Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(22)

Garrett scratched his beard. “Well, then, where the hell is he? And where’s the other dude? Ty?”

Chase shifted uncomfortably. “I tried to say something privately to Navarre. That didn’t work.”

“It’s all right, Chase,” Maia said. “What did you want to say?” She did a better job sounding soothing than I would have.

Chase scowled. “Ty’s claustrophobic.”

Garrett snorted.

“This ain’t a joke, man,” Markie piped up. “We brought him here thinking he could get over it, you know? It’s been a nightmare. He’s been drinking for two days just to keep from flipping out. Being on a damn island was bad enough, but now with the boarded-up windows, the storm, being trapped inside…he’s really starting to crack.”

“Where is he?” Alex asked. He sounded stunned that anybody could be unhappy staying on his island.

“He ran out of the room about half an hour ago,” Chase said. “I thought maybe he just needed to walk the halls or something, get some air. I didn’t want to embarrass him by making a big deal about it, but…”

“But?” I prompted.

“He wants off this island bad,” Chase said. “Bad enough to do something crazy.”

“There’s no way off,” Maia said.

Jose and Alex exchanged jittery looks.

“What?” I asked.

“There is the fishing boat,” Jose said. “In the boathouse behind the hotel.”

I stared at Alex. “That’s still there? Why didn’t you mention this before?”

“Ah, hell, Tres. It’s just a little charter fishing boat. It ain’t no good in choppy surf. It hasn’t even got a full tank of gas.”

“But, señor,” Jose said, “if a man were desperate—”

I cursed, then asked Jose to cover my sausage and bean tacos for later.

“Come on,” I told Chase and Markie. “We’ve got some hiking to do.”

Outside, the wind and rain had died to almost nothing. The air smelled so clean and charged with electricity it hurt to breathe. The night was unnaturally black—no city glow, no stars. But I could feel the presence of storm all around us, like the walls of a well.

Chase, Markie and I all had flashlights. We wore attractive black plastic garbage bags as rain ponchos. As we trudged around the side of the hotel, the beams of our flashlight snagged weird images—dead shrimp sprinkled in the sea grass, a child’s orange life vest half buried in the sand, an uprooted palmetto, an outboard motor wedged upside down in the dunes, its propeller spinning lazily.

And footprints—fresh footprints sunk deep in the wet sand.

They led toward the west shore of the island, where a covered boathouse extended on pylons over the water.

A faint light flickered in the window.

“Does Ty know how to drive a boat?” I asked.

Chase shook his head. “But that wouldn’t stop him. I mean, the poor guy was freaking.”

“We gotta yell before we go in,” Markie warned, “so he doesn’t shoot us.”

“Whoa,” I said. “He has a gun?”

Chase nodded. “A marksman’s pistol. He’s a shooter on the college team. Didn’t I mention that?”

Ty wasn’t making much progress with the boat.

He’d partially wrestled off the tarp, which now hung from the prow like a deflated hot air balloon. He stood in the boat, trying to start the engine, despite the fact that it still sat on rails, five feet above the water.

“Yo, Ty,” Chase said. “Come on down, dude.”

Ty’s expression wasn’t much different from the many bail jumpers I’d nabbed over the years—cornered, desperate, more than a little dangerous.

“Help me with this,” he pleaded. “I gotta get out of here.”

“Ty,” I said. “You can’t. You’ll die out there.”

“The storm’s calming down! I can make it easy. I have to get out of this place.”

Markie belched, which I guess was meant to be a gesture of sympathy. “Dude. Ty, c’mon. The eye’s passing over us, is all. You’ll never make it. Look at the fricking water under you.”

Sure enough, in the launching slip, green water was sloshing around, splashing everywhere. The boathouse floor was slick. The supplies strewn about the boathouse were soaked. On a nearby worktable was a red canvas duffel bag.

“I tell you what, Ty,” I said, “come back into the house for fifteen minutes. Just fifteen minutes. We can sit and talk. If the storm is still dying down when we’re finished, you can come back down here and I’ll help you launch the boat. If the storm gets worse, you’ll stay until the morning. And then we’ll see.”

Ty’s left eye twitched. I tried to picture him on a firing range, shooting in a competition. It was a troubling image.

“I can’t breathe in there,” he said. “I can’t go back in that house.”

“Just fifteen minutes,” Markie said. “Come on, dude. That’s fair. I’ll get you a drink.”

“I’ll need a bottle,” Ty said. His face was beaded with sweat.

“Sure,” Chase agreed. “You can’t start that boat by yourself, anyway. You’re a screwup with engines.”