"What do you mean, under control, Liz?" Paul asked. "The DEA's working on an arrest warrant; they might be sending me down there to escort him back, if they can find him."
"We have him; he's tied up below decks. We thought maybe Clarence…"
"What do you mean, you have him," Phillip interrupted.
"He miscalculated; pissed Liz off while Connie and I were ashore clearing in. He's in rough shape right now."
"What?" Paul asked.
"Look, guys," Liz said, "can you just send a chopper and get him out of our way? He's hog-tied in Connie's cabin, and he's too heavy and awkward for us to get him out of there. Besides, if he keeps bleeding on the teak, I'm afraid Dani's going to kill him."
"Wait!" Paul said. "The DEA wants him."
"They're going to have to get in line," Phillip said. "There's a warrant out for him here for two murders. Besides, the DEA and the French would both be better off if he spent a little time in Clarence's clinic first. Give him a chance to clear his conscience. Figure somebody'll be there in less than an hour to get him out of your way."
****
As the helicopter carrying Dan O'Leary disappeared over the horizon in the direction of Martinique, Dani and Connie got Vengeance under way again. Liz, fully recovered but sporting a big blue goose-egg on her forehead, had gone below to resume her interrupted preparation of her signature warm seafood salad. Dani was stretched out on the windward cockpit seat, her back against the cabin house.
"So where do you want to go, Connie? Your plans keep getting sidetracked. I feel like we should give you another week or two on your charter. This delay was on our tab."
"Don't worry about that. The sailing's great and I'm starting to feel pretty confident about my seamanship. That's what's important to me now."
"You're ready to run your own boat; no question about that. But there are still a lot of islands for you to see."
"I'll see them. I can see some of them from my own boat if we don't get there on Vengeance."
A few minutes passed in comfortable silence, and then Connie said, "I'm not sure about the protocol here, so give me a straight answer, never mind about my feelings. I need to know this for my charter business anyway."
"All right," Dani said, sitting up a bit straighter. "What's on your mind."
"Well, on a term charter like this, the boat is technically mine, right? I mean, I understand that you're still the captain, and your word is law when it comes to the safety of the vessel, and all of that."
"Yes," Dani said in a tentative tone. "What's your question?"
"What if I want to invite guests aboard?"
"Sure. That's your right." Dani looked puzzled. "What…"
"I mean long term," Connie said. "Like, what if I want to invite somebody aboard for, let's say a week or two. Can I do that?"
"In general, yes, I mean, there might be some…ah…"
"Business issues?"
"Exactly," Dani said.
"So if the person chartering agrees to pay for any additional expenses, and the guest will abide by the terms of the charter, and so on, it would be okay?"
"I don't see why not. Where are you going with this?"
"Just want to understand my options."
"Paul?" Dani asked.
Connie blushed beneath her tan. "It was just a hypothetical question. Why do you think I meant Paul?"
"Liz and Sandrine both commented on the way you two looked at one another when you met a few weeks ago in the midst of that Alfano thing. Me, I'm always out of touch on that kind of stuff, but…"
"But what?"
"Well, he just told us he was flying to Martinique to be on hand if the DEA needed him to help with O'Leary."
"So?"
"So I noticed that you had laid a course for Martinique on the chart while they were picking up O'Leary."
"I, uh, I was just curious about the flight time."
"Right. You're steering the first leg of the course you marked, and the chopper doesn't have to detour around the islands like the course you plotted."
"Okay, I'm busted. He's good-looking, and he seems nice. He's looking for a boat, and I want to spend some time shopping for boats myself. He's friends with all of us, and he said he'd been planning to book some time on Vengeance. I figured I could at least get to know him a little better."
Dani grinned and shook her head. "Women," she muttered. "First Liz, now you." She saw Connie's face fall. "Don't get me wrong. I'm just giving you a hard time. Paul's a great guy; nothing like Delorme. I don't know much about this sort of thing, but if I were you, I'd call him before he makes his travel arrangements." She handed Connie the satellite phone and nudged her out from behind the helm. "His number's in the memory."
Epilogue
Two weeks later…
Paul and Sandrine sat in the two chairs closest to the door. Dinner was almost ready, and one or the other had been dashing to the kitchen every few minutes while Phillip summarized what had transpired after O'Leary's return to Martinique.
"O'Leary gave up Delgado and the senator right away. Of course, most of what he had on the senator fell into the category of politically embarrassing rather than criminal," Phillip said.
"Yeah, but once he found out the authorities in St. Vincent wanted to extradite him to face charges as an accessory to Delorme's murder, the senator started talking, too. Jimmy Campbell put him right in the middle of that -- said the senator told Jimmy's guy to 'shut him up, permanently.' The senator's testimony's gonna bury Levine. That guy's behind the whole empire that everybody thought was Delgado's," Paul added. "Maggie O'Malley's probably going to win some kind of prize for her series of articles; she's got a book deal, too."
"Did Kandi Dulzuras ever turn up?" Liz asked.
"Not yet. If anybody knows anything about her, it's Rudy Fellini, and he's not talking. He's also clean, so far," Paul said.
"What about Delorme's wife?" Connie asked.
"Well, O'Leary had the address for the place where Leclerc and his pals had kept her and the other women, but by the time the cops got there, they'd cleared out. Leclerc had a partner who was running that place. A woman from Venezuela; nasty character, from what Godfrey pieced together. They don't know if she took her operation somewhere else or sold off the girls. Godfrey's still chasing that; last I heard, he was headed for Brunei," Phillip said.
A chime sounded from the kitchen, bringing Paul to his feet. He dashed inside, and Sandrine said, "For an Italian, he is not slumped down in the kitchen." She took in the puzzled looks around the table. "I have not said it right. You say, 'He is no slumper,' perhaps?"
"Slouch?" Dani offered.
"Yes! That is the word. He is not slouching in the kitchen."
"He is no slouch in the kitchen," we would say in the States, Connie offered. "He and Liz are going to take turns in the galley for the next couple of weeks while we shop for boats some more."
"So are you two going to team up?" Dani asked.
"Maybe," Connie said. "We're thinking about it. Any advice?"
Dani shrugged. "Not my field of expertise."
Connie looked at Liz. "What do you think, Liz?"
"Make sure he's up to it. I'd be careful about sending a man to do a woman's job."
****
Read an excerpt from Bluewater Stalker, the next book in the Bluewater Thriller series:
Chapter 1
"Humans, like other species, have a hard-wired predisposition not to kill each other. Oh, there are exceptions. Society comes up with reasons why people killing people is for the greater good. And then there are the odd, damaged individuals who deviate from the norm."
Dani exchanged a quick glance with Liz as she reached for her wine glass. They were just finishing a 'welcome aboard' dinner for their new charter guests. Bill Fitzgerald and his wife, Jane, had arrived in Grenada earlier that day, and Vengeance was tied up in a luxury marina, awaiting the couple's decisions as to itinerary. Bill, a professor of cultural anthropology at a small
, private university in the States, had begun to ramble in his response to Liz's question about his academic interests. His short answer, "Serial killers," had prompted Liz to draw him out. Warming to his subject, he had continued his lecture as his wife sat, nodding her agreement. It was obvious she had heard all this before, but she gave no indications of boredom. Quite to the contrary, she followed his lead, interjecting an occasional clarification.
"What about self-defense?" Liz asked, before he moved to another point.
He leaned back and looked at her, surprised and pleased by her interest. "That's instinctive in all species; it's not the same as the impetus to kill in cold blood. Even so, not every individual will react to a violent threat with violence. That's a matter of conditioning and moral values."
"Yes, exactly," Jane added. "Some people just submit when confronted with a violent threat."
"What about in war?" Liz asked. "Soldiers aren't 'hard-wired' not to kill, are they?"
"Aha! Interesting that you should bring that up," Fitzgerald said. "Early on, my interest was piqued by just that question. The answer just blew me away. There's been a lot of research on that topic by the military. It turns out that up through World War II, only a fraction of the soldiers in combat would actually shoot with the intention of hitting and killing or maiming their opponents. I mean 15 percent or thereabouts. Most of them were faking it."
Liz refilled his wine glass as he paused. "Unbelievable!" she said. "How can that be?"
He took a sip and cleared his throat. "It's certainly counterintuitive. I had the same reaction when I first heard that statistic, but it's well documented. One of the landmark works is the book, Men Against Fire, by S.L.A. Marshall. He was the Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations in World War II. That's where the 15 percent number comes from. Of course, nobody believed it then, either, but it stimulated a lot of research that supports his thesis."
"Wow," Liz said, shaking her head.
Bill took another sip of his wine and continued his lecture. "As people began to study Marshall's findings, they learned this wasn't a new phenomenon. It stretched back to the time when it first became possible to kill without personal contact. Battles fought hand-to-hand may have been different, because of the immediacy of the 'kill or be killed' element, but with guns, and probably even with bows and arrows, that statistic held true. There are some fascinating studies on that point, even going back into the 1800s. Seems the traditional training focused on teaching soldiers to shoot, which they did with gay abandon. Teaching them to shoot to kill was a whole different thing, and it didn't have much to do with marksmanship. It involved overcoming that inborn prohibition all animals have against killing one of their own kind."
"I guess that's well documented, too," Liz said.
"Oh, yeah. Actually, 15 percent is a surprisingly high number, considering that outside the battlefield, only a few percent — like less than five percent — of people are inherently capable of killing. Studies suggest about four percent of men and one percent of women take to killing naturally. The military took a lesson from the research. By the time of the Vietnam conflict, they managed to raise the percentage of soldiers who would shoot to kill in combat to better than 90 percent."
"That's as astonishing as the other statistic," Liz said.
"Isn't it?" Jane added.
"How'd the military do that?" Dani asked.
"They relied heavily on conditioning to engender a shooting response in certain situations. After some trial and error in Vietnam, when they went too far, they built in some constraints to help keep the response confined to appropriate situations. Now they spend some training time on the notion that the morality of killing another person depends on staying within those constraints."
Dani nodded, taking another sip of wine as they all pondered what Bill had said.
Liz broke the silence. "I have a different question, Bill."
"Sure. What's on your mind?"
"What about all the school shootings in the States, then? And the other cases of random mass shootings?"
"Did he pay you to ask that question?"
"Why do you ask, Jane?" Liz asked.
"Because that's the very focus of my research. She figures I put you up to it."
"I don't figure any such thing, Bill. Maybe we should change the subject to something more fitting for after-dinner conversation, though."
"Oh, I'd like to hear a little more," Liz said, looking at Jane, "and then I'll serve dessert and you can tell us about your own research. Okay?"
Jane nodded, and Bill took another sip of wine.
"Well," he said, "I think the military's success in suppressing the instinct not to kill and the upsurge in mass murders are related. Interestingly enough, many of the conditioning techniques the military uses are frighteningly similar to all the point-and-shoot video games kids play from their early years on up. Some of the games mimic the training so closely that kids learn marksmanship as well as learning to depersonalize their targets. And they're missing those constraints and moral precepts the military uses to keep the killer instinct in check. In a couple of school shootings, kids who had never fired a gun hit the people they were shooting at — one left multiple victims dead from single shots to the head from across the room."
After a somber moment, Jane asked, "What's for dessert, Liz?"
"It's a surprise, but I'll just say that all the ingredients were grown right here on the island of Grenada." Liz slipped out of her seat and collected the dinner dishes before she stepped back into Vengeance's galley to assemble the dessert course.
"You've been quiet, Dani," Bill remarked. "Do I sense a question?"
