The top flared open. A foam peanut popped out, clung to the cardboard. A sea of peanuts covered whatever lay inside.
“Moment of truth,” McLellan said, stripping the gloves from his hands as he joined them. His bare arms bore angry scratches and grime smears. “Let’s see what she sent you.”
Chris hesitated. Don’t be stupid. She didn’t ship you a poisonous snake. She plunged in up to her wrists. A heavy, gift-wrapped box surfaced first. Chris hefted it, then set it carefully on the counter.
“Here’s an envelope,” Smitty said. He plucked the creamy letter from the peanut barrage and handed it over.
Simple enough note. Chris read it aloud.
Dearest Chris,
I know you told me not to spend anything on you, but I also remember how you complained about that awful plastic or whatever compass you have on the helm. I don’t think you can keep this one outside, but it’d make a great table centerpiece (that’s a hint). I had it blessed by Father Xavier here in Rome, so maybe it’ll be accurate for you.
The rest is just for you and whatever you do, don’t wear these anywhere but parties! If I hear you’ve been trotting around the boat in these, I’ll be furious.
I miss you. I’ll call when I have a chance.
Lots of love,
Natalie
“The compass sounds promising,” Smitty remarked when Chris finished.
“Too obvious.” McLellan took the letter and scanned it. “If Scintella’s monitoring her mail and gifts, he checked the compass.”
Chris ripped through the gift paper and sliced the box open. She peeled off two layers of bubble wrap, then caught her breath.
An antique brass box nestled in more bubble wrap, its round top gleaming a dull greenish-gold. She carefully lifted the heavy top to reveal a gorgeous instrument with what looked like a vellum inlay of the compass points beneath a glass cover. North was designated by an elaborate star rather than the traditional diamond point. East’s diamond had a smaller star painted on top of it.
Smitty whistled. “She wasn’t kiddin’ when she said antique.”
“How old is it?” McLellan leaned over the counter to look inside the box.
“Maybe eighteenth century,” Chris replied. “Probably Italian.” She set the top aside so she could remove the compass itself from the box. On the clean Corian counter, the instrument looked ancient. Arcane.
Smitty folded his dust-covered arms. “Needs cleaning.”
“I’ll do that on the trip.” Chris traced the compass housing’s greenish edge with her thumb, then looked at the black smear on her skin. “Brasso and two hours should do it. It’s pretty tarnished.”
“Does it open?” McLellan asked.
“Yeah, it does. It’s gimballed so it can stay upright when the ship’s under way.” She pointed at the rods that held the compass in the center of its brass base. “It comes off those.” She carefully lifted the compass from the rods and out of the base, then turned it upside down to display the small latches holding its bottom in place. “Compasses have to be calibrated so the dial sits properly and you don’t think north is north-northwest or something.”
“Do they fall out of true very often?”
“Go electronic,” Smitty said.
Chris smiled. “Electronic compasses need calibration, too, every time you change the batteries.” She eased the latches open and the bottom casing slipped off. Inside, two small adjustment screws protruded. “Turn these to reseat the dial.”
McLellan examined the bottom cap while she played with the adjustment. When she held out her hand for the bottom to put it back on the compass, he gave it to her, then picked up the housing.
“Heavy,” he muttered. He turned it upside down and ran his fingers inside it.
“Anything?” Smitty asked.
“Nothing obvious. Where’s a flashlight?”
Smitty trotted off to the passageway where the rechargeable flashlight was plugged into a wall socket.
Chris peered into the housing. “You think she scratched his Swiss bank account number in there?”
The faintest smile flashed across McLellan’s lips. “Smart-ass.”
Smitty snapped on the flashlight and handed it to McLellan, who pointed it down into the cylinder. After a moment, he switched the light off. “No bank account numbers,” he announced. “No treasure maps, no secret codes, no blueprints for WMD.”
“Let’s check the rest.” Chris was already pulling plastic-wrapped bundles from the box. “She might have hidden a note or something.”
