Dark Water Rising

Dark Water Rising Plot Summary

Introduction

The last phone call Sam Quaid expected was from his ex-wife. Three years had passed since their divorce—three years since they buried their ten-year-old son Robbie and couldn't find a way to survive the grief together. Haley's voice cracked through the static of Hurricane Gladys bearing down on coastal Texas: "I'm trapped in a flooded house with two escaped prisoners. I shot them both, but they caught me." The card Sam had pressed into her hand on those courthouse steps years ago had promised: *If you ever need me, call and I'll be there.* Now, as winds howled at 150 miles per hour and floodwaters rose around the empty mansion where Haley lay beaten and bound, Sam faced an impossible rescue mission. In the sweltering attic of that storm-battered house, with two bodies decomposing in the rooms below and a killer holding a gun to her head, Haley would discover that some promises transcend divorce papers. The stolen money that had started this nightmare—two million dollars from an armored car heist—remained hidden somewhere in the chaos, drawing more killers to their door even as the hurricane's eye passed overhead.

Chapter 1: Trapped in the Storm: Haley's Desperate Call

The Victorian mansion in Houston's exclusive Thornwood district should have been empty. Haley Quaid, clutching the lockbox key with trembling fingers, had come here for what should have been a routine real estate showing. Instead, she'd tumbled down the grand staircase in the gathering storm, her ankle twisting with an audible crack, consciousness fading as Hurricane Gladys's outer bands began to lash the coast. When she awakened hours later, the world had changed. Water lapped at the bottom steps of the marble staircase. Through the shattered windows came the howl of winds that bent century-old oaks like saplings. Her phone showed she'd been unconscious for nearly a day. The Richards family who were supposed to view this four-million-dollar property were long gone, evacuated to safety while she lay bleeding on Persian rugs worth more than most people's cars. The concussion made her vision swim, but the sound of splintering glass from the kitchen sent ice through her veins. Two figures in orange prison jumpsuits waded through the rising water, their faces hard with the desperation of men who had nothing left to lose. Roy Baker, lean and vicious as a switchblade, and Hershel Arnold, already pale from blood loss, clutching his shoulder where Haley's wild shots in the darkness had found their mark. She'd fought like a cornered animal when they discovered her hiding place. The Glock 43 in her purse had barked twice in the narrow hallway, muzzle flashes strobing against antique wallpaper. But fear made her shots go wide, and two wounded killers were still killers. Roy's fist connected with her jaw, and the world went black again. When she came to, rope bit into her wrists and ankles. Hershel lay dying in the twin bed across from her, his blood pooling on Italian marble while Roy paced like a caged predator, the stolen gun now in his hands. That's when she remembered the business card tucked behind her credit cards. Sam's number. The lifeline she'd been too proud to use for three years.

Chapter 2: Against the Hurricane: Sam's Perilous Rescue

Sam Quaid's hands were steady as he loaded the extra ammunition clips, but his heart hammered against his ribs. Outside his Dallas office windows, the first gray bands of the hurricane's outer edge were already bringing rain. Lee Tolson's voice crackled through the phone: "Sam, you're talking about flying a helicopter into a Category 4 hurricane. Even if I wanted to help you commit suicide, my chopper would get shredded." But Lee had heard something in Sam's voice that transcended sanity. Twenty minutes later, they were racing toward Lee's private airfield in Sam's military-spec Hummer, the massive vehicle the only thing keeping them on rain-slicked highways as lesser cars spun out in their wake. Sam had packed his camping gear, medical supplies, and enough ammunition to hold off a small army. He'd studied satellite images of Haley's location until he could navigate there blindfolded. The flight into Houston was a white-knuckle journey through walls of rain that turned the windscreen opaque. Lee fought crosswinds that threatened to flip them into the flooded subdivisions below, while Sam watched the GPS coordinates tick down to Haley's prison. The Thornwood district was a lake now, elegant mansions rising from brown water like monuments to humanity's hubris. Through his headset, Sam heard Lee curse as they circled the antebellum mansion. "No sign of her on the roof. Either she can't get up there, or—" He didn't finish the thought. Sam was already in the rescue harness, checking his gear one final time. The attic dormer windows were their only shot—if they were unlocked, if Haley had managed to prepare an escape route, if she was still alive to use it. The descent through hurricane winds was controlled falling. Sam slammed into the rain-slick shingles, rolled to absorb the impact, and clawed his way to the dormer window. It opened with a squeal of protest. Inside the stifling attic, he could hear voices below—male voices, and the unmistakable crack of a gunshot. He'd made it just in time, or perhaps one second too late.

