Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(98)
Chapter One
Three and a half years later…
Pirates…
Wow. Now there’s something you don’t see every day.
That was Becky’s first thought as she ducked under the low cabin door of the thirty-eight foot catamaran named Serendipity and stepped into the blazing equatorial sun. Her second thought, more appropriately, was oh hell.
Eve—her longtime friend and owner of the Serendipity—was swaying unsteadily and staring in wide-eyed horror at the three dirty, barefoot men holding ancient AK-47s like they knew how to use them. Four more equally skinny, disheveled men were standing in a rickety skiff tethered off the Serendipity’s stern.
Okay, so…obviously they’d been playing the oldies a little too loudly considering they’d somehow managed to drown out the rough sound of the pirates’ rusty outboard engine motoring up behind them.
“Eve,” she murmured around the head of a cherry Dum Dum lollipop as her heart hammered against her ribs and the skin on her scalp began crawling with invisible ants. “Just stay calm, okay?”
Yep. Calm was key. Calm kept a girl from finding herself fathoms deep beneath the crushing weight of Davy Jones’s Locker or under the more horrifying weight of a sweaty man who didn’t know the meaning of the word no.
When Eve gave no reply, she glanced over at her friend and noticed the poor woman was turning the color of an eggplant.
“Eve,” she said with as much urgency as she could afford, given the last thing she wanted was to spook an already skittish pirate who very likely suffered from a classic case of itchy-trigger-finger-syndrome, “you need to breathe.”
Eve’s throat worked over a dry swallow before her chest quickly expanded on a shaky breath.
Okay, good. Problem one: Eve keeling over in a dead faint—solved. Problem two: being taken hostage by pirates—now that was going to take a bit more creativity.
She wracked her brain for some way out of their current predicament as Jimmy Buffet crooning, “Yes I am a pirate. Two hundred years too late,” wafted up from inside the cabin.
Really, Jimmy? You’re singing that now?
Under normal circumstances, she’d be the first to appreciate the irony. Unfortunately, these were anything but normal circumstances.
The youngest and shortest of the pirates—he wore an eye patch…seriously?—flicked a tight look in her direction, and she threw her hands in the air, palms out in the universal I’m unarmed and cooperating signal. But a quick glance was all he allotted her before he returned the fierce attention of his one good eye to Eve.
She snuck another peek at her friend and…oh no. Oh crap.
“Slowly, very slowly, Eve, I want you to lay the knife on the deck and kick it away from you.” She was careful to keep her tone cool and unthreatening. Pirates made their money from the ransom of ships and captives. If she could keep Eve from doing something stupid—like, oh, say flying at the heavily armed pirates like a blade-wielding banshee—they’d likely make it out of this thing alive.
Unfortunately, it appeared Eve had stopped listening to her.
“Eve!” she hissed. “Lay down the knife. Slowly. And kick it away from you.”
This time she got through.
Eve glanced down at the long, thin blade clutched in her fist. From the brief flicker of confusion that flashed through her eyes, it was obvious she’d been unaware she still held the knife she’d been using to fillet the bonito they’d caught for lunch. But realization quickly dawned, and her bewildered expression morphed into something frighteningly desperate.
Becky dropped all pretense of remaining cool and collected. “Don’t you even think about it,” she barked.
Two of the men on deck jerked their shaggy heads in her direction, the wooden butts of their automatic weapons made contact with their scrawny shoulders as the evil black eyes of the Kalashnikovs’ barrels focused on her thundering heart.
“You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight,” she whispered, lifting her hands higher and gulping past a Sahara-dry knot in her throat. “Everyone knows that.”
From the corner of her eye, she watched Eve slowly bend at the waist, and the unmistakable thunk of the blade hitting the wooden deck was music to her ears.
“Look, guys,” she addressed the group, grateful
beyond belief when the ominous barrels of those old, but still deadly, rifles once more pointed toward the deck. That’s the thing about AKs, Billy once told her, they buck like a damned bronco, are simpler than a kindergarten math test, but they’ll fire with a barrel full of sand. Those Russians sure know how to make one hell of a reliable weapon—which, given her current situation, was just frickin’ great. Not. “These are Seychelles waters. You don’t have any authority here.”
“No, no, no,” the little pirate wearing the eye patch answered in heavily accented English. “We only authority on water. We Somali pirate.”
“Oh boy,” Eve wheezed, putting a trembling hand to her throat as her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Don’t you dare pass out on me, Evelyn Edens!” Becky commanded, her brain threatening to explode at the mere thought of what might happen to a beautiful, unconscious woman in the hands of Somali pirates out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Eve swayed but managed to remain standing, her legs firmly planted on the softly rolling deck.