While she dug through the clothes—why would Natalie ever assume Chris would wear a dress that short?—Smitty and McLellan pawed the peanuts out and examined the box itself. A few minutes later, a heap of expensive silk and satin lay on the counter and the box had been reduced to a jigsaw puzzle.
“Nothing here, either,” Chris said, shoving a lacy, black merry widow deep under the pile. “None of the original store wrap had been touched and none of the items had anything sewn into the linings or hems.”
“Long shot, anyway,” McLellan replied. “Then maybe what Falks was looking for is already aboard. What was the last thing Natalie sent to you?”
Chris waved her hand at the gorgeous silk she would never have a reason to wear. “Just clothes like this.”
“You don’t party?” Smitty’s smile held a hint of a leer. “Wanna start?”
McLellan scowled. “Has she ever sent you anything else?”
“No.”
“If Falks is looking for something on this boat, it’s on this boat.” McLellan leaned his hip against the counter and surveyed the salon.
“We’ve taken the place apart,” Smitty said. “We’ve got carpet torn up, wall panels taken down. Chris has been all over the engine rooms. Hell, if anything new shows up, she’s gonna know it. My bet is it hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Possibly.” McLellan turned again to face them, his handsome face like stone. “We have to be ready if Falks’s mission changes again. That means we both stay aboard from now on. Wherever she goes, you or I go with her,” he ordered Smitty.
“Why?” Smitty protested.
Chris squared her shoulders, suppressing the sudden fear that spiked through her chest. “Because if there’s nothing to find, the next time Falks comes back, he won’t be here to find anything. Am I right?”
McLellan reluctantly met her stare. “It would be like Scintella to send Falks here to teach Natalie a lesson. Given the boat race…” He let the sentence drift between them for a moment. “We won’t let him hurt you.”
“Just hold him off until we leave,” Chris retorted. “Once we’re at sea, I’ll be fine.”
We’re sunk, Chris thought on Thursday afternoon. She slowly threaded the Chevy through the dry-docked boats toward Obsession. Smitty sat in the passenger seat, amiably waving at the workers and shouting to them in Spanish.
Chris glared at the boatyard office as she passed. Dave was a nice guy, she gave him that. A nice guy with a good heart and a mild manner but zero business sense and no inkling about customer service.
But then who the hell did in the marine services industry?
The carpet had shown up, but the carpet layers hadn’t. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the marine plumber. The service place supposedly supplying the new air compressor had called Dave bright and early this morning to say it’d be another two business days before it arrived. Monday, Dave had told her.
Monday.
Even if the new compressor actually did miraculously appear on Monday and the spray gun was in working order first thing Tuesday morning, the yard would have time to get only one primer coat and one topcoat on before launch on Friday morning. Unless the boatyard workers also ended up allergic to boats. Or work. Or both. And now it was too late to move Obsession to another yard for the work.
Anything else. It could have been anything but the hull painting.
And that wasn’t her only trouble.
There was McLellan.
In
the three days he’d been working with her, she’d idly fantasized about throwing him into the gulf several times, and just yesterday gave it some serious thought. A landlubber who didn’t know what he was doing was one thing; a landlubber who insisted on quoting boating magazine articles on maintenance and upkeep ad nauseam was a nuisance. Everything that came out of his mouth started with, “I read in last month’s Passage Maker…” or “There was an article in Good Old Boat…”
“I’ve spent the last year talking in excruciating depth to old salts who’ve worked on the water for decades,” she’d finally said after having a brief vision of grabbing his ankles and levering him over the aft deck railing. “Not to mention taking this vessel out myself and working my ass off to earn my captain’s license. I think we’ve got it covered.”
“There’s nothing wrong with trying something new,” he’d retorted.
“I have a plan. Just stick to it, okay? And please stop talking to those kids. You’re just encouraging them to hang out and steal something.”
