“Hey, Smitty,” Chris teased, “your buddy doesn’t think he’s going to help out on this cruise.”
“Aarr,” Smitty growled and hooked an arm around Chris’s shoulder. “You work for your grog on this ship, matie.”
McLellan was not amused. “Someone’s got to look like they’re supposed to be going to this island.”
Chris surveyed McLellan again. “You’ve got a point. How good are you at smooth talking your way into places you shouldn’t be?”
“Ask his last girlfriend,” Smitty said in his normal voice. “You got that engine room floor painted yet?”
McLellan scowled. “Done.”
“I thought you were going to do that.”
Smitty stuck his hand out past Chris so they could both see his uneven, grease-laden nails. “I did some of it. But I have to watch my manicure. I’m aspirin’ to become a model like pretty boy over here.”
Normally McLellan took Smitty’s ribbing about his looks with good humor, but now his eyes were cold steel and his jaw locked. Smitty dropped his arm from Chris’s shoulder and said, “Want a cold one?”
“Love one.”
Inside, Smitty poured beer into chilled mugs while Chris and McLellan spread a navigational chart over the dinette table.
“Garza was right behind me,” Smitty said as he set a mug in front of her.
“Good God, Smitty, did you leave him out there on his own?” McLellan snapped.
“He’s a grown man.” Smitty raised his voice as McLellan headed out to the aft deck. “He doesn’t like being coddled.” He slid into the horseshoe-shaped bench next to Chris. “Wants to save the world whether it wants to be saved or not.”
“I’m not sure helping a friend up a ladder’s the same as saving him,” she remarked.
Smitty grunted and sipped his beer. “His soft spot’s got him in trouble more than once.”
“I guess that’s a liability in your line of work.”
“Damn right it is. That kind of shit’ll get you killed eventually.”
Chris, acutely conscious of Smitty’s muscular arm and very male scent, regarded him seriously for the first time. His wrist, she noticed, was tattooed with a rattlesnake. “So compassion is a weakness.”
“Look,” Smitty said, warming up to what Chris suspected was going to be a well-practiced monologue, “they talk about victims in the drug war but from the way I see it, there’s only people getting what they ask for. The addicts, the pushers, the middlemen, the commandos, the guys out in the fields growing coca down in South America—they all make a choice. When guys like me and McLellan show up, all they wanna do is kill us because we’re going to mess up the status quo. Nobody wants anything different. A bleedin’ heart for one of these guys gets you dead. Period. I don’t care how personal it is.”
Personal? What about her sister? “And Scintella?”
“He doesn’t get an excuse. Everybody else can say, ‘Look at me, I’m an addict.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I’m in deep and if I try to leave they’ll kill me.’ But he’s the bad boy at the top of the heap. All he has to worry about is the guy on the rung below him, trying to drag him down.”
Which meant Natalie was in a kind of danger Chris hadn’t thought of. How often did the families of men like Scintella get caught in the crossfire? Made examples of? Chris swallowed hard and was grateful when she heard Garza and McLellan on the aft deck. Get her mind back on business and she’d be fine.
Garza’s forehead shone with sweat and he leaned heavily on his cane for the short walk through the salon to the dinette. McLellan held a bar stool steady at the dinette’s head. Dressed in Dockers and a Race to Vera Cruz T-shirt, Garza resembled a yuppie sailor more than a private eye.
Chris watched him brace himself against the dinette and hoist himself onto the stool. “Should we have arranged to meet somewhere else?”
“No, not at all.” Garza wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “The yacht’s clean, right?”
Smitty nodded. “Ran over it with a can of Raid.”
“For bugs?” Chris capped and uncapped her pen.
“It was another reason Falks could have been aboard.” McLellan slid into the dinette at Garza’s right hand. “Slim chance, but there’s no point in taking it.”
His quiet confidence stilled her nerves. She nodded and breathed deep. Smitty’s little diatribe had made her jumpy. Don’t live in the future, she reminded herself. Do what you have to do right now. And don’t borrow trouble. Chris put down her pen.
