Page 36 of Protecting Kelli
“We did it!” Flash said again, his features lit by the candle he was holding. He had a huge grin on his face, and Kelli couldn’t help but smile back at him.
Then he leaned forward and kissed her again. Not on the forehead either. But purposely on the lips.
“We did it,” he whispered a third time, against her lips.
Kelli wanted to throw her arms around him again. Wanted to feel him under her, around her. But he wasalready moving back, getting to his feet and looking around.
Moving more slowly, Kelli stood as well.
As naturally as if they’d done it a million times, Flash held his arm up and Kelli slid in next to him, wrapping an arm around his waist as his came down around her shoulders. They fit together perfectly.
“It’s not exactly the Taj Mahal, but we can work with this,” Flash said.
Kelli let out a snort of laughter. “Yeah, right.”
Flash shrugged. “I just…now that we have light, everything seems brighter…literally and figuratively.”
The crazy thing was, Kelli realized he was right. Being able to see had changedherentire perspective as well.
Now all they needed was for his friends to come and get them the hell out of there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Impatiently, Kevlar looked at his watch. It was eight in the morning, and none of the team had gotten much sleep. They’d arrived in Jamaica just before three a.m.—roughly thirteen hours after Flash had gone missing—and they’d been going nonstop ever since.
Even though it was the middle of the night, they’d gone straight to the resort where Flash and both wedding parties had been staying and interviewed as many employees as they could. The resort had driven the two groups to the tubing place, but they hadn’t been responsible for bringing them back to the hotel. That was the responsibility of the tubing company.
They were let into Flash’s room, which hadn’t given them any leads. While Blink and Safe packed up his belongings, Kevlar and Preacher went to the missing woman’s room. MacGyver and Smiley had continued casing the resort, talking to anyone who was up and about for any information they could get.
Kelli Colbert’s room, like Flash’s, had been neat andtidy. There was a book on the nightstand, along with a half-empty water bottle…a set of clothes neatly placed in a drawer. She’d even folded her dirty clothes and placed them back in her suitcase. She was mostly packed, obviously ready to leave the day after the tubing trip. Kevlar had been relieved to find her passport tucked under the clothes in her suitcase.
They’d packed up her few belongings as well, and left her and Flash’s bags in the security chief’s office for the time being.
Now they had to wait for the tour company to open before they could talk to them, and none of the team was happy about the delay. Flash was out there, as was Kelli, and they wanted to find them as soon as possible. In the meantime, they contacted Tex, the former SEAL who’d dedicated his life to finding missing people…civilians, former military, other SEALs, Delta Force…anyone who went off the grid without a good reason. He supplied special forces teams with trackers that he could use to pinpoint the wearers’ locations. But as they’d already discovered, Flash hadn’t brought his tracker to Jamaica. So they were flying blind.
Tex was doing his best to use his computer skills to track Flash, but Jamaica wasn’t like the US or a lot of other countries. There weren’t surveillance cameras literally everywhere, and so far, there weren’t any suspicious transactions on either Flash or Kelli’s credit cards. It was as if the two had disappeared into thin air.
But Kevlar and the rest of the SEALs weren’t going to lose hope. Flash was out there somewhere. They’d find him.
After getting all the information they could from theresort—which wasn’t much—the team headed for the White River tubing company in time to be there when they opened. They were led into a back room in the small building, where they met with the manager of the operations, who was flustered when confronted with six intense, large, pissed-off men.
He told them what they already knew, that the party of ten had checked in the morning before, and they had to wait about twenty minutes to go into the river, until after a group from a cruise ship had gone first due to their rigid timetable. No, he didn’t see them put in, as he was in his office doing paperwork, and he didn’t see them leave because the river tour ended at a location downriver.
Yes, he’d find the employees who helped them enter the river.
Interviewing the men who’d helped the group choose tubes and get into the water didn’t give Kevlar or the others any useful information. Just insistence that everyone looked happy. No one seemed concerned as they set off into the river’s current.
“What about the men who picked them up to drive them back to the resort? Can we talk to them?” Flash asked the harried-looking manager.
So far, he’d answered all their questions without reservation. Hadn’t seemed to be hiding any information, though hewasgetting a bit testy. But they had to keep pressing. They needed some sort of lead to know where to start looking. And at the moment, they had bupkis.
Impatiently, the team waited while the manager left to find the drivers who’d been scheduled to take the group back to the resort. After twenty minutes, he returned witha nervous-looking young man who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen.
“This is Mark. He drove the first group,” the manager said.
“Give us a minute,” Smiley told the manager, standing by the door and gesturing to it with his head.
“Um…okay.”
