I. Dark Path: A Ryan Weller Thriller Book 8 Paperback

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CHAPTER 1
East of St. John
U.S. Virgin Islands

The speedboat came out of nowhere, its sleek, colorful hull slicing easily through the two-foot waves. The roar of its powerful engines drowned out everything else as it swept past the sailboat.
Paul Langston stood as the speedboat’s wake violently rocked the sailboat. He grasped the steering wheel, trying to keep himself upright and maintain the boat on its original heading. His gaze shot to the compass mounted on the bulkhead beside the cockpit door, then back to the flashy orange, red, and blue Cigarette boat.
Diane Langston looked at her husband as the speedboat slowed to turn, sensing this had something to do with their sudden departure from St. Thomas. She ran a hand through her shoulder-length brown hair. She was a few inches shorter than her husband at five-foot-six, and her sixty-six-year-old body was still trim from hours of yoga and jogging along the mountainous roads near their home. Diane took pride in her youthful figure, and unlike her girlfriends back in New Jersey, she’d never had plastic surgery. She had changed into a black one-piece swimsuit once they were aboard and had been lounging in the cockpit ever since, enjoying the sunshine and wondering why they had made such a hasty exit from their home.
Paul watched from his place at the wheel, his eyes squinting against the afternoon sun even behind his designer Ray-Bans. She’d always thought he was a handsome man, even though his once thick brown hair had dissipated into a thinly disguised comb over. He was well-tanned from lying by their pool or on one of the secluded beaches on the island, but his lack of physical activity over the years had left him with what he liked to say was “Dunlap’s disease,” his joking explanation as to why his gut done lapped over his belt.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
There was something in Paul’s tone of voice that made Diane believe he might not know the men in the boat, but he knew why they were there. Paul was an accountant who had passed the bar and become a lawyer. In the late seventies and early eighties, he had worked at a firm in New Jersey before he’d quit and opened his own practice. She remembered visiting him at the little storefront in a strip mall in Perth Amboy, not far from the Harborside Marina, where he’d kept a thirty-foot motor launch for entertaining clients. Paul’s office had been spartan, with just two rooms: Paul’s inner office, where he spent long hours, and an outer reception area where a heavy-set blonde woman named Karen had worked. Diane was never quite sure if she and Paul were sleeping together, and if they were, she certainly didn’t understand the attraction, especially when he had a fit, willing wife at home.
She had never seen or met any of his clients, but she knew he had worked for the Mob. Almost everyone had a connection to them during those chaotic years in New Jersey, and Diane was happy that Paul had somehow kept them away from her family.
When their three children had left home to begin their own journeys in the world, Paul had taken Diane on a vacation to St. Thomas. After a week in the tropics, he had announced they were moving there. They’d settled on a modest house set on a hill off Frenchman Bay Road, which offered stunning views of Long Bay and the Caribbean Sea. Diane had fallen in love with the place at first sight, and it met Paul’s primary requirement that it have a pool. He continued to work remotely and had a small office on the second floor of a building across from the cruise port. The kids came periodically throughout the year, but they would all gather to celebrate Christmas together in the warm weather.
Now, standing in the sailboat’s cockpit and watching the speedboat full of men armed with large black guns, Diane Langston knew their life had come to an inglorious end, thanks to Paul’s nefarious dealings. She wanted to scream at him, but she knew she was just as complicit as him because she had taken the money the Mob so handsomely paid her husband with and created an enjoyable life for them and their children. Still, she couldn’t help herself. “Dammit, Paul. What did you do?”
“Get below,” Paul ordered, ignoring her tirade. He reengaged the autopilot and stepped around the wheel. Pushing his wife into the cabin, he jumped down beside her and went to the V-berth. Outside, the Cigarette slowed alongside the sailboat, matching its speed.
“What do they want?” Diane asked, watching her husband lift the mattress.
Before he could reach for the shotgun he kept there, bullets punched through the sailboat’s delicate fiberglass hull. The men in the speedboat continued to pour round upon round through their target.