“Need more light?” she asked. She got up to flip the dinette switch and the little lamp suspended over the table burped on, casting a feeble ambient glow.
“Mood lighting’s good, but I don’t plan on seducing you until these guys are gone,” Smitty remarked. “How about that salon lamp behind me?”
Chris snapped the switch. “Got another one down.”
“I’m working on the wiring when we’re under way,” Smitty said. “Can’t go blind on this trip.”
“I bet it’s a bad relay.”
“I bet you’re right, darlin’.”
Chris unplugged a tabletop lamp and perched it on the counter behind Garza, then aimed its shaded beam toward the table and took the outside seat next to Smitty again. Think sailing, she ordered herself. Don’t think about guns and Natalie and how much trouble she’s in.
Before her nerves could kick in again, she turned the chart so north pointed at McLellan and south pointed at Smitty. Setting a clear glass paperweight on the southeast corner between Garza and herself, she said, “You can see this group of islands here.” She gestured toward a little band of dots below Florida. “From what Natalie told me last time we talked, I think this is where Jerome Scintella’s resort must be.”
“Do your cruising friends know anything about it?” Garza asked.
She shook her head. “There’s no reference to Isladonata anywhere. Not on any map or chart I’ve found, not on the cruising newsgroups, not the Internet, nowhere.”
Garza nodded thoughtfully. “I haven’t come up with anything, either.”
“From what Natalie said, the island’s been inhabited and used as a resort for some time even if it doesn’t show up on charts by the name Isladonata.”
“A code name, then.” McLellan placed both palms on the two nearest corners. His fingers were both beautiful and strong, splayed over the paper like a concert pianist’s. Her own hands, she noticed, still had oil ground into the pores even after her shower.
“Possibly,” Chris replied. “Nat described it as a wealthy boys’ club. Lots of gambling and high-class prostitutes. Scintella’s going there for a business meeting.”
The men were silent for a moment, studying the chart’s named and unnamed islands, then McLellan said, “Could she tell you anything about the security arrangements?”
Chris shook her head. “Nothing about the island itself. She did say Jerome has personal bodyguards who travel with them, and that everywhere they’ve gone he’s had more waiting for him.”
“Local hires,” Smitty guessed.
Garza nodded. “Family connections. The Scintellas have been around a while. Lots of friends in lots of places.”
Was Scintella that powerful and well-connected? Chris had thought that he was just another thug with money, but Garza made him sound like someone out of The Godfather. She shuddered.
Smitty put his arm over her shoulders. “Hey, we’re here. Falks shows up, I take care of him. And I don’t care who he works for or what he’s doing.”
I have no business doing this.
Chris stared at the chart’s swirling lines—here’s where the water gets shallow, here’s a ship channel, here are all the markers of direction and distance and safe travel. Old World charts had had vast stretches of blue water labeled, “Ther Be Dragynes Here,” but this was now, the twenty-first century. The only dragynes she had to contend with were the one trying to hurt her and the one out there somewhere who might hurt Natalie.
But
it was uncharted waters, all of it.
Smitty gently tipped her chin toward him and smiled. “Hey. I mean it.”
She searched his gaze and found nothing to be afraid of. Just a warm fondness. In spite of her fear of Falks, her fear for Natalie, she felt comforted. She quirked a smile, the best she could do, and Smitty patted her arm. “So what’s our trip look like, mon capitaine?”
Chris swallowed hard as Smitty released her, then said, “We’ll take it in two legs. The first will be our shakedown cruise from here to New Orleans.”
McLellan’s deep voice, sounding slightly strained, made her look at him. “Where we see how well the yacht is holding up.”
“She’ll hold up fine, but yes, it’s where we work out the kinks. You’ll get to experience the yacht in action.”
“Ten bucks says you toss your cookies at the first four-foot swell, pretty boy.”
McLellan turned his scowl on Smitty. “Twenty says I don’t and you scrub the bilge with a toothbrush.”
“Ah.” Smitty shook his head. “Goin’ south with the mouth again.” He winked at Chris. “But you’re on.”