Dani shook her head and smiled. "No, that's okay. I shouldn't …"
"Oh, go ahead," Jane said. "He loves it. Don't worry. You can't possibly embarrass him. Ask whatever's on your mind."
"I just wondered if you'd been in combat, Bill."
"No, I haven't. Just read the studies and interviewed troops."
"So you've never killed anybody?"
Bill laughed. "My interest is academic."
Dani nodded. Liz set a tray of rich-looking chocolate desserts on the table as Dani said, "So, Jane, you said earlier that you met Bill when he was an advisor for your Ph.D. program. Are you in the same field?"
Jane smiled. "Hardly. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm focused on helping victims cope with the aftermath of violence — particularly battered women and abused children."
"How about survivors of mass shootings? Ever counsel any of them?" Liz asked.
"No, not yet, but I was thinking along those lines when I started my doctoral program. That's how I ended up with Bill as an advisor."
There was only the sound of spoons clicking softly against china as they addressed themselves to Liz's chocolate mousse. Finished with hers, Jane broke the silence.
"Was that really local chocolate?"
"Absolutely. Grenada's finest, and it's organically produced. If you'd like, we can arrange a tour of the factory."
"Maybe when we come back. I know Bill's eager to get to Dominica."
"Coffee, anyone?" Liz asked.
"Not for me, thanks," Bill replied. "Think I'll take advantage of Vengeance being in a marina and take a walk while we can just step ashore. Jane?"
"Sounds good. Anywhere we should avoid?"
"No. This is a safe place — probably safer than anywhere in the States," Liz said.
"Great. We're real hikers, and I need to walk off that great dinner, so don't wait up for us, ladies," Bill said as he handed Jane up the companionway ladder.
****
"Interesting couple," Liz remarked as she cleared the table and started in on the dishes.
"Yes, they are." Dani picked up a dish from the drain board and dried it, stowing it in the locker behind them.
"Did you think he'd been in combat?"
"No, he didn't come across that way, but you can never tell. Just seemed to have an easy familiarity with the m
ilitary, so I asked."
"Well, Jane told me earlier that he did some consulting with people at the Pentagon, and with the FBI profiling group at Quantico, so he's probably heard some pretty intimate descriptions."
"I guess. While you and Jane were up at the pool this afternoon, he was transcribing notes from a recorded interview he'd apparently done with some serial killer."
"I thought you were servicing the engine while he worked."
"I was, but he'd forgotten to pack his earphones. He asked to borrow some, so I turned on the Bluetooth speaker for him instead. I know how you are about your ear buds.
"Well, they're pretty personal."
"I know. We should remember to pick up some cheap ones, though. Not the first time our guests have asked."
"Good idea. Help me remember, and I'll put 'em on our shopping list soon as we finish the dishes."
As Dani stowed the last of the pans and utensils, Liz said, "Shall I make us a pot of decaf? We might as well enjoy a quiet evening in the cockpit while we can."
"Sure," Dani said.
A few minutes later, they were relaxing in the cool night air, gazing at the stars in the slice of the western sky that they could see through the entrance to the harbor.
"Any idea why they want to go to Dominica first?" Liz asked.
"When they booked the charter, Bill's email said he was doing some preliminary work on the Caribs and the Arawaks and the Tainos, and their interactions around the time the Spanish first came on the scene. I guess he's read all the historical accounts; now he wants to see where it happened. He's hoping to learn something from visiting the Carib village in Dominica, I think."
"Hmm. Guess maybe he'll get something out of it, but I can't imagine there's much of a connection between those poor people trying to preserve their heritage and the Caribs that terrorized the islands and ate the Arawaks before the Spanish came and baptized everybody," Liz said.
"I don't know. I just drive the boat. It's probably some scam to pay for a month-long charter with a research grant. Or maybe write it off on their taxes. Who knows?"
Bluewater Betrayal: The Fifth Novel in the Caribbean Mystery and Adventure Series (Bluewater Thrillers Book 5) Page 20