Page 4
Story: Trey (The K9 Files #28)
M issy woke, feeling surprisingly warm. She shifted uneasily, trying to figure out what was wrong and realized that she was on something moving. Then awareness hit her. She’d been rescued, picked up off the damn rock, and now hopefully heading home. They were motoring, so they were going somewhere.
She leaned over to check on her father. He was warm for a change and curled up on his side. Maybe it was her imagination, but his breathing was a little bit easier too. Feeling incredibly grateful to the stranger who had picked her up, she grabbed one of the blankets, wrapped it around her shoulders, and made her way topside. When she came up to the deck, she shivered immediately.
The man heard her movements and turned, smiling at her. “Hey, how are you feeling?”
“Now that I’ve had some sleep, I would like to say I’m warm, but I’m not anymore.” She clutched the blanket to her chest as she studied her rescuer. “I’m feeling a lot better, though still hungry.” She looked around. “Where are we? I’m Missy, by the way.”
“About two hours from home, if we can get there before that squall. It’s picking up off to the east.” He pointed to the incoming weather. “And I’m Trey… Jackson’s brother.”
She stared out in dismay, missing Trey’s response to her introduction. “Can you beat it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “and I also have to ensure that we have enough fuel to get home. I do have extra, but I don’t want to end up in a worse situation than we’re already in.”
“Damn,” she muttered.
“I have heard from the Coast Guard, and they’re on the way.”
“Really?” She looked at him in delight.
He nodded. “Because of your father’s condition and the potential for the weather to keep us from getting back, they’re on their way to us.”
“That’s something at least,” she said, looking around. She searched the skies, but all she saw was the incoming cloud cover. “Of course these clouds won’t make that easy either.”
“No, and the only reason the Coast Guard are even trying to reach us is because they were already close enough to make the trip,” he added. “Otherwise we would be home before they could get to us.”
“Right,” she muttered, as she released a deep sigh and took in a deep breath of the salty air. Looking over at him intently, she smiled. “I wanted to say thank you.”
He looked at her and nodded. “You’re welcome,” he murmured. Schooner, who she hadn’t realized had been happily ensconced on the passenger seat beside him, barked.
“Yes, Schooner,” she said, “I owe you thanks as well.” She gave him a big cuddle. She’d always loved the dog, but he had been very bonded to her father. Schooner was obviously a man’s dog, which she never thought would upset her, but she longed to have that same connection with something in life. Somehow the strays and the rescues always gravitated more to her father than to her.
“Grab the wheel and I’ll go get the thermos of coffee and sandwiches I have with me,” Trey announced, racing below. He returned almost instantly, handing her an oversized thermos full of coffee and several thick meaty sandwiches and quickly retook his spot.
“Did you check over my father?” she asked greedily biting into the first chunk of sandwich.
“I did,” he stated but said nothing more.
“ Right .”
“Nothing we can do except get him some help as soon as we can, and I’m doing everything to make that happen.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.” She stared down at the sandwich he’d provided. She really wasn’t at her best.
Surprised, he immediately shook his head. “You’re not. You’re worried sick about him. It’s been weeks, hasn’t it?”
“It’s not been weeks since he went unconscious, but it has been weeks since we got lost in the first place and when he first got hurt,” she stated, shaking her head. “He’s been injured for,… gosh, I don’t know how long.” She frowned. “I’ve lost count of the time.”
“That’s okay. The fact that he’s unconscious and that we can’t rouse him is the main part. If he’s just happy to have a good old snooze, that’s one thing.”
“That’s not him. He would revel in this weather,” she murmured. “He was always happy to go out when Mother Nature would kick up her heels. I’m the one who was much less content with that.” He smiled at her. She frowned and admitted, “You look familiar, but I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are.”
“Sorry, I should have introduced myself,” he replied, with a chuckle. “You may know my brother, Jackson.”
“Oh my gosh, you’re Trey.”
He nodded at her. “You were a couple years or so behind me in high school,” he noted, giving her a searching look.
