Read The Catch: A Novel for Free Online

would do the same for the others and that we were not to speak of it again.”
    “What’s your cut?” Munroe said.
    “If Leo finds out,” Victor said.
    “He’s the last person I’d tell anything.”
    “One-sixth,” he said. “On top of the voyage pay.”
    Munroe stopped walking. Whatever indifference she’d maintained after boarding the ship shed like the last of a snake’s old skin. Leo had gall forcing her on a gunrunning mission while cutting her out of the hazard pay.
    Victor paused, waiting for her, but Munroe had nothing more to say. She turned and strode away, and after a hesitation he continued on again.
    Munroe kept to the shadows, breathing in the dark and timing movement to skirt the others on patrol, went up on the inside, where, although she might be spotted, possibly caught, she wouldn’t cast shadows and invite a bullet the way she would outside. She’d not yet been on the officers’ levels, but she knew where Leo bunked and how to find him thanks to innocent questions and friendly banter with the bosun that had given her enough to map out the deck in her head.
    She reached the level and turned down the passageway, quiet like the rest of the ship, and when Munroe found the berth that she understood to be Leo’s, she thrust the door open.
    Leo was already upright on his bed, reaching for a sidearm, when she strode through.
    “There’s no point in shooting,” she said.
    The light in the room switched on, brilliantly painful, and Munroe shut the door, leaned back against it, and crossed her arms.
    Weapon two-fisted in her direction, Leo swung his legs over the side of the bed and said, “What are you doing here?”
    “Demanding my cut,” she said.
    “Are you insane? You walk into my room in the middle of the night and start nonsense.”
    “I’ve been down in the hold,” she said. “I understand basic math. There are six of your people on this ship. I’m one of them. I want my cut.”
    “Ah,” he said, and he smirked, then put the weapon on the floor beside the bed, swung his legs back up, and lay down as if she were a trifling inconvenience. “That cut goes to Natan,” he said.
    “Natan isn’t here, I am.”
    He laughed. “Your body may be here, but you’re of no help and there’s no way I’m giving you a cut.”
    “Natan’s body isn’t here,” she said. “That makes him even more useless than me.”
    Leo propped himself on his elbow in a brief pause, then sat up again. Swung his legs over the side of the bed again and rested his bare feet on the floor. “You had no reason for being down in the hold,” he said. “You are digging into things that don’t involve you.” He paused for emphasis. “It could get you hurt.”
    She maintained eye contact, a deliberate challenge to his authority, which, if he’d been capable of seeing beyond his idea of who she was, should have given him pause, made him wary; but his body language said otherwise.
    “It involves me,” she said. “You left out a lot of important details when you demanded I come along.”
    In response, Leo slowly stood, shoulders back, chest out, hands slack at his sides, as if his implied threat should cause her, the purportedly weaker of the two, to retreat out of fear of whatever would come next.
    Munroe followed him with her eyes but didn’t move. “Natan wasn’t hurt that badly,” she said. “He could have come if that was what you’d wanted.”
    In a space so small that Leo could have reached her if he’d stretched far, he took a step in her direction: another challenge.
    “I won’t be as easy to throw overboard as you imagine,” she said.
    “You are far out of line.”
    “Hardly. What’s your plan for the discharge? We get close to theSomali coast, offload at sea, and be on our way? Is this the captain’s doing or is someone else pulling the strings?” And because the muscles in his legs tensed as if he were preparing to take another step, she said, “It would be a mistake to get any