Surface Tension

by Christine Kling

  I crawled aft on my hands and knees, keeping my head below the level of the bulwark. There was a big white fiberglass deck box on the afterdeck. Under the dock lines, swim fins, tackle box, and snorkels, I found a man’s shortie wet suit. At least this would keep her afloat.

  “Put this on,” I whispered, handing it to her.

  I peeked around the edge of the bulwark. Crystal’s boat was still tied up at that house downriver from us, her engines idling. I couldn’t make out who was aboard, but my guess was that both Zeke and Cesar had jumped ashore to search. I couldn’t be sure though.

  “We’re going to have to go back in the water,” I told Sunny, and her eyes opened wider in fear. “I was a lifeguard. I won’t let you drown. Besides, this wet suit is made of material that floats. It’ll keep you up—you couldn’t sink in this. Okay?”

  She nodded, her mouth set in a tight line. She was showing more guts than I’d expected.

  “Come on.” I led her aft, and we slipped back into the river off the swim step. “Keep your face turned away from their boat. The light reflects off your face, and they might spot us. Just float. Take my hand.”

  We pushed our way around the stern and into the current. The river was only about fifty yards wide here, so we would be passing fairly close to the boat, even if we stayed to the far bank. The hardest part was not looking in that direction. I wanted to see who was on the boat and if they had Lex with them, but I knew it would be foolish to turn my face in their direction. As we drifted past an empty dock on our side of the river, a dog started barking up in the yard. We could hear him running, claws scratching against a wood deck.

  “Shut up, you fucking dog,” Cesar called across the river.

  I felt Sunny squeeze my hand tighter. Neither of us breathed for several long seconds as we floated just opposite their boat. The barking dog raced to the end of the dock. He had finally noticed our dark shadows in the water.

  “Come on, Cesar, we lost them. Crystal’s gonna be pissed,” Moss said just before the idling engine revved and we heard the thump of dock lines being thrown on deck. The noise of the boat began to move upriver, away from us.

  Sunny was shivering, and I could feel the trembling in her hand. I had to get her out of the water. I began scanning the docks and banks of the river for a small boat. Nearly everything we passed was chained up and locked. The river residents knew better than to leave boats loose in this town. We finally came by a little trawler with a punt tied alongside. The punt was no more than eight feet long, and it was so beat-up and ugly, its owners must not have worried about thieves. There were two oars tucked under the center seat. It would do. I held down the bow as Sunny climbed in over the stern, and I soon followed her. After untying the lines and fitting the oars in the locks, we were off, my back and arms straining to pull those oars as hard and fast as I could.

  At the Seventh Avenue Bridge, I pulled off to the side and grabbed hold of a piling. The noise of the cars passing on the steel grate overhead sounded like the rumbling of a jackhammer. This was where I had told Lex we would meet up with her. I waited five minutes before moving on.

  The city was dead quiet as we passed under the downtown bridges. A few cars passed on streets parallel to the river. Each time I held my breath, terrified that it might be them. But even along Riverwalk, there were only a few solitary couples far too wrapped up in themselves to pay us any mind as our creaky oars pulled us downriver.

  Lex would be fine. She was a survivor, I told myself. Then I remembered the last time I had heard that.

  XXIV

  We didn’t say a word to each other. I didn’t know what Sunny was thinking, but I was wondering what I would find at my place. Nervous as I was about what I would find, my hands were grateful as the Gorda came into view on the river. The red ovals on my palms would surely puff up into nasty blisters soon.

  Sunny had nodded off, slumped over in the stern of the dinghy. The wet suit rode up so that the shoulders were at the level of her ears, but the arm holes still gaped at her waist. She’d tucked herself inside, turtlelike, crossing her arms over her breasts. I tapped her on the knee to wake her and lifted my finger to my lips, motioning her not to speak.

