Bluewater Enigma

by Charles Dougherty

  "Are you telling me this is some kind of family quarrel?" Dani asked.

  "Yes. At least partly, I think."

  "I'm missing something, though," Dani said. "I see that Mike might be angry about the jerk betraying his sister, but why kidnap him like this?"

  "The McGuire family's funding Horry's campaign, for the most part. Mike was berating him for risking it all 'for a piece of ass,' as he referred to me." Beverly took a deep breath. "Mike said something about protecting his investment. He threatened to castrate Horry if he didn't stay straight until after the election."

  "Did McGuire know about you?" Dani asked.

  Beverly frowned. "I'm not sure what you're asking. He was standing there, looking at me."

  "The blackmail scheme," Dani said.

  Beverly shook her head and stepped close to Dani, leaning in to whisper in her ear, "We shouldn't let these guys overhear things they don't already know."

  Dani grinned. "Don't worry about them. They won't get a chance to tell anybody."

  "Even so," Liz said, "I agree with Beverly. Let's take this conversation up to the cockpit. I need fresh air, and these boys can't get into any trouble now."

  "Okay, now it's just us," Dani said, her voice low. She sat down in the cockpit, and Liz and Beverly followed suit.

  "I don't think they had anything to do with Berto's plans," Beverly said. "Just the opposite, the way I see it. Berto wanted to ruin Horry's chances at the presidency, for whatever reason. Mike McGuire was angry that Horry was blowing his shot at the nomination by being here with me."

  Dani sat, frowning, as she stared off into the distance. "I see what you mean."

  After several seconds, Beverly said, "I have a question for you, if it's okay."

  Dani shrugged. "Sure. Ask away."

  "What did you mean when you said McGuire's men wouldn't get a chance to tell anybody?"

  Dani's eyebrows shot up. She glanced at Liz and then stared at Beverly for a moment. "They're fish food, unless we think of something else to ask them."

  "That's what I was afraid you meant. Don't kill them, Dani. Please?"

  Dani's face flushed. "They were going to kill us. Why shouldn't I return the favor?"

  "Because you're not like them," Beverly said. "I know you think I'm not in a position to judge you, and I understand why you feel that way."

  "I'm sorry I said that, about the moral high ground," Dani said. "It was a cheap shot; you deserve better; you put your trust in us."

  "You needn't apologize," Beverly said. "Certainly, it stung, but all the more because it's true. What I am doesn't mean you should lower yourself to the level of these men. I said it a few minutes ago; you're a better person than that. I may be a whore, but that means I know how to recognize the scum of the earth. They are, and you're not."

  "But we're in the middle of nowhere; we have a right to defend ourselves," Dani said.

  "And you have. You had every right to do what you did to them. If you had killed them in the process, that would be different, but you didn't. Don't you see? You won. They're no threat to us now. Killing them would be cold-blooded murder."

  Dani looked at Liz. Liz held her gaze and said nothing.

  "I see your point," Dani said. "What do you think we should do?"

  "Call the police," Beverly said.

  "We're in international waters," Liz said. "Which police?"

  "Who would have jurisdiction over a ship in international waters? Dani, you're the captain. That's the kind of thing you must know."

  "It's fuzzy," Dani said, "but we're U.S. flagged, so the U.S. Coast Guard's a good place to start. They have jurisdiction over U.S. flagged vessels anywhere in the world."

  "Can you call them?"

  "We can, but ... What's your take, Liz?"

  "Where was Mike McGuire headed?" Liz asked. "Do you know where he lives?"

  "Miami," Beverly said. "They were flying there, he said."

  "We could call Luke, for a start, then," Dani said. "It wouldn't hurt to have him involved to help fight our corner. There will be miles of red tape."

  "You've mentioned Luke before," Beverly said. "Who is he?"

  "He's a captain in the Miami Police Department," Liz said. "He's in charge of homicide, among other things."

  "Homicide?" Beverly asked.

  "He's also responsible for liaison with a bunch of federal agencies, like the DEA and the Joint Terrorism Task Force," Dani said. "He's got the contacts to shepherd us through this."

