Karen Harper - Drowning Tides

He felt guilty that he’d caused this crisis and at how much he still wanted her. He figured she knew that. And he was scared, not at how finding someone he could trust and love had finally come his way, but that, even if he saved Lexi, he had to lose Claire so Ames couldn’t hurt her like this again.

* * *

Jace cruised over Cuba in the Cirrus SR22 turbocharged plane he’d borrowed from an old buddy who was a lot richer than he was. It was legal to pass over the embargoed island in a small plane. Several of his hotshot pilot friends had faked engine problems and asked for an emergency landing there just to look around in off-limits Havana. This was one heck of an emergency, but no way he was stopping anywhere but Grand Cayman.

He planned to get there in slightly under the three-hour flight plan he’d filed back at the Marco Island Executive Airport. He’d picked that smaller facility instead of Naples Municipal Airport, hoping the spying eyes of that damned Clayton Ames would have more trouble finding him there. Jace had obviously been researched and watched. He’d been sent photos of Nick and Claire together at an address no average outsider should have, but Ames’s long arms seemed to pull a lot of strings. He felt really guilty that the guy who had snatched Lexi had resembled and pretended to be him.

The distance was just under 400 nautical miles, and he was pushing the Cirrus near its top speed of 180 knots, hovering just under its ceiling of 17,500 feet since the plane was not pressurized and he didn’t want to mess with supplemental oxygen. He wanted to land at MWCR in the Cayman Islands as if he was a tourist. He’d case the area where Nick and Claire would be staying and, no doubt, where they would be contacted. Just as when he’d flown jumbo jets to Singapore and back or when he’d gone on Middle East combat missions, he wanted to be prepared and ready.

He didn’t really have a specific plan after he landed, but he’d recon and get one. Anything he had to do to find this Clayton Ames who held his daughter’s life in his dirty hands. So what if Nick Markwood said he’d been trying to get the goods on him, even locate him for years because he moved around so much? The guy might be rich, powerful and slippery, but he was going to pay for this, even if Jace had to take orders from Markwood for a while. Even if Claire was staying with the rich lawyer in what were probably luxurious digs on a gorgeous beach on a tropical island. Even if—this really scared him too—she seemed to trust Markwood, to look at him as if...

Damn, why hadn’t Claire been content to just run Clear Path from her home office and steer clear of criminal investigations? She put her life—all their lives—in danger. This whole mess really got to Jace. It would be so easy to just end things up here over this vast blue-green water, to just disappear. Maybe Claire would talk to people he knew to try to find out if he’d been suicidal, why he’d kept changing his work flight schedule, why he’d considered giving up the international flying career he’d worked so hard for. She could use her forensic autopsy skills on him even if they never found his body.

He shook himself loose from that sick daydream. He was going to not only survive, but live. Really live. And with Claire and Lexi by his side.

2

As Claire and Nick’s Cayman Airlines jet dropped toward the island’s airport, Claire pressed her forehead to the window. Her beloved little Lexi was down there somewhere. Terrified? Tied up? Locked up? Drugged? Claire’s mind could not let her go further. She prayed for her daughter’s safety again, trying to send her silent reassurance and love.

“Those two cruise ships anchored there look like toys in a bright blue bathtub,” she told Nick as he leaned closer to look out too. “Amazing, long, white beaches, even compared to those in Naples.”

“That one is Seven Mile Beach. Look how close George Town is to it. Did you learn much when you checked out the islands online last night?”

“Until my eyes crossed. Like a lot of resort areas, it seems a mix of rich and poor, good and bad. For us, I’m hoping for the good.”

She bit her lower lip and blinked back tears. Except when they’d had ginger ale to calm their nervous stomachs, she and Nick had held hands for most of the flight. They pretended to sleep at times so the lady with the British accent in the aisle seat would stop being so chatty. They couldn’t put it past Ames that she was a plant. After all, he’d sent the tickets with the ransom note, so he could have bought three seats instead of two.

“And, of course, it’s a tax haven,” Claire went on, keeping her voice low. “Grand Cayman’s offshore investment reputation means a lot of those pretty pastel-and-glass buildings down there are just fronts for companies that aren’t really located here but want to escape taxes.” She whispered even lower, “I read that big firms like Apple, Walmart and Exxon do business here. No wonder...” She checked what she was going to say about Clayton Ames and finished lamely, “I read too that Osama bin Laden was a genius at stashing money offshore.” Clayton Ames was in good company here, hiding his assets, she thought. At least his Grand Cayman home must be luxurious. So Lexi might—must—be in a good, safe place.

After their aircraft taxied to the gate, they took their two carry-ons from the overhead bins and walked out through people waiting for friends and family. Claire kept scanning the crowd in case someone had a sign with her or Nick’s name on it, to take them to Lexi. They assumed they’d be contacted at their hotel, but she had hopes of something sooner.

But nothing—no one for them.

They stood in line to take a brightly colored taxi, painted with a green turtle like the one on the Cayman Islands flag. Inside, as they’d decided earlier, they kept their conversation to tourist talk again. Claire was so physically and emotionally exhausted that scenery blurred by as the driver took them in heavy traffic—a lot of ritzy cars like BMWs, even Rolls-Royces—toward their hotel, the Sand and Sea Club, at the north end of Seven Mile Beach. Their cabbie spoke in a unique drawl and pronounced Cayman with the emphasis on the man part.

“Oh, look at that sign!” Claire blurted when the cab came to a sudden stop. It read Iguanas Have Right Of Way. Drive Slowly. “I read the iguanas here are blue, the only place in the world,” she added.

“They only blue when they mating,” their cabbie said. “April, May, not now. They endangered, nuh.”

Claire wasn’t sure what nuh meant, but it got tacked on the end of sentences here, maybe like an exclamation point.

Again, sights seemed to rotate past: a pile of conch shells for sale, several pirate mannequins advertising Pirates Week Festival next month. The mannequins reminded her of Cecilia and Lola Moran, women she’d interviewed for Nick’s St. Augustine murder/suicide case just last week. How far away that all seemed now.

She tried to convince herself that this warm, breezy location could pass for Naples, but it was far different, a mix of British and Caribbean, an exotic place all its own. Jerk chicken stands stood next to bars and pubs; she saw signs to squash clubs and cricket fields. Duty-free shops and banks were everywhere. She had read some of the workers were from Jamaica, the Philippines or Honduras, so, with the tourists, it was a real mix of people on the streets of George Town.

The American influence was here too. Signs advertised a Wendy’s and a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but there were ones that read Sting Ray City and This Way To Hell. She heard Nick grunt at that. She’d read Hell was a tourist stop where strange seaweed had turned the coral rock shaped like flames black. She didn’t need a place like that; she was so sick at heart about Lexi she felt she was in hell already.