Chapter 3: Healing Waters: Reconnection After Trauma

The hospital room in Nacogdoches felt like sanctuary after the hurricane's fury. Haley's face was a palette of purple and yellow bruises, her ribs wrapped tight from Roy Baker's boots, but she was alive. Sam hadn't left her bedside in thirty-six hours, not even when the FBI agents came to take her statement about the dead men they'd left behind in that flooded mansion. She remembered fragments: Roy's hand tangled in her hair, the barrel of her own gun pressed against her temple, the terrible moment when he'd suffocated his dying partner rather than let him slow their escape. Then Sam's voice cutting through her terror, the thunder of his weapon, and Roy Baker's body hitting the marble floor with the finality of divine judgment. Dr. Wyman's prognosis was cautious optimism. The concussion would heal, the bacterial infection from contaminated floodwater was responding to antibiotics, and the rope burns on her wrists would fade to thin white lines. But Sam saw deeper wounds in the way she startled at sudden noises, the way her hand sought his whenever someone entered the room. "The worst part," she told him as afternoon sunlight painted golden rectangles on the hospital linoleum, "wasn't thinking I might die. It was thinking I'd die without seeing you again." Her voice was steady, matter-of-fact, but Sam heard the tremor underneath. "I kept hearing Robbie asking for water, asking me to fill the hummingbird feeders. Even trapped in that hell, I was still failing him." Sam's response was swift and sure. "Robbie never needed the bird feeders filled, sweetheart. He was taking care of you the whole time, sending help when you needed it most." He lifted her bandaged hand to his lips. "We're going home to Dallas. Together. No more running from what we lost. It's time to build something new from what we found." The words hung between them like a bridge across three years of separation. Haley squeezed his fingers and nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. Outside their window, the first clear sky in a week was emerging from Hurricane Gladys's retreating clouds.

Chapter 4: Shadows in the Aftermath: The Price on Haley's Head

The news broke while they were driving back to Dallas: two escaped federal prisoners found dead in a Thornwood mansion, and the woman who'd survived their captivity was now the FBI's key witness in a multi-million-dollar armored car heist. Haley stared at her phone screen, watching her own rescue footage play on CNN, the Life Flight helicopter lifting her broken body from that nightmare house. What the media didn't know, but what FBI Special Agent Jack Gordon made chillingly clear in his phone call, was that Roy Baker and Hershel Arnold had been only two-thirds of the robbery crew. The third man, Alejandro "Dude" Santos, was still free and still hunting for his missing share of the stolen money. "She heard them talking," Gordon explained to Sam as Dallas suburbs rolled past their windows. "Arnold told Baker something about the money being hidden at 'his place,' at home. If we thought Haley might have useful information, then Santos is thinking the same thing. And unlike us, he's willing to torture and kill for what he wants to know." The safe house Sam had imagined turned out to be his own neighborhood. Louise Bell, his neighbor across the street, had vanished without a trace, replaced by a pleasant house-sitter who claimed she'd flown to Wyoming. But passenger manifests told a different story, and when Sam saw Louise's BMW still parked in her garage, he knew they'd found their stalking horse. Amy Ledbetter had credentials that read like a nightmare's resume. Thirteen years as a freelance killer, never caught, never leaving witnesses. Now she sat in Louise's kitchen with high-powered surveillance equipment, watching for the perfect moment to snatch Haley and deliver her to Santos. The old woman's body was already cooling in the garden shed, another casualty in a war that had started with simple greed. But Ledbetter had never faced a target who fought back, and she'd never encountered a man like Sam Quaid, who'd spent three years learning to live with loss and wasn't about to endure it again. When the FBI SWAT team burst through the sliding doors, they found Ledbetter flat on her belly with Sam's gun trained on her head and Haley safe in his arms.

Chapter 5: Deadly Currents: Santos and the Final Confrontation

Santos made his last mistake when he decided to face Haley himself. The freelance killer was in custody, his Dallas safe house blown, and every law enforcement agency in Texas hunting for him. A smart man would have fled to Mexico and counted his losses. But two million dollars in stolen money had a way of making smart men stupid, and Santos had already killed too many people to walk away empty-handed. He found sanctuary in the last place anyone expected: Haley's own apartment in Houston's Rochester complex. Power was restored, floodwaters receded, and residents were slowly returning to survey their losses. Santos simply walked in among them, picked the locks on apartment 404, and settled in to wait. He cleaned out the spoiled food, hung his clothes in her closet, and slept in her bed like some twisted Goldilocks with a death sentence. When Sam and Haley arrived with their U-Haul truck to pack her belongings, Santos was ready. He caught Haley alone in the bedroom, forced her to her knees with the barrel of his pistol pressed against her skull. His plan was surgical in its simplicity: torture the information out of her, execute them both, and disappear back into the urban maze of Houston's recovery efforts. But Santos had made the same error as every predator before him—he'd underestimated his prey. Sam's response was immediate and final. The gunshot echoed through the apartment complex like thunder, and Santos fell without ever knowing what hit him. His blood pooled on Haley's bedroom carpet, mixing with the floodwater stains that Hurricane Gladys had left behind. The irony revealed itself only hours later, when FBI agents raided a Kentucky farmhouse and found two million dollars in cash hidden in Hershel Arnold's childhood closet. Mae Arnold, the dead man's mother, had called them herself, unable to bear the blood money's presence on her property. Santos had died for information that wouldn't have helped him anyway—the treasure he'd killed for was a thousand miles from where he thought to look.

