Titanic: True Love Forever

Chapter 25: Extra Story(3)

"Sir, what happened to you?" The waiter who had just entered exclaimed in surprise, placing the tray of wine he was holding on the table before rushing to Carl's side in a panic to extract the towel from his mouth.

Carl didn't give a damn about the bystanders, anger, excitement, and madness twisted into a ball that made his screams a little hysterical, "Get me that woman, that f*****g woman."

Lovejoy happened to walk in, and the moment he saw Carl, coupled with his shout, the older man with the amazing observational skills of a bloodhound practically drew his legs and ran back. He looked around in the hallway he was in, attempting to see the woman who had done this to Carl. Unfortunately is quickly became clear that he had no more clues at hand, nor did he see any panicked fleeing criminals outside, so he headed back in vain.

Carl groaned a few times in chagrin as the waiter untied the sheet for him, barely able to get up, and with the waiter's assistance he rushed to the bathroom to vomit out everything in his stomach. The wine he had drunk, the food from the dinner party, and some of the fruit crushed through his esophagus, adding to his pain.

He slumped over the sink, sweaty and blue. As soon as he breathed in his stomach throbbed where he'd been kicked, and the embarrassing pain down there made it hard to walk.

Lovejoy came in and he said, "Already sent the head steward to get the doctor, Mr. Hockley."

Carl inquired with sudden urgency, "Have you seen her?"

"Her?" Lovejoy gave a rare blank expression, then responded by saying, "Was it the 'woman' who attacked you?" He was actually skeptical that a woman could beat a grown man like that?

"Wearing a long beige dress, blonde hair with a butterfly clip of Rose on it, and a fan in her hand." Carl shrugged off the waiter's hand in exasperation as he pressed on his abdomen, tugging at his muscles to make that pain more pronounced because of his tense emotional reaction.

Lovejoy jerked back and looked out, narrowing his own cold little eyes as he arrived just in time to brush up against the woman.

"She must be in the upper cabin." Carl gritted his teeth in an effort to suppress the pain from his breathing, he suddenly sneered twice and said in a loud voice in a sudden outburst, "I had all the clothes she was wearing bought by me, all by the best private designers, she definitely stole the clothes in order to blend in with the upper class."

"Have you lost anything else? Sir." Lovejoy began to look around carefully, he knew how to find traces of what the criminal had left behind in one place the fastest. Soon he saw something unusual, he walked quickly over to the bathtub, bent down and carefully lifted the dirty male clothing with two fingers, a palm-sized sketch portrait fell out of the pocket, Lovejoy continued to shake it a couple of times, and ten-dollar U.S. bills with the ship's ticket flew out with it.

"No." Carl denied without hesitation, finishing his sentence before he himself rose up in disbelief and murmured with less certainty, "She didn't take anything, just the clothes, and doesn't Rose have several suitcases of this stuff."

"The passenger's name on the ticket is Albert, male, civilian in the G tier of the Unity cabin." Certain that he couldn't pull anything useful out of the filthy clothes, Lovejoy picked up the ship's ticket along with the sketch.

"She's female." Carl swore back at him with conviction, and he finished hard enough to plop back down in the sink and dry-heave a few more times; the kick had nearly shifted his organs. Then he remembered something and turned back quickly, staring dead in the face at the tattered hobo clothes as his mind automatically pieced the images together. The watch that had been snatched away from the dock, the sound of the harmonica heard at the stern of the boat, and the way she'd sat in the chair with her head bowed as she'd identified the thief. Quickly, he finally remembered her clean, white face ...... the thief, the robber, the dead rat ......

It was the same person, it was the same person.

A kind of deceived anger suddenly raged and burned up, and Carl casually grabbed a cup that was sitting in the shelf on the washbasin and slammed it hard at the bathtub. He'd been tricked by a damned tramp of a woman who was a con artist pretending to be a celebrity.

She'd taken his watch and wouldn't even admit it. She stole clothes with the intention of sparrowing her way to upper class to seduce men?

"Grab her, go to the head picket and lock her up." Carl felt like it was this lower class woman's fault that he was so uncomfortable and irritable, and he would be back to normal once he locked her up.

Lovejoy picked up the sketch and scrutinized it and didn't get more than a few glances before the paper was snatched from his hand. Carl snatched the sketch up and looked at the man in the sketch with a puzzled look on his face, drawn like a bimbo.

"What is this?" Carl pinched the piece of paper, crumpling the lines drawn on it.

"Probably someone important to her." Lovejoy speculated calmly, "Probably a family member, but more likely a lover. Only a woman in love would be so sentimental as to carry her lover's drawing with her."

"Lover?" Carl repeated ridiculously, "Her lover? Third class too?" The paper was so hot that Karl wanted to crumple it, but ended up ghosting the sketch image into his pocket as soon as he could, swiping his hand upward in an attempt to wave away the sensations that were driving him mad. Then he braced his hands on his hips, leaned over the sink, and said to Lovejoy, "Let's hurry up and find it, she won't get far."

Lovejoy glanced at him, then walked briskly over to Carl and pressed a hand to his stomach. Carl was unprepared and sucked in a breath of pain.

"I think it's a bruise, it's in the area of the abdomen, let the doctor check it out and then you must lie down and rest, you shouldn't exercise strenuously when you've been kicked in the stomach."

Carl grabbed Lovejoy's hand impatiently and lowered his voice menacingly to him, "I said, find the woman, I want to find the woman."

"I know what she looks like, sir." Lovejoy said coolly, expressionless.

"So do I." Carl finally relented, and looked at himself in the mirror, his hair so disheveled he could have fallen off a horse. Then he pulled a watch out of his pocket and opened it, "There's a lot of other people out there at this time of night, and she's not a passenger here, there's no way for her to get back into her room in the upper class. So she must have gone to a public place, the walking deck, the reading room, the women's lounge or the dining room."

"Or maybe she'll take advantage of being a woman and hook up with some poor upper class man, from what I've seen, she's not bad looking." Lovejoy continued to pick up the conversation, just spelling out all the possibilities, only to realize when he finished that Carl was glaring at him with a very scary look, his bloodied face as angry as a ghost's.

Finally Carl nodded and admitted through gritted teeth, "Not bad looking."

"I'll call the picket captain." Lovejoy fumbled with the gun in his shirt, and with a cold face he turned and headed out the door.

"Come back." Carl suddenly whispered breathlessly.

Lovejoy turned his head and looked puzzled.

"Come over here and help me, I'll go with you." Carl held his hand over his stomach, which throbbed with pain, tugging at the spot where he'd been kicked whenever he breathed.

Lovejoy's face showed disapproval, and he was about to say something when Carl turned back to the mirror, ordering the waiter with a look of self-disgust, "Help me with that, straighten it out."

Lovejoy, ......