“We’ll pick up two agents in New Orleans,” McLellan said.
“Who?” Chris let her frustration flare in her voice. “Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”
“You thought Smitty and I would storm a heavily armed private island on our own?”
The lack of sarcasm in McLellan’s tone made Chris feel even more stupid and naive. “I like to have a plan,” Chris snapped. “I’m a civilian and I don’t know how stuff like this is supposed to go down. A little forewarning of your plans is appreciated.”
McLellan’s scowl deepened. “That’s why I’m telling you now.”
“You’ll like Jacquie,” Smitty remarked. “Tough babe.”
If Smitty intended to make her feel better about this new information, he misjudged her. “If she’ll help us get Natalie out, I don’t care who she is. So you’ll have four agents going to Isladonata. Is there anything else I need to know?”
“That’s it,” McLellan said tightly.
It wasn’t, she knew. He had that look: the defiant, dare-me gaze that meant he was bluffing. There was still something going on underneath these plans, but she didn’t have a clue how to get to it. Not without jeopardizing her role in the trip. She let her expression say what she wouldn’t: I don’t trust you. McLellan’s already chiseled face hardened further.
She turned to Garza. “Are you coming, too?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I’d be ballast. No, I’m going to stay here and be the investigator, build a case against Falks if I can.”
“Even if the DEA can’t figure out who he is?” Smitty’s skepticism echoed in his rapidly drumming fingers.
Garza smiled. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat. So the second leg is from New Orleans to Isladonata?”
Chris nodded. “I want to keep the shakedown to the ICW. The Intracoastal Waterway runs along the coast and is used for commercial shipping. Traffic’s manageable during the day and at night we’ll moor or anchor in protected inlets and coves. But from New Orleans to Isladonata, we’ll be on open water.” She traced the route, skirting the Florida coast in an arc toward the band of islands south of the mainland. “Even if we have a mechanical failure on that leg, we should be able to reach the coast without too much trouble.”
“And how do we figure out which island is the right one?” McLellan asked.
“Natalie told me this morning she may be close to getting more information,” Chris said, remembering the hushed excitement of Nat’s voice, the relief they’d both felt to be doing something, getting somewhere.
“How?” Garza asked.
“Igor—the bodyguard—doesn’t hang around when she’s with Jerome. She got Jerome drunk last night and searched his clothes while…anyway, he’s started wearing a key on a chain around his neck and she thinks it unlocks his briefcase. He keeps his travel diary there.”
“Lat-longs?” Smitty asked.
Chris nodded. “I hope so. If she can get those coordinates, we’re good.”
McLellan gazed steadily at her and she suddenly realized how broad his shoulders were. How distant his gray eyes could seem in this inadequate light. “You sound very sure we’ll succeed, Christina.”
At her name—her real name, the name she’d been given before she was adopted and had become someone else—she met his gaze. Had Obsession been in the water, she would have been conscious of the subtle hum of a bilge pump running or the splash of water that signaled a functioning air-conditioning unit. As it was, she was cognizant of the absence of those sounds. She could almost feel the massive Detroits hunkered down in their engine rooms, waiting to go.
She would get to Natalie one way or another, and her best chance was taking this boat. Even if McLellan was keeping something from her. Even if Jerome Scintella had bodyguards and money and connections with dangerous people.
She lifted her chin, met McLellan’s gaze head-on. “This is my sister’s life. I’ll make it.”
Chapter 5
Best laid plans, Chris thought in the growing darkness on the flybridge. Obsession’s bow sliced through a swell. First day out and wouldn’t you know it? A tanker spill and the subsequent cleanup in the ICW had driven Obsession from the ditch, through Johnson’s Cut and out into the open Gulf of Mexico after all.
And given the southwesterly wind coming at a good clip over the water, the shakedown cruise was going to be a real boneshaker. That was the gulf for you. It was either smooth as glass or trying to kill you. There just didn’t seem to be much of an in-between.
