Vortex (Cutter Cay) (15 page)

He wasn’t an inquisitive guy. If a person wanted to hide something, he figured it was important to them, and he didn’t pry. He walked away.
Sea Witch
being a case in point. Unless that omission directly impacted him or his family in a dangerous way, he left well enough alone.

Lies were a whole other issue.

His brothers told him repeatedly that his zero-tolerance policy made him a hard-ass. Logan didn’t give a damn. People could take him or leave him, and what they thought of him didn’t matter.

If someone chose to lie to him, he cut them off at the knees. Done. Done. And done. He wasn’t curious enough to dig deeper. None of his business. He washed his hands and moved on.

It was the only aspect of his life where there was no gray.

Black or white. Lie or truth.

And then there was Annie—

Over the sound of the ocean and the ship settling for the night, he thought he heard Dog whine, and swung his legs over the mattress. Annie must’ve let him out of her cabin and shut the door. Sometimes Dog liked company when he went topside to do his business in the area designated Dog’s dog-a-loo.

Logan pulled on shorts. He wouldn’t mind a run around the decks himself. He snagged his running shoes as Dog howled. Damn, he’d wake everyone. As Logan neared the door, he heard a hard thump.

“Okay, okay, I’m hurryi—” He yanked open the door. Dog fell limply across his feet.

Logan scooped up the inert form, kicking the cabin door closed as he raced over to the bed. He laid the dog down on his side on the rumpled sheets. “What is it, boy? Ate something bad?” Really bad, since Dog was clearly unconscious. But not dead, thank God. The animal’s chest moved with his breathing, which seemed strained.

Logan felt for a heartbeat and was relieved to find it slow, but steady. “Okay, Dog. What happened?” He extended the dog’s head, and lifted his upper lip. The animal’s gums were bright red, and although he was struggling slightly to breathe, he didn’t appear to be in shock, which would’ve indicated internal bleeding.

Logan yelled, “Annie!” as he pulled Dog’s tongue out to keep his airway open, elevated his hindquarters on his own pillow, and tucked the light blanket around him.

Logan strode to the connecting door, and banged on it. She must be awake, Dog had only just left her cabin. When there was no answer, he frowned. She might’ve let Dog out, then just presumed he wouldn’t be back, and gone to bed. He pounded on the door with his fist. “Wake up. Dog’s sick. I need to know if you fed him anything.” He pounded again.

Nobody
could sleep through the racket. He unlocked the door from his side, hoping she hadn’t locked it from hers. She hadn’t and the door slid open soundlessly.

“Annie?” He didn’t want to scare the crap out of her by suddenly materializing beside her bed out of the darkness, but he needed answers. The light from his cabin filtered through the darkness, and he could make out her form on the far bunk.

“Annie. It’s Logan. Wake up.” He spoke in a normal voice, but she didn’t move.

“What the hell’s going on?” He scooped her up in his arms, blanket and all, and carried her through to his cabin. Her head lolled against his shoulder as he moved swiftly to the bed. She was limp and unresponsive as he laid her out beside Dog.

Food poisoning? Jesus, what if other people on board had eaten the same thing? Except food poisoning wasn’t likely to render a person unconscious. Unless the food had been deliberately poisoned.

Or there was some sort of gas leak on board. Possible …

Logan glanced over at his dog as he straightened Annie’s limbs. The animal’s eyes were open, and he looked confused and disoriented. Logan leaned over the woman to rub the dog’s muzzle. “It’s okay, boy. Everything’s okay.” But it wasn’t.

He checked Annie’s vitals. She was unconscious, but her pulse and respiration seemed all right. Reaching for the phone with one hand, Logan tapped her cool cheek. “Annie, wake up.”

He managed to hit the right buttons to sound the general alarm. All the lights throughout the ship automatically turned on as the first of a series of seven short rings followed by one long ring sounded. Deafening, as it should be in an emergency.

Annie’s lashes fluttered, and she lifted her hand weakly to push at his chest. “Don’t—”

Logan covered her fingers with his. “I’m not going to hurt you. I think we have a gas leak. I’m going to carry you out onto the balcony, all right?” He spoke calmly, but his mind was racing as, not waiting for an answer, he scooped her up again, and pushed his way through the billowing drapes. Gently he placed her on one of the chaises on the small curved balcony.

