Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

“Drowning.”

Henry could feel her staring at him incredulously as he pulled the Corsair away from the dock and into the sound.

Lassiter seldom took special note of the weather. Rainy days never got her down because she was too busy to notice them. She wouldn’t have noticed this one, either, if she hadn’t been forced to spend part of it sitting on a bench next to Clay Verris. At least he had brought his own umbrella so she didn’t have to share hers with him like they were a couple of furtive lovers. The park was practically on the other side of Savannah from her office, which meant she hadn’t been able to stop at her usual coffee shop for her morning latte. Going without her standard morning pick-me-up was bad enough, even before the son of a bitch opened his mouth. And he was taking his sweet time about that.

“So,” the son of a bitch said finally, “this is you cleaning up your messes.”

Lassiter took a breath and listened to the raindrops pattering on her umbrella. “Spare me the lecture.”

“It’s like watching the Hindenberg crash into the Titanic.” Verris made it sound like something he would have enjoyed seeing. Well, he was that kind of sadistic bastard, Lassiter thought. Although she might have enjoyed it herself if Verris was a passenger on one of them.

“I haven’t decided what to do next,” she said stiffly.

“Henry Brogan is like any other soldier,” Verris said, going into full pontification mode. “When they’re young and stupid, they believe anything you tell them. Then they get older. They start to wear out and grow a conscience. This is why we need a new breed of soldier. Gemini will handle this.”

Lassiter had a fleeting mental image of thrusting the point of her umbrella into Verris’s eye. “I’m sorry,” she said in an even stiffer tone. “I can’t allow that.”

“I’m not asking your permission,” Verris said, and the edge in his voice was the vocal version of a lethal weapon. “You want to go to your bosses? I’m sure they’d love to hear about our little rogue project.”

The rain started to come down harder now but Lassiter could sense Verris’s self-righteousness; it radiated from him like heat, except it was cold, very cold. The man probably had a chunk of permafrost instead of a heart.

“I’ll make it look like a Russian hit,” Verris went on cheerfully. He stood up then and Lassiter followed suit. Apparently the meeting was coming to an end; she could hardly wait.

“You give Henry a state funeral. Flag on the coffin, twenty-one-gun salute, you give a nice speech, everyone cries, he’ll be remembered as a hero, and life goes on.”

“Not for Henry,” Lassiter said. The rain was coming down really hard now, pounding the pavement and splashing her lower legs.

“Oh come on,” Verris said. “Mutts like Henry were born to be collateral damage. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”

That’s not how you felt back when you were begging him to work for you, Lassiter thought, sneaking a glance at him. He was gazing straight ahead, all puffed up with importance, loving his own genius. There was no way she could win this one.

“Do you have an asset in place?” she asked.

“I have the perfect asset,” Verris replied.

Lassiter knew what that meant and her heart sank.

Henry dropped anchor just off a secluded bit of Florida shoreline. They would be safe here for a while, he told Danny, and suggested she get a few hours of sleep to make up for what she’d missed. Danny laughed—after what they’d just been through together, she wasn’t sure she would ever sleep again.

But even as she said it, she realized she had actually been running on fumes and was now so exhausted she was close to falling down on the spot. She stumbled down the few steps into the sleeping area in the Corsair’s bow and was surprised to find it wasn’t stuffy and hot; the owner had opted for air-conditioning.

As she lay down, she saw that the wide dark stripe running the length of the bow was actually dark-tinted Plexiglas, with three small hatches that could be opened for ventilation. She considered turning off the a/c and opening all three for fresh air, but before she could give that any further consideration, she dropped off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The sun was a lot higher in the sky by the time she woke, groggy and heavy-headed, but more than anything, hungry. She gave herself a few minutes to become more alert, then had a look around the small galley. There were a few bottles of expensive imported beer in the mini-fridge but no food—no gourmet cheese, no caviar, no chocolate. It was so pristine she doubted there ever had been anything in it other than beer. Which she took as proof positive that the Corsair was owned by a man who never brought lady friends aboard.

Danny’s stomach growled unhappily as she conducted a thorough search of the cabinets. If all she could find were smuggled drugs or diamonds, she was going to track down the owner and tear him limb from limb with her bare hands, just on general principle.

She was on the verge of despair when she finally discovered a box of saltines at the very back of the last cabinet. Just seeing the picture of the crackers was enough to make her mouth water. There had better be crackers in this box, she thought, because if it turned out to be a fortune in stolen gems or little plastic bags of cocaine, she was going to eat them anyway.

Nope, just plain old crackers, lightly salted and dry as a bone, which had to be some kind of miracle considering they’d been stored on a boat. The pictures on the box showed them floating in a bowl of soup or topped with cheese; nobody ever ate saltines plain. Unless there was nothing else in the pantry of your stolen Chris-Craft Corsair, of course. Danny told herself she was grateful, glad to have them, and she wasn’t wishing they were Ritz crackers or cheese crackers, nope, not at all, not even slightly. These saltines were divine. The taste of edible papier mâché had been criminally underrated.

She emerged from below to find Henry had waded ashore and was now lounging on the beach, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, and his ever-present Phillies cap pulled low to keep the sun out of his eyes. He looked up from his phone just long enough to give her a beckoning wave.

“Hungry?” she asked as she joined him, holding out the crackers.

He looked up from the phone again. “Very,” he said. “But—” he tapped the end of the box. “Those expired three years ago.”

“Really? They taste fine.” She turned the box around and saw the Best Before date. Apparently Henry didn’t know that Best Before wasn’t the same as an expiration date. She considered explaining it to him, then decided it could wait for a later time when people weren’t trying to kill them. Anyway, she was pretty sure the half-life for saltines was a lot longer than three years. Or maybe she was just so hungry she felt relieved that she didn’t have to share them.

“How long have you worked with Lassiter?” she asked.

“You know my file,” Henry said, not looking away from the phone screen.

“I do. Which was why I didn’t believe the guy in the marina office,” Danny said. “While he still had teeth, he said you were the rogue.”

Henry glanced up at her briefly. “But you didn’t believe him.”

“I was ninety-nine percent sure he was lying.”

“Yeah, there’s always that damn one percent, eh?” He gave a small laugh.

Yeah, that damn one percent, Danny thought as she shifted from one foot to the other. Here in the light of day, out of state with a stolen boat and only some very old saltines for breakfast, she couldn’t help wondering if she was doing the right thing. What if she had thrown her career away because she couldn’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys?