Page 1 of Hell to Pay

1

NOLAN

“What do you see?”

I held the binoculars steady while the boat rolled under my feet, Jude’s voice behind me.

“Same guy on the deck. Movement inside the cabin.”

“I’m going to check in with Rafe.”

“You checked in less than an hour ago,” I said, still focused on the black-clad figure visible in the binoculars.

“So fucking what?”

It was rare for Jude to be so nervous, but it wasn’t like I could blame him. Lilah had been gone over twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four hours without her meds.

Twenty-four hours in which someone could have hurt her.

Twenty-four hours without seeing her face.

We were all going crazy, and I was more than a little glad that Rafe was on another boat off another harbor, staking out a yacht named theOspreywhile Jude and I watched the sleek Ferretti withArtemispainted on its stern.

Rafe’s rage had nowhere to go. It was only a matter of time before it blew.

I heard the crackle of the radio.

“Anything?” Jude said.

“Nada.” Rafe’s voice sounded far away.

Jude swore under his breath.

“You?” Rafe asked.

“Same guy on the deck,” Jude relayed to him. “Movement inside, but we can’t make it out.”

I was afraid to lower the binoculars, afraid to miss something. More than that, I was afraid to admit we might be on the wrong track entirely. We’d discovered Lilah had been dropped at the dock on the east side of Folegandros, the Greek island where we’d come to look for the shadowy group of men kidnapping girls in Blackwell Falls, after canvassing the businesses downtown, asking locals and tourists alike if they’d seen her. It had been a stroke of luck when an older woman at the bakery had gestured wildly as we’d shown the picture of Lilah I had on my phone, snapped at the beach when she hadn’t been looking.

It had taken a German tourist and a Greek local with sketchy English to figure out that the woman had picked Lilah up on the road between our rental and town. The woman had dropped Lilah at the dock, and it was clear from the concerned expression on her deeply lined face that she hadn’t been too happy about it.

After that we’d turned our attention to the yachts that cruised the islands off the coast of Greece. One of our contacts in Athens — a guy we’d worked with on a ransom demand for the only son of a Russian oligarch — had helped us run down the boats that had been in the water the morning Lilah went missing.

Most of them had been easily traceable to wealthy business people and celebrities, but two of them, theArtemisand the boat Rafe was watching, had been registered to shell companies. It hadn’t been much, but it was all we had, and I still had to force myself not to think about the possibility that Lilah was on neither of them, that she was on some other boat, heading out into the open sea where she’d disappear forever.

My gut twisted at the thought and my heart did something else, something it had never done before that made me worry it might actually stop beating without her.

“How much longer until Crank’s due?” I asked, still watching the guard.

“About an hour,” Jude said. “But you know Crank.”

I sighed.

Crank was a grizzled former Army Ranger who worked on something we called “Crank time,” which meant he might be a day early or four hours late. He was more or less a lone wolf, but we’d contracted him a few times when we’d done work in this part of the world.

There were a lot of shady people in our business but Crank was one of the shadiest. His contacts included good guys and bad guys alike, which made it hard to know which side he would be on when the shit hit the fan, but he also had resources, access to just about anything you could want with little to no lead time.

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