She had to admit, he did throw himself into each chore she gave him. Tear out the salon headliner? No problem. Strip all the intricate mahogany trim in the lower deck passageway? Sure thing. When she’d left that morning for what she hoped was the last landfill run, he’d been gung ho about polishing the hull.
If Obsession couldn’t be painted, she could at least look as if someone had tried to remove the old rust stain runnels marring her sides. That rust, the byproduct of corroding screws in the chromed aluminum rub rail, had probably penetrated the gelcoat. There was absolutely no way Obsession could be turned into a showroom boat without a paint job.
She threw the Chevy into Park and stomped on the parking brake.
“I’ll double-check the paint sprayer status,” Smitty said as he swung out.
“Good luck.” Chris peered out the windshield, squinting into the sun hovering behind the yacht.
McLellan was up a ladder, stripped to the waist, traces of sunscreen smeared on his wide shoulders and back. He wore a baseball cap backwards, a water-soaked towel packed between the cap and his skull and hanging onto his neck. His wet jeans clung to his butt and thighs. One of those damn kids was holding the hose spray on the hull, the droplets spilling in a waterfall of chalky white liquid down the side of Obsession’s hull. And what was that in McLellan’s hand?
Sandpaper?
He wasn’t polishing the hull. He was ruining it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing to my boat?” she demanded as she bolted out of the pickup. “Stop! Right there! Don’t move!”
McLellan twisted on the ladder to grin down at her. “I saw this great article in Cruising World—”
“The hull’s supposed to be polished. Polished, not ground to freakin’ powder.” Chris clamped her hands into fists to keep from grabbing the ladder to shake him down. “You’re ruining the gelcoat and we don’t have time to paint over it!”
“No, I’m not. I did some research last night. Obsession has a special kind of gelcoat that you can sand down—”
“We have a plan. We have a schedule. This is my sister we’re talking about and you want to go farting around with some cockeyed magazine article? You can pull this stunt on your own boat, dammit, on your time. Not mine.”
McLellan carefully folded his sandpaper square and tucked it into his jeans back pocket. He said something in Spanish to the kid, who turned off the hose and walked over to stand in the yard’s warehouse shade. McLellan backed down a couple of ladder steps, then jumped the last four, landing easily. His chest, scattered with black hair, flexed powerfully as he took a deep breath. Under his sweaty baseball cap, his stony face and gray eyes looked remote and dangerous.
“Too late,” he said in a voice like flint. “I’ve already ruined the stern.”
“Shit.”
Chris stalked around behind Obsession, aware of McLellan following her, then caught her breath when she saw her reflection in the eggshell-colored fiberglass. The old, busted prefab swim platform had been removed, so there was nothing above the yacht’s waterline but crystal clear shine, unmarred even by polishing swirls. The stern mirrored the trees and buildings behind it. Hell, she could have put on mascara in that gleam. She ran her hand along the hull’s surface. Slick as glass. Gorgeous.
They just might make it after all.
“She looks like she’s been painted,” Chris said, turning then to look wonderingly at McLellan.
He glared at her in silence.
“It’s good work,” she said, unwavering, “but you had no right to experiment on my vessel. You didn’t ask my permission.”
“You wanted the yacht to look good—”
“You could have ruined her, made her worse than before.” Chris swept her fingers again across the glossy fiberglass, then turned to face him. “You could have done enough damage that we’d have to stay in New Orleans long enough to have her painted there. That would have cut into our time getting down to Isladonata.”
“Dave could have put on the primer here and we’d get the top coat in New Orleans—”
“Top coats need to go on in less than twelve hours after the primers, otherwise they won’t bond,” she pointed out. “You have to understand something. Aboard this vessel, I’m the captain. I’m the one in charge. This is my sister’s life at stake and I’m deadly serious about making this thing work.”
Muscles in his jaw and cheek flexed beneath his sweat-slick skin. “So am I.”
