meant getting some answers. “You just mentioned Bennie Blount. How’s he doing?”
“Mr. Blount is in serious but stable condition. He lost a lot of blood from the crash and the animal attack, but your buddy did a great job keeping him alive until help arrived.”
“What about his legs? Is he going to be able to walk again?”
Dawson shrugged. “I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know all the facts. From what I was told, he did sustain a spinal cord injury. They don’t think it’s a devastating one, so, God willing, he’ll be as good as new after some rest and rehab.”
Payne closed his eyes in thought. For some reason, Payne was always more devastated by his partners’ injuries than his own. “And what about the twenty-plus prisoners we saved? Are they all right?”
“Maybe I should ask you the same question. Are you all right?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Twenty-plus prisoners? You must have double vision or something. Like I mentioned before, you helped save the lives of eleven captives.”
“Yeah, I heard you. There were eleven people on the island when you showed up and ten on the boat that I set free several hours before. If my math is correct, that would mean over twenty.”
“Shit,” Dawson mumbled. He suddenly realized that Payne hadn’t been informed about the missing vessel. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but we never found the slave boat that you and your partner talked about. The Coast Guard is currently conducting an all-out search of the gulf, but as of right now, we don’t know what happened to it.”
“You’ve gotta be shitting me!”
“I wish I was. But it hasn’t turned up.”
Payne tried to process the new information as quickly as possible, but it threw him for a temporary loop. “So the slave boat could be on the bottom of the gulf? What about Robert Edwards? Did you find Robert Edwards anywhere?”
Dawson shook his head. “He’s one of the missing slaves. His wife and future baby are fine, but he’s still unaccounted for.”
Payne tried to make sense of the information. When he left the island, he thought he had rescued everyone except for Ariane and the unknown captive from the truck, but now he realized that he might have sent a boatload of inexperienced sailors to a watery grave.
“Jon?” Dawson whispered in a comforting voice. “Not to change the subject, but when you pounded on the mirror and called me an asshole, you implied you had a bunch of questions. Did you want me to answer anything else, or is that all for now?”
It took Payne a moment to gather himself. “With the new information that you just gave me, one suddenly leaps to mind.”
“Go ahead, fire away.”
Payne wished he’d stop using that expression. “How in the hell did you find us? I thought the people on the boat must’ve told you about the Plantation, but since they’re still missing I guess they couldn’t have been the ones.”
Dawson nodded. “A couple of planes noticed the house explosion from the air. They, in turn, notified the local authorities. Eventually, word filtered down to us.”
“And you’ve had no luck finding the missing slaves? What about Levon Greene and Octavian Holmes? Any luck with them?”
Dawson shook his head. “We put out an APB and flooded the airports and local islands with their pictures. Unfortunately, if they decided to head south, we’ll have little chance of finding them. Hell, a guy in a sailboat can fart and propel himself to Mexico from here. We’re that close to the border. It makes things kind of tough for us.”
ONCE Payne was excused from the conference room, he rode the elevator to the main lobby, where he met up with Jones. The two greeted each other with a firm handshake, then walked into the bright sunlight of the Crescent City.
“How’d the questioning go?”
Jones smirked like an uncaught shoplifter. “Just peachy, and you?”
“Not too bad. When things started to get sticky, I made a big fuss, and they immediately backed down.” Jones’s smirk must’ve been contagious because it quickly spread to Payne’s lips. “Did they ask you anything about the hard drive?”
Jones patted the pocket of his T-shirt and laughed. “Nope. And to be honest with you, I forgot to mention it.” He stopped on the sidewalk and pretended to turn around. “Do you think I should go back and tell them? Because I could—”
“Nah, I doubt it’s important. The damn thing is bound to be blank.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It probably won’t tell us where