Diane flattened herself to the cabin sole, watching her husband squat beside the bed and rack the shotgun. He poked the barrel through a hole in the hull and fired. The boom was deafening inside the confined cabin. Diane covered her ears, trying to make everything go away. She had known they were in trouble from the moment they’d set sail. Paul had been acting jumpy the last few days, and their flight from the island was so sudden that she’d barely had time to grab her purse. Paul had told her to leave everything, and yet he’d carried a yellow waterproof box under his arm as he’d grabbed her by the elbow and steered her toward their car.
What had Paul done to cause these men to destroy their precious sailboat?
Paul racked the shotgun again, thrusting a fresh shell into the chamber. As he stood to move, it looked to Diane as if an invisible hammer struck a blow to his body. He spun and fell to the floor; the shotgun flying from his grasp. She could see blood gushing from the wound to his hand. It dripped into the water, pooling on the cabin floor and turning an ugly black color.
Diane crawled to her husband through the rising water. The sailboat listed heavier to starboard. The waves caused little geysers to erupt through the bullet holes as the water gushed in. She glanced up through the clear hatch cover at the jib, luffing in the breeze. Despite the damage to the canvas, the boat was still moving forward.
“Paul! Paul!” she cried, her tears mingling with the seawater.
Her husband rolled onto his side and looked at her with fear and sorrow in his eyes. He gripped her hand in his. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and full of pain. “I’m sorry, Di.”
She glanced around the bullet-riddled berth. The shooters were higher in the speedboat, firing down at an angle with their shots, creating holes above the waterline on the port side upon impact and perforating the hull beneath the waterline on the starboard side on exit. If she and Paul stayed close to the port side and low to the sole, they might survive the intended massacre.
An explosion rocked the stern of the boat and a wall of water flowed through the cabin, smashing the couple against the V-berth bed. Diane fought to keep ahold of her husband, but the raging water forced them apart. It was in her mouth, her nose, and her eyes. She gagged and fought her way to the surface, reaching underwater to pull her husband up with her. She couldn’t let him drown.
As Diane struggled to stay afloat, the boat began to sink by its stern, gently pulling the Langstons into a watery grave.


CHAPTER 2
The sun-dappled water of the Caribbean Sea rolled endlessly to the western horizon, where there was nothing but water meeting the sky. To the east were the green hills of Peter and Norman Islands. A light wind billowed the white sails of the thirty-five-foot Lafitte 44 sailboat, Windseeker, heeling her over in a gentle four-degree list to port as she made her way north from the British Virgin Islands toward St. John in the USVI.
Ryan Weller stood in the cockpit, checking the speed on the GPS screen mounted to the pulpit in front of the sailboat’s wheel. Not for the first time on this trip, he thought, There’s something wrong with sailing north.
It felt weird to be heading for Florida. His journey as a commercial diver working on the Peggy Lynn with his old crew had ended, and a new adventure was beginning with his girlfriend, Emily Hunt. Ryan had no idea what lay ahead, and part of him dreaded it. It wasn’t his new relationship that bothered him, but the prospect of having to find another job. Had his life aboard his boat, bouncing from island to island and risking life and limb as a troubleshooter for Dark Water Research, really come to a screeching halt?
He had promised Emily that he’d give up that life and step away from doing dangerous things in the service of his friend’s company, but part of him didn’t know if he could keep that promise. It gnawed at his stomach, twisting his gut into knots.
He looked at Emily, resting on the starboard cockpit bench, her long legs propped on the port side. Her thick blonde mane, the color of harvest wheat, waved in the wind, blowing strands across her face. She must have felt his gaze on her because she turned and looked at him with those cornflower-blue eyes that he found so intoxicating. Emily brushed a strand of hair from her cheek and smiled. She was just two inches shorter than his six-foot height, and she wore a blue bikini over her lithe body. The sun had kissed her, making her skin glow.
