mean, another couple of months like the last few, and I won't even be that anymore. Did they just choose me at random? Am I just that unlucky?"
Kate thought about that for a second, but just a second. Maybe Chloe was unlucky. She had definitely been through enough to have reason to believe it, but that wasn't what this was about. The Willful Guild chose her on purpose, for a reason, and it was time for Kate to try to get to the bottom of why.
"Chloe, what can you tell me about your husband?" Kate asked gently, looking down at the woman.
"My husband?" Chloe asked, her face turning down in immediate, obvious, and heart wrenching pain. "He's dead."
Kate had to fight the instinct to lean down and hug the woman, but fight it she did. She needed to be professional.
"Yes. I'm sorry to hear that," Kate said. "What can you tell me about what happened before he died? He went out on a ship, right? He went searching for the—”
"The Jewels of Pascal," Chloe said, her tone taking on a dreadful tint. It was a lot like the tone Kate's own voice took on whenever she spoke of those damned artifacts. "He wanted to photograph them," Chloe said. "He was an underwater photographer by trade. He loved it, seeing things that no one else had seen and bringing those things to the world through his pictures. He said it was important, that it brought the impossible into people's lives and that people needed a—”
"Needed a little impossible to get through the day," Kate said, her voice cracking as she finished the sentence.
Every time she thought of treasure she thought of her father. For her, they went hand in hand. Thinking of her father often brought the emptiness she felt the day he died and that brought tears that she trained herself to suppress.
"You've heard that before?" Chloe asked, her eyes narrowing.
"My-my father used to say that," Kate said, remembering all the times he'd said that exact sentence. "It's an explorer's motto. He used to have it carved into wooden plaque in his study."
"Your father is an explorer too?" Chloe asked.
"He was," Kate answered, deciding not to add the fact that he had died going after the very same artifacts Chloe's husband had.
Growing up she always thought her father had the coolest job, but as she got older she realized the dangers that came along with it. He feared nothing and that put the fear of God in her.
"I'm sorry too then," Chloe sighed, reading Kate's face. "It's hard to lose the people we love, especially if it's unnecessary." She shook her head. "I loved my husband more than anything in the world, and I accepted every part of him. That didn't mean I understood them though." She swallowed hard. "Throwing yourself into danger at every turn, it's insanity. You know, I asked him not to go on that stupid ship the day before he left. I just had a bad feeling. He didn't listen though." She looked up at Kate. "We were having problems, marital problems. I hoped we'd make our way through it but, when I asked him to stay and work on things, he told me he needed to do this. He said he needed to find himself alone and then, hopefully, that would lead him back to me." She blinked back tears. "But it didn't, did it?"
"Maybe," Kate said, pursing her lips.
"What do you mean?" Chloe asked.
"The jewels," Kate said. "They're on the mainland. They're in Vero Beach."
"What?" Chloe asked, obviously stunned. "How?"
"I'm not sure," Kate admitted. "But they've been showing up during these robberies. They're on the victims." She knelt down, readying herself to ask a sensitive question. "Do you think it's possible your husband didn't die out there, Chloe? Do you think he might have made it back with the jewels and decided to make a life for himself without you? You said yourself he wasn't sure about your future together. Could he have—”
"Yes," Chloe said, her eyebrows knitting painfully. "He could have left me, but he wouldn't have left the rest of his family, and he sure as hell wouldn't start robbing banks. My husband was a good man. He worked his entire life to give his family a better life, and he did it the right way. He came from nothing, you see. He grew up so poor, and he never resorted to anything like stealing. He worked hard, and he wanted to do better for his family. That was why I hired Patrick after he died, because I wanted to carry that on as best I could. I wanted to—”
"Patrick?" Kate asked, standing upright. "Patrick is your husband's family? I assumed he was yours."
"No," Chloe said. "He's my husband's little brother." She shrugged. "They were always so close. Sometimes I thought he cared more about Patrick than he ever did about me."
Kate's mind spun as her body tensed. What if the guild hadn't been after Chloe? What if she'd gotten stabbed because she had been in the way? What if they were after Patrick this entire time?
That meant the boy and Anchor were in their crosshairs.
"Oh," Kate stammered. "Oh God."
Chapter 15
The world spun as Anchor worked his way back to consciousness. His head was pounding and his heart was racing. The airbag had gone off. That must have meant there had been an accident, but how?
