Henry slapped his palm against the rail of the ship. Seeing land, and not being able to go ashore filled him with a boiling anger. Well over a week ago, he’d awoken inside a barrel aboard a cargo ship bound for Hawaii. After breaking himself out of the barrel, he’d convinced the captain that he’d been shanghaied, but hadn’t been able to make the man turn the ship around and return him to the port of Los Angeles. Now he was told he couldn’t go ashore until the ship was docked for unloading. He could have swum the distance to shore if his shoulder hadn’t been dislocated when they’d shoved him in that flour barrel.
They. His assailants.
It had been two men who’d attacked him in his car that raining afternoon. He’d not gotten a good look at either one of them before they knocked him out cold. He’d come to while they’d been shoving him in that barrel, and he’d fought, but...
Anger renewed.
Not only at his assailants, but at himself for not having his mind in the right place that day. He’d been so focused on Betty. On what he’d done to her, that he’d let his guard down.
He’d never let his guard down before. He’d never questioned himself like he had with her, and this was where it had gotten him. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Still thinking about her. And all sorts of other things. Like fatherhood. That frightened him like nothing ever had. He knew nothing, nothing about being a father.
If it had done nothing else, his time at sea had given him the opportunity to get his mind back in order. To think straight.
He could now see things with a clear perspective. He saw everything he could never have in Betty. He’d been like a kid, wanting it so badly, he’d do anything to get it. Including stealing, which made eating the candy bittersweet, knowing he truly didn’t deserve it. He’d long ago set his path in life, that of being an agent, and that was the path he needed to remain on, because it was the only one he’d ever have.
“We’re scheduled to dock at midnight.” Captain Cahill stepped up to the rail. “There’s a passenger steamer heading back to LA next week.”
“Next week?” Henry shook his head. “I need to head back right away. On the next ship.”
Cahill’s beard was as gray as the hair on his head, and his leathery skin showed the number of years he’d spent at sea. “They are all cargo ships. Don’t take passengers.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” Cahill said. “Cargo ships can’t take passengers. I explained that to you already.”
“I’m not a passenger,” Henry reminded. “I was shanghaied.” The hairs on his arms quivered as they stood. If he hadn’t managed to break out of that barrel, a warehouse worker would have discovered his dead and decomposing body at some point. Probably when it would have started to stink.
“I know,” Cahill said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Cahill had said that several times, and Henry had been thinking about how he was going to get back to California, and knew there was one quick way for it to happen. Uncle Nate. “Where am I going to be able to find a telephone?”
“A telephone?” Cahill shook his head. “Telephone calls from Hawaii to the States cost a fortune and you don’t have any money.”
That was true. His pockets had been stripped clean. Even his badge was gone. “I’ll reverse the charges.”
The captain let out a gruff laugh. “Good luck convincing someone that will happen.”
Cahill walked away, and Henry would have slapped the rail again, but his injured shoulder was still aching from when he’d done that earlier. He reached up to rub at his shoulder. The pain had subsided a great deal after it had been put back in place, but it still hurt to the point he could barely use it. The captain was right about finding someone who would trust him enough to use their telephone.
Trust.
He’d never trusted anyone in his life. Certainly not his birth parents, not the people who’d run the orphanage, or his adoptive parents, who he’d always known had only adopted him as an experiment.
He’d thought he’d finally found trust within the Bureau, then within a year, the mole had started to play his games, and no one knew who they could trust. Scarlet had proven that, too.
He’d known all that, then why had he trusted Betty enough to tell her about his childhood? The good things?
Maybe it was him who couldn’t be trusted. She had to be wondering what happened to him. Just like his adoptive parents. Every time he spoke to his uncle, Nate said as much. That John and Esther wondered about him. Wondered when they’d hear from him, see him.
He clamped his back teeth together. Betty had done something to him. Inside. For years he’d told himself that John and Esther were only his parents on paper.
Just like Nate was only his uncle on paper.
He’d been trying to make up for that for years. Henry shook his head at his own thought. It wasn’t as if he’d been trying to make up for that as much as he’d been trying to prove his worth. To let all of them know he had been the right kid to choose out of the orphanage. The right man to choose for the FBI.
That, too, his very job, had been all part of his adoptive father’s plan to prove how well the junior-college idea could work, could benefit those unable to attend a full-fledged university. Therefore, upon graduation, John had sought out a job for his adopted son, through his brother. Nathan Randall. Nate had been a federal agent then and willingly took on the challenge of bringing a kid straight out of school into the agency, with the expectation that Henry would follow every rule, exceed at every assignment and hold his
