Chapter 33 Count the Boats

Chapter 33

Count the Boats

Two well-armed shooters from the ship’s security team met me at the hatch leading from the weather deck to the interior.

One man said, “Where are you headed, sir?”

I reached for the hatch. “Step aside.”

He laid a hand on my arm. “We’re not trying to stop you, Mr. Fulton. We just need to know where you’re going so we can tell the interior patrol.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Have you still not found the woman?”

“No, sir, but we will. The ship is only so big.”

“Are you certain she’s still on board?”

The two men glanced at each other and back at me. “Where would she go?”

I spun to my team behind me. “Put Cecilia in the brig beside Barbour. I suspect they have a lot to discuss, and I’d love to do a little eavesdropping. Then, clear the ship. They still haven’t found the woman.”

The first guard said, “We don’t really need help. We’ve got it under control. We’ll find her.”

I gave him the most sarcastic smile I could produce. “How long has it been since you’ve been in a real gunfight?”

The guard checked his partner again, and I cut him off before he could come up with something to say. “ We’ll find her. It’s kind of what we do.”

The interior of the ship was silent except for the hum of machinery and my own boots striking the deck. The corridors and ladders were vacant and eerie.

Sick bay was a different story. Dr. Shadrack stood over Gator with an iPad in one hand and a syringe in the other.

I stepped beside him. “So?”

He said, “Do you want the doctor version or the knuckle-dragger version?”

“Let’s go with knuckle-dragger if you don’t mind.”

He still didn’t look up from his iPad, but he continued talking. “Snake venom is a complex mixture of proteins, amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, metal ions, and a bunch of other trace material.”

“This is the knuckle-dragger version?” I asked.

He ignored me and kept talking. “Antivenin is a mixture of proteins and hyperimmune globulins that comes from the serum of animals that have been immunized with snake venom. Gator is allergic to at least one of those proteins in the venom, so I’m treating him for anaphylactic shock. Do you know what that means?”

I stared down at my brother-in-arms, who had a pair of hoses protruding from his mouth and nose, and I listened to the ventilator breathing for him. “That means his body’s immune system is trying to kill him, right?”

“Essentially, that’s what’s happening. I’m providing him a cocktail of drugs to suppress his immune system just enough to keep him alive while we try to help him fight off the venom.”

“But you’re giving him the antivenin, right?”

For the first time, Dr. Shadrack looked at me. “The antivenin carries many of the same proteins as the venom, so until I can isolate which protein he’s allergic to, I could kill him if I start introducing antivenin. He would’ve been dead in a matter of minutes if you hadn’t made the call to bring him to me instead of the ER.”

“Minutes?”

He nodded. “Yes, minutes. Most ER doctors would’ve pumped him full of antivenin within a few minutes of arriving, and that would’ve likely cost him his life. I’ve seen this only once before. It’s extremely rare, but you absolutely saved his life when you sent him to me.”

I parked myself on a stainless-steel rolling stool and let the events of the day wash over me. I made a billion decisions, and the one I battled with most was the one I got right. I guess that made one fewer club trying to pound me into the ground.

“Is he going to live?”

The doctor laid a hand on my shoulder as he walked from the room. “We’ll see, but your Cajun friend is going to be fine after a few weeks.”

“That’s good news,” I said, “but I’m afraid that’s not the end of the casualty list. An alligator bit Shawn, but she spit him back out when he shot her in the head. He’ll be down soon.”

He shook his head. “Of course we’ve got an alligator bite. Why wouldn’t we?”

Everything inside me wanted to stand beside Gator until he could walk from the room under his own power, but the need to find the rogue woman roaming my ship pulled me from the stool and propelled me into the CIC.

Skipper was monitoring the process and tracking sections of the ship that had been cleared. As my team swept each compartment, a guard from the ship’s security contingent stood watch over the section, ensuring the woman wasn’t moving behind my team.

“Brief me,” I said.

She said, “Ship security swept the vessel with no luck, and our team has covered seventy percent without a hit.”

“She’s gone, isn’t she?”

Skipper shrugged. “We’ll know soon. Is Gator okay?”

“No, he’s not, but the doctor’s doing all he can.”

She spun in her chair. “All he can? Seriously? That’s what they say when the patient dies. ‘We did all we could.’”

“That’s not what’s happening down there. He’s in very good hands. Right now, let’s focus on finding the woman.”

She chewed her lip. “He’s got to be okay, Chase. I can’t lose another one.”

I took her hands in mine. “Listen to me. Doctor Shadrack will take better care of Gator than anyone else on Earth. We’re not losing another one. But I need you to focus. We’ll have time to melt down when all of this is over. We’re in it together, and we’re going to come out of it together.”

She spun back to her computer and marked another corridor and compartment as clear.

I lifted the radio and called Gun Bunny.

She answered quickly. “Go ahead, Chase.”

“I need you to pick up Dr. Fred Kennedy at the Houma Airport.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible.”

“I’m on my way. Will you notify the captain?”

“Consider it done,” I said.

Skipper said, “That’s the shrink, right?”

“That’s him.”

She huffed. “I don’t have time for therapy right now. We still have a lot of work to do.” She motioned toward a panel in the console with a telephone handset plugged into it. “That reminds me. They put Cecilia beside Barbour…or McDuffy…whatever his name is. I’ve been recording every sound made in the brig since they locked her up. It should make for some interesting listening.”

“That’s brilliant. Nicely done. Can I plug in a headset instead of my grandmother’s telephone receiver?”

She giggled. “Sure. Go for it. I’ll let you know when the ship is clear.”

I made the call to the bridge to get the captain’s permission to launch the helo, and then I dived into the brig audio.

