Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

“Do you think he’s working for Carlos?” she asked.

Carlos Villegas, a Cuban-American thug who had, along with his brother, come aboard the Kilimanjaro one week before, for a day of SCUBA diving on the reefs near Dry Tortugas. He had in fact been interested in recruiting Noah to smuggle drugs across the Gulf of Mexico. Carlos’s brother, Raul, had been interested in something else: her. The situation had escalated to the point of a violent confrontation, and Jenna had seen a very different side of her father.

Afterward, Noah had told her that they would not speak of it again, but Jenna’s instincts—her gut—told her the brothers would want payback for bruises to both their bodies and their egos. Who else could possibly want to hurt them?

Noah shook his head, but whether it was an answer or from frustration, she couldn’t tell. “What else do you see?”

She looked up again, but there was no sign of Ken. “He’s gone.”

“Damn it.” Without further explanation, Noah broke from the cover of the pier and heaved himself up out of the water and onto the wooden deck. He moved so quickly that Jenna didn’t have time to ask what he was doing. She let out a reflexive gasp as she realized that he was now in the open, exposed to the sniper, but then just as quickly realized that the sniper—Ken—had gone and was not coming back.

Noah must have realized that, too.

Jenna pushed off one of the upright pilings and swam out from under the floating dock. The wooden platform was only about two feet above her, but for a moment, it seemed unreachably high. The section of dock that ran along the mooring slips was lower, closer to the water’s surface, but swimming back would have put her further from her goal, requiring her to waste time she didn’t have. She tried to recall how Noah had surmounted this obstacle. Her father had made it look almost effortless.

She reached up as high as she could and then kicked furiously, like a dolphin trying to launch out of the water. The maneuver got her up high enough to grasp the edge of the dock with her fingertips, but that was as far as she got. She hung there, straining to pull herself up, but at the same time feeling the wood slipping away beneath her fingers.

Jenna kicked again, pulling herself up with all her strength, and before she knew it, she was rising, the dock chest-high. She kept kicking, her feet now merely splashing water, and she wriggled forward until she felt the edge of the platform biting into the exposed skin of her abdomen. Her customary uniform—a bikini with an oversized blue Conch Republic T-shirt, knotted at the waist—was the perfect attire for a day-trip aboard the boat, but for life-and-death struggles and clambering around on creosote treated docks, not so much. Her flip-flops were gone. She had kicked them off during the swim. Now her bare toes could find no purchase on the algae-slick pilings. With a final thrust of her legs, she propelled herself forward and rolled onto the dock.

For a moment, she could only lay there, savoring the small victory, but then she glimpsed Noah, sprinting up the ramp that connected the moorage to the boardwalk in front of the bait shop. Getting out of the water was step one. She still had more steps to take, though she hadn’t really figured out what they were, aside from follow Noah. She sprang to her feet and took off running after him.

A slowly dissipating black cloud hung above the marina, and a foul smell, like burning tires, filled the air. Gawkers lined the docks, gazing in astonishment at the debris-strewn hole in the water where Kilimanjaro had been just a few minutes before. She saw a few people that she recognized—faces only, boat operators and residents that she passed every day but had never exchanged words with—and heard them muttering names: Flood, Kilimanjaro, Jenna.

She didn’t stop. Noah disappeared around the corner of the building. Jenna, sprinting all out, reached the same spot just a few seconds later.

There was a parking area at the northwest end of the structure, but the rest of the space on the leeward side of the bait shop was reserved for long-term parking, storage of trailers and boats undergoing repair. The lot was isolated, with no one to witness what Jenna now beheld.

Noah and Ken were fighting.

It was a close, brutal struggle. It was nothing like the fights in those movies with fists and feet flying, nor even like the sparring she did in the dojo, where she trained religiously, two-hour sessions, three days a week. The two men grappled, at times hardly moving at all, each trying to unbalance the other or find some weakness to exploit. Their movements were sinuous, understated, but then Noah’s opponent, evidently spotting some opening, let go with his left hand and drew back for a punch.