“Yes, I think so. Whatever brought you back here? You’re not someone I would have expected to run into out here.”
“The search and rescue crew was terminated,” he shared. “They can only give so many days to these searches. When the possibility and the timing looks even worse for a recovery mission, they just can’t continue.”
“Right, I know,” she said. “My father and I did talk about it beforehand, what I should do, but… what you should do with your father’s help versus what you do when your father is dying beside you is different. That’s been the horrific part.”
“Let’s hope he’s not dying.”
“He’s been out cold for a very long time.”
“I understand, but did you rouse him at all?”
“Once or twice,” she confirmed, “but then he just crashed back under again.”
“You’re a veterinarian, so you must have some idea of what he’s dealing with.”
“Sure.” She nodded. “A concussion gone bad. He’s most likely comatose now, and there are all kinds of related scenarios that I don’t even want to contemplate.”
“We don’t have to right now,” he stated, “because, first off, we’re looking for a way to get home. Barring that, a place to pull over and to get out of the worst of the weather for a time. We could try fighting our way down, but I don’t think either one of us really wants to battle Mother Nature when she’s in a bad mood, like this.”
“God no, not again. I just want to get Dad home, safe and sound.”
“We’re working on it, and we’re only a couple hours away. Still, that’s a long time, considering. Unless the winds change, Mother Nature will try and hit us sideways, and that won’t be a good scenario.”
“Jeez,” she muttered, as she stared out at the blackness, feeling her heart sink. “I was so hoping that, now that we were found and rescued, we would be safe.”
“It’s not that you’re not safe,” he corrected. “We’re just out on a regular fishing trip, and bad weather has come up.”
“Sure, and that’s exactly the scenario we had when I left with my father. And now he needs a whole lot more than that right now.”
“I agree, and we’ll get as far as we can, but, if you have any pull with Mother Nature, tell her to back off on that storm,” he suggested, pointing off to the approaching storm. “Now would be a really good time to test out those powers.”
She snorted. “As if.”
He looked over at her and asked, “So, this was all just bad luck?”
She looked at him sideways and shook her head. “I’m not so sure about that.” His glance when it came her way was curious. She shrugged. “I got the impression that this was deliberate. My father did too.”
“What was deliberate?”
“That our radio onboard didn’t work, that our fuel tank that had supposedly been replenished wasn’t, and that the emergency medical kit we always keep on board was missing. He mentioned something else about repairs that were supposedly done but didn’t appear to be done.”
“So, you’re thinking that either somebody was sloppy and that got you into so much trouble, or you think the boat was vandalized in such a way that it would only become an issue if you had bad weather?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds foolish.”
“Not necessarily. People do all kinds of stuff if there’s a reason to get rid of you or to make your life a whole lot more difficult. Is there anybody in particular who would do this?”
She shook her head. “No.… I don’t know of anyone. I know that my father was rambling on about sabotage, but I didn’t have any reason to feel that way, and Dad didn’t mention any names. It’s not as if he was making sense, you know?”
“Right,” Trey muttered. “So even if somebody had done a lot of repairs, the storm itself could have caused a mess on its own.”
“It’s possible,” she conceded. It was hard to understand how mixed up her feelings were over the entire topic. “I get it,” she murmured. “From your perspective, the thought of anybody sabotaging the boat is probably foolish.”
“Not at all,” he clarified. “The work that I’ve been doing for a lot of years involves people being absolute shits to each other,… and I’ve seen plenty examples of bad behavior. But, if somebody has done something to sabotage your boat, the wrecked boat will be completely messed up now. I won’t have the time or the inclination to search the wreckage. I’m not sure what the local authorities would do about the boat either.”
“It would be hard to prove anything at this point, given all that the boat has been through,” she agreed. “That’s the evidence you want to see before the rocks get a chance to hide any evidence of tampering.”
He smiled at her. “On the other hand, if somebody wants you guys to never return, we’ll find out pretty quickly, once we get you home.”
“Not necessarily,” she countered. “If somebody didn’t want us to come back, they could just play it cool for a time, and we would never know.”
