Always Watching (46 page)

“
Did you warn him,
Umberto?”

My legs hung limply against the wall. 
I curled my fingers around the chain strung across it and squeezed
tightly.  Yes, it hurt like a mother, but adrenalin pumped the
pain away on a flood of hatred and desperation.

“
Warn me about what,
captain?”  Spoken with a thick accent that rendered
captain
into a very
clichéd
cap-ee-tan
.

“
Ignore her.  Mr.
Gillette wants her prepared for the transfer
immediately.”

“
That’s right – what did
you say your name was?”

“
Raul –”

“
Idiot!” Umberto
hissed.  “Do not let her get into your head.  She is very
crafty, this one.”

“
I have a list,
Raul.  Take one step closer, and your name goes on that list,
right above Captain Umberto’s.”

“
What sort of list?” 
He paused his approach.  “Captain, what is she
saying?”

“
He won’t tell you,
because he’s a coward, Raul.  He wants you to come over here
because he knows I’m telling the truth, that the names on my list
are men who will die.  Very soon.”

“
Impossible, Raul,”
Umberto snorted.  “Go remove her clothing.”

He pulled a large knife from the sheath on
his belt and handed it to his crewman.  “Make sure to be
careful.  The buyer does not wish a damaged slave for his
collection.”

Raul stared at me, wide-eyed.  He gave
an imperceptible shake of his head.

“
Go on now.  I need
to prepare the hose.”

“
Ah,” I said. 
“You’re going to hose me down after you strip me, yes?  Andy
must like his victims clean before their first lesson.  Tell
me, Raul, did Andy make you strip the little girl that was raped,
or did Umberto take care of that one himself?”

He started speaking in Spanish too rapid for
translation.

“
Silence!” Umberto
shouted.  It echoed in the metal room long after he shut his
mouth.  “I will strip her clothing.  You prepare the
hose.  Dios mios.”

That one, I understood.

“
I warn you, if you resist
me, I will hurt you,” Umberto said as he approached slowly. 
Light glinted off the blade of his large knife.

“
Yes, and if you harm me
too much, the buyer won’t take me off your hands.  Careful
Umberto.”

He was within four feet.  I lifted one
leg and slammed my heel into his face with all the force I
possessed, all the rage bubbling in my heart.  The red-black
world blazed to life before my eyes.

Blood gushed from Umberto’s nose.  His
eyes glossed over a second before he crumpled to the floor.  A
well placed punch to the nasal concha will shove bone straight into
the brain.  My head rolled forward on a satisfied sigh.

“
One down.  How many
more to go, Raul?  Want to be on my little list?”

He ran five steps toward his fallen captain
before thinking better of it.  His Spanish approached light
speed at a tone barely audible to dogs.  Raul turned and ran
from the room.

It felt like two seconds before the door
slammed open again and a wild-eyed Andy Gillette charged into the
room.  He took one look at his bloody co-conspirator and
glared at me.

“
Goddamn you!” he
hissed.  “You killed him!”

“
Indeed I did. 
Worried yet, Andy?”

“
Fool!  Now we have
no captain!”

“
I suppose one of his
flunkies could steer the ship back to Darkwater Bay.  Do it
now, and your name comes of my list.”  Yeah, I lied.  Me,
Ms. Paragon of Truth told a big whopper.  No way would this
man continue to breathe air as long as I had life and fight left in
my body.

“
Pity Umberto died so
quickly.  I’d have loved to torture him for a few months
before letting him slip away into the comfort of hell.”

“
Shut up!” Gillette
screamed.  Blobs of spittle flew from his lips.  “Raul,
go secure her feet.  We’ll do this together.”

Wise man, Raul.  He turned and fled
from the room, securing his right to keep breathing.  At least
for the time being.

“
Fuck this,” Gillette
hissed.  He pulled his gun and aimed it between my
eyes.

“
Go for it.  If I’m
dead, you don’t get paid, and I think we’ve already established
that I’d rather die right now than become some pervert’s
slave.”

