36. Jezebel

CHAPTER 36

JEZEBEL

G uts clenching, I spun to check my surroundings. Had we swum too far? Not far enough? No, we were in the right place. That banana-shaped rock was the first thing I’d seen when we jumped into the water, and Cole looked as confused as I felt.

The shadow of the Crosswind ’s hull should have been right above us, but instead, there was only blue. Where had she gone?

We got our answer when we surfaced, kind of. I glimpsed her in the distance, heading north, almost at the horizon and about to disappear out of sight. Well, fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Yes, I’d wished I could spend more time with Cole in San Gallicano, but not like this.

He spat out his regulator.

“My boat! What the hell?”

“A remake of Pirates of the Caribbean ?”

“Someone stole my damn boat!”

“I can see that. The question is, who? We should get to the beach.”

No point in hanging around in the water. We couldn’t catch up with the Crosswind . When Cole didn’t move, I took hold of his BCD and began towing him toward the shore, kicking hard with my good foot. Of all the islands we’d visited, this was the smallest. The most barren. Had this been planned deliberately? We’d been abandoned here to die? My fins hit sand, and I pulled him into the shallows.

“My boat,” Cole said again. “She’s gone.”

“Relax, we’ll get her back.”

He threw his dive mask onto the beach. “How? How the hell will we do that, Bella?”

“Give me a minute.”

I ditched my tank, BCD, and fins above the waterline and took stock of my surroundings. The island was barely worthy of the title. Glorified sandbar was more like it. We had no food, no freshwater, and no shelter. Maybe we could catch something to eat, but with nothing but saltwater to drink, we’d die in a couple of days anyway unless it rained. I’d checked the forecast over breakfast this morning, and we were shit out of luck there.

“Wait, do you think they’ll come back?” Cole asked. “What if there was an emergency? A medical problem? Dr. Blaylock had a heart bypass before his ear problems started.”

“They won’t come back.”

Not after they’d abandoned two people underwater to die. There were two possible scenarios—either a third party had taken the Blaylock party hostage and stolen the Crosswind , or someone already on board had hijacked the boat. My thoughts immediately went to Witt. Not only was he the biggest asshole on the trip, but I also couldn’t see him getting overpowered by the others, not unless there was a weapon in play. And I’d searched their luggage pretty thoroughly the day we set out.

Had we heard two boats or one? With open-circuit scuba, breathing underwater led to a constant gurgle of air bubbles, so it was difficult to tell. But the noise had started suddenly. Loud, then grown quieter. If wannabe pirates were involved, there would have been a different pattern—quiet, loud, quiet. That motherfucker.

I explained my thoughts to Cole, and his anger turned to confusion.

“No way. Dr. Blaylock would never steal the Crosswind . He’s one of those salt-of-the-earth guys, and if he wanted a boat, he has enough money to buy one. He just prefers to rent because he surveys in a bunch of different areas, and he doesn’t want the hassle of the upkeep.”

“So he says.”

“I’ve known him for years. You’ve known him for less than three weeks.”

“A fair point, but I wasn’t thinking of him anyway. My concern is Witt.”

“Witt?”

“How well do you know him?”

“About as well as you know Dr. Blaylock, but he’s a good friend of Clint’s.”

“Clint is another question mark.”

“He’s Dr. Blaylock’s son .”

“Stepson. And from what I can gather, the divorce wasn’t amicable.”

Cole walked away, tearing a hand through his hair, but he didn’t get six steps before he whirled back around.

“This is insane.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Then said, “If you’re right and Witt and Clint are behind this, what happened to Dr. Blaylock? And Jon?”

“Jon would have gone along with the plan—whatever the three of them are up to, they’re in it together. As for Dr. Blaylock…” I shrugged. “I can’t see a body floating around, so I guess that’s good news. ”

“Damn, Bella. That’s cold.”

Oops.

“I must’ve used up all my tact in my day job.” That was kind of true. I mean, I hadn’t told Demelza to go fuck herself when she ordered me to take a vacation. “I’m actually worried about Dr. Blaylock.”

“Why on earth would they do this? Why would they take my boat?”

“I have a theory about that, and it has to do with conchs.”

“Conchs?”

I laid out the details, from the pearls to the journal page I’d seen. “Witt didn’t seem happy that I looked at the journal, which was an odd reaction because it was fairly innocuous. Just notes about sea creatures.”

