The Captain arrived at the cabin to find a pair of angry parents comforting a crying eight year old girl wearing a towel. There were red marks on her wrists and ankles, he saw. When the father saw him, he came storming over. "How can something like this happen on your ship? What the hell kind of ship are you running here?"
"Is she alright?" asked Tennyson.

"Does she look all right? She'll be emotionally scarred for life. I want the man who did this caught, and I'll be suing this company for every penny its got."

"Is this the girl?" said a woman's voice, and Tennyson turned to see Nina Bryn, the ships physician. She pushed past the Captain to grab the girl's face and turn it up so she could look into her eyes. "Has she been physically hurt?" she asked the mother.

Tennyson took the opportunity to push past them and enter the cabin. Joe Wardley was there with two of his security men, the three of them gathered around one of the ship's officers, lying on the floor. His shoes and socks had been removed, he saw, and there was a tag tied around his toe. The kind used to identify corpses in a mortuary. His heart jumped into his throat when he recognised the man. Harry Hoffman. Alan Fielding's nephew.

"What happened here? he demanded.

"Parents came back to find this guy lying here," Wardley told him, "and their daughter tied up and gagged beside him. Tied up with strips cut from her own dress."

"Oh God," said Tennyson in shock. "Has she been... Assaulted?"

"She was still wearing her panties, so I'm guessing not," Wardley told him. "I'm guessing she saw the killing. The killer didn't want her raising the alarm until he'd had time to get away."

"There were two of them," said the Captain, thinking of the two jet-skis he'd seen racing away from the ship. "The killer had an accomplice." He quickly filled the others in on the break-in at the jet-ski garage.

"Why didn't he just kill her?" asked one of the security men. "Isn't he afraid she'll give us a description?"

"We've already got a description," Wardley told him. "A passenger told one of the other officers he overheard someone saying he was going to kill someone. The passenger was able to give descriptions of the two men. He told me, and I told the other officers to keep a lookout for people matching the descriptions." He looked down at the corpse on the floor. "I'm guessing poor Harry found one of them."

"Why wasn't I told about this?" Tennyson demanded.

"We didn't think much of it at first," Wardley told him unperturbed. "Just some passenger imagining things, we thought. I guess we should have taken it a bit more seriously."

"You told my officers to tackle a possible killer?" said the Captain, stepping closer to glare down at the Chief of Security.

"Of course not," Wardley replied without backing away. "We told them to report any sightings to me, and I would send armed security men to talk to him." He looked down at the corpse again. "Harry must have tried to approach the man himself."

"Look at this," said the second security man. He showed his phone to the Captain. It was showing a photo of the tag tied around Hoffman's toe. It had the words "Wrong time, wrong place," written on it.

"Is that some kind of sick joke?" said the Captain.

"No," said the first security man. "I don't think so." The Captain turned to stare at him. "I mean," the man continued, "I watch these true crime documentaries, and there's a pair of hired killers who use toe tags as their calling card. One of them actually uses it as his code name. The other's called Double-Tap. They're supposed to be the best in the business."

"I want a head count," said the Captain. "Make sure there're no more dead people on this ship."

Wardley nodded. "You say they're off the ship?" he said.

"I suppose we can't just assume that," Tennyson replied, "although it would be a pretty big coincidence for two jet-skis to be stolen at he exact same moment a pair of killers go on the run. Spread their descriptions, and tell everyone not to try to tackle them themselves. Make sure that's very well understood, Joe. I don't want any more deaths. Any sightings are to be reported. Armed security men will do the rest."

"Have communications been restored?" Wardley asked. "If so, we should inform the Brazilian authorities. Maybe they can take them into custody the moment they step ashore."

"No communications," the Captain replied. "And the tender failed to find anyone ashore... Oh God, Fielding. He's still on his way back. I've got to radio him, tell him his nephew's dead before someone else does. The news needs to come from me. I'd rather tell him face to face, but some idiot who doesn't know they're related might want to give him the exciting news at any time."

Wardley nodded grimly. "If it was the two killers who took the jet-skis, what do we do?"

"Do?" said the Captain. "Well, there don't seem to be any authorities to report them to, and if they've gone ashore looking for sanctuary..." He thought again about what the crew of the tender had told him over the radio. Totally crazy, of course, but wouldn't Double-Tap and Toe-Tag get a surprise if it turned out to be true...

☆☆☆

Danny and Floyd rode in silence as their jet-skis raced across the surface of the ocean. Danny glanced over his shoulder, and saw the cruise ship shrinking in the distance behind them. Good riddance, he thought. Looking back in hindsight, it had been madness to accept a contract to be carried out on a ship at sea. Too confining. In a city, you could vanish into the teeming multitudes and be safe from the law. They'd thought that a ship with five thousand people aboard would be big enough, but they'd been wrong.

