Page 21 of One Last Chance

The water seemed to have pummeled the man, and he gasped for air, his eyes wide.

“Almost there,” Axel said. “This will hurt. But we’ll make it fast.”

Russell picked up Brian’s torso, and Axel moved his legs and ignored his shouts, although maybe the frigid water had helped curtail the pain, and in a moment, they wedged him into the basket. Axel grabbed the sling. “Get in.”

Russell climbed in, sitting on the sling.

“Hang on to the basket.” He sent a thumbs-up to the bird.

The boat pitched hard into a trough as the basket swung away, and Axel turned.

Oh. No. A wall of water curled over the boat, and at the rate of descent, would crash down over the basket?—

Maybe even drag the chopper into the depths.

“Moose, pull up. Pull up!”

He scrambled inside the cabin, then shut the door and threw the latch. The boat rode the trough up the front side of the wave—aw,they were going to pitchpole. But if the cabin could stay watertight?—

He threw himself down into the lower cabin and pulled the airtight hatch.

Then, as the boat pitched up, nearly vertical, he found the berth strap, slammed himself onto the berth and clasped it.

He grabbed a nearby rail as the boat slammed backward into the trough, the sound deafening as the wave thrashed it under the water. Then, caught in the submerged current and pushed horizontal, the boat rolled.

The strap caught him, but the roll slammed him against the berth, the walls, burning a line into his body.

But it held.

The boat finally stopped rolling, caught in the current under the surface—his best and most pitiful guess, because he hung from the bunk like a fish on a stringer, upside down.

And even as Axel unhooked and let himself down onto the ceiling-slash-floor, as he looked out the windows to the dark-hued shadows of the sea, he knew.

He was going down with the ship.

* * *

Flynn had traveled to the end of the world for nothing.

Two flights, including a delay, an overnight layover in a seedy hotel in Seattle, then a flight to Anchorage—and of course, the rental company had given away her car—so another night in an even seedier hotel near the airport, and then, finally, a drive through the drizzly day north to the chilly town of Copper Mountain.

At least the sky had stopped weeping. Three hours north of Anchorage, the spectacular Denali mountain range sat under a vivid blue sky, the clouds high and wispy, and the fresh dump of white on the peaks glistened like diamonds.

Not the place for dreams to die.

Now, Flynn stared at the massive map of Alaska that spanned the sheriff’s office, the one with the roads marked, including the dirt forest service paths into the woods.Where are you, Kennedy?

County sheriff Deke Starr clearly hadn’t been expecting her to show up again, but he’d been willing to listen to her request to dig through the evidence and maybe unearth something new.

She sighed and turned as he arrived back at his office, holding what she considered a terribly thin file.

“Only because you’re a fellow detective,” he said, handing it to her. “Those are copies. It’s considered a cold case because, well . . .”

“You never found a body.”

“We’re not sure she’s even dead, Ms. Turnquist.”

“Flynn. And I’m not either, to be honest. If it weren’t for this . . .” She touched the jagged half-heart pendant. “Thank you for sending it back to me.”

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