“You think they’re hunting for conch pearls?”

“I suspected they might be at first, but then Caro said they’d need to check a thousand conchs to find one pearl, and that seems like a lot of work. But maybe I underestimated their desire to make money out of a threatened species?”

“None of this makes any sense.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“How? We’re stuck on a deserted island in western San Gallicano, population zero. Nobody’s expecting us back for at least three days, and with no shelter in this heat, we’ll be dead in two.”

Unfortunately, Cole was right. If I wrote a big ole “HELP” message in the sand, my team would come, but would they get here in two days? Possibly? Echo had many qualities, some good, some bad. Some both. She was paranoid, nosy, and obsessive, and I didn’t doubt she was keeping track of me via the network of satellites she had access to. That was the main reason I’d stopped Cole from getting frisky on the sundeck in daylight .

She’d spot the message within a day, I was confident of that. Then Priest would allocate a team, and they’d have to work out what they were getting into. Was it a simple shipwreck situation? Or had I gotten involved with something more nefarious? When they—hopefully—worked out heavy weapons were unnecessary, they’d fly to San Gallicano, and then they’d have to find a boat. If Cole was right about the curse of Skeleton Cay, and I was beginning to think it might be true, no charter captain would bring them to this area, so they’d have to scope out a vessel to “borrow,” and that might take several more hours.

Yup, we’d probably be dead from dehydration by then.

Unless we could buy time—fish eyes were a source of water, but we were short of a fishing rod. Perhaps we could make a spear?

“We need to find shelter.”

“Find shelter?” Cole asked. “Just like that?”

“Obviously, we can’t stay here.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, somebody took our boat.”

“But we can swim. We have wetsuits, fins, and buoyancy aids. Skeleton Cay is less than five miles away, and the current is heading west.” I licked the back of my hand and raised it into the air. “We’re upwind too, plus I have a compass.”

“For a moment there, I thought you suggested swimming to Skeleton Cay.”

“It’s the closest island of any significant size, and it has the remains of the old prison. If people lived there for any length of time, then there must be a source of freshwater, and we might find coconuts too.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Don’t come at me with that curse bullshit.”

“I’m more concerned about the five-mile swim. You’re still wearing a cast.”

“Right, but at least I’m less likely to lose a leg to a shark.” Cole didn’t smile. “Chill, I’m joking about the shark.”

And my leg was pretty much healed. Doc Martinsson told me I had to leave the cast on for at least six weeks, and I’d done that, although I didn’t plan to test my recovery with a gruelling open-water swim. My oversized left fin would fall off my bare foot, so the cast would have to stay, at least for now.

“We can’t swim to Skeleton Cay. It isn’t safe.”

“Either we swim or I swim, because I’m not staying here to die.” I glanced up at the sun as it dropped lower in the sky. “And I’m going now because this is a two-to-three-hour swim and I don’t want to arrive in the dark.”

“You can’t swim there on your own.”

“Oh yeah? Watch me.”

“Bella, please…”

Cole looked distraught, which made me feel kinda bad. Not a sentiment I experienced often.

“It’s okay,” I encouraged. “My dive watch has GPS. The water’s warm, and you’re a good swimmer. You can make it.”

“I’m not worried about me.”

Huh? Okay, that was actually a little insulting.

“As long as we leave now, I’ll be fine. If we leave it till the morning, we’ll both be weaker from thirst.”

Cole heaved out a long sigh. “I can’t believe they left us here to die.”

And I couldn’t believe I hadn’t predicted what they were planning and stopped it. Yes, I’d gotten bad vibes from Witt, but I hadn’t realised he was a full-fledged sociopath, a lunatic who’d cause the deaths of two people over a few conch pearls. I mean, that was insane. Really fucking insane. Say they had to open a thousand conchs to find one pearl, and each pearl they found was a good one worth twenty thousand bucks… How many conchs could on e man find and open in a day? Three one-hour dives, one conch every two minutes, ninety conchs per day, times three, say three hundred conchs. Those assholes would have to dive three days just to find a single pearl, and then people would start looking for us. Frankie. Yolanda. And they didn’t even know about the Choir.

No, it didn’t make sense.

What was I missing?

“We’re not going to die, trust me. We’re not going to die.”