  "And he's a friend, right?" Beverly asked.

  "Well, yes. The guy who used to be his partner on the police force is married to a good friend of ours," Liz said. "It's a long story, but he'll help us."

  "Right," Dani said. "He'd be a good place to start. What do you think, Liz? Should we take the high road on this?"

  "There's no going back if we do that," Liz said. She looked at Beverly. "We'll be tied up with questions for who knows how long, and you were planning to fly back to the States the day after tomorrow."

  "I don't have any real need to, now," Beverly said. "I don't want to impose on you, but I could get a hotel room or something if I need to stay somewhere while we sort this out."

  "You don't need to do that. We're not booked for the next couple of weeks," Liz said. "What do you want to do, Dani?"

  "Now that I've cooled off, I think it's the right thing to do. Let's call Luke. But first, should we see about first aid for this sackful of assholes we've caught? It wouldn't do to let them bleed to death, now that we've decided not to kill them."

  "I already did the best I could with Billy," Liz said. "I put a tourniquet on his leg and a pressure bandage on the shoulder. I thought I should keep him around so we could question him. Should I look at Joey?"

  "He took a round to the kneecap. Lots of superficial damage, and he's probably not going to walk right from now on, but he's not bleeding much," Dani said.

  Liz opened the small locker in the steering pedestal where they kept their satellite phone. "I'll call Luke. Can you get a position fix?"

  "Sure," Dani said, punching buttons on the chart plotter mounted above the helm. "Those idiots didn't have it turned on; it'll be a minute getting a fix."

  23

  "That all happened much more quickly than I thought it would," Beverly said, "but what do I know about this kind of thing?"

  "It surprised me, too," Dani said. She and Liz and Beverly were sitting in the cockpit, watching the two orange U.S. Coast Guard RIBs that were disappearing toward the western horizon. One of them was towing the speedboat that McGuire's men had tied to Vengeance's stern earlier.

  "I'm surprised they didn't ask more questions, from what you said earlier," Beverly said.

  "That will no doubt come later," Dani said. "It's thanks to Luke that we're not tied up in red tape right now."

  "Yes. Luke said they'd be back in touch," Liz said. "They wanted to get those three to the sick bay aboard the cutter ASAP."

  When they had spoken with Luke a couple of hours earlier, he had put them on hold to talk with his DEA liaison. A medium endurance cutter had been holding station some 30 miles to their northwest, involved in a mission to interdict drug smuggling. Luke had arranged for the Coast Guard to arrest McGuire's three henchmen and return them to Miami.

  Given their relative positions, Dani had decided to sail to the north-northeast rather than drifting while they waited for the boats from the cutter. Vengeance was making a comfortable nine knots in the direction of St. Lucia. When the Coast Guard RIBs had intercepted them, Dani hove to for them to pick up the three wounded captives. The transfer had taken mere minutes, and they were once again under way.

  "What time will we get to St. Lucia?" Beverly asked.

  Dani fiddled with the chart plotter for a few seconds before she said, "Around nine this evening, if the wind holds."

  "You should be able to make your flight tomorrow with no trouble," Liz said. "What time does it leave? Do you need to confirm?"

  "I've be
en thinking about that," Beverly said. "I'm not sure I want to go back just yet."

  "What did you have in mind?" Liz asked.

  "I don't know. Based on what's happened, I'm not comfortable going back to Miami, though."

  "What about your place there?" Dani asked.

  "My place?"

  "Where you live," Liz said. "is someone looking after it for you?"

  A wistful look crossed Beverly's face. "I don't have a 'place,' like most people do. I don't have much of anything, actually, except a few clothes — and some jewelry in a safe deposit box."

  "I thought you had a condo or something," Dani said. "When we checked you and Velasquez out, we heard you were living in the high-rent district on the Intracoastal Waterway in Miami."

  Beverly shook her head. "I was hanging out there; it was part of my gig as Velasquez's mistress. I don't even know who owns that place. There's nothing there for me to go back to; that's for sure."