Giving him a dazed, helpless look, she swallowed convulsively and tried to swing her feet to the floor, but was too weak to manage it.

“Want to throw up?” he yelled over the sound of the alarms.

She shook her head no, but her panicked eyes told another story. Logan reached inside the cabin and grabbed the Murano glass shell from the small table beside the doors. He got it under her chin just in time, then braced her forehead in his palm as she hurled.

*   *   *

“Carbon monoxide. Great, just freaking great,” Daniela told Dog. Somehow he’d managed to stretch his big body alongside hers on the chaise. They were like two drunks together. Disoriented and wobbly. The alarm bells had gone silent a few seconds before, but her ears were still ringing. Daniela wanted to get up and go help. But Logan, autocrat that he was, had instructed her not to leave the cabin. And frankly, the clear glass railing looked low enough to topple over in her shaky state.

“So we’ll stay right here, and listen to that racket and wonder what’s really going on.” She had her fingers buried in Dog’s ruff. “I’m sure Logan will figure out that it’s my cousins. But I’m going to have to tell him myself. Oh yay. I can’t wait to see his expression for
this
news.”

She still felt a little sick to her stomach, and Logan had left the glass bowl for her. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. She was dying for some water, but she wasn’t sure her wobbly legs would carry her, so she stayed put.

“You know it was my slimy Apaza cousins, don’t you?” She told the dog, who had his head across her lap, and his eyes closed. Poor thing was probably sick to his stomach as well.

“We’ll be okay, Malcolm. Just breathe this nice fresh air and before you know it, we’ll be feeling right as rain.”
And I’ll find my cousins and knock their fool heads together
. “I have no idea
how
they pulled this off, but I
know
they did it. This was no accident.”

It was too much of a coincidence to believe that on the same day that Logan had placed a chunk of emerald in her hand, and then hauled up a mountain of gold coins and jewelry, that this wasn’t Piero, Angel, and Hugo’s way of scooping up the treasure and hotfooting it back to Lima before anyone was aware that the treasure had been stolen from under their very noses.

“I told you they were morons. Whatever they took was one day’s haul. If they managed to get anything at all.
And
they could just as easily have
killed
us all!”

By contacting her cousins out of sheer desperation last week, she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. She’d run out of money, and out of options. Which of course had been Victor’s objective when he’d sent his goons after her. She ran from one cheap hotel to the next, crisscrossing the country for almost a month.

She hadn’t been able to access any of her bank accounts, and the cash Special Agent Price had given her, with several sets of fake papers, had run out a week after she arrived in Lima, despite how frugal and conservative she’d been.

She’d been desperate enough to contact her long-lost cousins, erroneously believing blood was thicker than water.

Her life had already been crazy scary. Adding her cousins to the mix had just taken crazy scary to a whole new level of danger.

She could hear indistinct voices carrying over the black water from the deck above. What was going on up there? Had they discovered that their day’s treasure was gone? Had they caught Angel, Hugo, and Piero?

She shivered even though the air was quite warm and Dog was tucked next to her under a blanket. Her fingers flexed in the animal’s thick pelt. Logan was going to be pissed. She shivered again, a full-body shudder of bone-deep fear.

“How does he show his anger?” she asked the dog, her voice thick. “Is he a hitter? A yeller?” The blood drained from her head, leaving her dizzy and even more sick to her stomach. “God—
worse
?”

If he came at her, she wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate. She looked around for a weapon. This time, she would neither falter nor would she miss.

*   *   *

“This is what we have,” Logan told the assembled group, his tone grim. Everyone was in the common room. The door and windows to the aft and side decks were wide open, letting in the freshening night breeze. “Several hose clamps were removed, hoses were rerouted from the engine exhaust systems in the generator exhaust system. Supposed to, I imagine, lead us into thinking this was an accident.

