Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (4 page)

7

6:53 p.m.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Jenna froze. It was an instinctive response, and in the back of her mind, she heard Noah chastising her for not being more aware of her surroundings, not being in control of her reactions.

Freezing, she knew, was just another way of fleeing a situation, mentally at least, and hoping that things would get better. Usually, they didn’t. Freezing up was a way of surrendering control, letting luck and circumstances guide the outcome rather than a conscious decision.

Your gut reaction to a threat will be to either run away,
Noah had told her
, or to blow through it head on, which is what you would do because you’re a teenager and you think you’re invincible.

Run away?

John was between her and the exit. Nowhere to go.

Blow through?

Yes, she could do that. She could swing the SCUBA bottle at him, knock him down and then run… No, that would defeat the purpose of coming here.

Throw the tank at him, and then when he’s distracted, go on the attack, just as she had with Zack. A couple of punches to the jaw… Maybe hit the sweet spot and knock him out on the first try…or a kick to the solar plexus
.

I can take him.

The very idea of attacking this man, not a killer with a gun but one of her neighbors, kept her rooted in place.

But a lot of times,
Noah had continued
, those are the worst choices you could make. You might make a bad situation even worse, or you might miss out on a real opportunity.

Most people are an open book. Watch a stranger for a few minutes and you’ll know everything there is to know about them—their body language, the way they move their eyes when they talk.

Jenna had exchanged pleasantries with the shop’s grizzled namesake, but not much more. He was the epitome of a crusty old beach bum: mid-sixties, a full head of white hair, skin bronzed and eyes faintly yellowed from too many years of staring at the sun-dazzled water. She didn’t know if he recognized her. The only thing she saw in his eyes was the fear of what might happen next.

Opportunity
.

She shifted her posture, trying to mimic his alert stance, then slowly, visibly relaxed. Her spine straightened, her neck stretched, making her appear taller, more confident. She smiled.

“John!” She said his name like he was an old friend she hadn’t seen in years.

Uncertainty flashed across his face. She saw his eyes flicker upward, ever so slightly, as he searched his memory, trying to find the right connection to her.

“Hi, John,” she said again, repeating his name, reinforcing the familiarity. “Where do you want me to put this stuff?”

“What?” His eyes were moving wildly now, the biological equivalent of a computer hard-drive spinning to access data scattered across dozens of file locations.

Shape his perceptions
, she told herself,
control the finished product
. When Noah had first taught her these techniques, she had been doubtful regarding their effectiveness. It seemed like something right out of the Jedi Knights’ handbook. Surely, real people couldn’t be that malleable. But thereafter, she had become acutely aware of how often people were easily tricked.

“For the trip out to the reef, John. Remember?”

“Ummm…”

I’m losing him
, she thought.
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for
.

She mimicked his pose again, narrowed her eyelids, and used the small muscles of her eyes to change her focus and dilate her pupils without releasing his stare. It was a hypnotist’s trick, but she had no idea if she was doing it right, much less if it even worked at all.

“John, did he forget to tell you?” Her voice was lower now, almost seductively soft, but full of sympathy and commiseration. She made a conscious effort to avoid using any other name but his own. If she mentioned Noah, it might trigger a memory cascade that would connect her to the destroyed boat, and the spell would be broken.

“Do you want me to call him, John? I’ll bet he can get this cleared up in a jiffy.”
Jiffy
was a good friendly word. “Or we can take care of it when we get back? That’s probably what we should do.”

A smile, confused but nonetheless friendly, finally split his craggy face. “Ah, sure. That’ll be fine.”

“Thank you, so much.”

He nodded, but then the uncertainty started to creep back into his expression.
Don’t let him think about it
. “I could use a hand getting this stuff outside.”

“What?” John seemed to snap back into the moment. “Oh, sure thing, Miss…?”

She took a quick step forward and let the cylinder roll toward him. His reflexes took over and his arms came up to catch it. She scooped up the mesh bag containing the rest of the equipment she had gathered, then stepped around him, moving slowly to hold his gaze as he turned. She stayed close, backing toward the rear door. She made small talk about his wares, asked vague technical questions about diving to keep his mind occupied, and step-by-glacial step, got him to the back door.

She set the bag down and reached out for the filled tank. “I’ve got that one. Can you get the other one?”

“The other?”

“Yep. Thanks. Oh, I guess I’ll need a manifold, too.”

“Oh, sure thing.” He seemed almost reluctant to turn away, to let go of her stare. Truth be told, she was a little worried about that, too. How long would the spell last?