  "Could it have belonged to this Berto character?" Dani asked.

  "Maybe. I don't really know. Manny LaRosa gave me the keys to it when he set me up with Velasquez."

  "Does Velasquez know who owns it?" Liz asked.

  "I led him to believe it was mine," Beverly said. "I told him my parents left me a trust fund when they were killed in an auto accident my senior year in college. I'm afraid to go back there, after all that's happened. Manny won't be too happy with me."

  "I thought Berto told you you'd never see Manny again," Dani said.

  Beverly laughed. "One thing I've learned in the last few years is not to trust anything a man tells me. Especially not one as handsome as Berto. He has his own game; I'm just a pawn."

  "What will you do?" Liz asked. "How will you live?"

  "I'll think of something. I have some money — enough to keep me afloat for a good while, if I'm careful. If it looks like it's safe, maybe I'll finish grad school and get a real job. As boring as that sounds, I've had enough excitement for a while."

  "What were you studying?" Dani asked.

  "International finance."

  "What was your undergraduate field?" Liz asked.

  "I did a double major in accounting and French."

  Dani and Liz began to laugh.

  Beverly's face flushed and she said, "Well, the hell with you, then."

  "Wait, Beverly!" Liz said. "I'm sorry. We're not laughing at you."

  "Yeah, sure. A whore with a master's degree," Beverly said. "Pretty funny, isn't it?"

  "We're laughing at the irony," Dani said. "Fate bringing us together is what's funny."

  Beverly turned an angry stare on Dani and didn't say anything.

  "We never told you about ourselves," Dani said.

  Beverly shook her head, but her face still radiated anger. "You said you worked in a family business."

  "Yes," Dani said. "Investment banking, in New York. I have a master's in international finance."

  "Is that where you learned to mutilate people?"

  "No. My time in finance was much more brutal and far less honest than what we did to those jerks."

  "Were you in the military or something, then?"

  "Something. I didn't have a normal adolescence, that's for sure. I did enough strange stuff to learn not to judge other people's choices. Can we leave it at that, for the moment?"

  "Uh-huh." Beverly shifted her stare to Liz.

  "I have a master's in finance, too," Liz said. "I worked for the E.U. in Brussels for a few years. That's why we were laughing, Beverly. Relax, please. We like you. What you've done is done. I'm certainly not in a position to criticize your past."

  "I have a chip on my shoulder," Beverly said. "Whatever you say about my past, I'm not proud of it."

  "You can't do anything about it," Dani said. "You can either wallow in it, or suck it up and move on."

  "You sure you weren't in the military? I've heard combat veterans use almost that exact phrase."

  "Me, too," Dani said. "I picked it up from a family friend who had a career in the U.S. Army. He was in business with my father when I was growing up. He's like an older brother."

  "I see. You said your father was French, but from Martinique, originally?"

  "That's right."

  "What kind of business was he in?"

  "International trade. He's still active; he deals in heavy equipment, mostly, and the training that goes along with it."

  "Wow. You had an entrée into finance from both sides. How did you end up doing this?"

  "I burned out on investment banking, and I broke up with an asshole that I was supposed to marry. I've sailed with my father since before I can remember; he taught me to love the sea. I bailed out of an unhappy period in my life and started crewing on big yachts. I was between boats when Liz and I bumped into one another in Antigua and decided to give this business a try. Liz?"

  "I was on a sabbatical down here, running from some unhappiness of my own," Liz said. "I'd been in the islands for around six weeks, chilling out, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I hitched a ride to Antigua on a classic boat. It turned out the guy who was sailing it was nuts, but that's another story. He wrecked it on the approach to Antigua, and he was lost at sea. I washed up on the beach, literally. A friend of mine from university has an art gallery there, and I was visiting her. I was in her gallery, working on a painting of the yacht that was wrecked. Dani happened along and looked over my shoulder."