“We think Captain Vandyke interrupted them, because we found several canisters of CO hooked up to the ventilation system. We presume they meant to take those with them when they left.” There’d be fingerprints on those, and Logan had them locked securely in Jed’s cabin.

“Why didn’t the alarms go off?” Cooper demanded.

“They circumvented the CO detectors in the vents.” When disconnected or tampered with, that would cause a supervisory signal at the main annunciator. Which had been disabled on the bridge. “These people knew their way around a craft. They were in and out, and nobody saw them. The captain was taken from behind and knocked out. Two crew members, one in the engine room, the other returning to his quarters, were coldcocked as well. All three are being transported via chopper to the hospital in Arequipa. Anyone else need to be checked out?”

He scanned the room. There was a swell of negatives. Relieved, Logan contacted Jed on his headset and told him he could take off.

“Thank God all of you are all right.” He sat on the arm of one of the comfortable chairs scattered about the room. He heard the throb of the rotors overhead and was pissed. He felt violated. And worried as hell. Not that he’d let that show to the men who were all looking to him for answers.

“If Dog hadn’t howled for help, we might be telling a different story right now.” They were fortunate more people hadn’t been hurt. Three people were bad enough, but they all had head injuries from being struck; they didn’t have to be rushed into a hyperbaric chamber for treatment.

“Who did this?” Galt demanded. His bald head was shiny with perspiration. He still looked green around the gills, and ready to pass out. The carbon monoxide had affected everyone slightly differently. Logan hadn’t been hurt at all because of his close proximity to the open door in his cabin.

Fortunately, Logan, Piet, and Jed had advanced medical training. But Piet had a serious head wound and would require a hell of a lot of stitches. The other two men had minor wounds. He and Jed had got everyone sorted out, then Jed had gotten the chopper ready. Logan wasn’t taking any chances. They shouldn’t have had to handle anything, damn it.

Once he’d established that everyone was back to normal, he’d dispatched them to search the ship in pairs if they were mobile. They’d gone from stem to stern looking for the culprit; but the only thing found were the redirected hoses and CO cylinders.

They all had drinks, either soft or alcoholic—God only knew they deserved a drink under the circumstances—and they were crowded into the room so that everyone was in the loop.

“Rydell Case,” Logan told them grimly.

“Shit! Seriously?” Galt demanded.

“How did none of us see his ship?” Cooper demanded, pissed.

Earl Horner scowled as he got up to refill his glass. “Isn’t he tied up in all that legal red tape in Cape Town?”

“Last we heard.” Logan’s tone was grim. Inside he was seething with fury. This time Case had gone too fucking far. The sight of Annie unconscious would haunt him. “Either he slithered out of that tangle, or possibly he sent someone else.” Saying it aloud made Logan realize that didn’t make sense, unless Case had changed his MO. He liked the hands-on approach.

“What about those cousins of Annie’s?” Vanek demanded.

“Possibly. I’ll make inquiries.” Logan, who was drinking strong black coffee, paused with the mug to his lips. “We’ll take it from there.”

This
time he refused to let their lawyers deal with Rydell Case.
This
time he’d deal with the son of a bitch himself.

“Who checked today’s haul?” Izak Vanek straightened from his slouched position in one of the easy chairs scattered throughout the room.

“Relax,” Cooper told him. “Horner and I checked there first. Everything is exactly like we left it earlier.”

“
Nothing
touched?” Galt asked, surprised. “Are you serious? Maybe it was the Sea Witch? Easier to come aboard and take directly instead of diving for it.”

“She’s foolish enough to dive alone,” Logan told the men. “But I doubt she’d be stupid enough to board our vessel alone. There are people wandering around at all hours. She would’ve been seen.”

“Well,
someone
came on board, and that someone, or someones, was
not
seen,” Vanek pointed out, his fingers white around a beer bottle.

His guest’s relatives, or Case? The bastard would’ve done the job himself. And gotten great satisfaction in doing so. Doing so and then getting away cleanly without leaving a clue behind. That was Case’s MO. One phone call would tell Logan where the man was. This seemed more like a Case trick than something done by Annie’s cousins. But he’d know who was where soon enough. Piet had already called the authorities.