Yeah, he thought with a grin. Everything is gonna be all right.
But was he trying to convince himself that it would be?
And what the heck were they doing sailing north during hurricane season?
Before leaving Trinidad over three months ago, he and Emily had prepared Windseeker for cruising. Ramesh, the hulking owner of Five Islands Yacht Club, had done as Ryan had asked while Ryan was working off the coast of Nicaragua and Windseeker had been sitting on the hard at Five Islands. Ramesh had replaced the aging Perkins diesel with a brand-new Volvo Penta, scraped the hull, and re-coated it with anti-foul paint. He’d changed the bearing on the propeller shaft and repacked the stuffing box where the shaft ran through the hull, then he’d added a folding propeller that collapsed when not in use.
Ryan and Emily had done even more work to Windseeker when they arrived at Five Islands. They’d inspected the rigging, replaced lines and halyards, scrubbed the sails to remove the mold that had accumulated from being folded up in the lockers, or rolled up on the main mast boom and the jib roller furler. Then they’d put the old girl in the water and had taken her for a test run. The Lafitte 44 was a true bluewater boat. She’d seen her previous owner around the world and had now taken Ryan around the Caribbean.
After saying goodbye to Ramesh, Emily and Ryan sailed north, stopping at every island in the necklace of green gems that made up the Lesser Antilles. Some islands had sheer volcanic walls that rose straight out of the water and were topped with dense jungle, while others had lush tropical beaches uninhabited by man. Ryan enjoyed both, and this trip was a dream come true for him. He had finally found a woman who wanted to sail with him to exotic ports and run wild on the beaches.
He should have been happy, but there was a part of him that wouldn’t fully let go. When they reached Florida, they would have less time together. Emily would want to go back to work, and he would be left at loose ends. Ryan didn’t need to work. There was more money than he could spend in a lifetime deposited in his Cayman Islands bank account. The bankers had invested well and increased his holdings, firmly banishing any financial worries he might have had.
What was he going to do? He wanted this relationship to work, but he also knew he couldn’t give it his all while he felt that a piece of him was missing. He wanted to continue chasing criminals.
Even though Emily had told him that their work wasn’t all that different, he thought it was. Investigating insurance fraud was a far cry from disarming bombs, fast-roping onto ships, and dealing with the scum of the earth.
He ran a hand through his thick brown hair. Like his girlfriend, his lean muscular body was deeply tanned. Today, he wore orange swim trunks that Emily had picked out for him, saying they flattered his shapely behind, and a white T-shirt bearing the logo of his old employer, Dark Water Research, the global commercial dive and salvage firm.
Emily interrupted his thoughts by suddenly pointing at the horizon. “Do you see that smoke?”
Ryan grabbed a pair of binoculars and held them to his green eyes. He fidgeted with the focus dial, but whatever was burning was over the horizon. He glanced at the GPS screen and radar, verifying there was nothing but empty sea between themselves and the smoke. Standing in the cockpit, he could only see for three miles, but the radar dome mounted on the mast fifty feet above him gave a sweeping view of nine miles, and it showed the burning boat to be near the edge of their screen.
He punched the starter button on the diesel engine. It rumbled to life and idled smoothly before he engaged the drive and shoved the throttle forward.
“Get the mainsail down,” he ordered while grasping the jib’s furling line, jerking it hard and causing the jib to furl around the forestay.
“What is it?” Emily asked.
“I don’t know, but smoke like that can’t be good. Somebody is in trouble.” He caught her worried glance, but they both knew they had to find the source of the smoke.
Windseeker’s original Perkins engine had made just fifty horsepower while the Volvo that Ryan was now throttling up was nearly twice that. The extra ponies pushed the sailboat to ten knots at max throttle, and that was where the GPS speed number hovered as the bow bucked through the waves.
Emily had the main sail collapsed into the lazy jacks and was strapping it to the boom. Ryan put the binos back to his eyes, centering on the smoke, but they were still too far away to see anything.