The first several minutes were Cecilia and McDuffy screaming at each other over whose fault it was that they were locked up on a ship. When the screaming match lost its vigor, the conversation turned to details not even Shawn could’ve extracted from our guests.

Cecilia said, “I think I killed a federal agent.”

“You did what ?”

“Yeah, I think these guys are feds. Chase has Secret Service credentials.”

I could almost hear McDuffy’s gears grinding. “No way. These guys can’t be feds. They’re cowboys. They didn’t have a warrant when they hit my ranch.”

“That’s not a ranch, you pompous ass. It’s an oversized subdivision lot.”

He seemed to ignore the jab. “These guys are better than feds, but they don’t seem to have any restraint. They hit hard and keep running like a tier-one team. Which one did you kill?”

“They call him Gator. I thought I had him sucked in, but you’re right. They’re good. He played me like a fiddle.”

“What about the old man?” McDuffy asked.

She said, “I thought I had that handled, too. Before I torched his place, I left him out at Crooked Leg Cut. If there’s anything left of him, it came out of the belly of a gator.”

“So, the land and mineral rights will fall to you?”

“That was the plan, but I didn’t count on whoever these guys are. Now it looks like we’re both going to prison.”

McDuffy howled. “Maybe you’re going to prison. You’re the one who killed two men and burned down one of their houses. I’m an innocent victim. I plan to sue everybody in sight when I get out of this.”

She laughed. “I’m sure you will, but something tells me your lawsuits won’t go very far when they discover the audio recordings in my safe deposit box of you and me planning all of this.”

“You little bitch. Virginia will find you, and when she does, you’ll beg for a prison cell.”

Cecilia continued laughing. “Your little make-believe wife is in this thing just as deep as you and I are. All three of us are going down,”

McDuffy said, “There’s one big difference. You and I are still here, but she’s gone.”

I caught a glimpse of Skipper turning toward me, so I pulled off the headset to hear her echo McDuffy’s claim. “She’s gone, Chase. She’s not on the ship.”

I pointed toward the headset. “That’s gold. I just heard the rest of the story, but we need to do a little digging into our missing woman. It would appear her name might be Virginia Barbour, but there’s a pretty good chance that’s an alias.”

I made a call to the bridge. “We can secure from general quarters, Captain. The woman is gone.”

“Gone? Where could she go? She’s got to be on this ship somewhere.”

I said, “My team and yours both cleared the ship, and she’s not here.”

“We need to count the boats.”

I asked, “What?”

“The lifeboats… Somebody needs to count them.”

We secured from general quarters and opened the ship. The boat count came back one short, and Captain Sprayberry exploded. “Nobody will ever go over the rail of my boat again without a camera watching it happen. I don’t care how much it costs! Somebody better have a man-overboard alarm system up and running by the time the sun comes up tomorrow.”

His tantrum, no matter how loud, couldn’t make that happen in eighteen hours, but I had no doubt it would happen within hours of completing our mission.

The team convened in the CIC. Clark joined us via video call, and I briefed the transcripts of the conversation in our brig.

When I finished, I turned to the camera that would pipe my face directly onto my handler’s screen. “Like the old saying goes, what me do now, Gurdy?”

He said, “I told you to stop calling me Gurdy, and you don’t do anything now. I’ll take it from here.”

“What do you mean you’ll take it from here? What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna have a black helicopter land on your helipad and relieve you of your responsibility for the guests. What happens next is none of your concern.”

“What about the woman McDuffy called Virginia?”

“You don’t need to worry about her, either. Based on the fingerprints Skipper tried to run with no success, Ms. Virginia already has a relationship with the U.S. Marshals Service.”

Skipper gasped. “She was in WITSEC?”

“Not that kind of relationship,” Clark said. “It’s more of a working relationship, you might say.”

* * *

We spent another thirty-six hours hovering off the coast of Southern Louisiana until Kenneth LePine was healthy enough to fly back ashore. When we touched down five hundred yards away from where his house had been prior to the fire, there were two bulldozers leveling the tiny spit of land in preparation for the construction of the new house to come. Perched on the seat of the larger of the two dozers was my friend and Kenneth’s son, Cajun Kenny LePine, with a giant cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth.

I shut down the Huey, and the rotors spun to a stop over our heads. Apparently, the few residents of the sparsely populated community had grown accustomed to hearing and seeing our chopper come and go because no one so much as looked up when we showed up.

“Do dat der be my boy, him?”

Somewhere along the way, a magical switch had flipped inside my head, and I could all of a sudden understand Kenneth. That both terrified and delighted me.

“Yes, sir. That’s him. You know, I think you’d be proud of the man he is. I’ve never known a more sincerely kind, generous, and hardworking man…unless dat man be him’s daddy, you.”

The elder LePine rolled his eyes. “Don’t do dat no more, Chase. You sounds like a fool, you.”

“Come on, old man. Let’s go have a cigar with your boy. I’ve got a feeling you two have a few decades of catching up to do.”

“Dat boy don’t wanna see me, no. Hims gots all dems peoples working under him and got dat fancy life off in da city. He done lef da bayou and never looked backs.”

“Oh, he looks back, Kenneth. Trust me on that.”

We climbed from the cockpit, and Kenny shut down his dozer.

Kenneth LePine stopped in his tracks as if he’d been frozen by some unseen force, and I stopped with him.

“Dem arms and dem legs out der in da bayou… Dat was da rougarou, wasn’t him?”

The battle raged inside my head and heart as I struggled with the answer I’d give the old Cajun. Dr. Shadrack had posited a scientifically sound explanation of why the gators wouldn’t eat the decaying bodies. He discovered traces of a chemical compound in the bone samples that would likely deter any animal from feasting on the flesh.

I came up with a simple way to explain the science to Kenneth. “Yes, sir. It was the rougarou.”