49. Jezebel

CHAPTER 49

JEZEBEL

Y ou have to be fucking kidding me.

Cole had a real problem with female authority, didn’t he? Or maybe with authority in general because he hadn’t struck me as particularly sexist. Whatever, he’d decided to “help,” and now we were screwed again.

Witt truly was a gigantic asshole.

And a shitty liar.

“Just put the gun on the deck,” he said.

“You promise you won’t shoot us?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

His eyes had a weird gleam, and he both looked and sounded crazy. Money could send a man mad. And madness could make a man sloppy. I bent to put down the rifle, my right hand reaching for the pistol tucked into the back of my bikini bottoms. After I ascertained Dr. Blaylock was still alive, I’d retrieved it—and my lucky dollar—from the cabin I shared with Cole, and I’d made damn sure there was a round in the chamber. Witt was so focused on the AR-15 that he didn’t notice anything untoward.

At home, all members of the Choir practised point shooting on a regular basis. In close-quarters combat, where half a second could mean the difference between life and death, there was no time to line up the sights, so we often shot from the hip and relied on instincts honed through years of experience.

As I rose, I whipped out the pistol, aimed for Witt’s head, and fired in a heartbeat.

Except Witt’s head wasn’t there anymore.

No, his head and the rest of him was falling over the edge of the boat behind Cole. Fuck my fucking life.

I dove into the water after them, the gun in my hand. I had a shot, but Cole hated it when I shot people. He especially hated it when I shot people in front of him. So I kicked after them, growling in frustration when Witt wrapped an arm around Cole’s neck, and not in a fun way.

Now I didn’t have a shot, but I did have a job that was far more difficult than it needed to be. Cole’s eyes began closing, and I was ready to claw Witt’s face off when I saw teeth.

And not just any teeth.

No, these teeth were pink.

Once, they’d been white, but Spider had painted them as a joke because everyone knew Barbie’s colour was pink, didn’t they? At least nobody would mistake which DPV—diver propulsion vehicle—belonged to the Choir’s blonde bombshell.

Barbie shot past me, pulled by the underwater scooter that let her travel faster than a mere human could. Tulsa was hot on her heels, and I grabbed hold of Dice’s waist as she stopped beside me. A second later, I was sucking air hard from her spare regulator. I tried to get my breathing under control. My pulse was racing far faster than usual, and I knew why.

Cole.

I loved him .

No matter how much that fact would upend my life, I loved him, and no amount of denial would change that.

Tulsa grabbed Cole, and Barbie ripped Witt away from him. Touch him and die, motherfucker. Witt tried to kick for the surface, but Barbie pulled him deeper and held him down. Damn, I loved that woman, in a purely platonic way of course. The only thing better would have been drowning that asshole myself, but watching his death was a joy.

One that I had to cut short.

Tulsa was heading for the Crosswind with Cole, and Dice turned to follow, pulling me with her. Cole had a regulator stuffed into his mouth, and there were bubbles trailing behind, so I had to take that as a good sign. He was alive. He was alive, and everything else was just white noise. We surfaced at the stern, and I grabbed the ladder with one hand and Cole with the other as Tulsa passed him over.

“You couldn’t follow a simple instruction?”

Cole coughed up water. “I was trying to help.”

“It’s one thing not to trust me personally—I mean, I’m somewhat economical with the truth there—but it hurts that you don’t trust me professionally.”

“I was terrified. Witt was on the boat, and you were trapped.”

“Witt has the grace of a walrus—I heard him board, and I was waiting to ambush him at the bottom of the stairs.” The anger ebbed away as Cole kissed my forehead. “But I guess it’s sweet that you’re so protective.”

Dice made a gagging noise.

“What took you so long?” I asked her. They must have HALO jumped out of our specially modified jet. She was still wearing a lightweight parachute harness.

“Uh, you kept moving around? And hello, cloud cover—what kind of psycho takes a boat out in a storm?”

“I tried to tell her,” Cole said .

Tulsa patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, that’ll never work.”

“There are two more idiots down there,” I told the girls as Barbie popped up serenely, sans Witt.

“You want them dead or alive?” Dice asked.

I glanced at Cole. “Alive.”