Windseeker surged through the waves, making impressive progress courtesy of the vessel’s upgrades. As Ryan continued to watch through the binos, a mast head appeared above a sinking sailboat. Its tattered main sail hung over the cockpit, and black smoldering smoke rose into the air. More than half of the hull was underwater. Suddenly, a woman pushed aside part of the mainsail and fell over the side of the boat.
“Get the life ring, Em,” Ryan ordered.
She moved with urgency, grabbing it from the rail and loosening the coil of rope attached to it, so she was ready to throw the ring when commanded.
Ryan drove Windseeker straight toward the distressed boat. Five minutes later, he was abreast of the sinking vessel and bringing his sailboat to a stop. Emily threw the life ring to the bedraggled woman, who was struggling to stay afloat in the water. She snagged the life ring with both arms. Ryan reflexively hit a button on the GPS, marking their location, before helping Emily drag the woman through the water and pull her aboard the sailboat.
Shivering as she sat on the cockpit bench, the older woman looked up at Ryan and said, “You have to help my husband. He’s in the V-berth.”
As the last words came out of her mouth, Ryan saw the nose of the sinking boat tip up into the air as the stern slipped beneath the waves. Within seconds, the boat was fully submerged. Ryan ripped off the bench seat cushions and retrieved the box that contained his dive gear.
In the middle of mounting his wing and backplate buoyancy compensating device, or BCD, to a tank, Emily said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going after him.” Ryan pulled on his mask, dive boots, and fins, then shrugged into the BCD.
“Help him!” the woman shrieked.
Emily jumped into action, grabbing the tank and aiding Ryan to stand. She steadied him as he stepped over the lifelines.
Ryan turned to Emily. “The current will take us north as we come up. Watch for my surface marker buoy and then drop a weighted line for us to ascend along. I’ll give three jerks on the line to let you know I have it, then pull up the SMB.”
“Okay.”
He shoved the regulator into his mouth and took a giant stride off the side of Windseeker.
Ryan splashed through the surface in a burst of bubbles. He had dumped the air from his BCD so he would drop like a stone. He took a moment to reach between his legs and fasten the BCD’s crotch strap, then he kicked furiously downward, chasing the sailboat in a head-down position.
Beneath him, the sailboat arrowed stern-first into the dirt, throwing up a cloud of sediment. With a quick glance at his Shearwater dive computer, Ryan saw he was approaching one hundred feet in depth. Twenty minutes of dive time, his mind automatically told him. The sunken boat was still another fifty feet away and rested on its starboard side with its bow over the edge of a precipice that dropped thousands of feet down into darkness.
At the recreational dive limit of one hundred and thirty feet, he had ten minutes of bottom time; at one fifty, he had less than five. The computer beeped as he approached the sailboat, letting him know he was surpassing the recreational limits and was now accumulating decompression time. He ignored it. If he could save a man, then the decompression obligation would be worth it.
He noted the name Balance Sheet lettered across the stern in gold leaf, then pulled aside the nylon sailcloth and pushed through the cockpit door. Snapping on his dive light, he shined it around the cabin.
Cushions and clothes floated in the confined space. Dishes, books, and other gear had fallen from the port side and lay strewn across the starboard settee, cabinets, and hull, making the place a snag hazard that threatened to trap Ryan. Nevertheless, he continued forward, ensuring he was neutrally buoyant. He couldn’t afford to bump the boat and send it sliding over the edge into the deep, where the weight of the water would crush to death both himself and the man he was trying to save.
At the door to the V-berth, he poked his light inside and moved it around, seeing a tangle of sheets and clothes. The next thing he saw was the blood streaming from the man’s wounds, then a pair of thin legs, poking out of surf shorts. Moving the light upward, he saw the man was clutching a yellow waterproof box as a flotation device. His head was above the water in the space created by the trapped air.
Ryan inhaled and his body moved up. His head broke the surface to see the man staring at him in wide-eyed disbelief.
