Barefoot Bay: Wild on the Rocks (Kindle Worlds)

by Kiersten Hallie Krum

  “Don’t forget the vests. Look, this is a high-class resort. The owners don’t get excited having a lot of guns on campus on a regular basis. Once everyone was safely off this morning, I sent the excess ordinance back to my office in Naples where we store more stock. That’s what we’ve got. Make it work.” McBain glanced around the office. “Where’d your ex-wife go?”

  “Head,” Jasper muttered, his focus fixed on stripping down one of the pistols until the speaking silence from the other two men finally penetrated. “Fuck,” he snarled, checking his watch. Quinn had been gone for fifteen minutes and even she didn’t take that long. He tossed the gun on the table and lunged for the hall. But the open bungalow front door next to the hall one for the head told him the thing he’d feared all weekend had finally happened at the absolute worst possible moment.

  Against all he’d hoped for, she had left him again.

  Quinn was gone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Giving up drinking is the easiest thing in the world. I know, because I’ve done it thousands of times.

  —Mark Twain

  Jasper prowled around McBain’s office in a killing fugue. “Why the hell am I still here? I need to go after her.”

  “Hang on, Roy,” Twist urged. “Gotta figure out where to go first.”

  “I know where to go. She’ll head back to that shitheel apartment first. Quinn’s not going anywhere without her stuff.”

  “You’re assuming she left on her own.”

  “I know Quinn. You heard her. The running scenario was her favorite option. She got her shot to give me the slip and took off.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Not like it’s my first time, Twist,” he scoffed, his words so bitter, he could taste it. “When that woman wants to leave, she goes.”

  But Twist was shaking his head. “Queen, I know this shit dicks with your head, but trust me, that woman didn’t want to go anywhere you weren’t. Far more likely she got jumped.”

  “From inside McBain’s office? In the middle of the damn resort?! Come on, man. I don’t need to be handled.”

  What he needed was to move, get the hell out of this fucking resort and find the men who were trying to kill his wife.

  Then they’d be done. He was done trying to hold onto a woman who’d made it perfectly clear she didn’t want to be held if it didn’t involve and orgasm. Christ, he should’ve known it would end like this; he did know, but had to hope they’d both learned something in the year apart to change their ending.

  But here he was again, alone, wondering where the hell she went, scared to death and pissed the hell off at the same time.

  Fuck that shit. He’d give her a different ending. Given the sitch with the Russians, he couldn’t leave her ass hanging out there, but he that was all he’d do. She wanted to run out on him when the shit hit the fan? She could keep running this time, for all he cared.

  This would be the last time he ever went after her. Once he was sure she was alive and safe, they were done.

  I can’t unlove you.

  The words were so clear, Jasper lurched around to double check Quinn hadn’t returned. But it was only him and Twist in the office.

  The moment I saw you, I knew you were it for me.

  Jasper dropped into the office chair with an audible thud.

  Christ, it was like she was right there, whispering those words in his ear, reminding her of their sweetness. Of how it’d broke his heart.

  And then I had you and it was, it was—everything! You were everything!

  Jesus.

  She was the best thing to happen to him. He hadn’t lied when he’d said it. Even with her head all fucked up, her instincts twisted, and her trust a daily battle to win, he was in love with her and would be for the rest of his life no matter how many times she left him.

  Nothing in the world holds a candle to you.

  He’d meant every word. He had to believe he wasn’t the only one turned inside out by all they’d shared that weekend.

  He had to believe she meant it when she said she loved him.

  God knew he did.

  What did it say about him if, the moment there was an opportunity for doubt, he threw her and everything they had together to the wolves? If he expected Quinn to trust him with her shit, he had to trust her to stick. Even when everything pointed to her bugging out again, he had to trust that she wouldn’t leave.

  He had to trust Quinn.

  I didn’t fall for you on a whim. I did it forever.

  Fuck.

  He was a son of a bitch.

  “She wouldn’t leave.”