  After tying the punt’s bowline off to a piling, I climbed on the dock and gestured for Sunny to stay in the boat. I whistled very softly, not wanting to scare Abaco. I heard her get up from her spot in the bushes, a low growl beginning in her throat, but then she saw me and trotted over jumping up on me to be petted. I motioned for Sunny to reach up and let the dog sniff her hand.

  Peering through the crack in the gate, I saw the dark shadow of a vehicle parked out in the Larsens’ driveway. I slipped through the gate and, crawling on my hands and knees, made my way to the drive. When I lifted my head to have a look, I saw a black El Camino, B.J. slumped over in the front seat.

  I made my way around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was rolled down. I didn’t know if he was asleep or unconscious or worse. I reached in and shook his shoulder.

  He started awake, wide-eyed and alert. “Uh... what?”

  I held my fingers to my lips. “Shh.”

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.” At that moment I heard a car start down the street. “B.J., duck, hide.”

  I made my way to the front of B.J.’s truck, where I couldn’t be seen from the street. The car, the same dark blue Camaro with tinted windows, slowed to a stop at the Larsens’ drive. I could hear the radio tuned to a rap music station, and then Cesar’s deep voice. “See anything?”

  “Nah, it’s too soon, man.”

  The car moved on, making a U-turn and then coming back past the house once more before leaving the neighborhood.

  I slid back around to the window. “Come on. Let’s go out back.” He sat up and opened the door. The noise it made when he closed it made me cringe. I hoped they were well down the street. We hurried back through the gate, and I led him down to the dock, where Sunny still waited in the boat.

  “Help her up, will you?”

  Sunny reached up one arm, and he lifted her out of the boat.

  “I don’t think we ought to go into my house. Let’s go into the Larsens’ place.”

  “Good idea,” B.J. said, and went for the key hidden by the back kitchen door.

  Food smells lingered in the kitchen when B.J. opened the door.

  B.J. reached for the wall plate, and I grabbed his hand. “No lights.”

  Sunny leaned against the wall, her arms wrapped around her midriff, her glazed eyes staring into space.

  “We need to get her into a warm shower. She’s been too cold too long.”

  “You, too,” B.J. said. “You need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re shaking.”

  I hadn’t even noticed it, but he was right. Taking her by the hand, I led her through the dining room to the downstairs guest bedroom and bath. At first she didn’t want to take a shower in the dark, but once I explained the situation to her, she agreed. I found huge, thick towels folded in the closet, and I set one out for her and another for myself, then turned down the covers of the queen-size guest bed. She didn’t speak to me when she got out, just toweled off and crawled under the covers.

  The clothes I peeled off stank of the river: rotting vegetation, oily street runoff, and sewage. The clean hot water felt good, but it restored feeling to my limbs and body, which had been pleasantly numb. Now the many aches returned. In the dark I ran my fingers over the little barnacle cuts on my belly and thighs, the bumps on my head, the deep bruise in my shoulder, the raw blisters on my hands.

  After toweling off my wet hair and combing it out, I wrapped myself in a huge white bath sheet and went in search of B.J. I found him standing to one side of the unshuttered entry window, keeping watch over the front of the house.

  “Any sign of them?”

  “They’ve driven by twice so far. Now they’ve parked. See, down there by the stop sign.”

  “What happened to the cops who were out
there?”

  “They left around seven o’clock. I guess they gave up.” B.J. continued to stare at the vehicle down the street. “I bet they’re talking right now, saying you’ve probably gone somewhere else tonight, but they know you’ll eventually be back. They’ll just wait. And they’re right.” He turned to face me. “You can’t hide in here forever.”

  “No, I know that.” I looked around the front room. “Any idea what time it is?”

  “It’s just after two. I saw a clock in the kitchen.”

  “So we have some time before daybreak. The Larsens shut off the phone when they’re out of town. So I have to sneak over to my cottage and call Mike Beesting in a bit. I know why Neal was out there that day on the Top Ten. We’ll take Gorda out in the morning.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know what Neal was diving for out there, and I know why people are getting killed.”

  He reached out and ran his hand over my slick wet hair. He felt the old bump from the fire extinguisher and then the new one from when they pushed me into the closet.

  “Come, tell me the story in here.” He led me into the family room, where a big-screen TV sat opposite a soft, deep nine-foot couch, the kind of couch you sink into and have a hard time getting out of. When we fell into the soft pillows, I made sure we were a safe distance apart and that my towel remained discreetly wrapped.

  I puffed out my cheeks and exhaled loudly. “B.J., you can’t imagine what I saw tonight.” My throat tightened. “We’ve got to stop them.”

  He chuckled. “Like I said, out to save the world.”

  “No, not the world ... just some girls, like Sunny in there. I didn’t save Elysia; in fact, I probably even contributed to her death. I mean, if I hadn’t gone to talk to her that night... I think she’d still be alive.”

  B.J. reached over and took my hand in his. There was more compassion than romance in the gesture, yet my body reacted to his touch as though an inner fault line were shifting.

  I looked into his almond-shaped brown eyes. B.J. was a man, like Neal, like Cesar. Could I trust this man? I’d made so many bad choices recently, I didn’t trust my own judgment anymore. Was this man any different?

  He stared back at me, unflinching. “It’s okay to ask questions,” he said.

  I slid over the cushions, wrapped my arms around his waist, and rested my head against his chest. “And that’s why you are different,” I whispered.

  We sat like that for a while just holding each other. And then, with those miracle-worker fingers of his, he began massaging my head, easing the pain in the bumps and taking the tension out of my temples. I twisted around until I was leaning against him like a backrest and started to tell him the whole story.

  “See, B.J., people don’t normally build compartments into ships to smuggle stuff out of this country. That didn’t make sense to me at first.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “But then I thought about where they were going, the Cayman Islands, and then it all made sense.” From my head to my neck to my shoulders, his fingers worked, bringing life and warmth and tingling and pleasure.

  “What made sense?” he asked.

  “What are the Caymans known for?”

  “Diving and banks,” he said, and began kissing me on the side of my neck.

  “Right. So if you’ve got lots of illegally obtained cash...”

  I started to ask him where he thought Neal might have hidden the money on the freighter, but just then his hands reached over the tops of my shoulders.

  I needed to check on Sunny, I needed to call Mike, but all that faded with this other need. Leaning back into B.J.’s chest, forcing his hands to slide lower, I pulled loose the bath sheet so that his hands were free to slide over my breasts and down my belly. From deep in his chest I heard a murmur, maybe a groan, and I knew, as surely as he had known the time was wrong before, that this time was just right.

  XXV

  We lay naked on the couch, our bodies entwined, and I tried to join B.J. in that much-needed world of sleep. I’d had almost no sleep in the last forty-eight hours, and the fatigue I felt was bone deep. But I was too tired to sleep. I wanted and needed the rest so badly, I was trying too hard. My eyes simply would not close, so I lay there staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, willing myself to get some rest.

  Once again I had a feeling that we were being watched. All the windows except that one by the front door were covered on the outside with aluminum hurricane shutters. No one could be looking in. I glanced toward the entry, wondering if I was sensing someone coming to the front door. Or was it just paranoia, a reaction to the days of dealing with these wackos?

  My heart rate had quickened, along with my breathing. Thoughts went around inside my brain like clothes in an electric dryer. I felt trapped under B.J.’s arm, so I slowly rolled off the couch, out from under his embrace. He moaned and rearranged himself but didn’t wake.

  I had to get to a phone, call Mike, then get out to the wreck site. There would be clothes upstairs. Mrs. Larsen was shorter and heavier but I wasn’t up to crossing the yard in the buff.

  Their bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and in the dresser I found some navy shorts and a black T-shirt. With a belt from the closet, I was able to keep the shorts up. The shoes were all too small for my size nines. Padding down to the toilet at the end of the hall, I thought I heard a noise from behind a closed door. I stopped for a moment and listened, but I didn’t hear anything. In the bathroom, I heard it again. It was a creaking metallic sound.

  As I pulled up my shorts, I thought about the closed door out there in the hall. I knew the house fairly well; the door led to another guest bedroom. I couldn’t imagine why this door was closed, unless B.J. had closed it for some reason. Reaching for the doorknob, I heard the sound again, much louder, more distinct this time. I froze. I knew that sound. It was the sound of the aluminum hurricane shutters rolling up.

  The hallway seemed wide open and very exposed. I pulled my hand back from the doorknob, my pulse now pounding in my throat. Cesar must have figured out we were in here. But how did he get up onto the second story?

  Unless ... The idea forming in my mind seemed farfetched at first, but then all my tumbled thoughts fit together. Maybe someone trying to get out, not in.

  I crept down the hall to the spare bedroom and put my ear to the door. It was quiet, almost too quiet for anyone to be in there. Then, far off, I heard the sound of an outboard cranking over. My outboard.

  I opened the door and the light from the open window lit the interior almost like daylight to my unaccustomed eyes. Stopping short in the middle of the room, I stared at the mess around me. There were food wrappers, dirty dishes, and soda and beer cans all over the carpeted floor. Some tools and hoses were set out on blankets on the floor, and several torn-open FedEx boxes were stacked by the closet. The linens on the bed were twisted into a crumpled, dirty jumble. A rope tied around a large armoire led over to and out the window. Rags and towels with dark stains were strewn about everywhere. I picked one up and held it up to the light. Bloodstains.

  The outboard engine caught and roared to life. I made it to the window just in time to see a familiar silhouette throw off the lines from the davits and take off upriver in my Boston Whaler.

  XXVI

  My feet barely touched the carpet as I flew down the stairs. Damn him! First my money, now my boat! That son of a bitch! I didn’t bother closing the kitchen door behind me. Abaco yipped at my heels as I ran down the path to the dock. She liked this game—first she got to chase her old buddy Neal, and now I was playing, too. Only this was no game.

  I yanked the door to the Jet Ski’s boathouse. Locked. Keys . .. keys . . . where were the keys? That’s right, Gorda. I ran over, punched the code into the tug’s alarm panel, and yanked open the wheelhouse. Chart table drawer. It was a mess, jam-packed with pencils, old fuel dock receipts, brass dividers, a small hand-bearing compass, and down in the bottom of the mess, the boathouse keys.<
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  The key turned easily in the lock. With a single tug, the Jet Ski slid out and down the carpeted ramp, splashing into the water. I jumped on and hit the button with my thumb. Nothing happened.

  “Damn!”

  I glanced upriver in the direction Neal had gone. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered the emergency kill switch—a tab that had to be in place for the bike to start. I threw an extra dock line over the water bike and crawled into the little boathouse on my hands and knees. I felt the coiled plastic-coated wire, grabbed it, and hopped back on the boat. I slipped my hand through the Velcro wristband and slid the tab into place. I prayed the gas in the water bike wasn’t too old. She started right up. I hunkered my body down tight to the machine and cranked that baby up full bore.

  Only a few hours earlier, Sunny and I had rowed quietly down this waterway. Now the Jet Ski screamed back upriver, her engine’s whine echoing back off the houses lining the riverbanks, the wind making my eyes water and tying my loose hair into knots. I’d ridden this thing only once before, and I found myself oversteering, zigging and zagging, nearly slamming into one seawall, then the other.

  The startled bridge tender’s moonlike face appeared behind the glass as I roared under the Andrews Avenue Bridge. He must have wondered what the hell we were doing tearing upriver at that hour, first Neal in my Whaler and now me, maybe two to three minutes behind him.

  After I passed under the 1-95 bridge and the river widened, I could see the remains of the Whaler’s wake ahead of me. I knew I was closing on him.

  As I approached the fork in the river, I wondered which direction he would take—west toward the Everglades or south to the Dania Cutoff Canal and a big circle back to the entrance to Port Everglades. I bet on the Dania direction, and that choice was confirmed when I saw that his wake still ruffled the water in that direction.