A Man Overboard by Shawn Hopkins Read Free Book Online Page A

think about that now, not while his brain was actually emotionally numb enough to process the thought.
    He leaned back against the headrest and massaged his temples. So think, damn it. When he got home, he would contact the FBI himself. The police in the Bahamas, along with the security people from the boat, assured him that they had reported the incident to the FBI, but Jack didn’t necessarily believe that. Their whole approach had been to do nothing at all, choosing to disbelieve his story rather than to do anything worthwhile about it. It was infuriating. As soon as he could, he would get on a computer and search for more options, see who had jurisdiction and who might be able to help.
    As soon as he could …

    The guy sitting in front of him was sound asleep, his laptop open on the empty seat beside him.
    Beyond the point of caring, Jack reached around the seat and quietly took the man’s computer. After taking another reassuring peek at the man’s tanned eyelids, he placed a finger on the touchpad and brought the screen to life. Thankfully, there was a portable Wi-Fi device plugged into one of the USB ports, and the computer was already logged onto the internet. The man’s Facebook status was up, and judging from the pictures he’d just uploaded, his time in the Bahamas had been a little on the wild side. Jack minimized the page and opened a new one.
    Half an hour later, the man still asleep in front of him, he had found enough information on cruise ship crime to infuriate him all over again. In his searching for some kind of direction, he’d come across a dozen sites dedicated to cruise victims. Hundreds of stories were documented. Drug trafficking, rape, theft, missing children, murder… The accounts of negligence, cover-ups, and lies by the cruise lines in these instances were maddening, provoking one congressman to declare there being no better place to commit a crime than on a cruise ship. You were almost guaranteed to get away with it. In one instance that Jack read about, a woman had gone missing—the crew packing away her possessions and failing to inform anyone that she’d even disappeared! The police were never contacted nor was her family. Not until her father reported her missing was anything done. And even then, it took the cruise ship company three days to confirm that she was even a passenger on the ship! The number of disappearances over the years was staggering, from little children to crew members. It was even estimated that a person went overboard every two weeks !
    Had Jack known all this, he wouldn’t have been so eager to accept Viktoriya’s offer.
    But the most disturbing and frightening part was that in the wake of a committed crime, it was commonplace for the incident to be swept under the rug. One case involved a naked woman found drugged and dead in a room with four men—no conviction. The stories went on and on and on, and the more Jack read, the more pissed he got.
    The man began to move, and Jack quickly closed out his window and maximized the Facebook page. He reached around the chair and placed the laptop back on the seat while the man rubbed his eyes, looking out the window.
    Yeah, Jack thought as he waved down the stewardess for another drink, he would call the FBI as soon as he got home. He was sure now that absolutely nothing had been done to find either his wife or the men who had thrown them overboard.
    And there was going to be hell to pay for it.

11
     
    The empty silence coming from the Sonata’s vacant seat beside him was more haunting than what he’d endured on the plane. He was driving their car and approaching their house. But there was no their anymore—as the empty seat proclaimed. Just his . And in the quiet, he could barely make out Stacey’s faint screams as, sinking beneath the eerie darkness, she reached out for the same moonlit sky he had reached for. Only no one was there to answer her cries.
    Tears failed to exorcize the lingering cries, and the