  "I recognized the yacht she was painting," Dani said. "I'd had an encounter of my own with the whack-job who was sailing her. Liz and I had a long lunch and hit it off with one another, so the next day, I took her sailing on a friend's boat. Vengeance was on the market in Antigua, and I'd been thinking about buying her and going in the charter business, but I needed a partner. Liz and I decided to give it a go, and here we are."

  "That's so cool," Beverly said. "I'm at a low point, myself. It's good to hear that things work out, even just sometimes."

  "You'll find something you like," Liz said.

  "Thanks, both of you. Sorry I snapped; it was more about me than it was about you. You've been kind to me, especially considering that I got you into this mess of mine."

  "Actually, you didn't," Dani said. "I've been thinking about that. Somebody picked Vengeance as the setting for springing the trap on Velasquez. It can't have been random."

  "But why?" Beverly asked. "Are you connected to any of these people?"

  "We must be," Liz said, "but we don't know who 'these people' are, even."

  "I don't know either," Beverly said. "I'd never run across Mike McGuire before last night. I don't know much about him, except that he's Horry's brother-in-law."

  "Do you remember any details of what the two of them said to each other?" Liz asked.

  Beverly shook her head. "No. I was too rattled by the whole thing. But it should be on the recording. I forgot to turn — "

  "Wait!" Dani said. "You recorded it?"

  "Yes. I forgot to turn it off before I fell asleep. Should I go switch it off now?"

  "Please," Dani said. "But hurry back. I want to ask you something about Berto."

  "She's touchy about her past," Liz said.

  "I'm not surprised. I feel bad that I said that to her about the moral high ground."

  "She's seems to trust us. What did you want to ask her about Berto?" Liz asked.

  "While we were talking just now, I remembered what hit me last night before we went to sleep."

  "About Berto?"

  "Yes. She's seen him, remember? Met him for dinner a couple of times. We talked about that in the dinghy last night."

  "That's right," Liz said. "We were going to talk with Luke about it today. I forgot all about it in the excitement. Should we call him? We can tell him about the recordings, too."

  "Not so fast," Dani said. "There's nothing that won't keep, and I'm nervous about the recordings."

  "Why?"

  "As I was drifting off to sleep, I thought about the recordings. We have no idea what'
s on them."

  "We've been careful; we knew about the risk," Liz said.

  "We tried, but we might have slipped up ... besides, think of Beverly," Dani said.

  "She did that voluntarily," Liz said.

  "And she's ashamed of that part of her life," Dani said. "She thought the recordings were going to be held over Velasquez's head by Berto. She never expected anybody to see them, other than maybe those two."

  "What are you thinking, then? Do you want to hide them from Luke?"

  "We need to take a look at them. Then we can decide what to do. But I'm thinking that at most, Luke could use the parts where McGuire and Velasquez were talking."

  "So we'd edit them?"

  "Yes," Dani said. "Just cut out the parts that don't relate to McGuire. Nobody needs to watch what she and that scumbag were doing. And then there's whatever we might have said without thinking. We don't need anybody second guessing how we dealt with those three pieces of slime, either."

  "I see what you mean," Liz said. "How are you proposing to do that?"

  "Marie could help us. Then we can send Luke the parts that are relevant to his case against McGuire. Or Berto."

  "What about McGuire and Berto?" Beverly asked, climbing into the cockpit.

  "We were talking about the recordings," Liz said, "and sharing them with Luke."

  "Oh," Beverly said in a soft voice, her face turning red. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, sighing. "I guess if we have to ... I don't — "

  "Beverly?" Dani said, interrupting her.

  "Yes?"

  "We were talking about cutting out everything except the parts between McGuire and Velasquez."

  Beverly looked up at Dani, raising her eyebrows. "Could you do that? I mean, I don't — "

  "First," Dani said. "Nobody knows about it but the three of us."

  "And Marie will, if she helps us," Liz added.

  "Marie?" Beverly asked.

  "She only knows the recording system exists right now," Dani said. "Marie is a friend in Martinique who works as ... well, she does a lot of undercover work for some government agencies. She found the system when we asked her to check over Vengeance after we got her back. She installed the cutoff switch we told you about, too."