“I’ll be right here,” she said, with as much innocence as she could muster. “Just grab another bottle and a manifold.”

With an audible sigh, John ducked back through the door. As soon as he was gone, Jenna pitched the cylinder over the side, and then, with the mesh bag in hand, she jumped in after it.

8

7:29 p.m.

NO PERSONS UNDER 21 ALLOWED

Jenna stared at the notice, mounted just to the right of the weather-beaten wooden door. Just below it was another sign that declared: NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SERVICE.

At least I’ve got a shirt
, she thought, as she gave the door a push and went inside. The space beyond was dark, or seemed that way after fifteen minutes of walking into the setting sun. She waited until her eyes adjusted.

She had exited the harbor, underwater and undetected, and headed north, staying in the channel that ran along the eastern side of the island until her tank was about half-empty. Then she ditched everything but the mask, snorkel and fins, and paddled up onto shore. With dry land underfoot, she had discarded the rest of the gear and headed west across the island.

A teen-aged girl walking barefoot down the street was not that unusual a sight—not in a place like Key Weird anyway. Once she got her bearings, she had stayed off the main thoroughfares, weaving down cross streets and through neighborhoods of trailer homes. Although she had lived on the island all her life, she had found herself experiencing it from a completely new perspective. Everything seemed different at a walking pace, familiar but at the same time foreign. The strangeness of her surroundings compounded the mental and physical exhaustion she now felt.

She didn’t want to run anymore. She was tired of running. Noah was dead. She hadn’t completely processed what that meant. She knew that eventually she would feel pain and loss, but right now she felt only anger: anger at the men who had blown up their boat and shot Noah, and anger at herself for running when what she really wanted was to fight. And since she couldn’t do that, she just felt tired.

The stuffy air inside the bar smelled of bleach and fry oil, undercut with a hint of stale beer. Country music drifted through the air, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the audio from two different television sets mounted to a wall behind the bar, one displaying a baseball game, the other tuned to an all-news network. Jenna studied the latter for a moment, curious to see if the events at the marina had made the news, but the commentators were discussing an international crisis—something about a bio-terrorism attack in China…or had it come from China? On any other day, Jenna would have been fascinated by the subject. While other girls she knew wanted to be famous singers or sports stars—or to just marry rich husbands, she hoped to become an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, she scarcely noticed the bio-attack story.

The sunspots in her vision continued to recede, and after a few more seconds, she could make out human shapes. Two men stood over the pool table that dominated one end of the establishment. It took a moment longer for her to realize that they were looking at her. She turned away from their watchful stares, and moved toward the bar. Two of the stools were occupied, the patrons hunched over their drinks, their backs to Jenna.

“Jenna, honey, what are you doing here?”

Jenna felt the last of her weariness slip away at the sound of the voice. “Mercy!”

Thirty-six year old Mercedes Reyes was the sole proprietor of
Ex Isle
, a not-quite disreputable, out of the way, dive bar, frequented by local regulars and ignored by the island’s transient vacationing population. She was also Noah Flood’s girlfriend, or at least Jenna assumed she was.

The exact nature of the relationship between her father and Mercy was difficult to pin down. They didn’t live together and their very independent lives meant that they didn’t spend much time with each other. Mercy was almost twenty years younger than Noah, making him literally old enough to be her father. She was also more than twenty years Jenna’s senior, old enough to be Jenna’s mother. Given the striking resemblance between them, a similarity which only seemed to increase as Jenna approached maturity, the question of whether they were actually related had come up more than once. Both Noah and Mercy insisted that they met for the first time when Jenna was three years old. The obvious explanation, that Noah was attracted to Mercy for the very reason that she resembled Jenna’s mother, would have made sense if not for the somewhat cool nature of their relationship. They were certainly friends, but they seemed to be in no great hurry to have a more intimate connection. Either that, or they were just very discreet about what they did have.

Jenna had always been of two minds about that. Because he was the most important person in her life, she felt both jealous and protective of her father. Sometimes she wanted him all for herself, and sometimes she wanted him to find someone to make him happy. Jenna thought of Mercy as both mother and big sister, and that, too, was problematic. There was no sense in upsetting the status quo with romance.

Now, all those considerations were moot.

“Mercy, I… Noah…” The words refused to form. If she said it out loud, that would make it all true. She had put her grief into a box and buried it deep. Her sole focus had been getting away, running, reaching Mercy, just like Noah told her to do.

Mercy’s face creased with concern. “Jenna, honey, what’s wrong?”

She tried again. The words didn’t come. The tears did.

Mercy, unbidden, folded her arms around Jenna, hugging her tight.

Stop it!