“Something to keep in mind at least.” He didn’t say much more.
She looked at him and declared, “I’m not making it up.”
Surprised, he shook his head. “What makes you say that? I am not assuming that you made up anything.… It would be nice to get your father’s take on it too.”
“It sure would,” she muttered, as she stared where Silas Ragner was tucked safely inside the boat.
“How are you doing?” he asked. “Do you want to go below and get warmed up?” When she shivered, he nudged her toward the galley. “Go ahead. Go downstairs, stay warm, grab another coffee. Eat more. I’ll do the best I can to keep us going toward home,” he murmured. “You just stand strong. You’ve survived the worst of it, and now we just have to get through this last bit.”
She smiled up at him. “Thank you. I think I’ll curl up downstairs with my father.” And, with that, she turned and headed back down. If this trip was the last she got to spend with him, she wanted to make the most of it. Though it’s not the way she would have chosen to say goodbye, at least if this was goodbye, she’d had the chance to spend these last few days with him.
Trey stayed up top, guiding the boat safely back toward home, knowing that time was of the essence. He really had no business looking to find a place to hide from the storm when they had someone injured on board. At the same time, he also knew it was foolish to continue to risk all their lives if it came to that. Just as he was wondering how bad it would get, the winds cleared away the clouds, and, weighing his options, he looked up and off to the side, then spotted a Coast Guard cutter racing toward him. He smiled, signaled that he saw them, and immediately stepped below to tell Missy that the Coast Guard was on their way.
She looked up at him in disbelief and then bolted up top. “Oh my God.” She saw the boat racing toward them. “It’s really them, isn’t it?”
“It’s really them,” he confirmed, with a smile.
It took another twenty minutes before they were alongside and got her father transferred to the larger ship. She went with him, but then she stopped and looked back at Trey. “You can’t come with us, can you?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll take my boat back, but it’s clear weather, and you’re safe now, so that’s all that matters.”
She threw her arms around him and gave him a huge hug. “I’ll call you as soon as you get back again.” And, with that, she was gone.
Trey had to admit, finding and rescuing all three of them gave him a huge sense of relief. After his accident, a part of him always wondered whether he would be of any value to anybody anymore, or if he was just so injured, so broken, and so mentally racked over everything he’d gone through that his old confidence and tendency for success wasn’t anything he could count on anymore.
It sounded terrible, even pathetic in a way, and he certainly didn’t want to experience that, so he felt a huge relief to have found her and her father and the War Dog. It gave Trey a mental boost that he really needed.
Why had nobody found them yet? Still that was neither here nor there. As he made his way in the boat to the dock, he saw Jackson standing there, waiting for him. Trey pulled in alongside, tossing the rope to his brother, who immediately tied them off and swung him into a big hug when he arrived.
“Look at that. The mighty hero has returned home and what? In two days you found people who have been missing for over three weeks.”
Trey shook his head. “I’m just glad that they’re found.”
“You and everybody else,” Jackson stated, with an amazed expression. “How is it that you even found their location?”
He laughed. “I used to go fishing in and around this place, remember? I knew of a couple fishing holes that I could always count on when it was a shitty fishing day and the fish weren’t biting. Silas, being a regular, was always determined to change the location, but, in this case, that location is one that he likely turned to after trying out his favorite spot.”
“And of course everybody went looking through all those known locations,” Jackson said, “but nobody seems to have had that particular spot locked down in their mind, and the fact that you did is huge.”
“I don’t even know that it’s anything I had locked down, so in a way I hit the jackpot,” he shared, with a laugh, as he picked up his bag, took another look around the boat, right as his brother told him to just leave it.
“We’ll come back here tomorrow and take care of that. You need some sleep and some food.”
Trey shook his head. “I’ve had sleep and food, and I’m feeling pretty decent, I’ll have to admit. It’s enough knowing that she’s fine and”—he gave a sharp whistle, watching as Schooner hopped up on his side at the edge of the boat—“and I found the War Dog.”
“Good Christ,” Jackson muttered, staring at the dog in fascination. “You really found him, didn’t you?”
