Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

fine chain was strong enough to serve as a garrote, but the Senator had decided to try and no amount of clawing at the chain could keep it from burying itself further in her skin.
    She had a vision of the necklace slipping broken from Abby’s breathless throat and falling to be trampled into the sand. She saw a rasp-voiced bird pluck it from the ground, adding it to the hoard of Christmas tinsel and soda pop tabs lining its nest. Later, much later, she watched as one too many tropical storms washed over Seagreen Island and a tiny islet was set free to safeguard Abby’s bones. Her great-grandmother’s necklace remained behind with the birds.
    Reality had slipped so far from Faye that it was easy for her to believe that she had seen a vision through Abby’s dead eyes. She could actually see very little through her own eyes, because lack of oxygen was making the sun go dark.

    Nguyen was an experienced pothunter, but he was a landlubber. He had learned to SCUBA dive for this job and he did it well, but learning to pilot a boat had seemed like a waste of time. He had figured Wally might as well make himself useful, but now there was a great deal of money to be made if he could figure out how to get himself, alone, to an island called Joyeuse. Well, if Wally could get himself from Point A to Point B in a boat, Nguyen was sure he could do it, too. How hard could it be?
    He’d been surprised to hear from the boss, who must have called him just as soon as Wally left their little business meeting. Nguyen was no accountant, so he was usually happy to leave the business arrangements to others, but it seemed that the boss felt there were some tasks that couldn’t be entrusted to pea-brained Wally. He had offered Nguyen a small fortune to find two people hiding on Joyeuse and make sure they were never seen again.
    From observation, Nguyen knew how to turn a boat key to crank the engine. He could steer the boat he “borrowed” from Wally because it had a steering wheel like a car. With the overconfidence of a man who did a lot of things well, he figured he could steer it east, find the secret island, do away with the boss’s enemies, then come home and collect his payment.
    The boss had given him the island’s latitude and longitude, down to the last degree, minute, and second, but Nguyen had neglected to bring navigational charts, since he didn’t know how to read them. Besides, the long chain of barrier islands was perfectly visible on the map he kept in his car. In fact, they were visible on the horizon. How could he possibly get lost? Wally had said his friend lived east of the marina, and only one barrier island extended east of the marina, so Nguyen simply pointed the boat’s bow in that general direction. He would be a richer man by sundown.
    He couldn’t have known that his idea of an island was limited, that he was headed for a windswept spit of sand that could never have supported plantation agriculture. His targets, Faye Longchamp and her friend Joe and their hidden home, were not out there. Joyeuse Island was surrounded by water and accessible only by boat, but it was snugged up so close to the swampy coastline that, from the Gulf, it didn’t look like a landlubber’s idea of an island. Nguyen would never have found Faye, even in favorable weather.
    The crashing, rhythmic waves only began to worry Nguyen when the first one splashed over the gunwales of his low-slung craft. Even then his faith in the slab of fiberglass beneath him didn’t waver. Instead, he fretted over the wreck that still waited among the Last Isles to be looted. Who knew what this storm was doing to it? He would hate to think that the sunken drug-smuggler’s boat would be silted over before he and Wally could pull all that plastic-wrapped cocaine out of its hull.
    He was quite near the barrier island he had his sights on, the one that wasn’t Faye’s, when he steered broadside to the pounding waves and one of them tossed his boat belly-side-up. It would have been better if Nguyen had been knocked unconscious when the boat capsized. Then he could have drowned quickly rather than using his diving skills to fight through the debris trapped with him. He wouldn’t have had to try, time and again, to overcome the powerful wave action slamming him into the wreck, so that he could swim down and escape his prison. He could have died easily rather than clinging to the upturned hull as it rose high on each approaching wave, then crashed into