Eighty-three

MY head throbbed, and the madly rocking cradle wasn’t helping. I wanted to call my nonna to make it stop, but when I opened my eyes, I snapped back to grim reality.

I wasn’t safe and warm in my childhood bedroom above my grandmother’s little Italian grocery store. I was shivering aboard Tristan Ferrell’s boat, on my way to a watery grave.

I tried to move my arms, but they were tightly tied behind my back. My ankles were bound, too—I knew because I could touch the ropes. I’d been dumped between two fine leather seats at the ship’s bow, squeezing me into a fetal position. Helpless, I feigned unconsciousness while I observed the murderer, drug dealer, and kidnapper through half-closed eyelashes.

Ferrell was steering his Riva downriver. I saw the tops of several landmark buildings and realized we were just passing Midtown.

I shut my eyes completely when Ferrell hit autopilot and approached. I remained motionless while he groped me through my clothes, then under my clothes. He gave up, to rummage through my purse. When he found my phone, he tossed everything else over the side.

When I realized he hadn’t tossed my phone, I felt a surge of hope.

I knew the NYPD had the ability to ping a phone and track its location, using cell phone towers. If Nancy realized I was gone, she would have alerted Madame, Franco, and Sergeant Jones.

A curse interrupted my thoughts. Tristan was poised to toss my smartphone—and my only hope of rescue—over the side. Instead, he threw the phone back at me. I stifled a cry as it bounced off my shoulder and clattered to the deck.

When Tristan took control of the boat again, I opened one eye, saw that my phone was still locked, and nearly laughed at the irony.

Meanwhile, Tristan popped a compartment on the dashboard, and a cascade of Styx cylinders tumbled onto the deck. I thought he was hooked on his own stash, but quickly learned the fitness guru had another addiction.

While he steered with one hand, Tristan used his teeth to rip the cellophane off a two-pack of cream-filled Twinkies—

Twinkies!

In a frenzy of stress eating, he stuffed them into his mouth, one after the other, grunting as he chewed. When the Twinkies were gone, Tristan went for a big bag of Double Stuf Oreos.

And I should “consider cutting out a few forms of sugar”?! Kiss my assets, guru! (Yes, despite my predicament, I silently stewed.)

After gobbling three Oreos in a row, he dropped the bag on the passenger seat and approached me again—this time to administer a designer loafer kick to my torso.

There was no faking it this time; I cried out as my body instinctively curled into an even tighter ball.

“I know you’re awake,” he said. “And I want to know who you’re working for. You’re not wearing a wire, so you’re not a cop or a Fed. If I had to guess, I’d say you were a private detective working for the bitch.”

I was smarting too much to make a coherent reply.

“Deny it all you want; I know you’re Sydney’s snoop. Too bad your boss is going down. Cops are circling her like vultures over a carcass. Of course, Sydney will still be breathing in a week. I can’t say the same for you.”

To ease the pain in my side, I gripped the rope around my ankle and discovered I was missing one high-heeled shoe. In a flash of memory, Haley Hartford’s lost pink sneaker came back to me. I could still see it lying there, on its side, beneath that bench by the river.

After I’m dead, will someone find my shoe?

Gritting my teeth, I felt for the rope with renewed determination. Locating the knot, I began to work it. To cover what I was doing, I had to distract Ferrell—

“You know you’re not getting away with anything, Tommy Finkle!” I bluffed. “The NYPD’s Harbor Patrol has barge camera footage of you murdering Haley Hartford in Hudson River Park.”

Tristan threw up his hands in mock surrender. “You got me,” he said around a half-chewed Oreo. Then he laughed.

“I didn’t kill Haley.”

“So who did?”

“Robert Crenshaw—she was working for him.”

“I thought she was working for you?”

He shoved another cookie in his mouth.

“I was just the front man. I needed someone to create my fitness app, and Crenshaw overpaid Haley to do it—as long as she also agreed to put a backdoor into Cinder’s programming for him. He lied to her when he bribed her. She thought he only wanted access to Cinder’s analytics—the number of users, customer demographics, that kind of crap. When she figured out what was really going on, she freaked out.”