He pulled another implement from his back
pocket.  A moment later, a blue arc snapped between the metal
clasps at its tip.  “You’re not the first to fight me, Helen,
and you damn sure won’t be the last.”

Gillette moved in, rushed me from the side
and pressed the stun gun against the tender border of my
belly.  Same as the first time, my body jerked, spasmed and
the world faded to black.

When I woke again, my first thought wasn’t
for my clothing, or the passage of time.  No, my immediate
concern was for the tiny life nestled in my womb.  Was he
safe?  Had the electrical charge harmed him?

Angry tears welled in my eyes, not only
because I worried for my baby, but because in all of my plotting,
not one time had I stopped to consider that the consequences for
him could be dire.  I’d never felt so helpless in my entire
life.

Gillette crouched against the wall across
the room.  A large puddle bled out around his feet.

“
I’m still going to kill
you, you know.”

“
I think not.”

I pressed my feet against the wall and
raised myself again.  A new chain clanked.

“
It should slow down those
lethal legs of yours,” he said drily.  “Should’ve known better
than to treat you like the average detainee.  Lesson
learned.”

Not quite,
asshole
.

Yes, there were shackles around my ankles
now, but they were attached to nothing.  I could still get a
leg around his neck and snap it.  In order to do it, Gillette
would need to believe I was starting to break.

Actually, it wasn’t much of a stretch. 
The desperation of my captivity, the worry for my baby, the fear
that this son of a bitch just might succeed in fobbing me off to
some unwitting buyer had me on the verge of a crying jag.  No,
it was probably 99 percent hormonal.  That thing I couldn’t
control any more than my homicidal urges rushed to the fore.

Before I knew it, I was sobbing
brokenly.

Smirking, Gillette approached with his water
hose.  “That’s more like it.  Now begins the first of
many lessons.”

The icy cold spray added another layer to my
physical discomfort.  There was nothing like the harsh stream
of water pummeling me.  Gillette spent an inordinate amount of
time focusing the water on my breasts and between my legs. 
Emotional tears quickly evolved into ones evoked by the pain
response.

With a satisfied grunt, he tossed the hose
aside and swaggered toward me.  He unfastened his belt buckle
as he walked.  The zipper’s grind was eerily loud in the metal
box that was my prison cell. 

“
We can do this the easy
way,” he paused in front of me and dragged his tongue in a slow
circle around my navel.  “Or as I suspect, you’ll want to do
it the hard way.  No matter.  The end result will be the
same, Helen.  I’m going to fuck you, and there’s not a damn
thing you can do or say to stop me.”

“
Please don’t,” I
rasped.  “I’m pregnant!  Please, for the health of my
child –”

“
Pregnant?” he
gasped.  “My, my!  This is an added bonus.  Thank
you for telling me that, Helen.  It increases your value – and
my profit – considerably.”  Vile fingers slipped between the
folds of skin between my legs.

The automatic response was to recoil from
it.  The chains securing my ankles clanged loudly against the
wall.  I had their mates in a death grip.  They cut into
my palms while I waited.  Waited.  Waited.

Finally, Gillette looked down.  He
dropped his pants to his ankles.  My legs flew up, the chain
helping more than hindering when I got both limbs wrapped around
his neck.  I squeezed, all the while listening to Gillette
wheeze and gasp for breath.  His fingers clawed at the leg
restraining his neck until warm blood oozed out the wounds.

“
Your buddy Preston was
right about me, Gillette.  This feels great.  I guess I
am nothing more than a cold blooded killer.”

The nails digging into my flesh grew
weaker.

“
See you in hell, Andy
Gillette,” I rasped.

A satisfying crunch reverberated from his
neck through my leg.  I released the body and panted
heavily.  Dead.  Good.  Son of a bitch.

I spat on the body lying at my feet. 
He was close enough to use him as the missing floor.  I pulled
the chain in my hands and leveraged myself so I was standing tiptoe
atop my latest victim. 