“That means you learn to take direction.” She drew herself up to her full height—still a good half foot shorter than his—and lifted her chin. “You don’t take direction on a vessel at sea and you endanger not just yourself but everybody else.”
“It’s just some fiberglass polishing—”
“It’s about remembering who’s in charge,” she snapped. She’d seen his type before. McLellan needed to know—and accept—how the land lay. “My boat, my project,” she said. “Look, I’m glad your experiment turned out well. We’ll keep doing it your way. That’s not the issue.”
She took a deep, calming breath, then laid it on the line. “But if you can’t figure out how to listen to me, how to do what I tell you to do, you’re not going anywhere on this vessel.”
His eyes snapped fire but before he could reply, she added, “Once this boat leaves shore, I’m responsible for you. Morally and legally. If you do something that seems right to you even though I said not to do it, and you end up hurt or killed, it’s my responsibility. Period. Admiralty law.”
She fell silent and waited for him to jump her case again. He studied her for a few long moments, then nodded curtly once. Maybe even a DEA head honcho could take orders.
“It looks great.” She reached up almost against her will to stroke the yacht’s hull. “You’ve done a great job.”
“We’ve done a great job.” He nodded slightly to the boy, all baggy jeans and T-shirt, standing in the shade. “But thanks.”
“Now show me how to do it,” she said, “so I can get started on the other side.”
Chris took several steps back from Obsession the following Wednesday evening and marveled. What a difference two weeks and several thousand dollars could make.
McLellan’s trick with the gelcoat sanding had saved a substantial chunk of change and showed that Obsession’s builders had been a class act. The hull and coach house alike mirrored everything around them. The yacht’s new window frames and high-impact glass would prevent water from leaking down the newly restored salon walls and pooling on the bare floor still awaiting its carpet. The new stainless steel railings and the rub rail shone like freshly minted coins.
“She looks good, doesn’t she?” McLellan said as he joined Chris in the boatyard, wiping his paint-smeared hands with a towel that smelled faintly of thinner.
“She’s what I always thought she’d look like,” Chris replied, tugging her blond hair from its ponytail. “Beautiful.”
“Yes, she is.” McLellan’s mou
th curved in a half smile as he watched Chris finger-comb the strands. “You got your new prop finally.”
“Yeah, that’s a load off my mind.”
Chris walked around to the stern, McLellan following, to look at the massive four-bladed bronze propeller. She reached out and fingered one of the blades, then grasped it and pulled down. The prop turned heavily.
“Remind me not to swim while the engines are running,” McLellan remarked.
“Slice and dice,” she agreed. “The swim platform’s here, by the way. It’ll be ready for mounting in the morning.”
“We’re nearly ready to go.”
The suppressed eagerness in his voice made her glance at him as they walked up to the bow. He’d taken seriously to boating, even to spending an hour each evening with her reviewing the charts while Smitty sanded down mahogany trim strips in preparation for varnishing. He wasn’t particularly mechanical, but he was a fast learner. More than once she’d caught him practicing his knot tying when he had a few spare minutes. McLellan was as ready to go as a landlubber who’d never been to sea could be.
“Yeah. Obsession’s got everything she needs to take us to New Orleans.”
“So do we get to splash a day early?” He tossed his towel into a drum labeled FIRE HAZARD WASTE.
“I’d like to. We need to go over the sailing plans tonight when Garza gets here.” She started up the ladder to the aft deck, McLellan following.
“We should talk about what happens when we get to the island.”
“You mean when you guys go storming in, guns blazing?”
A scowl darkened his face as he swung onto the deck. “How we’re going to fake our way through security.”
She drew her hair back into its usual ponytail, then looked him up and down, noting how his T-shirt snugged his chest and wondering where he kept his firearm. “You’re going to need a first mate’s uniform,” she remarked.
He shook his head. “That’s Smitty’s job,” he said, watching his partner clamber up to join them. “I’m just a lazy passenger.”
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