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Huffing, I shuffled onto my knees and started crawling around the place, hoping there’d be something sharp I could use to free him.
I froze.
The floor was slimy.
"Oh, God," I whispered, literally forcing myself not to retch.
Fish had been in here recently.
The stench told me that.
But the slime…
If I was crawling around in fish guts in a Prada suit, someone was going to pay for that too.
There was nothing sharp or pointy. Nothing that would let me cut him loose, but therewasa flashlight.
I found it by chance when my face collided with a wall—faces were useful sometimes. I hissed, though, because the burn on my cheek from, I assumed, the deployment of the air bag stung as the tender flesh grazed what felt like a roughly hewn plank of wood.
My head connected with the flashlight next, making it worth the duel for supremacy between the burns on my cheeks and throat, the pain in my skull, and the stench in my nostrils over which would make me vomit first.
Fumbling, I switched it on, wincing at the bright gleam, wincing even more when my supposition was right.
Fish guts.
The floor was bright red.
I gagged for real this time before I clenched my eyes closed and focused on my priorities—don’t look down.
"Do not look at the goddamn floor, Savannah," I told myself, trying hard not to retch again.
It was easier to walk around with the flashlight, and I quickly studied our surroundings. It was a fifteen-by-fifteen shed, clearly used for gutting fish. Or something. I mean, it had to be fish, didn’t it? In a place like this, with a smell like this?
Didn’t they have nice clinical places for that now? They did. Fish markets!
Something wasn’t right.
This wasn’t the forties.
So what were they gutting here that smelled of fish but wasn’t for food?
Or were they using the fish to—
"Of course," I muttered grimly.
Trafficking came in many forms.
I’d heard of heroin being transported inside the bellies of cattle which were shipped from Afghanistan, which then traveled across the continent to the West.
But…
"I thought it was a joke," I whispered to myself.
There’d been a rumor that someone was bringing in blood diamonds in Atlantic halibut trawls…
Dismissing that for the moment as I wasnotresearching a story but trying to save mine and my husband’s lives, I quickly realized that the room had no windows or doors. And I’d yet to find anything sharp or pointy either.
Squinting at the flashlight, I saw it was an older model, not a newer one. It not only weighed a ton, but it had a glass cover on the front, not a plastic one.
