an AK-47, you running up on somebody’s ass in a little rubber boat.
Diablo II was moving slowly now, because of the shallow water and all. The man was trying to feel his way along the Ragged Keys using his depth sounder and his GPS, trying to find an escape route without running aground. Stoke kept his distance, knowing the guy most likely had an RPG tube aboard, not wanting to get anywhere near inside the grenade launcher’s thousand-yard range.
The two boats moved south like that for a good ten minutes, Stoke stalking him, taking Sands Key on his port side, still way east of the Intercoastal Waterway. Diablo II accelerated now, sensing deeper water and Stoke sped up too. Cat and mouse all right, but who was who?
Sand Cut was coming up fast now, just off the port bow. This was the cut which separated Sands Key from Ragged Key to the south. Stoke swore under his breath. Rodrigo gets through there, he’s out in the open Atlantic and gone adios, muchachos. Problem he had, though, unless the Corps of Engineers had widened it since he was down here, no way the big Diablo could squeeze through that channel. Which the cat had obviously just figured out, because he suddenly hung a hard left and blasted into a wide opening in the mangroves. Okay, Stoke thought, grinning like a barracuda, here we go.
Now, we in it, boy.
Stoke slowed the engines to a crawl entering the swamps. It was a twisting maze, seagrapes and mangroves you could reach out and touch on either side of the boat. Plenty of deep water back in here, though, and Diablo disappeared around a sharp bend. Stoke heard him throttle back. The Cigarette’s big motors made a deep rumble no matter how low the RPMs. This was good. He could just track the sound, stay out of sight but stay with him, turn for turn, wait for his chance. On the bow, Ross suddenly held up his hand. Halt. Then, a slashing motion across his throat.
“Kill the engines,” Ross turned to him and whispered, “He’s stopped.”
Ain’t that interesting, Stoke thought, hitting the two red kill switches on the console that instantly shut down the outboards. He listened carefully to the swamp sounds. Crickets, tree frogs, skeets, that was it. Must’ve, what, run aground? Fouled his props in mangrove roots maybe? Or, he’s up to something. Playing games. Either way, old Stoke was not about to be going around any corners blind.
Stoke left the console and stepped aft, stooping to grab another one of the confiscated Glock nines stowed in the stern lazarette. He popped the clip, saw it was full, rammed it back into the grip. He jacked a round into the chamber and shoved this second pistol inside the black cummerbund still wrapped around the waist of his nonresplendent dirt and grease and bloodstained white satin trousers. Fountainbleau Hotel seemed long ago and far away.
“You know—” Stoke started to say something but Ross held up the flat of his hand, signaling for silence. Stoke edged his way forward and crouched beside Ross in the bow. The current had moved the inflatable to the right side of the narrow channel and they’d drifted up under some overhanging sea grape and mangrove branches.
“Listen,” Ross whispered.
“Yeah. I hear it.”
A woman crying, sounded like. Yeah, that’s what it was. Fancha. Begging, maybe. He could see the guy doing that. Bait. Using the woman, hurting her, trying to draw him in.
Damn.
“He’s playing games, all right,” Stoke whispered, ripping off his torn and ruined pleated formal shirt. “Motherfucka think he playing Cat and Mouse.”
“He is.”
“No. He ain’t.”
The ex-SEAL swung his legs silently over the side and lowered himself feet first down into the warm black water. He gripped an overhanging mangrove root with one hand and used the other to slice off a thick cattail reed with an assault knife. Then he looked up at Ross.
“Ever try this? Works great. I stayed submerged, breathed through one just like this for over an hour one time, Mr. Victor Charlie stalking my squad up some Mekong backwater.”
“You were riverine, Stoke. I was the Navy flyboy. Remember?”
“Yeah. I forgot. Rocket man. You okay? You too doped up to do this? I don’t want alligators sneaking up on you.” He’d felt kinda bad earlier, not leaving Ross at Vizcaya where the Dade County EMS guys would have fixed his leg up. Not that Ross would have ever in a million years let himself get left behind, they going after the man who killed Vicky, hot on his trail now.
“Come on, Stoke. Who do you think you’re talking to? I eat morphine for breakfast.”
“You’re right. Sorry. Tell you one thing, though, Ross,” Stoke said, easing himself soundlessly deeper into the brackish water until only his head was visible.
“Yeah?”
“Like I say, this boy, he thinks he playing Cat and Mouse, but he ain’t,” Stoke said.
“No? What’s he playing?”
“Cat and Cat,” Stoke said, and, flashing a huge white grin, he disappeared beneath the surface.
“Boo!”
Stoke popped up right next to the Cigarette. He’d been underwater, breathing through the reed, treading water and watching for movement of the hull above. See where everybody was up there. The hull hadn’t moved in sixty seconds. Before that, he’d swum for eight minutes without taking a breath. Hell, it wasn’t even a record. In his old SEAL Team Six days, they’d called him the Human Draeger. Draeger was the German underwater breathing apparatus used by SEAL insertion teams to swim great distances without a telltale trail of bubbles.
He surfaced, took a gulp of air, and swung the Glock back and forth above his head, expecting to see Scissor peering down at him over the gunwale. The sun was up now, and the temperature back in the deep severe was climbing fast. He banged the muzzle of the pistol on the hull a couple of times. A loud, hollow thud. Then rapped it a couple more times, harder. Still nothing.
“Hey! Ahoy, there, Captain! Big black dude down here in the water about to blow a big fat hole in your yacht!” He aimed the pistol just where he expected Scissor’s head to appear.
Nothing.
He kicked his legs, lunged up and grabbed a shiny cleat, rocking the boat side-to-side, singing one of his old favorites to himself.
“Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby…rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby!”
That’s when the drop of blood plopped down, splat, right in the middle of his forehead.
Scissoring his legs hard, he shot up out of the water, grabbed the stainless rail with one hand, and hauled himself up and over into the cockpit in a single move. The deck was sticky under his feet. Whole mess of confused bloody footprints. Fancha was sitting with her back to the transom, head down. Blood matted in her hair. Stoke stared hard at the blood spatters and footprints until he could begin to make it all jell.
He’d been right. Scissor had used her for bait. Lure them in on his own terms. But she put up a fight. Guy fights girl. Guy wins. Guy ties girl up, hands and feet with anchor chain, hurts her with scissors, and then goes over the stern.
He pressed two fingers on the side of the naked woman’s neck. Strong pulse. Out cold, though. Big contusion on her forehead, like she’d hit her head on the gunwale going down. Going to the stern, he stared at the footprints, then saw more blood smears on the big overhanging mangrove, the one Rodrigo must have grabbed in order to haul himself over the side and climb ashore.
Stoke was ticking off the possibilities as to what Rodrigo might be up to when he heard a low moan from Fancha. Girl was going to wake up in a world of hurt from what he could see. He knelt down beside her, scooped her up in his arms and quickly carried her below. The whole interior was done in creamy white leather and he lay her down on a long sofa, getting a lot of blood on the man’s custom upholstery.
He got the ropes and chains off, talking softly to her and trying to get her to come around.
She was whimpering now, saying something he couldn’t understand but could guess at, rolling her head back and forth. He ducked into the head and stuck a couple of hand towels in the sink, turned on the cold water. Wringing them out, he returned and sat down on the floor beside the sofa where she lay. He wiped off a lot of the
