Aleko wouldn't answer his phone; that was the first indication Liz had that something had gone wrong. Even when he blew her off sometimes—on the weekends, mostly—he'd usually get back to her by the next day at the latest. It had been three days since she last heard from him now, and it was the middle of the week, to boot. It just wasn't like him to go radio silent like this and she was starting to feel more than a little unsettled about it.
Liz would've come sooner to check on the boat herself, but she got caught up in a case and she couldn't get away. Red had been keeping the FBI busy lately and as much as she wanted to help take down the awful people he scrounged up for them, she couldn't help wishing he'd go easy for a while. Between work and changing motels every other night and trying to keep her secret, well… secret, she had next to no time for herself anymore. She was already near to her breaking point, and now Aleko was in the wind.
The dock was completely empty of people, but not suspiciously so for this time of day. It didn't seem like a trap. Liz pulled her gun from its holster anyway and proceeded to clear the area directly around the boat. It wouldn't do her any good to get jumped by anyone hiding amongst the trappings strewn about the dock.
An image flashed in her mind's eye of Tom, somehow free of his restraints, tackling her to the ground and immediately turning her own weapon against her, no longer interested in trying to manipulate her into believing he was useful after she held him captive for so long.
Liz shook herself and kept moving. Once she stepped onto the boat deck, she called out for Aleko and there was no answer. Not from Aleko, not from Tom, who usually took any passing sound as an opportunity to scream bloody murder in hopes of being set free by someone within earshot.
This… wasn't good. None of this was good. A sick feeling started to well up in the pit of her stomach, as if some subconscious part of her knew exactly what she would find here before the rest of her even got a chance to investigate.
As she descended the stairs deeper into the boat, the strange damp chill she'd come to associate with the sea enveloped her. Perhaps it would be more pleasant in a warmer climate or on the open ocean or aboard a nicer vessel, but after spending all this time in this glorified tin can trying to wrestle back some control over her life, she wasn't sure she liked the idea of sailing anymore. She didn't like the subtle movement to the floor beneath her feet, even docked as she was now. She didn't like the smell of the tide. All of it turned her stomach.
There was no sign of Aleko anywhere below deck, but at this point Liz wasn't expecting to find any. If what she was starting to suspect happened was true, she couldn't exactly blame the guy for taking off, but good god, she wished he had at least given her a heads-up before he skipped town.
Liz called out again, this time just for Tom, but still got no response. She swallowed reflexively, took a deep breath, and adjusted her grip on her gun before stepping up to the heavy door to peer in through the porthole. She could only barely make out a figure the vague shape and size of Tom slumped against the wall in the room beyond.
Her heart started to pound in her ears. She fished around in her jacket pocket for her set of keys, the jangling noise impossibly loud against the echoey boat hull. Her left hand was so clumsy and slow to cooperate that she could hardly fit the key into the lock, let alone turn it, but at last she managed.
Liz wrenched open the door and her worst fears were realized.
The slumped-over figure was, indeed, the man who called himself Tom Keen. Or had been, as the case was here. Had been, because he wasn't Tom Keen anymore—he wasn't anybody anymore, really. The eyes staring back at her, unblinking, from the grimy gray face were cold and empty and dead. An empty vessel aboard an empty vessel.
He didn't look… injured. Or at least not more than he already had been. There wasn't any evidence of a struggle, no indication that Aleko or perhaps someone else who stumbled onto him had killed him. No, Liz couldn't foist the responsibility for this onto anyone else. She'd kept a man with grievous abdominal wounds in the dank, dark bowels of a boat without proper medical attention and he died.
He was a terrible, awful man who had hurt her in unimaginable ways, but he was still human and he was still dead because of her. She shot him. She held him captive. She did this. There was no escaping it.
Something inside her twisted and knotted itself up, tightening in her chest in a way that made it very difficult to catch her breath.
Liz stumbled her way across the room, landed hard on her knees on the metal floor. She pressed her shaking fingers against the artery under Tom's jaw, feeling for any sign of a pulse. Nothing. An ear to his chest earned the same result, which wasn't a surprise; his body was already cool and stiff.
It was cold enough in the boat that it would be hard to determine time of death, but it didn't really matter when he died. It mattered that he did. It mattered that when she could've turned him in to the FBI or even turned him over to Red, she decided to chain him up instead. It mattered that he either froze to death or succumbed to infection or malnutrition or whatever the fuck else. It mattered that she killed him.
If she had only let him die that day, the day she shot him because he shot at her and Red, then at least she could claim it was in self-defense, or in defense of another. But it wasn't. Not after… not after this. Her moral high ground had eroded fairly quickly once she decided the information Tom might have was worth torturing him over. She thought she could handle this, but, good lord, she had now proven that she could not in a most spectacular fashion.
She collapsed against the filthy steel wall, trying her damnedest not to hyperventilate. Panicked tears began to flow unchecked down her cheeks, blurring her vision and making it even more of a challenge to control her breathing.
What the hell was she going to do?