Chapter 6: Reclaiming the Future: A Second Chance at Family

The cemetery visit came six months later, when Haley's bruises had faded and her nightmares had softened into manageable dreams. Hillcrest Memorial Park lay peaceful under Texas sunshine, the headstone reading "Samuel Robert Quaid III" still sharp-edged with grief, but no longer unbearable to approach. Sam produced a quarter from his pocket and flipped it high into the blue sky. "You call it, son. Heads or tails?" The coin tumbled in the light, landing heads-up in the grass beside the white marble vase. "You win again," Sam laughed, dropping the quarter among the fresh flowers. "Man, you are the luckiest guy I know." It was a ritual Haley had never witnessed, born in those final hospital days when father and dying son watched baseball games and pretended the outcome of coin tosses could somehow matter in the face of leukemia's relentless advance. "We miss you," Sam said, rubbing the top of the stone like he was ruffling a child's hair. "Make sure Mama's angels stay close to her. She needs all the help from us she can get." Haley stepped forward then, her voice steady with acceptance rather than anguish. "I didn't forget you, my son. If you still play ball in heaven, hit a home run for me." The silence that followed wasn't empty—it was full of memory transformed into something bearable. They walked back to the car hand in hand, past other graves and other stories, toward a future that could honor the past without being imprisoned by it. The nightmare of Hurricane Gladys was behind them now, dissolved into the larger pattern of a life that had room for both joy and sorrow, both endings and beginnings. That night, by the pool behind Sam's house, under stars that shone clear in the storm-washed sky, Haley made her request with the directness that had kept her alive through everything that came before. "I want to make a baby with you, Sam. Can we do that?" His answer came without hesitation, spoken against her lips as he pulled her close. "We did it before with stunning results. I think we should do it again."

Summary

The money was found, the killers were dead, and the federal case was closed with bureaucratic efficiency. But the real treasure had been recovered in a hospital room in Nacogdoches, when two broken people discovered that love doesn't die just because it gets buried under grief. Sam and Haley's second marriage took place in a small ceremony attended by friends who'd watched their first one crumble, all of them understanding now that some bonds require breaking before they can be properly forged. One year later, as Mae Arnold watched sunsets from a Miami pier and drank margaritas to forget the farm she'd sold and the men she'd lost, another story was beginning in a Dallas delivery room. Baby Samantha Quaid entered the world with her father's dark hair and her mother's stubborn spirit, arriving exactly on schedule despite the chaos that had preceded her conception. In the end, Hurricane Gladys had taken much from the Texas coast, but it had also returned something precious that everyone thought was lost forever: the possibility of hope rising from the darkest waters.

About Author

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Sharon Sala

Sala delves into the complexities of human emotion through a wide range of genres, using her storytelling to unravel themes of love, resilience, and mystery. With over 145 books published since her debut in 1991, she skillfully navigates through romantic suspense, mystery, and even young adult fiction, engaging readers with her versatile narrative techniques. Her long-standing involvement with both the Romance Writers of America and the Oklahoma Romance Writers of America reflects her dedication to her craft and the literary community.\n\nA prolific writer, Sala's works are characterized by their emotional depth and engaging plots, offering readers an immersive experience across different genres. Her ability to craft compelling stories has earned her numerous accolades, including being an eight-time RITA finalist and a five-time Career Achievement Award winner. These honors underscore her impact and recognition in the romance and fiction communities, further solidified by her consistent presence on bestseller lists. For readers seeking both entertainment and emotional engagement, her books offer a diverse range of stories that appeal to a broad audience.\n\nThe author’s early book successes have not only solidified her place in the literary world but also inspired a loyal readership. Her bio reveals a journey marked by commercial success and critical acclaim, demonstrating her ability to connect with readers through authentic storytelling. As she continues to produce engaging narratives, Sala remains a significant figure in popular fiction, influencing both aspiring writers and devoted fans with her remarkable contributions to the genre.

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