“So that’s why Haley had the viral videos from my coffeehouse—”

“Haley wasn’t stupid. As soon as she saw those videos, she knew Crenshaw was playing her. Some underling at Cinder was already getting suspicious with all the unexplained activity and uncovered some of Crenshaw’s sabotage. The videos sent her over the edge. Turns out Haley was a true believer . . .”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Haley was outraged that Crenshaw used a woman-friendly app to abuse women—” Tristan raised his hands in mock horror. “‘The victims, the victims,’ she kept saying. Haley told me Crenshaw’s abuse, on top of sabotage, was too much, and she was going to put a stop to all of it.”

“Why was Haley talking to you?”

“She thought she could trust me.”

“How could she think that?”

He shrugged. “She assumed Crenshaw had lied to me, too. And she was desperate. By then Crenshaw had cut off all communications with her, and she was still technically working for me. So she demanded that I set up a meeting with Crenshaw at Habitat Garden or she’d blow the whistle. Crenshaw planned to pay her off anyway, and he offered her another ten thousand in cash to keep her mouth shut. She told him no, and the rest is history.”

“Yes. Criminal history,” I wheezed, my side aching from Tristan’s kick.

“After he killed her—he claimed it was an accident—Crenshaw called me. I used Equator’s blacked-out back door, went to the park, and we tossed her into the river, after I made it look like a mugging.”

Another cookie went down the hatch.

“I decided that night that he had to go.”

“Go—as in murder?”

“Please. People die every day. Sometimes they die because they make themselves a problem for other people. And they have to be dealt with—like you.”

“But I’m not your friend. Crenshaw was.”

“Ancient history. I only went along with his schemes because I needed the money, and he agreed to invest in my business—”

“So you didn’t get rich off Hookster?”

“Crenshaw got richer than I ever did. He was the programmer, and he made a side bundle from the software that he’d developed, and more from his deal to distribute Styx, through a guy he knew in Scotland.”

Tristan gobbled another cookie and checked the steering. Apparently, the boat was on course, because he faced me again.

“I was glad to get Crenshaw out of my life. He was the one who couldn’t keep his hands off Sydney. He screwed her for a little while, then he screwed her over—like he did with all his women. But she fought back—in the press. She talked about all the crap that went on inside the Hookster offices. And when she had the gall to turn around and start her own dating app business, Crenshaw went nuts. All he cared about was setting up his ex-girlfriend for a fall. Ever hear of a website called Silk Road?”

“No, did you help sabotage that, too?”

He rolled his eyes. “Silk Road was closed for illegal activity. When you go there now, all you see is a big fat THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED notice from the US government. That’s what Crenshaw wanted for Cinder. He dreamed of hitting the Cinder web address and cackling over that notice, while Sydney rotted in prison. He was obsessed—so distracted that he was throwing money away, jeopardizing everything, me included. So I made my own deal with the Scotsman.”

“What kind of deal?” I asked, tearing another nail as I worked to untie the ankle ropes.

“Now that the Hookster lawsuit is over, two million dollars will be released from receivership. A pathetic sum compared to what we could have had, but with Crenshaw finally out of the way, I get it all, and I’m going to use it to build up my fitness business—a nice, legitimate front to use while I get filthy rich distributing Styx in the USA.”

He tossed the Oreo bag aside and turned his back on me.

“You really don’t know anything, do you, Cosi?” he said, steering the boat. “That’s a shame, because I’m about to rendezvous with a freighter beyond the Verrazano Bridge.”

Part of the knot slipped, and I felt the rope around my legs loosen.

“The Scotsman sent over a batch of Styx, and I’m going to deliver you to the smugglers as a bonus. I’m sure they’ll dump you overboard, in the middle of the Atlantic, after they’re finished with you. I’ll leave it to their imagination.”