Coldwater Revenge James Ross (best fantasy books to read TXT) 📖

send, and that’s how Tommy would get dead. Joe would not call for help.

“Idjit!” A voice began to scream. The voice was angry… almost crazed. “You goddamn moron!” The voice was closing fast, followed by what sounded like a swarm of bees.

“You had to make one more trip!”

“Shut up, Mickey! I’m not the goddamn weatherman.”

“We almost drowned!”

As the swarm grew louder, an aluminum jon boat appeared out of the storm. A vibrant humming seeped from a padded wooden box fitted over its outboard engine. The wet, familiar faces in the boat gaped at the figure poised on its toes at the end of the dock.

“Clever muffler, Mickey. Keep the salmon. Leave the boat.”

* * *

Hassad turned a dial beside the cellar door. Yellow light revealed a wall of empty wooden racks. Stacks of surplus ammunition boxes covered a rough plank table in the center of the stone floor. Two metal footlockers filled the space beneath it.

“Bring everything to the boat,” he ordered. “Carefully.”

Tom worked as slowly as he dared… hands numb… knees cracked and bleeding. A knot of throbbing flesh swelled the back of his head where Hassad had clubbed him with the pistol. Other than to keep from freezing inside his soaking clothes, there was no reason for Tom to hurry. As soon as he ran out of jobs, Hassad would surely kill him.

The insides of the metal boxes clinked like wind chimes as he carried them up the stone steps. The two Dobermans rode his heels, snarling at his every twitch. Hassad screamed caution and speed at the same time, and when Tom couldn’t budge a pair of footlockers, he shoved him to the floor and tested their weight himself. The professor’s nerves were frayed, and Tom wondered how long before they snapped.

Hassad grabbed the canvas strap at one end of the locker and ordered Tom to take the other. Their combined strength was enough to haul the heavy trunk out of the cellar and across the snow to the top of the bluff, though the effort exhausted them both.

Tom tried to visualize how he might unbalance Hassad on the steps leading down to the cove and, with luck, send him tumbling onto the rocks. A kick to the knee? He shook his head and tried to clear his mind. And a bullet to the face, if you miss. Think! But his mind was as numb as his body, and it took all his energy and focus to hold onto the heavy trunk. He licked a snowflake from his swollen lips and ran his eyes along the steps leading down to the cove and the rocks below. Why not just shove the trunk into his chest? He looked up to see Hassad watching him.

“You first,” said Hassad, gesturing him forward. Placing his pistol along the top of the trunk, he added: “If you so much as stumble, or even hesitate… I can manage from here on my own.”

Tom willed himself to remain alert for weapons and opportunity. But nothing that his exhausted brain proposed had any reasonable chance of success. He could turn the boat broadside to the swells outside the cove and try to capsize it. After that, he could try to swim to shore before he froze to death or drowned. But neither capsizing nor survival seemed likely. And the professor remained vigilant.

Hassad marched Tom back to the house and ordered him to drag a Morris chair to the plate glass window overlooking the lake. From a pocket inside his parka, Hassad took a roll of duct tape and ordered Tom to wrap his ankles to the chair’s front legs and his right wrist to its flat wooden arm. Ocher liquid oozed through tattered cloth as Tom forced his crusted knees to bend one more time. Hassad wrapped the final appendage and fortified the others with extra turns of tape. “Now we wait.”

Tom didn’t ask for what, or who. Hassad couldn’t handle a boat in this weather. He’d need someone who knew the lake to take him wherever he needed to go next. When Susan showed up, if she showed up, he’d have one more pilot than he needed.

At the risk of having Hassad use the duct tape on his mouth, Tom began to probe. “If you don’t mind me asking, did the NeuroGene owners know what they were handling for you?”

Hassad’s answer was curt and dismissive. “I should think you’d have other things on your mind.”

Tom tried to smile, but the effort made his temple ache where Hassad had clubbed it with his pistol. “What’s in the trunks, then? It felt like cement, but it’s not, is it?”

Hassad’s eyes widened. “Call it justice, Mr. Morgan.”

“As in the ‘free exchange of ideas and resources’?”

“Excuse me?”

“The shit you were shoveling in your office.”

“You would think that,” he dismissed.

“I don’t think it’s grandma’s crystal clinking around in those little boxes? What is it? The plague?”

Hassad’s face grew hard and his voice irritated. “Dark skin, foreign accent? That must mean something nefarious, mustn’t it, Tom?” The slip to informal address was pointed, but not friendly.

“The gun and the duct tape don’t mean good times… Suliman.”

Hassad scowled.

“Justice for what?” Tom demanded. “From who?”

“Surely you know. Surely Susan has told you about me. About us?”

Tom shook his head. The effort made him dizzy.

“I find that hard to believe. She’s spoken so much about you.”

“It doesn’t seem to have done me any good.”

“No. And frankly, it’s irritating. That and her inflated view of your intelligence.”

Shit. “Susan and I were over a long time ago,” said Tom. “If you think I’m standing in the way of something now…”

Hassad waved the pistol at his duct tape handiwork. “Hardly.”

“Then why did you drag me out here, at gunpoint? For what?”

Hassad eyes locked on his. “Why don’t you guess, Tom? I’m told that you’re exceptionally good at games. Is that true? Or is Susan confused about that too.”

The chill from the concrete floor spread through Tom’s torso. Shit, shit, shit. He cocked his head as far