I knew I sounded disappointed. I really didn’t care. Tulsa, Dice, and Barbie submerged, and Cole clung to me tighter.

“Who are those people?”

“Three members of my team. I told you they were coming.”

“Holy shit.”

I shifted gold bars off the seats so we could assemble in the saloon, and there were a lot of gold bars. At least the boys hadn’t killed Dr. Blaylock. I’d found him in his cabin, the door jammed shut from the outside with a chair. He was hungry and shaken and shocked at his stepson’s actions but otherwise in good health.

Clint glared at him from the other side of the room, furious. Tulsa looked as if she’d been practising shibari. Jon was sitting next to him, and he seemed more defeated than anything else. He’d also been the most talkative of the pair. Unsurprisingly, Clint had tried to blame the whole affair on the conveniently dead Witt, but Jon swore Witt and Clint had planned the expedition together, and he was just along for the ride. He claimed he thought they were going to photograph the Spanish Dancer , not loot her. Barbie hadn’t bothered to retrieve Witt’s body. None of us thought it was worth the trouble. He’d go down in history as a victim of a tragic diving accident and someone—probably Dr. Blaylock—would write a sympathetic letter to his parents. Only Clint might dispute the story, but he was such a bitter little shit that I doubted anyone who mattered would believe him.

“I didn’t know there was a wreck,” Dr. Blaylock kept saying as I flipped my lucky dollar across my knuckles. “How could anybody value an old ship more than the health of our oceans?”

“It’s a mystery to me,” Barbie said as she checked out a cut on his hairline. Apparently, he’d received a bump on the head at some point. Jon blamed Clint, and Clint blamed Witt.

Cole glanced at the girls again, as if he couldn’t quite believe they were real. Or maybe he was just checking out Barbie’s ass? Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed him. She had the body of a cheerleader, and she knew it.

Was I jealous? No. I trusted both of them.

We were a team.

Speaking of teams, Priest was somewhere between the Bahamas and San Gallicano on a borrowed superyacht—the hardship—heading in our direction in case we needed any additional assistance. We didn’t. We had everything under control. I’d found my satellite phone undamaged in my nightstand drawer and used it to call Demelza, and although I couldn’t see her, I just knew she was rolling her eyes.

“Several million dollars’ worth of gold, you say?”

“The dead guy said there was a literal ton of it, so even based on a conservative estimate, we’re talking fifty million plus.”

“And it’s just lying there?”

“I understand a hurricane shifted the wreck a couple of years ago. Until then, it was hidden below the sand. Three idiots set out on what, by rights, should have been a wild goose chase and turned to attempted murder when they found a fortune.”

On my brief foray into the water, I’d seen the Spanish Dancer ’s bow sticking up from the seabed, camouflaged among the rocks that had probably led to the ship’s sinking. While Tulsa and Dice watched the prisoners, I’d free-dived with Cole to take a better look. The visible part of the ship included a hatch on what looked to be the forecastle, which the boys had pried open to access the lower decks. Before I ran out of air, I’d glimpsed jumbled piles in the gloom.

We knew now that Bart Huntley had been the diver who found the remains of the Spanish Dancer . Dr. Blaylock had identified his handwriting in the old journal. Huntley had bequeathed all of his notes to his old friend, and Clint had been helping to catalogue them when he’d found the cryptic note. He’d mentioned the Spanish Dancer to Jon, who’d come across stories of the ship in his studies, and then Witt got involved. Jon said Clint had resisted the idea until the divorce turned acrimonious, and then he’d decided to “stick it to the old man.” Jon’s words, not mine.

“Even idiots get lucky sometimes,” Demelza said.

“And unlucky. Don’t forget the drugs.”

“I won’t forget the drugs. This is going to earn us beaucoup brownie points with the San Gallician government.”

“Does everything have to be a trade with you?” I asked.

“That’s how the world works, my dear. That’s how the world works.”

Demelza performed her magic, and when we arrived back in the harbour on Emerald Shores, complete with the recovered Tide Pod , half a dozen cops were waiting there to greet us and take Clint and Jon off our hands. Dr. Blaylock was fretting over how to explain developments to his ex- wife, but that wasn’t my problem. I’d kept him alive. My involvement ended there. An ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital for a checkup, and everything else could wait until tomorrow.