There was no plan for escape at the
moment.  Raul’s fear all but guaranteed that nobody else would
bother me for the duration of this little pleasure
cruise. 

So I stood waiting, wondering how the hell I
would manage to get out of this predicament without killing the
rest of the crew.

Even so.  Dead and adrift at sea was
better than the alternative.

Chapter 40

My cell plunged into
indefinite darkness after Raul showed up and found me standing on
Gillette’s corpse.  He ran shrieking from the room, his cries
of
el diablo
and
something about a senior tree – surely a symptom of my full-blown
insanity – echoing behind him down the corridor. 
Fabulous.  I’m a devil now, and maybe he wants to crucify me
on an ancient tree.  Since when is vigorous self-defense a
sign of demonic possession or necessitate exorcism?

No matter on the
lights.  There was no porthole in my region of confinement, so
the passage of time could not be marked by light or the absence of
it.  I couldn’t use morning sickness either. 
The Celeste’s
undulations were non-stop.  So was my queasiness. 
I started thinking about the inevitable decomposition of the body
beneath my feet. 

Lovely thought.

Between Gillette’s putrefaction, the roiling
sea and my queasy belly, the bouquet in the cargo bay promised to
become rancid in short order.  The moment of supreme
satisfaction flagged in light of how wretched my environment was
about to become.  Plus, I still had no way off the ship. 
What if Raul returned with a decision that no amount of money in
the world was worth the trouble and shot me?

Perhaps I should play the devil card to my
advantage if he ever came back.  I could prey on his innate
superstitions and make him believe that even if he killed my
physical body, that the spirits within me would haunt him for
eternity.  Or I could just remind him that murderers go
straight to hell.  

I knew that hours had passed since I snapped
Gillette’s neck.  The once firm flesh beneath my feet grew
boggy.  I was certain that if Raul had left the lights on, I’d
be able to lift my feet and see the outline of my foot print in the
developing livor mortis as the body progressed through the early
stages of decay.

Had Johnny or David figured out what
happened to me yet?  Would I die in this metal box before
anybody discovered what Gillette had done?

His words replayed in my
mind. 
Martha
Henderson
.  My first abductor. 
I closed my eyes and let the image of the police report flash
through my mind.  I’d require scientific evidence to prove the
veracity of what Gillette implied with his brief statement. 
My date of birth seemed to bear out the claim.

I thought of all the conversations I’d had
with people over the years on the phenomenon of coincidence,
particularly as it related to crime.  I didn’t believe there
was much happenstance in our world.  My date of birth,
coincidentally eleven minutes after Crevan’s was another case in
point for disproving a random fluke. 

Was it possible?

A rapid slideshow of moments flashed on the
backs of my eyelids in reverse chronology.  David with his
profiler-dissection stare at dinner last night – or whenever it
was.  Crevan’s calm, gentle approach in opposite contrast to
my explosive action-first method.  Earlier in time, when we
apprehended Fulk Underwood in Crevan’s apartment and the odd stare
that Johnny gave us when Crevan and I embraced.

And what about that?  Had he seen
something that looked familiar in the physical sense? 
Crevan’s eyes were a bit different than mine, more the chameleon
hazel variety that changed with his moods.  Mine are simply
vibrant green all the time.  I’d seen Crevan’s that color
before, when he was upset or agitated.

Did mine possess the same chameleon quality
that had merely gone unnoticed by me?  I thought of my
temperament over the years, specifically the past three when life
as I knew it unraveled in a hurry.  To say that I was
generally upset and agitated was an understatement of grand
proportion. 

Did Dad know about this?  Memory
reached back to its earliest depths.  I used to crawl into
Dad’s lap and beg him to tell me the story about the day that I was
born.  His eyes always grew misty when he retold what he
claimed was the happiest day of his life.

“
My little sprout, when
that nurse brought you out of the nursery and put you in my arms,
this tiny, beautiful baby girl, I knew that the best years of my
life were ahead of me because of you.”