Aloud, he said, “I’m not giving orders. I’m just making it real clear that if you keep waving your gun in her face, the first chance I get, I’m going to grind you up until you’re nothing but teeth and toenails.”
He meant every single syllable.
Each time the yawning black hole at the end of the dude’s Smith and Wesson revolver swung toward Cami, Doc could very clearly imagine himself beating the asswipe into a bloody pulp.
Andenjoyingthe exercise.
Especially because Cami posed no threat. Her hands had been secured behind her back with a black zip tie.
“Hands behind your back, bub,” said the man who’d already hogtied Cami.
Doc had to hand it to the intruders. They were well organized.
The four masked men had exchanged only a handful of words while ordering the Wayfarer Islanders about. Three of them had automatically moved in front of the group once they’d gotten them seated, spreading out so each of them covered two islanders a piece. And the fourth man, a tall, skinny guy, had moved behind the line of ladderback chairs, tucking his pistol into the front of his pants and pulling out a bouquet of zip ties from his back pocket.
If Doc had been a little less seasoned on this particular subject, he might have said they were military. That kind of synchronization usually stemmed from hours of training.
But the gunmen didn’t carry themselves like soldiers, where every move was a study in efficiency. And the way they handled their weapons told him they weren’t terribly comfortable around handguns. Lord knew, by the end of bootcamp, any serviceperson worth their salt considered a sidearm an extension of their hand.
So…what are they?he wondered.Cops?Nah. Police were pretty comfortable around weapons too. Not as comfortable as soldiers, but still.
Which leaves civilians?He could see that being the case if these four were life-long friends, guys who’d grown up connected at the hip and, as such, could anticipate each other’s moves.
But then the questions remained.Who the hell are they? And what the hell are they doing here?
“Wrists together,” Zip Tie Guy barked at him because he’d failed to comply the first time.
Curling his hands into fists, Doc lined his wrists up thumb-to-thumb behind the chair. Holding his breath, he waited for Zip Tie Guy to tell him to change his positioning and face his palms together.
One heartbeat became two. Two became three. But the man never said a word. Instead, Doc felt the cool plastic cinch around his wrists.
A surge of satisfaction almost had the corners of his mouth curling up.As LT likes to say,bingo, bango, bongo.
And speaking of LT…
When Zip Tie Guy moved on to secure Dana, Doc leaned forward ever so slightly.
LT was at the other end of the line of chairs, but he’d craned his neck around the others so he had an unencumbered view of Doc. The instant their eyes met—and despite the room’s dismal lighting thanks to the quickly setting sun making the lone candle sitting on the desk work overtime—a silent exchange passed between them.
Doc:He doesn’t know about the zip ties.
LT:Roger that.
As Navy SEALs, they’d been trained to do…well, just about everything. Whether it was tying knots underwater while fighting someone hell bent on sabotaging their oxygen tanks, making explosives out of common household cleaners, or jumping out of airplanes at altitudes so high the air was too thin to breathe, the SEALs believed that knowledge made for the perfect human war machine.
One very specific segment of SEAL candidate instruction was known as SERE training—survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. It was the brainchild of a bunch of Vietnam POWs.
And talk about some tough sonsofbitches.
Doc had utilized hisescapeknowledge while allowing his wrists to be bound. Now he waited to see if he’d need to putresistanceandsurvivalinto action.
The man guarding LT and Olivia spoke up for the first time. “Where have ya hidden the treasure, eh?”
Well, that answers the question of what they want with us,Doc thought, his stomach clinching into a hard ball.
He’d hoped the fact that the gunmen had tied the islanders up and were wearing masks meant that, whatever they were up to, whatever they were doing on Wayfarer Island, they had no intention ofkillingthe six of them.
But if the intruders had come for the treasure, there was no way they would leave behind witnesses who’d seen their trawler, who’d heard their accents, and who could give their physical descriptions to the authorities. Unless they were a pack of fools, there was no way they thought they could get away with the heist without offing the islanders first.