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br /> He pulled at his brain, trying to reach the memory of what had happened leading up to this, of where he had been and whom he had been with. It hurt like the rest of him, but it came slowly. He was down a long lane. He was with Patrick, the bumbling boy who worked for Chloe at the now decimated bakery. He was dropping him off at home, all safe and sound after the hell he had just gone through.
And now this. Now his head was pressed against an airbag. His eyes were shut and his throat was dry. He didn't even want to imagine what sort of damage had been done to his cherry red convertible.
A man could only take so much in one day.
He swallowed, wrestling with himself as he tried to open his eyes.
Then there was a scream. A throaty yell cut through the fog in his brain. It was thick, loud, and afraid.
And it was calling his name.
"Anchor!" The voice screamed. "Anchor, help me!"
Anchor's eyes flung open as he recognized the voice. It was the boy. It was Patrick, and something was happening to him.
Blinking clarity into his line of sight, his head jutted toward the direction the boy's plea sounded from. As he turned, he saw the wreckage of his car. He hadn't gotten hit from the back as he'd expected. It was from the front. The force of it had shattered his windshield and crumpled the entire front of his car.
There was more to it than that though. This was a dead-end drive, a path which ended at Patrick's weathered trailer. That meant the huge black truck which plowed into Anchor's car had been waiting for them here.
His eyes focused on Patrick and he was only a little surprised by who he saw. Three of the four black clad figures from the bakery stood around the boy. Two of them had either of his arms, pulling him toward the large black truck while the third figure held a pistol in Anchor's direction.
For a moment, he felt like he was watching a horror movie, but then he snapped out of it. He had to do something to save the young boy. He had so much ahead of him. He had dreams to make come true and Anchor was going to do everything in his power to help him.
"Not going to start with the vintage stuff this time?" Anchor asked, his voice weaker than he would have hoped for.
"Get out of the car," the figure said flatly. Anchor was surprised by how light the voice was. This sounded like a woman, which shouldn't have surprised him. After all, the figure was shorter than the others, and there was no reason a woman couldn't be involved in this. Still, Anchor had always imagined bank robberies were more of a men's thing.
"What happened to your friend? I'm guessing he didn't like the pointy end of my knife," Anchor said, plastering on his cocky grin. Sure, he was ten different shades of concerned, but that didn't mean he had to let the guild know as much. He had to keep his wits about him. Otherwise, this could all go even further south than it already had.
"Get out of the car," the woman repeated. "Otherwise, I'm going to blow a hole in his head."
She pointed the pistol over to Patrick, who was still kicking and screaming as they pulled him toward the truck, which was irritatingly unaffected from its close encounter with Anchor's car.
The boy instantly stopped resisting, his face dropping and his eyes going wide as he saw the point of the gun.
"Oh, my good God," he muttered.
"Stop!" Anchor said, glaring over at the boy. "She's not going to shoot you."
He knew as much. If the Willful Guild was here, it meant he had screwed up. He had either missed something about what they were doing, or he was wrong about who was the most important person in the photographer's life. He had naturally assumed it was his wife. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe Patrick was more important to him. Chloe said he was family. Maybe he was her husband's family.
A spike of guilt shot through Anchor. He was responsible for this. He should have known. He should have been prepared. Either way, it didn't matter. Whatever the connection to the photographer, they wanted Patrick. They weren't going to just kill him.
"Don't test me, Mr. Anchorage," the woman said, her body as still as a statue.
"I wouldn't dream of it," he answered. "Are you a fan? If so, I'm pretty sure I can get you an autograph."
She shot at the ground in front of Patrick, narrowly missing his feet. The boy screamed and rattled around, trying and failing to free himself of the grip of the figures who held him.
"Enough!" Anchor said, his jaw tightening. "I'll get out of the damned car."
Anchor did as he was told, moving out of the car slowly.
"Hands up," the woman said, her pistol still pointed to the boy. "Eyes up too. I don't want that resourceful mind of yours spinning too hard. It might have helped you off of the Caribbean, but today it'll only serve to get you killed."
Anchor's mind flashed back to the Caribbean, to a day when he'd used an old tire and a set of tubing at the end of a can of Fix a Flat to create a makeshift air tank and scuba system.
"I knew you were a fan," Anchor said, raising his hands as he walked around the backside of the wreckage of his car.