  “Sorry?” Twist asked.

  I meant us to be forever.

  “She didn’t leave,” Jasper repeated more strongly. “She wouldn’t do that. Not again.” Dazed, he looked up at his best friend. “She loves me. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Well, halle-fucking-lujah,” Twist crowed. “’Bout damn time you figured that out, brother. Thought I’d have to pound it into you before we were done.”

  At that moment, McBain burst back through the door. “Got it?” Twist asked sharply. McBain threaded a silver disc into his laptop. The flat screen flickered and filled with the grainy black-and-white images from the parking lot security camera. McBain hit a button and the image fast forwarded until he hit a time stamp marked twenty minutes earlier.

  Jasper watched, a coil of dread twisting in his belly as Quinn was dragged into frame by the golf bag-toting man Jasper had nearly run down. Her hands were zip tied behind her back and he kept her gagged with his hand as he guided her along the edge of the lot to a Cadillac Escalade with its engine already running.

  Jasper stepped up until he could almost touch the screen, automatically cataloging clues that would help him track the man who dared put hands on his wife. “How the hell did he get her that far and no one stopped him?” he muttered almost to himself.

  “You can be sure I will find out,” McBain snarled. “Rossi tests the security on Casa Blanca on a regular if unpredictable basis. There’s no way that asswipe should’ve gotten that far without tripping someone. Hell, he shouldn’t have made it to the offices without being questioned.”

  Onscreen, the enforcer’s partner leapt out of the passenger seat to inject Quinn with a sedative. As she went out, he took her from the fake golfer and muscled her into the third-row of the Escalade. The three men continued to watch until the Escalade sped out of sight. McBain rewound the film and hit pause in time to freeze an image in the center of the screen of Quinn’s terror-filled face as the partner stuck a needle in her neck.

  “Where the hell did they take her?”

  “Did you get that tracker on her?”

  For a moment, Jasper stared at his friend without comprehension for a moment before he remembered affixing the GPS tracker Twist slipped him to the back of Quinn’s neck before she’d left McBain’s office.

  “Holy shit, I forgot.”

  “I’ll get you a cell phone tuned to the tracker and a set of car keys,” McBain said, already halfway out the door.

  Jasper couldn’t look away from the frozen image of Quinn’s face. Twist’s hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed.

  “We’ll get her back, Roy,” he promised quietly.

  “And then I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” Jasper vowed. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Quinn came to when the Escalade hit a bump, bouncing her head off the window where it rested. “Ugh,” she groaned, or at least tried to, but her mouth was filled with too much cotton to make noise. With effort, she licked her dry lips, pulling up what little saliva she could manage to make her voice work.

  It looked like she’d been stashed in the third-row seats of a large, luxury SUV. She shifted in her seat, the expensive leather creaking beneath her, which alerted the men in the front seat. All of a sudden, the light over Quinn’s head flicked on showing her the man who turned around in the passenger seat to look at her. “Oh,” she croaked
and then rubbed her lips together before trying again. “It’s you.”

  “You have been given a sedative,” Thug One told her in a flat voice as though he couldn’t care less about her if he tried. “It is natural to feel disoriented at first.”

  “Does that mean you haven’t kidnapped me, and this is a drug-induced dream?”

  “You are not that disoriented.” If he didn’t sound so completely removed, she would’ve thought he’d made a joke.

  But then, she was drugged outta her skull.

  He held out a bottle of water. Quinn reached for it only to be snapped back by the ties on her wrists that bound her to the seat.

  She rattled the plastic cuffs. “This might be taking automobile safety too far.”

  Thug One gave her a look, then, at a Russian directive from the driver, climbed into the second row of seats. Quinn absently noted the quality of his suit when he took a straw from his inside pocket and stuck it in the opened bottle.

  “You should know,” she said around grateful slurps. “I was going to pee when your pal grabbed me from the bungalow. Dunno how long we’ve been driving, but going by my bladder, you may not want to pour more water in me without first getting to a rest stop.”

