Melissa Cutler - Hot on the Hunt

Alicia turned her body and looked back toward St. Thomas. In her hand, John glimpsed a flash of metal. Her gun. Which meant she hadn’t exactly hired the pilot to take her to St. Croix. She’d used force, digging herself even deeper into a criminal hole. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that jazz. The question was, why had she put herself in such a desperate position? It’d been a miracle that she’d survived the gunshot wound Rory had inflicted on her, so why was she squandering her second chance at life with vengeance? It didn’t add up.

“The navy’s coming,” she called.

Not unexpected, but he still needed to get away before U.S. authorities found him. They’d already accused him of being Rory’s accomplice after Rory’s initial arrest, but though one criminal’s claims alone hadn’t been enough proof of John’s guilt to charge him with a crime, finding him there and Rory gone might be the corroborating evidence the Feds had been waiting for to put John away for life.

He hated to ask for help, not from her. Anyone but Alicia. She already thought him as less of a man. The sidekick. Never the alpha. Damn it all to hell. “Throw down a rope.”

Her attention swung to Rory’s boat. Even from that distance, he could see it in her eyes, the disdain for John, her desperation to get to Rory. Unbelievable. She was going to leave him there in the middle of the ocean, tens of miles from shore or the nearest boat.

Anger at her and Rory and the entire rotten farce that had become his life made him snap. He smacked the water, shouting, “Don’t do it, Phoenix.”

Ignoring him, she nudged the pilot’s shoulder. He couldn’t hear her for the thunder of the rotors, but he watched her mouth the word go.

Just like that, she was gone.

The Caribbean Sea had never felt so vast. John tipped his chin up and looked at the clouds. His boat was miles away, the U.S. Navy was bound to catch up with him and try to pin him with orchestrating Rory’s escape, and he’d had no choice but to beg Alicia not to abandon him. Triple ouch.

Most of the time, he relished being the perpetual underdog. His whole life he’d been a scrapper, but he’d used it to his advantage. In warfare and black ops combat, it was rarely a bad thing to be underestimated by the enemy. But sometimes, clawing for a seat at the table sucked. Today, it sucked.

His only hope of getting through the next hour without becoming shark bait or getting arrested was to get the attention of one of the yachts or sea kayakers passing by. Treading water, he turned in a slow circle, assessing his options. The navy was maybe only five or ten minutes back. In the distance, a modest luxury yacht cruised his way, coming from St. Croix, blasting reggae music and with sunbathing, barely clothed women adorning its deck.

One thing John loved about his HK45 was that water didn’t jam it up. He raised the gun overhead and squeezed off a round to get their attention, hoping they’d process the sound as an emergency flare gun instead of a lethal weapon, then tucked the gun out of view and waved his arms high, saying a silent prayer that the boaters were feeling charitable.

* * *

“You know how you can guarantee I won’t kill you?”

The pilot’s eyes were wide with terror and bugging out of his beet-red face as he gave a spastic shake of his head.

The real answer was Because I would never kill a civilian—ever. But honesty like that wasn’t exactly an A-1 coercion technique. Alicia burrowed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his neck. Her finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger, but it didn’t need to be. The metal on his skin was convincing enough that she meant business.

“Because you’re going to hover over that field, no funny business, and I’m going to jump out. And then you don’t ever have to see me again. Sound like a plan?”

He nodded, right on cue. Holding the helicopter pilot by gunpoint hadn’t been her first choice, but money hadn’t worked as a bribe and she couldn’t take the chance of Rory making it to St. Croix—or, worse, disappearing—before she got a read on him.

She hadn’t wanted to abandon John in the water, either, but what choice did she have? She’d unleashed a vicious criminal and now it was her duty to stop him at the sacrifice of everything else. Not only her duty to herself, but to the planet. Wasn’t that a disquieting thought? In the twenty months since she’d been shot, she’d barely thought of anyone but herself. That’s the way rehab and physical therapy worked. If you weren’t thinking about yourself 24/7, thinking about healing and regaining your strength until it was almost an obsession, then you weren’t doing it right.

She jiggled her gun against the pilot’s skin. “But if you try to be a hero or do something stupid, the deal’s off and I shoot. Got it?”

Another nod.

“Take it down as far as you can without landing.” She didn’t need marks left from the chopper’s landing skids. Her footprints would be evidence enough of her presence on the island. With any luck, the pilot would return to St. Thomas and shake off his flight under duress. Maybe he wouldn’t even call the police. Yeah, right.

Jumping out of a helicopter into a soggy field in the middle of St. Croix’s wilderness wasn’t ideal, but the airport was on the west side of the island—miles from any one of the harbors Rory was almost certain to have chosen as a landing point on the east side and way too central a location for her to disembark at. After a sweep of the coastline, she’d spotted Rory’s speedboat drifting in the calm waters near a secluded high-end resort, with Rory nowhere to be seen.

If she’d been in his position, she would’ve done the very same thing because the resort’s remote location tucked into the lush green tropics of the northeast shore meant fewer witnesses had noticed him drive up and jump out. Plus, the resort sported a whole parking lot full of cars ripe for the stealing.

Contrary to St. Thomas’s Let’s-help-the-tourists-spend-their-money-fast! vibe, this was a sleepy island of wealthy, older vacationers who liked their tennis games at the club in the morning and their naps in their beach hammocks in the afternoon, thank you very much. An escaped convict couldn’t hide here long—at least, that’s what Alicia was counting on.

Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t hide out here long, either, so it was a good thing that she didn’t plan to. The idea was to locate Rory, execute him and vanish before the vacationers had woken from their naps. The closest, best place to make a clean break with the helicopter and its frightened pilot was a field two kilometers from the resort.

She poked the pilot in the neck with her gun once more for good measure. “Hold it steady now.” She yanked his radio wire from its socket and tossed it out the door opening, then his earphones. No sense giving him a chance to call the police the moment she jumped, even if she’d never said directly why she needed him to get her to St. Croix or what she planned to do while there.

She tucked two one-hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket to cover replacing the equipment she’d destroyed, secured the computer bag she’d retrieved from her rental car across her shoulders, then walked to the edge of the doorway. He’d done a great job getting low. She had maybe a two-meter jump. No problem.

On the ground, she ran out from under the helicopter’s shadow and sought cover beneath the tree canopy. She watched the helicopter rise and head off, not back toward St. Thomas, but in the direction of the St. Croix airport. Just terrific. With the navy on its way to the island, she had ten, maybe fifteen minutes to vanish before the U.S. authorities he was most likely on his way to notify descended on the resort.