The thought was so sudden, so violent, that Jenna jerked away from Mercy’s embrace. She blinked furiously at the tears, embarrassed at the display of weakness, but that was not why she had pulled back.

Noah’s instructions to seek out Mercy had been specific:
if we get separated
... Mercy’s bar was to have been a place to rendezvous, not a refuge. But how was Mercy going to help? She would call 911—what else could she do?—and that would almost certainly bring Cray and his partner right to her doorstep.

She couldn’t put Mercy in danger. She couldn’t let herself be put in danger.

So what am I supposed to do?

What would Noah do?

That was a question she no longer felt she knew the answer to, but she knew one thing:
He wouldn’t put Mercy in danger
.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking away the tears. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

9

7:33 p.m.

As she crossed the parking lot, Jenna quickened her pace, moving with a determined stride that none-too-subtly telegraphed the message:
Leave me alone
. Mercy, standing at the entrance, called out to her but didn’t follow.

Jenna felt a profound, but short-lived sense of relief. She had protected Mercy and probably herself as well, but in so doing, had wiped clean the slate of options. She was on her own now, and the men who had tried to kill her were still out there. There was nowhere else she could go, no one she could trust to save her…

You’ve got to stop thinking that way
, she told herself.
Noah didn’t raise you to let other people solve your problems
.

“So I’m just supposed to take on these killers myself?” she muttered.

If it comes to that. Flight or fight. You either run away, or you take the fight to them. You stood up to Zack, and he had a gun. You are not powerless. Trust your gut, but make up your own damn mind
.

Her gut told her to fight, but who was she supposed to be fighting?

“Who wants me dead?”

She had thought that perhaps the bomb attack was the work of the Villegas brothers, wanting revenge for what had happened a week before.

Noah was very careful about which clients he would let her interact with, especially now that his little girl was becoming a very attractive young woman, but he would always introduce her to clients as a way of testing her people-reading skills. When he introduced Carlos and Raul Villegas, a pair of young Cuban-American entrepreneurs who, if their claims were to be believed, operated a successful night club in Key West, her keen senses went on high alert.

She could tell, at a glance, that Raul was the younger brother. He looked younger, with an athletic physique, a clear unlined face and a full head of jet black hair, but it was the less obvious clues that spoke to Jenna. Raul was cocky, with a strutting attention-seeking demeanor that was textbook younger sibling behavior. She noted his clandestine glances to see if older brother Carlos was watching him, but she couldn’t tell whether Raul was looking for his older brother’s approval, or trying to assert his independence. She also caught him looking at her, not leering openly, but letting his eyes flick up and down her body.

His attention had made her uncomfortable enough to loosen the knot in her T-shirt hem and tug it down to her thighs.

Carlos was very different. Handsome but not in a youthful way. He had a fake but practiced smile and eyes that never seemed to move. He made her wary. Noah had warned her about people like this, men who were well-versed in the art of manipulating others to get what they wanted—hucksters and pick-up artists who used their charisma to exploit people. Carlos hadn’t even looked at her.

She had retreated to the
Kilimanjaro
’s bridge and later, when Noah had joined her and asked for her impressions of them, she had expressed her opinion in the most succinct terms. “They’re both creeps.”

“It’s actually much worse than that,” Noah told her. “Carlos Villegas has been making the rounds of charter operators, looking for someone to run errands for him.”

Jenna was intelligent enough to know what that meant. The Villegas brothers were small-time drug traffickers who were looking to find new ways to bring product across the Gulf. “You knew that, and you still let them come on board?”

“Today, they are just clients, out for a dive. Their money is as good as anyone else’s. Don’t worry. I’m not going to become a smuggler.”

Only now did she recall that his answer, and his evident willingness to even associate with men like the Villegas brothers, had bothered her. Subsequent events had caused her to forget all about that.

It had happened just as they were preparing to weigh anchor and head back to port. Carlos had approached Noah and tried to strike up what he must have thought would be a casual conversation as a way to make his pitch. Jenna had been eavesdropping from the relative isolation of the bridge, curious to hear how Noah would shoot him down, when to her astonishment, Raul had appeared on the ladder.

“Is this where you’ve been hiding,
chica
?” Without waiting for an invitation, he climbed up onto the elevated deck and then leaned back against the control console as if he had every right to be there.

Jenna had felt herself go cold. It was, she realized now, the first time she had ever truly felt the fight or flight response. She wanted to scream for help, to run down to the lower deck and take shelter behind Noah, but she had resisted the urge. This was one of those opportunities Noah had talked about, a chance to put what she had learned to use in real life. And besides, other than sneaking up on her, what bad thing had Raul done? Nothing. Yet.

His smile had been genuine, but his eyes had betrayed him. Jenna noticed how he had kept glancing to his left, mentally constructing the fiction he would use to win her over. “You should come down and party with us.”

“I don’t think my father would like that.”

She had stressed the word ‘father’ hoping that would be enough to discourage him, and almost immediately saw that it would not. He had smiled like they were old friends who skirted parental rules on a regular basis. Co-conspirators. “You always do what daddy says?”

“It’s a small boat.”

He had licked his lips and eased forward. “Aww, c’mon baby. Don’t play hard to get.”

He wants me to call for help, to be scared. What will shut him down?

She had forced herself to relax, leaned against the console beside him, mimicking his posture, and had looked him in the eye. “Raul, I’m not playing hard to get.”

There was a glimmer of triumph in his eyes, and she had wondered for a moment if she had misjudged him. Desperately, she had searched her repertoire of techniques. “Do you have a sister, Raul? Or is Carlos your only family?”

The triumphant look had faded. He had looked away, and she’d known that she had found the right pressure point, perhaps more than one.

“No. No sister. I have a younger brother in Cuba.”

“Oh? What’s his name? How old is he?”

She had sensed a shift in his demeanor. His narcissism was ebbing. He no longer felt compelled to conquer her, to possess her. His lust was gradually changing into something more like the protective love of a brother for a sister.

Suddenly, Noah had charged up the ladder. “What the hell is going on here?”

Before Jenna had been able to answer, Noah had slammed a fist into Raul’s abdomen. Raul had curled around the blow like a worm on a fishhook. Noah had grabbed him by the neck and propelled him away from Jenna, pitching him off the elevated platform. Raul had thudded, senseless, onto the deck below.

Noah had turned to Jenna, and in a voice that still chilled her, said simply. “Stay here.”

Jenna had complied, but her insatiable curiosity had driven her once more to spy on what was happening below. She saw Noah pull Carlos close and whisper something in his ear. A moment later, both of the Villegas brothers had gone into the water, willingly it seemed, and had begun swimming toward nearby Long Key.

When Noah had joined her on the bridge, he’d said, “We won’t speak of this.”

And they didn’t.

To the best of her knowledge, no complaints were registered with local law enforcement or maritime authorities. If they had wanted to, the Villegas brothers could have sued Noah or tried to get his charter privileges revoked, but doing so would have exposed them to further investigation that might have revealed their illegal activities. Yet, they had not seemed the sort to simply let it go.

Somehow though, the idea that the Villegas brothers were behind the bomb attack just didn’t fit. It was too complex, too sophisticated. They were small-time thugs, more likely to lie in wait with a baseball bat. If she had read them correctly, they were the sort of men who preferred to deal with their enemies personally.

There were other pieces that didn’t fit. Who were the men posing as FBI agents? Why had they been interested in her?

Suddenly, she saw what she had been missing, the one thread woven throughout all of the unconnected dots, the one thing that was constant in every instance. It still made no sense to her, but the connection was there.

The sound of a vehicle approaching from behind drew Jenna out of her musings. She moved to the edge of the street to give it room to pass, and then turned to make sure that she was clear. Her heart fell as she recognized the weather-beaten Ford F-150 pickup that pulled up beside her.

Mercedes Reyes leaned across the seat and spoke to her through the open passenger window. “Jenna, get in.”

There was an unusual gravity to her tone, and despite her reservations, Jenna found herself opening the door and climbing into the cab. She settled into the seat but refused to meet Mercy’s stare. There was a long uncomfortable silence, filled only by the gentle chug of the idling engine.

“Are you just going to sit here?” Jenna finally asked.

“I tried to call Noah,” Mercy said. “No answer. So I called the marina. They wouldn’t pick up either.” She laid a hand on Jenna’s forearm. “What’s going on?”

Jenna felt her resistance eroding. Mercy’s touch seemed to uncork the bottle into which she had placed her weariness and grief. Mercy had the uncanny ability to read her like a book, sometimes even better than her own father.

“I don’t know.”
Don’t tell her. You’ll only put her in danger
. She met Mercy’s gaze. “What are you doing here? You need to get back to the bar.”

“We’re closed for the rest of the day. I would have been here sooner, but it took a couple of minutes to roust everyone.”

“You didn’t need to do that.”

Mercy squeezed her arm. “Talk to me. I can tell something is seriously wrong. Let me help.”

“You really want to help?” Jenna drew in a breath. “Then tell me this. Who in the hell is my father?”