  “We will stop soon enough,” the driver said. She blanched at the sound of his voice, higher than expected in a tight tenor that would’ve done a men’s choir proud.

  Interestingly enough, Thug One didn’t seem to like his partner’s travel plans if the scowl he failed to smother was anything to go by. “I remember you from Atlantic City,” she said to him with a cautious flick of her eyes to the driver. “You told the other guy not to kill me.”

  Immediately, his face was wiped blank. “Our orders were to retrieve you. A death in so public a place would not have pleased my boss.”

  “Someone told me the other guy was murdered.”

  Not even a flicker of reaction marred his expression. “He failed in his duties. The consequence was high.”

  “Yeesh. That’s some kind of performance review.”

  “It was an insult to my boss’s reputation to have a soldier incapable of retrieving a lowly, untrained female.”

  Quinn resisted the urge to roll her eyes. With the drugs she’d been given, they might decide to stay locked in an upright position. “Just sayin’. Not like you catch a bullet for messing up the Starbucks order.”

  “Niet. No Starbucks order is a matter of life and death.”

  “Clearly, you’ve never met a coffee addict recently switched to decaf.” When he continued to show no reaction, she peered up at Thug One through hazy vision. “Have you considered you Bratva people might take life a teeny bit too seriously?”

  He shot her a look from under his lashes and Quinn couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or amused. Worse, she wasn’t sure which one worked better in her favor.

  She knew she was being far too flip for the circumstances. The ball of terror that’d lodged in her throat the moment she’d been grabbed in the bungalow had yet to dislodge.

  She was in serious shit.

  But the lingering effects of whatever they’d shot her up with included a cocoon of fuzz in her head that muted the edge of fear and gave courage to her tongue.

  From the look the driver shot her in the rear-view mirror, he’d come to the same conclusion. “You are carelessly bold for a woman enjoying her last moments,” he noted.

  “You should see me after too many tequila shots.” A petrifying thought burned off the last of the fuzz and she reeled back in the seat for what little distance she could get before asking, “Are you—are you Palach?”

  His mouth twisted, but the driver answered before he could. “I am The Hangman,” he declared.

  “Koo koo kachoo,” she said and a strangled sound came from Thug One. Ignoring him for the moment, Quinn caught Palach’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. His were a stunning winter blue that reminded Quinn of a Nat Geo show she’d watched once about Antarctica. Palach’s eyes were the exact color of the sky over the ice-flow.

  And as cold. Beautiful as they were, his eyes were entirely void of emotion.

  These Bratva, they have no souls.

  Quinn flicked her gaze back to Thug One who suddenly didn’t seem so bad for being a remote automaton. She scooted the few inches her bounds allowed so his body blocked hers from view in the rear-view mirror. He looked down at her and she could tell he knew exactly what she was doing and more, how useless.

  Hurry up, Jasper.

  * * *

  Jasper hurried the sedan up the interstate. He wove in between three minivans in two lanes and nearly clipped a Honda before finding an open pocket of road and slamming the accelerator to the floor. Beside him, Twist swayed and jerked with the car’s movements. His attention was fixed on the cell in his hands that beeped with updates from the GPS tracker. “They just hit the outskirts of Tampa. Looks like they’re headed for the south part of the city.”

  The console rang with an incoming call. Twist hit the button on the radio, and McBain’s voice filled the cabin. “I talked to Gregg,” he said with no preamble. “His FBI connection, an Agent Dougherty, says they’ve had no movement on the boss man in New York, this Sokolov who hired the Hangman. His working theory is they’ll look for a place in the area where they can knock her off and bring proof of the kill back to New York. Less chance of getting caught with Quinn en route.”

  The car was quiet but for the beeping on Twist’s phone. “You get that?” McBain asked.

  “We got it,” Twist confirmed. “GPS puts them entering south Tampa.”

