In Rides Trouble: Black Knights Inc.

by Julie Ann Walker

  “Call it in,” he instructed, wondering why it sounded like he was talking through a tunnel.

  “That’s a pretty bad bump on your head, Boss,” Bill said, and when Frank turned to glance at him, the guy’s face looked all wonky. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  I am?

  “Frank?” Becky stepped toward him, her gorgeous brown eyes dark with worry inside a face that was as funky-looking as Bill’s.

  He didn’t care. She was still beautiful and, more importantly, she was safe. And when she said his name, Frank, in that dusky voice, he wanted to whoop with joy. Oh, how he’d missed the sound of her—

  Whoa.

  Why the hell was the deck suddenly rushing up to meet him?

  ***

  Wowza. Whoever came up with the expression, “falling like a ton of bricks,” must’ve seen something very similar to Frank’s nose dive into the Hamilton’s deck. Becky dropped to her knees beside him, calling his name, but he was out cold. Stone cold. The gash along his hairline leaked thick rivulets of dark blood all over his pale face and onto the deck.

  This was bad. This was real bad.

  Losing consciousness after a head injury was a sure sign of concussion, and she knew from the elementary medical training she’d received from Steady, a concussion could sometimes turn deadly. You could just slip into a sleep from which there was no return…

  “Frank,” she whispered his name, gently shaking his good shoulder as anguish burned up the back of her throat like nitric acid. “Wake up now, Frank. You’re too tough to let something like a bump on the head bring you down.”

  Nothing. Not so much as a twitch.

  Oh God. If he died while saving her, she’d never forgive herself. She’d never—

  No. No way. He wasn’t going out like that. Not the legendary Boss Knight.

  “Frank,” she nudged him harder, pressing the gauze pad Angel handed her against the deep cut on his forehead. The tears she’d been holding at bay for nearly a week finally burst through the emotional barriers she’d erected, flowing hot and salty down her cheeks as her racing heart threatened to shatter into a thousand little pieces.

  Looking at him lying there, so still and pale without the bright vigor that usually animated him, made her more scared than she’d ever been in her life—which was saying something considering mere moments before she took a header off the side of an oil tanker.

  Just when she was about to press a finger to his carotid to check for a pulse, his gray eyes fluttered open and lasered in on her. He lifted his good hand to rub at the swelling lump on the side of her cheek where her face had introduced itself to the Hamilton’s steel hull.

  “Are you okay?” he rasped.

  Are you okay…

  He was bleeding profusely, undoubtedly concussed, and that arm was certainly dislocated if not broken, and he was asking her if she was okay.

  God love the man. She certainly did…

  Hiccupping on the tears clogging her throat and running down her cheeks, she managed, “Thanks to you I am.”

  He blinked at her, then frowned.

  “You’re crying.” He said it like one might say, I believe in unicorns, with a heavy dose of incredulity.

  “Yep.” She wiped her runny nose on her forearm—gross, but she was without another option. “I do that sometimes.” Way more often than she’d ever admit to anyone, especially him.

  “Don’t.”

  “You can’t tell me whether I can or can’t cry, Frank. Geez.” Although, she was so glad to see him awake and talking, she couldn’t quite imbibe the comment with her usual level of sarcasm.

  “Nothing to shed tears over, woman,” he told her, wincing when she lifted the gauze to check on his cut. The bleeding had slowed. Angel handed her another pad, and she pressed the fresh gauze to his forehead. “You lived, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not crying over my near face-plant into the ocean, you big, dumb dill-hole. I’m crying because you scared me to death when you fainted.”

  His lips twisted. “Men don’t faint. I just…I…uh…lost consciousness.”

  “God, whatever,” she huffed, but inwardly she was smiling.

