“All we have to do is play this out. Tell Esteban we saved his daughter’s life and want something more for our efforts. He’ll give us whatever we want of his dirty money. Any amount.”
“A new play, new rules,” Ricci said. “That it?”
Lathrop looked at him. “Explain why not,” he said.
“Maybe because it would make us no better than the men we killed,” Ricci said.
Another silence. The stillness of Ricci’s eyes did not betray the close attention he was paying to the Glock.
“We made a deal and it isn’t going to change for money we don’t even know how to spend,” he said. “Damn you, Lathrop, give me the phone and let’s take her the hell out of here.”
Lathrop looked at him a second longer.
“And what’s my other choice?” he said.
Ricci nodded his chin slightly toward Lathrop’s gun.
“Think you know,” he said.
“Could be I do,” Lathrop said. “But I want to hear you say it.”
Ricci waited a beat, nodded toward the gun again.
“We see which one of us is quicker,” he said.
Lathop stared at him for several long moments, his head angling a little to one side. Then his lips parted, took in air… and shaped themselves into the faintest of grins.
Keeping his Glock pointed down at the ground, he tossed the phone into Ricci’s outstretched hand.
“You going to want my gun, too?” he said.
Ricci shook his head. “You might need it later on,” he said, and then turned toward Marissa Vasquez.
Ricci stepped to the back of the hut, saw Marissa’s expression, paused before he quite reached her. Her captors had used battery lanterns for lighting as dusk closed in around them, and their stark radiance had washed any hint of color from her face. She looked afraid, but mostly she looked to be in shock, her wide, glassy eyes seeming to stare at everything and nothing.
He crouched in front of her and glanced over at Lathrop, nodding toward the bodies of the men they’d killed. Lathrop began searching them for the keys to her restraints.
Ricci looked at her again.
“Marissa,” he said. “We’re taking you out of here.”
Her gaze went to him. At first its remoteness, coupled with the strange, flat look on her face, made him feel only half in her attention. Then she appeared to draw it upon him with an effort.
“My boyfriend needs help,” she said, her voice thin. “They’re keeping Felipe here somewhere.”
Ricci looked at her a moment, then shook his head.
“His name is Manuel Aguilera,” he said slowly. “He was with them from the start.”
She took a while to react. Ricci wasn’t sure she’d grasped the meaning of what he had told her and gave it a while to sink in. But there was Lathrop behind him in the hut, and the possibility of stragglers outside from among the group who’d abducted her, and he could afford only so much time.
“No,” she said at last.
Ricci kept looking at her.
“It’s the truth,” he said.
“No.”
Ricci started to reach out a hand, saw her flinch back, and held it still.
“It hurts,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”
Marissa Vasquez moved her head slightly from side to side.
“No.”
Ricci hesitated.
“I’m not saying I know how he felt about you,” he said. “He might’ve gotten to care, but maybe cared more about things you weren’t part of. It isn’t always one way or the other with people.”
Though Marissa was shaking her head more vehemently now, Ricci saw tears gathering on the rims of her lower eyelids. She seemed to be trying to hold them back.
“His name is Felipe Escalona,” she said.
Ricci looked at her.
“His name isn’t what matters,” he said. “What does is that he helped those men bring you here. And that I’m bringing you out.”
She stared at him. Then her eyes sharpened on his face and she made a choking sound and began to sob, the tears running down her cheeks.
“I love him,” she said, a desperate, pleading quality in her voice.
Ricci extended his hand a little further.
“There’s a plane waiting for us,” he said. “We’re taking you home.”
Ricci hesitated again, reaching his hand out until it was within an inch of hers.
“I know,” he said. “But you need to trust me.”
A moment passed, and then several more. Marissa Vasquez bent her head, crying hard, her entire body shaking with the release of emotion.
Ricci crouched in front of her without saying anything else, waiting, leaving his offered hand out there between them.
And then, finally, her chained hand came up and took it.
EIGHT
Nimec brought the pontooner in toward the mangroves that hemmed the island’s wild northwestern shore, getting it as far under the trees as he could, sliding through their pale web of roots to finally pull beneath their arched, outspread limbs.
He throttled to a complete halt and turned toward Annie. She was knelt over Blake, who had for the past few minutes shown signs of awareness, if not quite consciousness, squeezing his big hand weakly around hers as she held it, once even half opening his eyes to look at her face with seeming recognition.
“You holding up okay?” Nimec said.
“So far,” she said. “There’s nothing to do but try, I suppose.”
He ran a hand across his chin in thought, still looking at her. Unable to guess the severity of Blake’s injury, they had been careful not to move him from where he’d fallen, and done little in the way of treating him other than to pat some of the blood off his head with gauze from the boat’s first-aid kit, then gently ease it from the hard deck onto her folded windbreaker, providing whatever minimal comfort they could.
“Been about fifteen minutes since we radioed base on the mainland,” Nimec said. “The Skyhawks are taking off out of San Fernando, and fast as those birds travel, it’ll be another ten or fifteen before they show.” He paused. “I’m guessing we can buy enough time right here… or at least that right here’s our best chance.”
Annie nodded her understanding. Overhead the sky was almost unseen through the roof of branches, cut into thin slivers of blue that scarcely showed between their interstices. In the Stingrays that patrolled the island, men they could no longer trust — and had every reason to want to elude — might very well be out searching for them. And what blocked their view of the sky would also block any view the chopper crews might have of the pontoon boat from above. That gave Annie some measure of hope. But she had been a pilot most of her life, had flown above the atmosphere in a space shuttle and trained others to do the same, and it had occurred to her there was more to be concerned about than visual observation.
“Pete,” she said, her expression troubled. “If our people can fix on your GPS signal…”
He looked at her, and she let the sentence trail.
“Yeah, Annie,” he said. “We’d have to figure theirs can, too.”