  They could hear McBain pecking away at his keyboard. “Hang on, I’m getting something from that FBI agent. Shit, Sokolov owns a piece of a shipping company that works out of a free trade zone right there in Tampa. Queen, these FTZs are like the Wild West. Shipping conglomerates pretty much have free rein.”

  “Explains why they hauled ass to Tampa rather than doing her here.”

  “I can see that,” McBain agreed. “Long as their goods never leave the zone, they’re not subject to import taxes. There’s private security, but these foreign-based conglomerates basically do whatever they want so long as it’s stays on the FTZ. This Palach could kill her in one of Sokolov’s packing centers and no one would stop him. I’m sorry, man, but I don’t know how to get you in.”

  “If it’s an FTZ, it’s got to be on the water,” Jasper interjected.

  “Yeah, it butts up on an estuary that feeds into the gulf.”

  There was a flash of white teeth from the passenger seat, and he knew Twist had followed the bouncing ball. As long as there was water, there was a way. “We’ll get in,” Jasper said.

  “We’re ten minutes on their six at the rate we’re going,” Twist informed McBain.

  “All right, man. Good luck. Hope the next call is you telling me she’s in hand.”

  “Keep a line open to that agent,” Jasper ordered. “We may need an FBI friend before this night is done.”

  “Yeah, to get our asses outta jail,” Twist muttered as he hit the button to disconnect the call. He wasn’t wrong. “Take the next exit,” he instructed with a glance at the cell. Jasper yanked the wheel right and sped across traffic to a chorus of horns he ignored. “We’ll make it. We’ll get her back, brother.”

  Jasper didn’t reply. If he did, he’d have to acknowledge the fact that they were likely too late. He’d have to brace himself for the real possibility he’d find Quinn dangling from a gibbet, her wide smile spread in a death grimace that would haunt him the rest of his sad, sorry life.

  For a searing moment, he understood what drove Maverick to kill himself. Jasper looked at a future that didn’t include Quinn and knew there was nothing there to make it worth living.

  He blew through the traffic light at the foot of the exit ramp and locked away any thought of being too late. There was no room for doubt, no time to second-guess.

  There was only Quinn.

  * * *

  “What is this place?�
�� Quinn asked, craning her neck to peer out the tinted window at the stacks and stacks of shipping containers through whose rows they now drove.

  “This is a free trade zone,” Thug One informed her. “It is an area where international trade can happen without the annoying influence of the intrusive United States. Trade…and other things.”

  “Are you…trading me for something?”

  It surprised her to see his face was not unkind. “No.”

  This was it. Soon as they reached wherever it was they were going, Palach was going to string her up and that would be it. No more crazy whims. No more wild adventures.

  No more Jasper.

  It never occurred to her that Jasper wouldn’t find her in time. But, as Palach pulled up in front of a long warehouse, Quinn had to accept the future she’d begun to see for her and Jasper—the hope he’d brought back to her life—was a wild run he’d have to finish without her.

  Tears clogged her throat. “This isn’t the sort of adventure I’m usually up for,” Quinn confessed to Thug One as he incongruously helped her from the Escalade.

  He had the needle at her neck in the next second. “No, please,” she begged even as she felt it pierce her flesh.

  “It is a lower dose to keep you from fighting,” he told her. “It will make this easier for you.”

  Already her limbs felt too heavy and the cotton was back in her mouth. “I don’t want to sleep through my last minutes.”

  “You will not sleep,” he assured her. “You simply will not care.”

  His fingers tight on her arm, Thug One led her into the warehouse. Though her vision was once again fuzzy, Quinn made out metal conveyors that lined the massive room in a maze of sorting apparatus. “What do they sort here?”

  “Cigars and beer, mostly.”

  That explained the pungent scent lingering in the air. Though at this point, that could be her flop sweat.

  Thug One nudged her along in Palach’s wake. In her stupor, Quinn’s ankles crossed over each other. She stumbled into one of the conveyors with a loud clatter that brought Palach’s head around to check on them.