“We need to get out of here,” Ryan said. “Do you have any diving experience?”
“Yeah. I’m Open Water certified,” the man said in a thick New Jersey accent.
“Cool.” Ryan handed the man his primary regulator and then reached for his secondary reg, which hung from a necklace below his chin.
“I can’t leave the box.”
“What’s your name?” Ryan asked.
“Paul.”
“Okay, Paul, we don’t have enough air to worry about that. We need to go. Now.”
“I have a scuba tank in the starboard bench of the cockpit.”
“Great; we have some extra air for deco stops. Let’s go.”
Hugging the box a little tighter, Paul said adamantly, “Not without this.”
“Have it your way. See ya.” Ryan jerked the regulator from the man’s hand and turned to swim away. The man screamed for him to stop, letting go of the box and thrashing after the diver. Ryan rose back to the surface and handed the reg to him. With the seven-foot hose attached to the reg he’d given Paul, they didn’t need to swim side by side, and Ryan could lead the way with Paul following behind him.
Once clear of the hull, Ryan opened the starboard bench seat and found the scuba tank, a jacket-style BCD, and a set of regulators. He dumped everything into the dirt beside Balance Sheet, fastened the tank to the BCD, and hooked the reg to the tank valve. Paul grabbed a mask and put it on while Ryan worked. When he had the kit together, Ryan helped Paul into the BCD, then gave him an okay sign. Paul returned the gesture, and Ryan indicated they were to head for the surface with a thumbs-up.
They continued to use Ryan’s tank and regs as they ascended. Ryan knew his air consumption rate, and, for him, the tank would have lasted through most of his decompression stops, but he would need another tank to finish. With Paul breathing heavily on the octopus, the air in the tank was rapidly being depleted. Even with both tanks, they wouldn’t have enough air to complete their deco obligations.
The normal ascent rate was no more than thirty feet in a minute, meaning that if a diver was ascending a line, he would place one hand just above the other to maintain that rate. Ryan understood that Paul would be nervous about spending so much time in the water and would want to get to the surface as soon as possible. He tapped his dive computer and held it so Paul could see. Paul nodded. Ryan pointed to the deco time, then at Paul, and flashed five fingers on his right hand, meaning Paul needed to do an additional five minutes.
Paul’s eyes widened, and he shook his head vigorously. Ryan held up his fists side by side and acted like he was bending an invisible bar. Paul nodded. He would get bent if he shot to the surface.
At seventy-five feet, Ryan forced them to stop. He tapped the computer and flashed five fingers. They would stay at the current depth for five minutes. Normally, it would be half the time at half the depth, but Ryan added a few minutes to compensate for Paul’s longer bottom time.
Paul did not have thousands of dives under his belt like Ryan, and his neutral buoyancy was shit. He kept bobbing up and down, adding and removing air from his BCD. Ryan gave him a few silent pointers but eventually slapped his hand away from the inflator button. While they waited for the minutes to tick by, Ryan pulled the SMB from his BCD and attached a finger spool to it. With a small breath, he inflated the SMB, and they watched as it shot upward, unspooling line behind it. When the SMB reached the surface, Ryan tied the line to a bolt snap, clipped it to his BCD, and wrapped his free hand around the shoulder strap of Paul’s BCD.
When they had depleted the air in Ryan’s tank, they changed to Paul’s, putting the new regulators in their mouths. The line to the SMB went taut and jerked hard several times. Ryan swiveled his body to look at the surface. There was a shadow above them, and he hoped it was Windseeker. He motioned for Paul to hold and let out some air from his BCD, compensating for Paul’s overinflation.
As they watched, a weighted line dropped through the water column five feet in front of them. Ryan grabbed it and gave three jerks on the line. It stopped falling, and he figured Emily had tied it to a boat cleat.
Ryan pulled his companion over to the ascent line. He unclipped the SMB and jerked it hard several times. Emily grabbed it and began pulling it up to the boat.
