He stood up, took two steps over to the hanging locker beside his bed. One of the many reasons he’d chosen the 1986 Chris-Craft Corinthian over some of the other boats he’d seen was that it had a master stateroom with an actual bed and some halfway decent storage. Evan hadn’t kept much when he’d emptied the Cocoa Beach house and moved aboard the boat, but he liked everything to have a place, and to be there when he expected it to be.
He opened the locker, pulled a pair of black trousers from their hanger and slipped them on. Three identical pairs remained in the locker, next to three identical navy trousers and five identical white button-down shirts. As he bent to step into his pants, he swore he could smell cat urine. His upper lip twitched as he leaned into the locker and sniffed. The only light in the room came from the lights on the dock, shining vague and gray through the curtains over the portholes.
His shoes, two pairs of black dress shoes, one pair of Docksiders, and a pair of running shoes, were lined up neatly on a shelf at the bottom of the locker. He bent lower, and the scent magnified. He picked up a shoe from the middle, a left dress shoe. The inside was shinier than it ought to be. He brought it to his nose and jerked back.
He managed to stop himself from throwing the shoe across the room, distributing cat pee throughout his cabin, but just barely. Instead, he carefully set it down on the floor, and pulled a shirt from the locker.
Once he had dressed, he walked in his sock feet into the boat’s one head, which the previous owner had fortuitously remodeled just before he got divorced and had to sell. The guy had expanded it into the space that had been a closet, which gave him room to put in a real shower, and a space for a stacking washer and dryer. It only fit the type that people used in RVs, but it was enough for Evan, who had trouble using public appliances and would prefer buying new clothes every week to going to a laundromat.
Evan grabbed his cleaning tote from the top of the small dryer, wet a cloth with a mixture of warm water and the expensive wood soap, stalked back to the hanging locker, and thoroughly cleaned and dried the small, sloped shelf on which he kept his shoes. Then he carried the wet shoe up to the galley, tied it up in a trash bag, and set the trash bag just outside the French door to the large sun deck.
When he came back inside, he spotted the cat sitting on the built-in teak cabinet between the steps down to the V-berth Evan used for storage and the steps down to the galley. Plutes was as black as ebony and weighed at least fifteen pounds. Hannah had brought him home just a few weeks before Evan’s life had fallen apart, and said she’d named him Pluto. Plutes for short.
Evan had thought she’d named him after the idiot dog from Disney. In fact, she’d taken the name from a Poe story. Evan didn’t read Poe’s stories, although he liked The Raven quite a bit, so he could never remember which story it was, but he thought the name was probably appropriate anyway.
The cat had never made a sound in all the time Evan had been burdened with him; at least none that Evan had been there to hear. He was a shiny, black statue of seething disdain and discontent. He turned away from one of the windows that wrapped around the entire salon and stared at Evan over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and dismissive.
“Was that you?” Evan asked the cat, then cringed at the realization that he had become one of those people who asked cats questions. It was also a stupid question, since Plutes was the only cat aboard.
Plutes blinked at Evan, just once, slowly. Then he looked back out the window. If he could sigh, he clearly would have.
“Do it again and you’ll go to the pound,” Evan said, then went down the three steps that led to the eat-in galley. It was small but got good light from the windows in the salon, and it suited Evan’s needs. To one side was the U-shaped galley itself, with fairly new stainless appliances and two feet of gray Corian countertop that was just enough. On the other side, a built-in dinette booth with blue striped upholstery and a small window.
Evan poured a cup of milk two thirds full and set it in the microwave to heat, then loaded up his espresso machine and turned it on. Vi had sounded distressed, and no doubt the call was urgent, but Evan had only had three hours of sleep. He wouldn’t get to We-whatever any faster by crashing.
While the espresso brewed, Evan walked back to his stateroom and retrieved the undefiled dress shoes from the locker. He slipped these on, then opened a side table drawer, and pulled out his holster, his badge and his Sheriff’s Office ID. He dropped the ID wallet into his pocket, clipped the holster over his belt on the right side, and fastened his badge to the front of his belt on the left.
There was a decent breeze coming through the open windows, and the air smelled briny and clean simultaneously. Evan took a deep lungful of it and mourned the day out on the water that he’d had planned. Then he went back to the galley, poured the milk and espresso into his travel mug, and took three swallows before he headed back up to the salon.
He returned Plutes’ look of disgust as he crossed the salon, then stepped out onto the sun deck. It was Evan’s favorite part of the boat, large enough for a rattan table and chairs and a decent stainless BBQ. He picked up the trash bag containing the stinking shoe and walked it out to a garbage can on the dock. Then he headed down the long dock toward the main marina building, now mostly dark, and the lights of Port St. Joe, FL. It was mostly dark, too.
Aside from the creaking of fenders against the dock and the clinking of mast rigging on the few sailboats nearby, the sound of Evan’s footfalls was the only noise that disturbed the infant morning.
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I’d like to thank all of the real people in Apalach who, generously and with good humor, have allowed me to turn them into fictional characters. Many thanks to John Solomon, Linda Joseph, Kirk and Faith Lynch, Chase Richards (otherwise known as Richard Chase), and Officer Shawn Chisolm, as well as to Mayor Van Johnson, Sheriff AJ Smith, the Apalachicola Police Department, and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. All of you make these books something I could not make them on my own.
As always, so much gratitude to God, to my family, and to my friends, who put up with me so that I can write, and last but not least, to the most amazing readers any writer could hope to find. I love you all.
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