“I really did, but we didn’t want to send Schooner with the Coast Guard, so I just kept him myself. I know the Ragner family will really want Schooner back.”
“I haven’t heard any update on Silas, have you?” Jackson asked.
“No, I haven’t, but we haven’t been back very long. I’m sure they’ve got him airlifted to a hospital by now.”
As it was, they had just barely made it back to the house when Trey’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway.
“Hi,” came the quiet voice. “It’s Missy.”
“Missy, how are you doing? How is your father?”
“We’re at the local hospital. He’s in the ER, and they’re doing all sorts of tests of course. I don’t know what the prognosis is yet,” she muttered, her misery clear in her tone, “but I wanted to let you know that we made it this far. Did you make it home?” she asked anxiously.
“I did. I just now stepped in the front door of my brother’s house.”
“Oh good,” she said. “When we left you, the bad weather was still around, and I was afraid that something might have happened.”
“Nope, nothing happened to me,” he stated, with quiet reassurance.
“I never thought it would ever happen to me either,” she stated, her voice choking. “But the one thing you can never do is imagine that you know more than Mother Nature,” she whispered. “I just wanted to thank you again.”
“I’m fine,” he replied. “Go spend time with your father, and, when things have calmed down, give me a call. We’ll go out for coffee or something, and we can talk about it.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, “that would be lovely.”
He ended the call, and Jackson raised his eyebrows, watching him intently. “And now you’re getting a date with Missy?”
“Just checking in with Missy and her father.”
Jackson added, “I’m pretty sure she realizes you saved their lives.”
“That’s true,” Elizabeth confirmed, coming up behind them.
Trey smiled as he turned, opened his arms, and she gave him a big hug.
“I can’t believe you came home, headed out, and immediately found them,” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“Not sure I would put it quite that way. It wasn’t a case of immediately finding them, but I did have some idea of which fishing holes to check. I’m surprised that nobody else knew about Silas’s favorite spots.”
“I don’t know that nobody else knew,” she corrected, “but Gerald, who was running the search and rescue efforts, certainly didn’t know about them, and he’s been best friends with Silas since forever.”
Trey nodded at that. “That could just be because, as we know, fishermen tend to be very competitive about their special spots and keep them secret.”
“Oh man”—she nodded—“are they ever competitive. Hard to believe that they would argue over fishing locations, their super secrets ,” she muttered, followed by a chuckle. “Come on in. I’ve got a meal ready to sit down to.”
Trey shook his head. “I never really understood how you could always do that.”
“Always do what?” she asked.
“Always have a meal ready. It’s like, at any point in time, somebody turns up, and you always seem to have a meal ready.”
She shrugged. “Been cooking a long time, and you learn what you can do quickly, without a whole lot of effort,” she replied with a smile. “So, you don’t worry about it. The more cooking I do, the better off you are.”
“Ha.” Trey smiled. “I won’t call you a liar, but…”
“Ah,” she quipped, “but you’ll call me a liar.” Laughing out loud, she stopped when she took one look at Schooner, her eyes glued to him. “Wow.”
Schooner immediately barked and nudged her hand.
Trey nodded. “I hoped you might have a little bit of spare food for him. I did pick up a big bag of dog food, and I’ve got it, but I’m sure he’s looking for a treat. According to Missy, he kept them alive, which I wouldn’t doubt for a moment,” Trey declared.
“I’m not even sure I want to hear all the details,” Elizabeth admitted, “but the fact that they’re even alive is huge. Everybody gave up.” At that, she gave Trey a curious look. “And yet you never really had that thought, did you?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know for sure. I just knew that Silas and his daughter had a certain amount of survival training that gives them an edge, and an edge is all that is needed. Also they had found a place that was safe and out of the wind, and they were all tucked up, with all the blankets.”
“Would they have lasted much longer?”
“Probably not a whole lot longer, but they did survive, and that’s what’s important,” Trey said.
Elizabeth nodded. “A returning hero—animal or human—deserves a treat, so come on in.”