One Chef!

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

A clank, a thump, and light poured into the darkness on level with Kate’s knees; proof that thankfully she wasn’t blind. A one-foot square inspection port had been opened in a sidewall of their prison, for Kate had no doubt that’s what this was.

The flash of light confirmed her suspicions as well.

They were the sole occupants inside an eight by eight by twenty-foot cargo shipping container. The rumble through the steel-plate floor probably belonged to a ship’s engines. That meant they were at sea.

She watched mesmerized as a couple of water bottles and what appeared to be a bag lunch were dropped through the opening.

“Hunh? Hey? What’s going—” Harold Merritt. As she’d have guessed if she’d been ready to think about it; her guest judge belonged to the very nice chest she’d been unconscious on.

In half a second he was going to spook their unidentified provider. There wasn’t time to shush him. Therefore, as he sat up, she spear-handed him in the sternum. He collapsed back onto the mattress with a pained but relatively quiet whoosh.

She’d spotted something.

Two things: one past, one present.

Her brain had processed them both even if she hadn’t caught up with either yet. Kate held herself frozen for a long instant.

Then the memory fought its way through her miasma.

There wasn’t merely a threat now or in the past, there was immediate danger.

Mortal danger.

Marianne Rimaldi managed to get the desserts distributed, but her hands were shaking.

She was blinking hard.

Kate felt a sharp knot in the pit of her stomach. Marianne’s sudden change of mannerism was ringing a bell somewhere.

Not as a cook.

But from Kate’s life before that.

Marianne rallied to distribute the plates, but there was no finesse, no flirting that her earlier manners had promised—not with Harold, not with the bombshell Zania. Her explanation of the dish rambled so badly that Kate very tactfully cut her off.

The connections finally surfaced.

Training videos from the five years Kate had been a Secret Service agent.

Videos of poisonings!

The hand that had delivered the food and water reached into the cargo container.

It was far steadier than Marianne’s had been.

He was reaching for the other something that Kate’s brain had cataloged, even if her conscious mind had not.

A covered bucket stood close by the opening. Their toilet.

Just as the arm stretched through the small opening to check the bucket, Kate dove, grabbed his wrist—no question of gender by the thickness of the fingers—and bent his elbow backwards against the edge of the opening.

She managed to stop Harold before he bit into the tiny dessert.

She turned, but far too slowly, as if she was moving in a dream.

The world slowed to an impossible crawl.

Twice in her life, Kate’s perceptions had slowed. Neither time had it saved her life, instead it had cost others theirs.

The first time was when the newly elected Vice President had been executed.

Kate had been close enough to feel the heat of the gunfire and the stinging impact and hot burn of the sprayed blood.

She’d taken down the shooter hard enough to break four of the woman’s ribs and both arms—a mistress with a grudge about not being Mrs. Vice President. Being a familiar fixture had gotten her past the first several layers of security; Kate was supposed to have been the final guarantee.

She’d quit the Service the day the investigations were done. Even though they’d exonerated her, she hadn’t forgiven herself.

The second slow-down had been watching the unfolding disaster in her television studio.

Zania made a show of popping Marianne’s dessert into her mouth before Kate could act to warn her. The actress gave the dessert one clean bite with those perfect white teeth, then swallowed the whole thing down. She licked her bright lips with an impossibly long tongue promising immense delights to whoever could conquer her. Clearly she was “ramping up” to re-engage Marianne’s wandering attention.

The bombshell picked up her plate, licked it once where Marianne had pooled the ganache, then slowly tipped forward to land the plate back on the table—with her face planted directly on it. She hit the edge of the table hard enough for one of her breasts to break free of its sheer confinement adding disgrace to…death.

Kate didn’t need to reach for Zania’s pulse to know she no longer had one.

Hollywood was going to need a new super-hot starlet.

It had been too little and too late then…

But not now!

She torqued harder on the jailor’s elbow, could feel it would only take the least little pressure for it to give and break backwards.

Well and truly trapped, his scream now echoed the others in the studio.

Kate turned back to Marianne.

The chef settled to sit cross-legged on the studio floor, tipped to the side, and hit the concrete like a sack of flour. Her eyes popping open to remain fixed and dilated.

Dead. Murdered.

The chocolate ganache.

Kate’s last though then had been that death by chocolate was no kinder than death any other way.

Her first thought now was how pissed she’d be if she’d died over a bite of chocolate cheesecake back in the studio. Almost as pissed as she was at being made prisoner in a damned cargo container going god knew where.

She eased off the pressure on their jailor’s elbow, then yanked inward on his arm hard enough for him to slam his head on the outside of the container. That changed his screams to whimpers.