Dead in the Water by Janice Kay Johnson

Author:Janice Kay Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-06-11T01:37:14+00:00

Chapter Ten

“Go!” Adam called to Claire. “Don’t wait for me!”

Fog again closed around them, all-encompassing gray. He paddled as fast and hard as he could, and hoped she was doing the same. To his frustration, he could still see her. Why wasn’t she pulling ahead? Hadn’t she taken him seriously?

When they next emerged from the mist, he cast a look over his shoulder. He couldn’t see the boat, but the volume of the outboard motor grew. What he’d give for a gun. If they were being pursued by the inflatable, he could capsize it with a few well-placed shots.

His muscles screamed but he didn’t ease up. There had to be something he could do to delay these bastards enough for her, at least, to slip away.

Grabbing the flare gun he’d taken from Kyle Sheppard’s kayak would require him to quit paddling, if only momentarily. The pocket of his PFD had seemed handy enough, but he’d been wrong.

Using the flare gun—that would mean he had to be within two or three hundred feet, and he had to be able to see the boat. He’d get only one shot, too, so it had to be a good one. If he was in range to use it, they’d sure as hell be in range to shoot him, too, with their far deadlier firearms.

Some distance had opened at last between his kayak and Claire’s. She disappeared in fog while he was still in the open, but she yelled something back at him. He couldn’t make it out.

He shot into the band of fog and she yelled again. The buzzing from behind grew ever closer, but he heard something else, too. An odd sound. Another boat approaching from the north?

Then she called out again, and this time he heard her. Orcas.

That’s what he’d heard: the explosive exhalation of an orca. The same pod they’d seen yesterday evening, now turned around to head south?

It came again. A gun fired, too. He was low in the water, which made him a less-than-ideal target. God. What happened if bullets passed through the hull of the kayak? Would he sink? Get dumped back in the bitterly cold water, where he’d wait for death from another bullet...or death from hypothermia if they didn’t see him—or felt especially sadistic?

But he was still moving forward, his level in the water no lower. He rotated his body the way Claire had taught him, going for maximum speed, praying she’d achieved even more.

A bullet skimmed the water to his left even as he heard the report from the gun. Not easy to be accurate when shooting at a moving target from a small craft on the water, he thought, in that remote part of his mind making calculations.

And then water and sound exploded into the air not ten feet to his right, just as a massive black-and-white body leaped out of the water. His rhythm broke. Would one of them come up right under him? As close as he and Claire had been on the shore, he hadn’t understood how huge these animals were.

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