Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
It’s a smuggler’s haven.
Tonight the inky black depths are as familiar to me as my own bed and the sound of water lapping at the hull is music to my ears.
I lift the night-vision binoculars and scan the waterline, portions of which are swallowed by the night and others illuminated by dock lights. I sweep back and forth, taking in every minute detail. My diligence is why I’m not in prison.
You don’t approach a dock without doing your homework.
“Got eyes on the Brown place yet?” Marcus asks.
His voice is the same low, rich rumble it’s been since I met him in a Bremerton dive bar nine years ago. He was fresh out of the navy, looking for work, and I was two years out of my one and only stint in prison.
“Working on it,” I say, soft enough not to be heard over the water but loud enough to carry back to him.
“Tide’s against us in about twenty,” he points out.
“I know.”
“Just letting you know.”
“I know.”
I hear his coffee thermos click against the wheel mount. He’s never without it… an addiction that will eventually eat his stomach from the inside out.
The Brown place is a private dock half a mile up the channel from where we’re sitting now. It’s owned by a retired commercial fisherman named Walt, who’s taken my money for the last six years to look the other way. He’s never once asked me what I was unloading.
This evening’s cargo is a Pieter de Hooch domestic interior painting. A private collector in Bellevue bought it on the gray market for $2.3 million. It was supposedly looted by Nazis from a collector in Amsterdam in 1942 and my cut is five percent to get it through these waterways and into the purchaser’s hands. That’s $115,000 for a night’s work, which isn’t a bad way to live in my opinion.
Normally, Marcus would handle a run like this with our crew, often with Connie as his first mate, but this is a new buyer and he insisted I be the one to deliver.
Which is totally fine… new buyers get the boss.
I sweep the shore again and see the light on Walt’s porch. It’s his signal that it’s safe to dock. I shift my focus east, scanning past black water to the next slip about four hundred yards away.
I lower the binoculars. “Marcus.”
“Yeah?”
“Cut the engine.”
It quiets and The Quartermaster slows to a dead drift.
I find the dock again. It’s a small private slip and I know the owners. I know every owner on this stretch of waterfront. Fishing family, two brothers, both retired. They head to Arizona every September and don’t come back until April. It should be empty but tonight there’s a forty-foot boat tied off with no running lights and three men standing on the dock. A panel van sits at the end.
My stomach knots as I watch a small line of figures being walked off the boat with hands behind their backs.
“Fuck,” I growl.
“What is it, boss?” Marcus asks, his tone laced with tightness.
“Voronin’s men.”
Marcus moves to my side, and I hand him the binoculars. He lifts them to his face and mutters the same curse before handing the optics back to me.
I look through the ocular lenses again. “I see Sokolov, but I don’t recognize the others.”
“Fucking leeches.”
Leeches is too kind a word for the assholes I’m watching, Mikhail Sokolov being the worst of the worst. As Voronin’s number one man, he handles all the runs. A fourth man has come down the bluff behind the dock, walking a woman in front of him at gunpoint. She’s not part of the women coming off the boat. She’s oddly dressed in tactical pants, a dark jacket and heavy boots. There’s an expensive camera with a long lens hanging from her neck.
Reporter?
“That’s interesting,” I murmur.
“What’s that?”
“They picked up a watcher.”
He swears under his breath, and I wait to see what happens. “We might have to ditch tonight.”
It’s too risky to unload our cargo so close to another trafficker.
“We could head down to Duwamish,” he suggests. “Connie could meet us.”
“Maybe.”
One of the men puts a gun to the woman’s lower back as the others seem to be discussing something. The sound doesn’t reach us, but I can imagine the conversation. The woman’s body language appears composed.
Too composed.
Undercover cop?
Mikhail gestures with his free hand toward the water.
“They’re going to kill her,” I say, the knots in my stomach tightening. I know what fate awaits those women being loaded into the van, but at least they’re likely to live.
This other woman though?
Not a chance.
“What do you want to do?” Marcus asks.
The instinct is to cut bait and run. Not only do I not want to be a witness to human trafficking going down, if that is a cop and there are others around, I don’t want to get caught with my own illegal cargo. I’m not going back to prison.