With the ascent line, they didn’t have to worry about their buoyancy, allowing the boat above to do the work. Ryan guided Paul through the decompression stops. Emily dropped a fresh tank to them, knowing they would need more air, and at the last stop at ten feet, they took turns breathing one hundred percent oxygen to help clear the last of the built-up nitrogen from their body tissue. Ryan liked to keep a pony bottle of oxygen aboard his boat in case of emergencies and to help off-gas after long dives.
As the two men made the final ascent and broke the surface, they saw the women leaning over the railing, staring at them.
Ryan and Paul shed their BCDs and passed them to Emily before climbing up the boarding ladder. Paul sat wearily on the bench beside his wife. Ryan had looked at the older man’s wound while they were decompressing and had wrapped a piece of Paul’s shirt around it to stop the bleeding.
“Emily,” Ryan said, “grab the first aid kit, please.”
He used his dive knife to slice the makeshift bandage away from Paul’s hand.
“You’re lucky it didn’t hit any bones, or you’d be a lot worse off,” Ryan said as he applied a bandage to the deep cut on Paul’s palm.
Paul leaned back against the rail, cradling his right arm against his chest. Ryan handed him four acetaminophen tablets and a bottle of water. While Paul washed down the pills, Ryan hauled in their ascent rope and stored their gear. He’d seen the bullet holes in the sunken boat and the shattered shotgun on the deck. Fortunately, the current had carried them a long way from the wreck site and hopefully even farther from the men who’d sunk her.
When Windseeker was back on course with her sails trimmed, Ryan sat beside the rescued couple. He extended his hand to Paul. “I know we met earlier, but my name’s Ryan. That’s Emily, and we’re on our way to St. John.”
“Thanks for coming to my rescue.” Paul shook his hand and then Emily’s. “This is my wife, Diane. We just left St. Thomas.”
“What happened?” Emily asked. “Were you attacked by pirates?”
Paul nodded. “I think so. It was one of those high-speed racing boats.”
Diane’s shoulders shook as she spoke. “They just started shooting at us.”
“You’re out of danger now,” Ryan said, “but you need to get that wound looked at.”
“Yeah,” Paul agreed. “Can you take us to St. Thomas? I know a doctor there.”
“Is it wise to go home?” Diane asked him.
“Fuhgeddaboudit.” Paul waved his hand. “Those yutzes aren’t coming near us again. Me and Ryan will go up to the house and get some stuff. You girls’ll stay at the marina.”
Ryan saw the look that Paul shot his wife. He took it to mean she should shut up and not talk in front of the strangers. That was fine with Ryan. The sooner he dropped them off, the sooner he and Emily could get to St. John, and whatever danger the stranded couple was in would be behind them.
Paul turned to him with a smile. “Please, let us take you to dinner as a ‘thank you’ for saving us.”
“Yeah, I think we can do that,” Ryan agreed.
Paul smiled gregariously. Despite his problems and having to drag him out of a sunken sailboat, Ryan liked the man. Even his wife had a staunchness about her.
Ryan moved behind the wheel. “What’s the closest marina to your house?”
Paul got up and came over to look at the GPS plotter. “We can put you in at my old slip at American Yacht Harbor.”
Ryan tapped it into the touch screen and hit the Go button. A white line populated over the blue ocean.
“Might as well settle in,” Ryan said, checking the arrival time. “We have two and a half hours to get there.”
“Once we’re abreast of Cabrita Point, it’s best to go in on the motor,” Paul advised. “It can get pretty crowded in there between the ferries and the fishing boats.”
“Roger that,” Ryan replied.
As they sailed, the rescued couple seemed to relax, but Ryan saw how Paul vigilantly scanned the horizon. Emily found a cover-up for Diane and fixed tea for the two women. They stayed in the cabin, chatting.
“What do you do for work, Paul?” Ryan asked.
“I’m an accountant. Me and Diane moved here about ten years ago.”
“Are you retired?”
“I still work a few days a week. What about you?”