Chris turned the wheel to adjust course slightly. They had another three hours to reach the next cut back into the ICW. Rolling swells lifted Obsession’s stern, then slid beneath and dropped the yacht in a sickening slow-motion roller-coaster action.
She wondered idly whether McLellan was locked in the forward head spilling his excellently cooked dinner—and where had he learned to cook like that?—or if Smitty was hunkered down in the bilge, toothbrush in hand. Warm wind stroked her back. If the weather picked up a little more, she’d be forced into the pilothouse, but for now, the edginess, the wildness of it, thrilled her. Gave her something to think about besides Natalie and dragynes.
She checked the radar. The display showed no moving body for two or three sweeps, then a blip maybe half the size of Obsession. A thirty-foot fishing boat, maybe. A blue-water sailboat. Maybe one of the over-engined, testosterone-fueled Cigarette boats sometimes used to smuggle illegal goods into the lower forty-eight. Someone else forced out of the ICW by the spill.
Not necessarily Eugene Falks.
But if it was Eugene Falks, she had a surprise waiting for him. Not a fire extinguisher trick this time. Her grip tightened on the wheel. No, this time it’d be a Ruger 9mm.
The radar arm swept again. Nothing. Whoever it was stayed just out of range.
She shook off the thought. No sense in scaring herself. Wasn’t that what Gus had said just before they’d left him at the dock? And the other important thing: If you run into trouble, if you need anything, you give old Gus a call, you hear me? Nobody messes with my favorite girl.
Until now, she hadn’t had much time to scare herself. After this morning’s launch, Smitty had been his usual playful, almost affectionate self. McLellan had kicked around the yacht like a kid in a candy store, examining everything, asking questions a mile a minute. They’d joked and chatted and teased her by turns until it felt like a good-natured assault. What were they trying to do, nice her to death?
She thought about McLellan’s trips forward and aft, his eyes’ gleam as he recognized the practical application of his book learning. He’d stood for almost an hour at the bow, watching the yacht slice the waves. She hadn’t seen genuine excitement like that in a long time. Hadn’t felt it herself, either.
It was exciting to finally be under way, in a sound vessel, her vessel. I’m coming to get you, Natalie,
she’d thought more than once, and each time her heart had surged at seeing her sister again.
The helm compass’s glow showed Obsession on the correct heading. No oil rigs or other standing obstacles dotted their immediate path. She wondered how bad commercial shipping traffic was backed up in the ditch while Parks and Wildlife cleaned up the mess. Obsession hemmed in with a bunch of barges wasn’t an image she wanted to contemplate. The old girl was a strong boat, but Chris respected both the water and a larger, heavier vessel. Either could crush the yacht to splinters of fiberglass.
One hand on the wheel, she leaned over the chart table again to double-check Smitty’s notations from his six-hour stint at the helm. As she studied the charts, she heard nothing but the wind filling her ears, smelled nothing but clean air growing cooler with the threat of storms. She raised her head to look out over the black water, at the fluttering path of light leading to the fingernail moon just lifting above the horizon. The gulf heaved long, slow waves against the yacht. Beneath the surface, she sensed, the water roiled and churned, always moving, never satisfied with stillness. Suddenly the pitching waves seemed to be all part of one huge being, separate from it and tied to it and within it all at the same time.
“We say the sea is lonely,” McLellan said as he joined her at the helm.
She smiled as she straightened and met his relaxed, open gaze. “William Meredith,” she replied. “‘The Open Sea’.”
His delighted grin warmed her. “Beautiful opening to a poem about drowned people, isn’t it?”
“I thought it was about being glad to be alive.”
“That, too.” His deep voice softened into an almost intimate tone, as though the connection—quotation and poem—was deeper than merely intellectual.
She slipped back behind the wheel and perched on the captain’s chair as Obsession heaved up over another rolling wave. “Not feeling sick?”
“Stomach of iron.” McLellan shrugged. The gesture opened his windbreaker enough to let her see the pitted grip of the gun strapped under his arm. His T-shirt clung to his ribcage and she wondered suddenly how hard his muscles would feel under her hands.
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