The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens Page A

brain, all part of the easy way people talked in foreign places when they assumed they wouldn’t be understood: a cacophony of mixed conversation that added to Munroe’s burnout and made her head hurt.
    She surrendered passport and money in exchange for a key, and a teenage boy showed her to the bungalow, breezy with a high ceiling and a fan with wide blades that took the sea air and turned it into something cooler.
    On the dresser were two bottles of water and a bowl of fruit, which Munroe ate, one piece after the other. And then there in the room, with the burn of the sun and the salt of the ocean spray still crusting on her skin, she let down the mosquito netting, lay on the bed, closed her eyes, and slipped away.
    How long she slept, she didn’t know. Long enough to feel rested, not enough for the dreams to overtake her or for the sun to rise. Over the ocean the first hint of color change began to paint the sky, and she followed the pedestrian paths to the great room, quiet and empty.
    Munroe called out a low hello and a woman shuffled out fromthe back with a slow indifference that said Munroe had woken her and she could only half-pretend to be happy about it.
    “I need to use a phone with an international line,” Munroe said.
    “It needs a deposit.”
    Munroe placed a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “Enough?”
    The woman nodded and led her to a door just beyond the wide front desk, a small business center, with a computer, a printer, and a phone all on one narrow table. When the woman left, Munroe sat, sighed, and picked up the handset.
    Of all the people who’d screwed her over during this past week, Amber Marie made her the maddest, and there were things to say before Munroe could cut completely free. She dialed, waited out static and hiss while the phone rang long, and eventually, with sleep in her voice, Amber picked up.
    Munroe said, “Hey, it’s Michael.”
    “Michael?” Amber repeated, and the tone in that one word conveyed disequilibrium and a hundred questions that had no voice or articulation. Munroe waited a second, an exclamation to the silence, and then said, “Yeah, Amber, Michael. And thanks a fucking lot for stabbing me in the back.”

CHAPTER 9
    Munroe heard movement on the other end of the phone, as if Amber had sat up, swept the sheets aside, and swung her legs over to the floor. “Wait, what?” Amber said, and the phone was repositioned, one shoulder to the next. “What are you talking about?” And then after another pause, “Michael, where are you, and why are you calling?”
    “I can tell you where I’m not,” Munroe said. “Not out on the fucking ocean on a craptastic freighter carrying illegal weapons, that’s where I’m not. And you know what? After everything I’ve done for you, Amber, after the friendship, the times we’ve worked together, and the fact that I’ve watched your back, it would have been real solid of you to at least clue me in on Leo’s little gunrunning mission before I agreed to take the job.”
    There was a pause before Amber said, “Gunrunning?”
    In the hiccup of that hesitation Munroe heard the bewilderment and breathed down the anger of betrayal. Wished she could take the seething venom back, could rephrase and reword. Understood in that drop of time that of all the people Leo had deceived, his wife was at the top of the list, and that this phone call, which had been meant as a kiss-off and a way to vent her rage before cutting tiesforever, had turned into one of being the bearer of the worst kind of news.
    Amber, still several mental paces behind, mellow and pleading, said, “Michael, where are you? Where is Leo?”
    Munroe said, “Who brokered the deal to get Leo on board the
Favorita
?”
    “I don’t know,” Amber replied. “Someone Leo was tight with in his military years, came by way of a phone call or something.” Then, voice twining higher with desperation, added, “Why, Michael?”
    “I’m going to break this to you as