“Emily is an insurance investigator and I’m a commercial diver. We both took a sabbatical from our jobs. We’re on our way back to Florida.”
“Is that where you live?”
Ryan smiled. “I live wherever my boat is. Em has a place in Tampa.”
“You make a nice couple,” Paul said.
An hour from St. Thomas, Ryan used the Customs and Border Patrol’s ROAM app to notify them of Windseeker’s arrival. After putting his information into the app, he called the CBP office at the Port of St. Thomas, and the agent said to go straight to the docks at American Yacht Harbor.
The low green hills of St. John slipped past as they entered Pillsbury Sound. Not much later, the green and red dirt hills of St. Thomas appeared. Ryan started the engine, and Paul helped Emily lower the mainsail and put the sail cover in place. Paul called American Yacht Harbor on the radio and explained that an accident had befallen his boat and that Windseeker would take her place in his slip. The harbormaster asked that Ryan and Emily have their paperwork ready.
Paul guided Ryan into the slip and leaped onto the dock to secure the mooring lines to the dock cleats. The man might not have been a great scuba diver, but he was a more than capable sailor, and his fastidiousness showed when he coiled the ends of the spare dock line beside the cleat. The harbormaster greeted Paul with a handshake and looked over Ryan and Emily’s paperwork, scanning the pre-approved ROAM application number into his smartphone.
“Ryan, do you have a shirt I can borrow?” Paul asked. “I want to go to our house and get us a change of clothes.”
“Are you sure that’s wise, dear?” Diane asked.
“It’s okay, Di. There’s nothin’ to worry about.”
Ryan went below and pulled on a pair of khaki cargo shorts over clean underwear, slipped into a clean T-shirt, pocketed his wallet and CRKT tactical folding knife, then grabbed a light green guayabera shirt for Paul.
Back on the dock, Paul shrugged on the shirt. He couldn’t button it over his stomach and left it open. The two men headed for the marina office to call a taxi.
They rode across the island to the Langstons’ residence. Fifteen minutes later, both men got out of the cab after asking the driver to wait and they walked to the front door. Ryan grabbed Paul’s arm and pointed at the door frame where someone had forced the lock open and left the door ajar.
Paul shoved the door open, standing right in front of it while Ryan stepped off to the side, invisible and protected behind the solid wall. When Paul stepped through the door and no one took a shot at him, Ryan followed.
The place was a wreck. Someone had tipped over, ripped open, smashed, or otherwise destroyed everything in the place. Ignoring the disaster that was his home, Paul headed across the living room to a bedroom. Ryan followed cautiously. What were the odds that a man and his wife had their boat shot out from under them on the same day that someone had robbed them?
“Is anything missing?” Ryan asked.
“Not that I can tell,” Paul replied from the bedroom. “Give me two more minutes.”
Ryan stepped over the piles of debris and walked to the sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool. They, too, were open.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Someone was watching them. He was sure of it.
An icy coldness clutched at his chest at the thought of a sniper’s crosshairs centered there. He ventured no farther outside and instead returned to the safety of the house’s concrete block walls.
“What the hell’s going on, Paul? Why are people shooting up your boat and ransacking your house?”
“The wife and I had a little argument. That’s why the place is a mess,” Paul answered. He came out of the bedroom, carrying two bulging suitcases.
Ryan looked past him and saw the open wall safe. “Uh-huh.” It was hard to tell how a person would act just by meeting them, but Ryan suspected Mrs. Langston would never destroy her own home in such a manner.
“Let’s go. I’m starving,” Paul said, his New Jersey accent dropping the R and G in starving.
Ryan stopped the older man before he could get to the front door. “Paul, I’ve made a good living out of helping people in trouble. Maybe I can help you.”
“Fuhgeddaboudit, Ryan. This ain’t no big deal. Let’s go get the girls.” He patted his belly. “All this excitement’s worked up an appetite.”
When all the signs pointed to trouble, there was no way Ryan could forget about it.