But for all that, its engine that he’d left running was miraculously still chugging.

“And they called you a piece of shit,” Gannon said as he climbed in over the broken glass and clicked on the dome light.

There was a sound of ragged breathing behind him. He winced as he glanced back into the crew cab thinking surely Emerson must have been turned into a bunch of bloody rags.

But no. Emerson, wide-eyed and very much alive, sat on the floor of the crew cab staring back at him.

He leaned in closer and looked him over. There was blood on the right leg of his khakis. He took out Blackbeard’s knife and slit open the pant leg and looked at the gunshot wound.

Emerson had been shot through his right thigh. Gannon turned him to the side. The exit wound was nasty.

But at least it was off center on the outside of the leg. It didn’t look like the bullet had hit any bone or arteries.

He slipped Emerson’s belt from his khakis. He cried out as Gannon tightened it into a tourniquet above his thigh.

He rolled him back over and checked his pulse.

He was in a bit of shock, but what do you know, Gannon thought with a shake of his head as he clicked off the dome light.

Like the truck, Emerson was still kicking, too.

Gannon brushed the glass off the seat and sat and put the truck into Reverse. When he let off the brake, gravity began immediately rolling them back down the hill of sand.

After he got the truck turned around, he had to stick his head out the door window to see past the shattered glass.

After a moment over the hiss of the radiator, he heard Emerson begin to cry softly behind him.

“I know, right?” Gannon said. “Shoot up a fine vehicle like this. How could they? Make a grown man cry.”

89

“Emerson, enough already. Wake up,” Gannon said, softly slapping the young agent on the cheek.

“What’s going on? What the hell?” Emerson said weakly from where he sat taped to a kitchen chair.

Gannon watched the young agent’s eyelids flutter open. Then Gannon smiled as he watched them shoot wide as he took a good look around at the windowless rusty Quonset hut they were now in.

It was three hours later, coming on midnight, and they were in the northernmost opposite end of the island in an area known as Lower Bogue. They were behind the razor-wired fence of a business called Island Safe Storage that belonged to an associate of Little Jorge.

Gannon gave Little Jorge and Stick and Ruby a thumbs-up through the glass of the office behind them. They were drinking soda and eating pizza as they went through the money and diamonds they’d already taken from the recovered sea bag.

Gannon loudly dragged an old kitchen chair over the battered concrete floor and sat before the one Emerson was now duct-taped to.