  It didn’t matter that he was determined to keep their relationship on a strictly professional level. It didn’t matter that most times she irritated the ever-lovin’ hell out of him and he had no qualms about letting her know it. It didn’t even matter that he kept a girlfriend up in Lincoln Park. What mattered, all that mattered, was that he was alive. Because she couldn’t stand the thought of a world without him…

  “My point is,” she continued, smoothing some hair back from his forehead, reveling in the fact that she was able to touch him like she’d always dreamed of doing, even if it was only because he’d been knocked silly and didn’t have all his faculties about him, “you went nose first into the deck and were out for nearly thirty seconds. That combined with the fact that you look like a piece of meat that’s been through the garbage disposal frightened me. And yes, when I get really frightened, sometimes I cry. Just deal with it.”

  He blinked at her for several seconds like he was having trouble focusing. “No need to be scared for me. Imokay.” He crushed the last two words together as he struggled to sit up.

  Testosterone. God save her.

  “No, no.” She laid a palm on his uninjured shoulder. “Just be still.”

  “Can’t,” he said, pushing past her restraining hand and into a sitting position. “Hafta finish the mission. Hafta get going.”

  “It’s finished,” she assured him. “You saved us.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head like a dog shakes off water, dislodging the gauze pad and causing little drops of blood to splash across her tank top. “Sorry ’bout that,” he said as he pushed to a wobbly stand—as if a little blood on top of all the grease and grime was anything to worry about. No amount of washing was ever going to get her tank top and shorts clean again. The only logical future for the garments was an up close and personal introduction to an incinerator. “But now we’ve got to ghost it out of here,” he finished, swaying slightly.

  “What?” she swung toward her brother. “What’s he talking about?”

  Billy’s lips curled in as his hard jaw sawed back and forth. It was his classic you’re-not-going-to-like-what-I-have-to-tell-you expression. He’d donned it fairly regularly since they were kids, and it never boded well.

  “Out with it,” she demanded, hands on hips.

  “He’s right. It’s the only way to maintain our cover,” Billy explained. “Besides you and Eve, no one on board the Hamilton knows who we are. It’ll be hard to keep it that way if we don’t get out of here now.”

  “Okay, but…but where will you go?” They were all certifiably nuts. Frank was in no condition to—

  “Back to the USS Patton, the destroyer we arrived on. She’s anchored a few miles out. Once on board, we’ll sail over here and pick up you and Eve and any of the Hamilton’s crew that needs medical attention.”

  “He needs medical attention!” she yelled, pointing at Frank’s freaky-looking arm.

  “Just need to pop it back into place,” Frank said, his tone similar to the one he might use for pass the potatoes. She spun to glare at him, letting him read in the her face exactly what she was thinking in her head—which was that they were all frickin’ frackin’ crazy.

  That arm was…well, it was not right. He should be medevacked to the nearest hospital, raced into surgery and—

  “Will you do the honors?” he asked, turning to Angel and completely ignoring the fact that her head was threatening to explode.

  “No, he most certainly will n—”

  That’s all she got out before Angel grabbed his arm and with a twist and a shove snapped the appendage back into place.

 
Oh, sweet Jesus, the sound it made. She figured she’d hear it in her nightmares.

  “Once on board the Patton,” Billy told her, drawing her attention away from the makeshift sling Angel started fastening out of bungee cords, “you can’t let on that you know us, or that we’re the ones who facilitated the rescue. Except for the captain and the commander, the entire crew thinks we’re simple K&R specialists hired by Eve’s father to secure your ransoms.”

  “Okay,” she said absently, sneaking a peek over at the slapdash field dressing that was going on, “but I still think—”

  “Let’s do it,” Frank said, wiping the blood out of his eyes with the hand that wasn’t secured in the temporary sling.

  “You can’t possibly think to—” she began, but none of them were listening to her. They all started jogging across the deck, making their way toward the aft of the drifting ship.

  She raced after them. “Stop!” She tried pulling on Billy’s arm, but with the disparity in their weights, it was like trying to halt an elephant. “Billy,” she pleaded, “he can’t make—”

  Her brother spun and slapped a hard palm over her mouth, his eyes bright with fury. He nodded for Boss and Angel to continue when they stopped to glance at him over their shoulders.

