One Way or Another: A Novel by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

did not want to see him, knew he would not want me to be able to recognize him. Not a killer like that.
    Then, “She’s young, same age as one of my own daughters. How could this happen to her?”
    My brain clicked in. This man had a daughter. He was concerned about me. He was not the one who’d tried to kill me. I kept my eyes shut though, just in case I was wrong. I wondered why someone would want to kill me. I was unimportant, a nonentity, simply a young woman trying to earn a living that matched her expectations and, like most, barely succeeding.
    My throat was parched, my lips dry. I put out my tongue and licked.
    “See!” the man crowed triumphantly. “She is not drowned.”
    Suddenly, remembering, I wished I was.
    *   *   *
    The man looking at her, Apollo Zacharias, realized he was stuck with a severely wounded, half-drowned woman. His three shirtless crew members stood staring down at her, wrapped like a mummy in blue towels, red hair clogged with blood. Zacharias observed that it had stopped flowing. He knew this happened when a person died. No more heartbeat to push the blood through the veins, keep the arteries working. He had never longed for anyone to bleed before.
    Theos. He was tempted to throw her back in. Get rid of her— the body he meant, because he was certain now she was dead and there was no way he was going to be responsible for a dead body. But then she blinked again.
    Zacharias thought of his wife, of his children, the eldest only eighteen. Young, like this girl. Too young to die.
    “Carry her to my cabin,” he ordered, then he got on the radio and called for help. Another ship might be close, there might by some stroke of luck even be a doctor. To his surprise, he got an immediate answer.
    “I am in your vicinity. My boat is fast. I can get her medical attention. Stand by, we will be approaching from southwest.”
    Zacharias summoned his men back, told them to return the girl, or the body, to the deck, whichever, he did not care, she would no longer be his responsibility. He instructed them to prepare the rope ladder to lower her over the side. He was stunned when a few minutes later, a large yacht appeared on the horizon, steaming fast toward him. She must be 250 feet, he thought, impressed. Sleek as a dolphin, all coal-black and steel. A rich man’s boat, it gleamed with care. The crew were immaculate in white shorts and shirts—no bare chests here.
    The black yacht looked, Zacharias thought, stunned, like a ship from the gates of hell, ready to take you over the River Styx into the flames guarded by the fierce three-headed dog Cerberus.
    But the man who hailed him from its deck was clearly not from hell. He was red-faced, self-important, and gave orders like he was used to being obeyed. Zacharias noticed he did not wear a captain’s cap, yet the crew members obeyed him immediately, throwing out fenders to guard their craft from Zacharias’s lowly boat, sending two men across a rope which they attached, then slinging the cage over.
    Two of the men picked up the girl in her blue blanket. They did not so much as look at her, simply laid her inside the cage, closed it up, and propelled it back to their ship. Then they went back by rope to their own smart craft, signaled Zacharias to release the rope, which he did. The grand black yacht took off, churning up a swell that lifted Zacharias’s boat to the peak of a twenty-foot wave and back down again, taking on water, half drowning them all.
    Cursing, Zacharias shook a fist. The boat was already almost out of sight. He did take a silent moment, though, to think about the girl, and what might happen to her. Dead or alive, he assumed she was in good hands. Rich men’s hands anyhow.

 
    11
    Yet another week had passed and Marco was still in Turkey, unwilling to leave the peace and sunshine, and the mystery of the girl, behind. Relaxed, at Costas’s bar in the shade of the giant olive tree, he looked the very picture of a man content