Page 105 of No Safe Place

Then my eyes lit up.

Water was coming in over the sinking yacht’s rail onto my back as I reached up and clicked Olivia’s dropped handcuff cinch tight around Shaw’s left wrist.

The cold sea was suddenly there rolling over the rail, rolling over the deck, rolling over the both of us.

Then I slid to my right and clicked the other end of the cuff to the sinking ship’s steel rail.

I snorted stinging salt water down the back of my already gagging throat as the sea closed over my face.

As we both became completely submerged a second later, I felt Shaw’s grip on my neck slip.

I finally managed to snake my right hand up in between Shaw’s forearms and I felt the grip loosen some more as I hammer-punched Shaw once and then twice in the chest.

It was only when I stiff-armed the bastard hard in the soft of his throat with the edge of my palm that he finally let go of me completely.

Then I was sliding out from underneath him, moving away to my left.

I quickly found the deck rail and had just put my foot on the top of it to kick myself free of the sinking vessel when I felt something seize my ankle.

I looked down.

With one outstretched hand cuffed to the rail of the huge sinking ship and the other outstretched one clutched onto my ankle, Shaw looked like a man playing an extremely desperate game of electricity tag.

My eyes narrowed as I brought up my free leg hard and aimed it and then I brought it down even harder.

I felt Shaw’s grip break simultaneously with his nose as I smashed my heel into his smug face with everything I had.

Finally free, I looked up toward the surface now twenty feet above me and began to breast-stroke.

Even though my lungs were bursting, just as I was about to break the surface, I turned and looked down into the water one final time.

In all my life, I would never forget that ghostly image of Shaw and the now completely submerged multimillion-dollar steel yacht he was handcuffed to sliding away slowly, deeper and deeper down into the bottomless Atlantic.

It looked surreal, I thought, otherworldly.

Especially Shaw.

Because in that last moment, the mercenary no longer appeared to be a drowning psycho killer.

Instead, he suddenly seemed to be a legendary captain from a children’s story, a happy, intrepid, magical nautical adventurer, frantically bon voyaging as he set underwater sail toward new lands twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

92

After I returned the powerboat to the dock in East Hampton where Colleen was waiting, the three of us headed to an Airbnb I had rented in Bay Shore.

Olivia was in no condition to do much of anything, so we just tried to make her feel as comfortable as possible at the house. She did manage a small smile when Colleen showed her the new clothes we had bought for her.

There was no way to imagine the hell she had been through. Beaten, kidnapped, trafficked. Victims of this abuse were no different than veterans with PTSD. It would be years before she felt like herself if she was lucky.

It was around six when we finally got back to the city in my pickup. We were going to reunite Olivia with her mother at her place in the Bronx. Which was going to be a challenge to say the least as the woman, like the rest of us, had thought Olivia had been dead for the last year.

As we came into the Bronx over the Whitestone Bridge, I looked out at Manhattan’s famous skyline to my left, lit up in an orange sunset haze. Then I looked back at Olivia to see that she was crying.

“Olivia, listen,” Colleen said. “The stuff you’ve been through has nothing to do with you. It was done to you. You’re innocent. It’s the men who hurt you who are bad. Not you.”

Olivia looked at me in the mirror.

“But my poor father,” she said. “I got my father killed.”

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