  “I’m right behind you,” he assured them and once they were out of earshot growled, “This is how it’s done, sis. You wanna be an operator? Well, an operator protects his cover, through injury, through torture…hell, he’ll even die to protect it. So you go on back to Eve, impress upon her just how important it is that she keep her damn mouth shut, and I’ll see you on board the Patton. Do you understand me? Nod if you understand me.”

  What could she do? She nodded.

  Billy gave her one last probing look before he raced to catch the others, and she could only watch helplessly as, one by one, they disappeared over the side of the tanker and into the starlit night.

  ***

  “Aahhhh!” Sharif screamed as he pulled the big knife from the center of his right palm, biting his cheek against the mind-bending pain until the bright coppery taste of blood filled his mouth.

  He threw the blade over the railing with a vicious curse and ripped off his wet shirt, clumsily trying to secure it around his useless hand.

  “That bitch,” he whispered, managing to use his left hand and his teeth to tighten the makeshift bandage. The maneuver ignited a flame of hot agony that exploded up the length of his arm and detonated at the base of his skull.

  That bitch…

  Staggering, swallowing down the urge to vomit, he grabbed the smooth wooden steering wheel and squeezed his eyes closed, sucking in ragged breaths and praying for the weakness to pass.

  When it finally did, finally, he blinked open his eyes and turned to glance behind him. The smoke from the ruined engine parted for a brief moment and in the blackness of the nighttime ocean, he saw the bright lights of the Hamilton on the far horizon. It was a shining, taunting beacon heralding the position of the prize that would have allowed him to leave this distasteful business once and for all.

  “That bitch! That bitch! That bitch!” he yelled over and over, pounding his fist against the wheel and imagining it was her pretty American face.

  If she had not stalled, if she had not had the audacity to ignore his repeated threats to blister her soft hide for every minute she dawdled at tasks he knew she could have accomplished in moments, she would have had those big diesel engines repaired, and he would have been sailing back toward the Somali coast aboard a multimillion dollar trophy instead of this ridiculous sailboat.

  “I will kill her,” he vowed, grinding his teeth as he tucked his ruined right hand up into his armpit. With a shriek of vitriolic agony, he applied, what he hoped, was enough pressure to stop the bleeding. “I will find her,” he panted through the pain. “I will find her and show her what a woman’s true place is in this world…and then I will kill her.”

  ***

  “So does this pass muster?” Becky asked Billy and Angel as she held out her arms and pirouetted. “Am I allowed to go see Frank now?”

  The wait for the USS Patton’s arrival after the guys disappeared over the side of the tanker had seemed interminable, and she knew her pacing made everybody onboard the Hamilton, especially Eve, nervous, but she wasn’t able to help it. All manner of horrific scenarios had flashed through her brain, not the least of which being Frank eaten by a huge great white shark because he’d been bleeding into the water.

  She kept seeing that mammoth shark from Jaws, and that creepy da-da…da-da…da-da-da-da music circled endlessly through her brain. Add in the horrific picture show of those last seconds with Sharif at the rail, the certainty she’d felt that they were her final moments, and it was an understatement to say she was going nuts. Just when she was on the verge of screaming and pulling out her hair, the big destroyer arrived on the black horizon, its sparkling lights like a lodestar in the night.

  She and Eve were the first to transfer aboard where they were met by Billy and Angel. Both men looked rather guileless in their civilian clothes and anyone seeing their innocent, freshly scrubbed faces wouldn’t believe they’d just frogmanned a pretty spectacular rescue.

  Oh, but they had.

  “Hello, Miss Reichert, Miss Edens,” Billy shook their hands. “I’m Vinnie, and this is Bruce,” he said as he nodded to Angel. “We’re here to negotiate your ransom, but uh,” he shuffled his feet and grinned—he stopped just short of aw shucks-ing it, and she fought the urge to roll her eyes—“I guess that’s a moot point now, isn’t it? Still, your father is paying us hourly, Miss Edens, so we’ll do our best to see to your comfort until we can get you both home.”

