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So finally, I figured, okay. I give up. I’ll ask Arvid. He owes me that much. And if he doesn’t see it that way, what the hell, the worst he can do is not tell me. So I figured I’d go up on deck and ask him. Or if the cabin door was locked, which seemed pretty likely, I’d pound on it until he came down to talk to me.
I stood up and took a step toward the door. Anyway, I tried to.
It turns out you can’t step anywhere when there’s a great big fucking chain locked to your ankle with the other end bolted to the hull.
I had been too woozy until now to do anything but lie there. So I hadn’t noticed it before. I sure as shit noticed it now. One step and it yanked me straight back. And now my ankle hurt worse than my head.
I reached for the door. Even leaning and stretching as far as I could, I was about four feet away. So I sat back down and checked out the chain. It was a solid professional job. I could probably get it off—if I had an hour and a couple of tools. Which I didn’t. So that kind of narrowed down my options. Mostly to sit and wait.
I sat. I waited.
It was around an hour before anything happened. Then I heard footsteps on the deck above my head. They clumped down a flight of stairs to my door. Arvid was coming down at last. I stood up and watched the door swing open. Which it finally did, but—
It wasn’t Arvid.
I’d never seen this guy before. Whoever he was, he was big, nasty-looking, and dirty. He had a face like an Army surplus combat boot. It was covered with stubble that wasn’t long enough to be a beard but was too long to be anything but who-gives-a-fuck. He had a big hooked nose that looked like it had been broken more than once, and the kind of angry sneer that made you want to break it again. He stood there in the doorway and poured the sneer on me.
“You are awake,” he said. A weird high voice and a French accent.
“Not me,” I said. “I’m sound asleep.”
His face didn’t change at all. Like either he didn’t understand me or he just didn’t give a shit about anything I might say or do. I was pretty sure he understood me.
But he just nodded and said, “Soon we are there.”
“Good to know. Where exactly?”
His face twitched into a small smile. It was the kind of smile a psycho gets watching puppies drown. “I will show you,” he said.
He stepped forward, and while I was looking for some kind of opening—some way to make a move on him—he launched a kick at my crotch. I barely saw it coming—but I sure as shit felt it.
If you have ever been kicked in the balls, you will know that there’s not a whole lot you can do for a couple of minutes. To say it hurts a lot doesn’t come close to covering it. So let’s just say that I was busy moaning, retching, and wishing I was unconscious again.
By the time I could stand up straight and see things again, my new best friend had the chain off my leg and my hands handcuffed behind my back. He reached behind me and grabbed the cuffs, yanking up until I thought he was going to pull my arms off. Then he frog-marched me out of the little cabin and up onto the deck. It wasn’t Arvid’s boat, either. From the little I could see of it, it was a lot newer, sleeker, and cleaner, in spite of Frenchy’s personal filthiness.
It was also obviously a working boat. There was a heavy crane mounted on the gunwale, with a big hook on the end of a steel cable. It stuck up ten feet above the deck. The cable was wound all the way up so the hook wouldn’t swing with the motion of the boat, which was smart. Aside from being heavy, the hook looked kind of sharp. On the deck below the crane, lashed to a series of cleats, were some large shipping crates. So I wasn’t the only cargo, wherever we were headed.
I didn’t get a whole lot of time to admire the boat. Frenchy yanked me up the ladder to the pilot’s station on the flybridge. There was a bench at the back of the bridge where a passenger or two could sit. I didn’t get to use it. Frenchy jerked me over beside the wheel and dropped the chain on my cuffs over a big steel hook screwed into the wall. The hook was almost shoulder height, which put all my weight on it and meant I couldn’t unhook myself.
But at least I could see ahead, presumably to wherever we were headed. “Look,” he said.
I looked. Big surprise: I was pretty sure this wasn’t the Baltic, either.
Straight ahead of us, maybe a mile away, an island loomed up. Calling it an island was being polite. It looked like a big chunk of dark rock. There was some green showing on it, but it didn’t look like happy, let’s-have-a-picnic green. More like some kind of unhealthy mold that would give you a wasting disease if you touched it. And no trees or beaches or anything like that. Just jagged black rock that rose up out of the water, and big waves crashing into it, and no way I could see to land on it without smashing the boat. And just to make an absolutely perfect picture, there was a crust of ice on top of the whole thing.
“Île des Choux.” The voice startled me. Not just because it was so high and raspy and weird sounding but because I’d been kind of lost, staring at the rock we were steering toward. And I was startled enough that I whipped my head around and looked at Frenchy and just blinked for a minute without a clue about what he’d said, before I remembered that I speak French. I knew what Île des Choux meant. I just didn’t get why.
“Cabbage Island?” I said.
He gave me one of those whole-body shrugs that only the French can do.
“We’re going there?” I asked him.
He went back to his default expression, the sneer. “Your new ’ome,” he said.
I had a lot of questions about that. I mean, “home” sounded better than “grave,” even with the French accent leaving off the h. On the other hand, from what I could see of the island, if I was stuck there it would turn into my grave in about two weeks. So was that why he was bringing me here? Just so I could die on a cold and empty rock? Or was there more to Cabbage Island than you could see from a mile away on a boat?
That last question was answered pretty quickly. As we passed a bright orange buoy, a shrill beeping started up from the control panel, and a red light began to blink. Frenchy leaned over the red light and stuck a key into a panel below it. He twisted the key and the face of the panel swung down, revealing a keypad. He punched in a string of numbers, at least ten digits long. Maybe more; he worked fast and I wasn’t really counting. Whatever, the beeping cut out and the light stopped blinking.