You live and learn, he told himself. And everyone misses a contract now and then. He and Floyd were supposed to be different, though. They were supposed to be the best. We still are the best, he told himself. Like I said, everyone misses a contract now and then.
They didn't bother trying to talk as they rode the small but powerful machines. The engines were way too loud. As the miles of ocean passed by beneath them, though, he kept an eye on the coast, looking for towns and settlements. Somewhere with a car they could steal. They passed the estuary of a big river and kept on, and as they did so the hills lining the coast got lower and pulled back from the coast until there was a wide strip of low-lying forested land separated from the sea only by a far narrower strip of golden sand. It looked like prime holiday real estate. The whole strip of coast should have been covered with hotels, but there was still no sign of human life. A tingle of worry began to run down the back of his neck. What was going on here?

After about ninety minutes, the dial on his fuel gauge showed the tank was close to empty, and he made hand-signs to Floyd to angle towards the coast. The other man nodded back to show he understood. The two small boats slid onto the sand just as the engine of Danny's machine began spluttering, and he turned the key to turn it off. He jumped off the machine into the ankle-deep water and waded ashore, Floyd walking beside him.
"I didn't see a single house," the other man said as he reached dry sand and stared at the dark line of trees facing them. "We must have travelled nearly a hundred miles. How come we didn't see a single house?"

"I don't know," Danny replied.

"We should have passed several small towns," Floyd added. "Maybe a small city. Where is everyone?" Danny could only shake his head in bafflement.

"Where we going to spend the night?" Floyd added. "We got no food, no water. No transport..."

"If you hadn't screwed up on the ship, we wouldn't be in this mess," said Danny, still facing away from him.

"I didn't screw up!" Floyd replied indignantly. "You're the one that screwed up. You brought those Americans into our business, and they betrayed us, because they figured out we were going to betray them. We shoulda whacked 'em. Hidden the bodies somewhere. We'd have been in Rio before they began smelling too bad."

"I don't think there is a Rio," said Danny, though. "We haven't seen any other towns or cities. Why should there be a Rio?"

"Well of course there's a Rio. I've been there."

"Wherever Rio is, I don't think that's where we are," Danny replied. "I think we're somewhere else."

Floyd stared at him. "Where?"

Danny didn't reply. Instead, he began walking up the beach towards the trees. Floyd shook his head in bafflement and followed him. Danny stared at the trees as they approached them. He'd expected them to be palm trees or mangroves or something. No, mangroves were in Australia, weren't they? He suddenly wished he knew more about trees. The ones they were approaching looked like no trees he'd ever seen before. They looked more like tree ferns, like the ones he'd seen in the gardens of a stately home he'd visited once, except that these had bright red fruits hanging from them.

He was so intent on the trees that he almost didn't see the flash of movement in time. As it was, he had the gun in his hand just in time to aim it at the monster that came crashing out of the undergrowth at him. He fired at it, and so did Floyd, the explosions causing birds to erupt from the trees all around them. Danny's first two bullets went wide, by which time the creature was almost upon him, but the next two went right into its face, and three bullets from Floyd pierced its hairy hide. The creature spasmed, looking almost surprised, and then it fell dead at Danny's feet.

The two hit men went to stand beside it, staring down at it in wonder. "My mum took me to the zoo once when I were a kid," said Floyd. "They had lions and tigers and crocodiles, but I never saw anything like that."

The creature was the size of a horse, but instead of a friendly horse-head, the thing had a head from a nightmare, filled with tusks and wicked teeth. The front feet had long, black claws, and there was a ridge of stiff, wiry hair running down the middle of its back. It was camouflaged to be almost invisible in the dark forest undergrowth. Danny thought that, in a dappled forest, it could stand within a couple of dozen feet of an unsuspecting man and be completely unseen by him. He certainly hadn't seen it before it began to charge.

"I reckon it wasn't in the zoo because it would have scared the kids too much," he said. "Never saw anything like it in any of David Attenborough's shows. either."

"Or jungle movies," said Floyd. "They'd love to have something like this in a jungle movie."

Danny nodded. "So why didn't they have them in the jungle movies?" he mused to himself. "If it's a real creature, why don't they have the action heroes fighting them?"

"What do you mean, if it's a real creature?" asked Floyd. "There it is right there, as real as you could wish."

Danny nodded unhappily. He prodded it with his toe, almost expecting to find it hard, like metal. A robot, created by a mad scientist, maybe. Instead, it was soft, as if it was made of meat. The blood trickling from the bullet wounds confirmed its status as a flesh and blood animal.

"Well, at least we've got something to eat tonight," he said. "We just need a fire to cook it on."

"Do you know how to start a fire?" asked Floyd.

"You rub two sticks together, don't you?"

The two men stared at each other, as the true nature of their predicament began to come home to them for the first time.