  Under the watchful eyes of the destroyer’s crew, she and Eve carefully played their parts, shaking hands with the men and feigning unfamiliarity. But as soon as the four of them were alone, trudging down a metal gangway, she snorted, “Vinnie and Bruce, is it? And is Mark down in sick bay?”

  Billy glanced at her over his shoulder, his eyes widening in feigned surprise. “As a matter of fact, he is. How in the world did you know?”

  She shook her head and chuckled. Leave it to her big brother to come up with aliases that all just happened to be the names of the transient band members of KISS.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s fine,” Billy answered.

  “He’s fine,” Angel echoed from behind.

  Pfft. “Well, then, when can I go and see Mark?”

  “After you shower, my dear girl,” her brother told her, stopping before a metal door labeled women. “Not to be rude, but you two smell like something that recently crawled out from under a rock…at the dump…one that was sitting in the Porta-Potty section.”

  From the corner of her eye, Becky saw Eve’s tired face glow crimson in the artificial overhead light.

  Poor Eve. She’d always been particularly vulnerable to Billy’s bad manners.

  “Geez, Billy,” she growled, “tell us how you really feel, why dontcha?”

  “I just did,” he grinned as he held the door wide, handing her and Eve each a towel and a stack of clean, folded clothes.

  The shower was heaven, and she heard Eve’s deep groan of pleasure from the stall next door, but she didn’t dilly-dally. She wanted to see Frank. She needed to see Frank in order to assess his situation for herself. Angel and Billy were obviously complete crap at accurately diagnosing a man’s injuries, evidenced by their quick assurances that he was absolutely fine.

  He was not. How could he be? His arm was nearly ripped off!

  After quickly scrubbing away the grease and grime of nearly a week, she put on the warm-up suit someone—one of the female crew members, she suspected—had loaned her. Slipping on the pair of blue hospital booties, she opened the door to find both men waiting.

  Which was why she was t
wirling, arms held out, in order to give Billy and Angel a good gander at the racy, red, über-chic, cotton warm-up. Someone shopped at Victoria’s Secret. She made a mental note to find her mysterious benefactor and thank the woman.

  “Angel’s going to take you down to sick bay,” her brother informed her. “I’ll wait here for Eve.”

  She folded her arms and scowled up at him. “You be nice to her.”

  Billy’s jaw locked, and she tried not to roll her eyes. That hard-ass expression of his might work on some. Not her.

  “I was never anything but nice to her,” he grumbled.

  “Pfft,” she punched him in the shoulder and gave up on not rolling her eyes. “I’m serious. She’s been through a lot. The last thing she needs is you rehashing the past.”

  “Since when do I ever rehash?” He planted his fists on his hips. She called it his Superman pose. It made the little sister in her want to hold her finger an inch from his nose while chanting, “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you…”

  She resisted the urge, saying instead, “Just don’t mention—”

  “Becky,” he growled, “I swear, after all you’ve put me through this week, I’m going to wring your neck if you don’t turn tail and run.”

  It was his favorite threat, one he’d once made good on when she was five and he was ten. Although at the time, he hadn’t understood what the expression actually meant, so he’d taken a big black permanent marker, held her down, and drawn fat circles around her neck.

  As punishment, their father forbade him to play Nintendo until the evidence disappeared completely. And she—never having been one for vanity—had delighted in “forgetting” to wash her neck. The humiliation of wearing the black smudges was nothing compared to the sheer joy of watching Billy gaze longingly at his Super Mario Bros. cartridge.

  It’d taken weeks for the marks to vanish and to this day, she couldn’t help but grin every time he repeated that particular threat.

  Ow!

  Damn, that hurt. Her injured cheek wasn’t quite ready for grinning yet.