Hot on the Hunt. Melissa Cutler

Triple ouch.

      Most of the time, he relished being the perpetual underdog. His whole life he’d been a scrapper, but he’d used it to his advantage. In warfare and black ops combat, it was rarely a bad thing to be underestimated by the enemy. But sometimes, clawing for a seat at the table sucked. Today, it sucked.

      His only hope of getting through the next hour without becoming shark bait or getting arrested was to get the attention of one of the yachts or sea kayakers passing by. Treading water, he turned in a slow circle, assessing his options. The navy was maybe only five or ten minutes back. In the distance, a modest luxury yacht cruised his way, coming from St. Croix, blasting reggae music and with sunbathing, barely clothed women adorning its deck.

      One thing John loved about his HK45 was that water didn’t jam it up. He raised the gun overhead and squeezed off a round to get their attention, hoping they’d process the sound as an emergency flare gun instead of a lethal weapon, then tucked the gun out of view and waved his arms high, saying a silent prayer that the boaters were feeling charitable.

      * * *

      “You know how you can guarantee I won’t kill you?”

      The pilot’s eyes were wide with terror and bugging out of his beet-red face as he gave a spastic shake of his head.

      The real answer was Because I would never kill a civilian—ever. But honesty like that wasn’t exactly an A-1 coercion technique. Alicia burrowed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his neck. Her finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger, but it didn’t need to be. The metal on his skin was convincing enough that she meant business.

      “Because you’re going to hover over that field, no funny business, and I’m going to jump out. And then you don’t ever have to see me again. Sound like a plan?”

      He nodded, right on cue. Holding the helicopter pilot by gunpoint hadn’t been her first choice, but money hadn’t worked as a bribe and she couldn’t take the chance of Rory making it to St. Croix—or, worse, disappearing—before she got a read on him.

      She hadn’t wanted to abandon John in the water, either, but what choice did she have? She’d unleashed a vicious criminal and now it was her duty to stop him at the sacrifice of everything else. Not only her duty to herself, but to the planet. Wasn’t that a disquieting thought? In the twenty months since she’d been shot, she’d barely thought of anyone but herself. That’s the way rehab and physical therapy worked. If you weren’t thinking about yourself 24/7, thinking about healing and regaining your strength until it was almost an obsession, then you weren’t doing it right.

      She jiggled her gun against the pilot’s skin. “But if you try to be a hero or do something stupid, the deal’s off and I shoot. Got it?”

      Another nod.

      “Take it down as far as you can without landing.” She didn’t need marks left from the chopper’s landing skids. Her footprints would be evidence enough of her presence on the island. With any luck, the pilot would return to St. Thomas and shake off his flight under duress. Maybe he wouldn’t even call the police. Yeah, right.

      Jumping out of a helicopter into a soggy field in the middle of St. Croix’s wilderness wasn’t ideal, but the airport was on the west side of the island—miles from any one of the harbors Rory was almost certain to have chosen as a landing point on the east side and way too central a location for her to disembark at. After a sweep of the coastline, she’d spotted Rory’s speedboat drifting in the calm waters near a secluded high-end resort, with Rory nowhere to be seen.

      If she’d been in his position, she would’ve done the very same thing because the resort’s remote location tucked into the lush green tropics of the northeast shore meant fewer witnesses had noticed him drive up and jump out. Plus, the resort sported a whole parking lot full of cars ripe for the stealing.

      Contrary to St. Thomas’s Let’s-help-the-tourists-spend-their-money-fast! vibe, this was a sleepy island of wealthy, older vacationers who liked their tennis games at the club in the morning and their naps in their beach hammocks in the afternoon, thank you very much. An escaped convict couldn’t hide here long—at least, that’s what Alicia was counting on.

      Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t hide out here long, either, so it was a good thing that she didn’t plan to. The idea was to locate Rory, execute him and vanish before the vacationers had woken from their naps. The closest, best place to make a clean break with the helicopter and its frightened pilot was a field two kilometers from the resort.

      She poked the pilot in the neck with her gun once more for good measure. “Hold it steady now.” She yanked his radio wire from its socket and tossed it out the door opening, then his earphones. No sense giving him a chance to call the police the moment she jumped, even if she’d never said directly why she needed him to get her to St. Croix or what she planned to do while there.

      She tucked two one-hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket to cover replacing the equipment she’d destroyed, secured the computer bag she’d retrieved from her rental car across her shoulders, then walked to the edge of the doorway. He’d done a great job getting low. She had maybe a two-meter jump. No problem.

      On the ground, she ran out from under the helicopter’s shadow and sought cover beneath the tree canopy. She watched the helicopter rise and head off, not back toward St. Thomas, but in the direction of the St. Croix airport. Just terrific. With the navy on its way to the island, she had ten, maybe fifteen minutes to vanish before the U.S. authorities he was most likely on his way to notify descended on the resort.

      Cursing at the messiness of it all and how screwed up her vengeance plan had gotten, she made a break for the hotel. What she really needed was a quiet place to log on to her computer. Maybe that was less glamorous than stealing a car and scouring every inch of the island, but Alicia could cover a lot more ground that way, so to speak.

      She could tap into the local police phone line and radio and let the police and civilians do the grunt work. If what she’d seen on St. Thomas as the helicopter lifted off was any indication, St. Croix’s main town of Christiansted would be crawling with police and soldiers, too, so the less visible she was, the better.

      In the resort’s parking lot, she scanned for a sign of Rory or any indication that he’d been through. She didn’t expect a top-rate operative like him to leave a trail, and he didn’t surprise her with one. She jimmied open the door of a rusty, early 1990s model American-made sedan—the kind that only took the touch of a screwdriver to the engine’s solenoid starter to jumpstart and so were, statistically, the favorite choice of auto thieves the world over—that probably belonged to one of the resort’s employees.

      With another look around, she pulled the driver’s door closed, but it caught on something and bounced back open. Her gaze shot sideways to see a man’s black boot propped on the bottom of the door frame.

      Squelching a gasp, she pulled her gun and twisted to aim at him, but the man was faster. Cold metal of a gun muzzle jabbed at her neck. Didn’t karma have an ironic sense of humor?

      “Not the best idea, Phoenix.”

      There were only a handful of men in the world who called her that, and none of them owned that smug, smooth voice. She followed the boot in the doorway up past a pair of black cargo pants, black leather belt and gray T-shirt concealing a lean, fit build to the smirking face of a man who looked a few years older than her thirty-two. It was going to take some effort and strategy to best him and escape, but she had no doubt that she would.

      Her first strategic move was to bide her time and wait for an opening. Blanking her expression, she released her gun into her lap and raised her hands in a show of surrender. “What do you want?”

      He cocked his head and looked sideways with mocking amusement. “You and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Do you know who I am?”

      A navy SEAL, she’d bet, given his clothes and high and tight haircut—and, if the gleam in his eye was any indication, one with a mean streak. “Should I care?”

      His