He heard his phone go off on his side. Looking down, he saw it was Kate's number calling him and that, judging from the number in parentheses beside her name, the woman had called him five other times while he had been unconscious. Since that couldn't have been over a minute or two, it was obvious to Anchor she was frantic. She must have figured out what was going on, which either meant she was on her way to him now or she'd sent backup. Either way, Anchor needed to stall. He needed to buy himself and Patrick enough time to get them out of here.
Luckily, his years of yapping for the camera made him just the right choice to spew time filler.
"Eyes up!" The woman with the gun yelled. "And don't even think about answering that phone."
"I had a hell of a time that day," he said, settling in front of the woman and not even attempting to go for his phone. If he was right, Kate already knew he was in danger. Not picking up would do just as much to verify that as screaming into the phone would. "Crashed right into a sandbar, if I remember correctly. Completely screwed up my rotor."
"Anchor!" Patrick yelled.
Anchor turned quickly and instinctively to find the boy had been heaved upward and was being placed in the backseat of the four-door truck.
"There's no need for that," Anchor said. "He's a kid, just a boy. You want to make waves, you really want to make a splash, then you let that kid go. You take me." Anchor swallowed hard. "You send me strutting into some bank, handsome as the devil with a bomb strapped to my chest, and I promise you your name will be on every newscast from here to the Virgin Islands." His hands balled into fists in the air. "I'm a celebrity, guys. That's got to do better to spread whatever message it is you're trying to send."
"The fact that you don't know what the message is only serves to prove it's not for you," the woman said. "We have a very specific audience, Mr. Anchorage, and not only are you not in it, you also can't help us reach it." She shook her black clad head. "You know that. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been at that bakery today."
"Where did you get the Jewels of Pascal?" Anchor asked. "How the hell did you find them?"
She chuckled loudly. "Why do you ask that question, Mr. Anchorage? Is it because you never could?" She stepped forward. Moving the barrel of the gun from Patrick to Anchor himself. "Better men than you have tried to find the jewels and failed, but not all of them, Mr. Anchorage. Two men didn't fail. One, because he was better than the rest, and the other, because he knew where to look."
"Why are you doing this?" Anchor asked. "These people have suffered enough. They've lost the people closest to them in the whole world. Now you're going to put them through further hell? For what? For money?"
"This isn't about money, and it isn't about them," the woman answered. "If you were thinking clearly, you'd see that. This is about evening the stakes, about taking from them what was taken from us. Blood was spilled for this treasure, Mr. Anchorage, and that has to be made right. The Mayans demand it, and so does fate." She chuckled again.
“The words led us to where we needed to be, like a beacon hidden in plain sight. Only the worthy would find them, only the true believers would understand them. He knew that so, when we found him, he knew we were his people, his guild.”
A siren blared through the air. It was either Kate or the backup she'd sent. Either way, it meant the guild was out of time.
"Too bad we can't chat more, Mr. Anchorage. I'd love to see the look on your face when you finally understand what's really going on," the woman said.
With a swift and deft move, she flipped the gun in her hand. She brought the butt of it up on Anchor's head, knocking him hard across the temple with it.
With an oomph, he crumpled to the ground.
For the second time in mere minutes, sleep engulfed him.
Chapter 16
By the time Kate got to the lot at the end of what seemed like a needlessly long and narrow path, everything had already gone down. Anchor's car was a steaming wreck, the Willful Guild had already absconded with Patrick, taking him to God knows where, and leaving Anchor with a knot on his head and a heaviness in his heart.
"You okay?" Kate asked, slamming the door of her unmarked vehicle and looking at her would be partner with a surprising amount of concern on her face.
Anchor looked over at her from the back of an open ambulance. There was a cold compress on his head, which he tossed forcefully to the ground as he stood up.
"Fine," he muttered, shooting daggers with his eyes at the EMTs perched around him. "I couldn't convince these jackasses not to take me to hospital unless I took that stupid wet rag."
"It's a compress," one of the EMTs said, her tone tired enough to let Kate know this wasn't the first time she'd had to make the distinction to Anchor.
"It's a rag," the reality star said as he made his way to Kate. "I screwed up, Cross," he said, pain flashing in his eyes as he winced at the woman. His mouth tightened and his arms folded over his chest. "I screwed up royally, and this is what happened."