From the bedroom I heard him say, “Sunny, it’s okay. I’m here now.” There was something not quite right about how he said it. It was too calm.
I got my fingers firmly around the dog’s collar and dragged her to the bathroom, and locked the door.
When I turned around, James was kneeling in the closet opening, and he had freed the rope around Sunny’s legs with a small keychain knife. He helped her to her feet. He’d removed her gag, and she shouted, “Sey!” before her voice was cut short so suddenly, the silence that followed sounded louder than her cry.
In my dark bedroom, the scene lacked color of any sort. The walls, the closet with the swaying empty hangers, the back of James’s head, all were colored only in black and white and muted shades of gray. In that quick glimpse I’d caught of her face, Sunny’s wide white eyes and pale skin made me remember James’s paintings hanging in the gallery down on Las Olas.
“James, what ...,” I started to say, but then I saw that same little half smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. His hand was wrapped around her throat, his brown skin contrasting with hers, the position grotesque yet familiar.
“James, let go of her!” I grabbed his arm and tried to wrench it free. A burst of lights went off in my head, and I found myself on the floor, the side of my head feeling like a firecracker had exploded in my ear.
“Man, that feels good.” Cesar was standing just inside the door to my room, smiling and rubbing his fist. Zeke pushed past him and took James by the arm.
“Mr. Long, not yet. We can still use her.” He peeled James’s fingers from Sunny’s neck. She began coughing and gasping for air. Zeke shook his head and said to Cesar, “The man just doesn’t know his own strength.”
James adjusted his shirt and cleared his throat, blinking at Zeke for a moment as though struggling to remember who he was. “That’s enough, Zeke.”
“No disrespect, but the boss would be pissed if you did this one before he got a shot at her.”
In the video. The arm.
I launched myself at James before I’d had time to think it through. A high-pitched wail filled the room, and even I was startled at some deep level to realize the sound had come from me.
Finally, Zeke grabbed me about my midsection and pulled me off him. James had never stopped smiling.
B. J. was half asleep or unconscious when we all came into the house through the kitchen, but the noise woke him, and he started to heave himself up off the couch before he saw the gun in Zeke’s hand.
“What...”
“Relax, lie back down,” James said. He turned on a small lamp. “See, everyone here is fine.”
“Sey...”
I didn’t answer him. There was nothing left in me. Zeke pushed me toward the love seat, and I fell back into the cushions and covered my face with my hands.
I had kissed those lips. I had touched him, laughed with him. If we hadn’t been interrupted that night by someone, probably Neal, looking in the window, I might have slept with him. First Neal, then James. What was wrong with me? I rubbed at my lips and felt dampness, and realized I had been crying.
Cesar dragged Sunny into the room with his big hand clamped over her mouth. “I think she likes me.” He stuck out his thick tongue and ran it over the side of her face.
“Hey, let her go,” B.J. said, pushing up into a sitting position and then finding Zeke’s gun again pointed at his face.
Sunny’s eyes met mine, looking not so much afraid as resigned. Cesar’s hand held her head tight against his upper abdomen.
I forced myself to sit up on the couch. “Dammit, James.” Even my voice sounded soft. “Make him leave her alone.”
“Seychelle, you’re so predictable. It’s certainly made it easy to follow you. We would have been here sooner except for the fact that this idiot”—he motioned toward Cesar—“couldn’t put two and two together when he heard the boat engines start up earlier.”
Cesar looked at James through his wide-set eyes and his upper lip curled.
“I’m surrounded by idiots.” He waved his hand at Zeke and Cesar.
Cesar’s grip on Sunny’s head grew so tight, the blood drained from his fingers. He and James were locked in some sort of staring match.
“She’s just a kid, James,” I said. When I got no response, I added, “I don’t know why I’m even bothering. You’re no different from either of them.” I jerked my head toward Cesar and Zeke.
“Actually, I’m quite different.” James turned to face me, and his smile turned into a self-satisfied smirk. “I see her as a commodity. I understand the business potential. Men have an appetite for young girls like Sunny.” He spread his hands apart, palms up. “It’s the law of supply and demand.”
“You sick, twisted jerk.”
“No, Seychelle, it’s not that much different from selling cars or shoes. I’m just a good businessman. It takes a certain kind of talent—insight, if you will—to recognize opportunities.”
“Talent? Who are you kidding?”
“I’m serious. I first met Crystal at a Harbor House fund-raiser, and I recognized the opportunity immediately. I could see he was fascinated with what I did, working with young girls every day. He told me he was interested in meeting privately with young girls, and I had an endless supply of runaways. We never had enough beds for all of them at Harbor House, anyway.”
“Stop it. Why are you telling me this?”
He reached over, took my hand, and pressed it between his. I yanked my hand back as though I’d been burned. “I’m just a good businessman, that’s all. Crystal’s the one with the need, always wanting someone fresh, unsuspecting, someone who will fight hard. Who am I to judge? Live and let live.” He laughed out loud then, as though at some private joke.
“When it was just the beatings, I paid the girls well, and they left happy. He got jobs for some of them in the club, and they could make lots of money there.
“Then he started with the video camera. The timing was perfect. I got us onto the Internet, contracted with servers around the world.”
“That’s right, Long,” Cesar said, his guttural voice lower than usual. “You’re the man.” He turned to me. “Dude never wanted to get his hands dirty, always acting like he’s better than us, till one day he found out he likes squeezing off chicks.”
James moved so fast, Cesar never saw it coming. Sunny fell to the floor and James held Cesar’s wrist twisted high behind his back. “No one asked your opinion, now, did we, Mr. Esposito?”
When Cesar didn’t answer James applied more pressure to the bent wrist. Cesar grunted.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I said I’m fucking sorry,” Cesar said, his voice strained.
The room seemed unnaturally quiet just before we heard the crack of breaking bone, followed by Cesar’s scream.
James smiled as he looked down at the man now crumpled on the floor cradling his wrist and whimpering. Then he smoothed out imaginary creases in his clothing, reached into the pocket of his slacks, and pulled out a cell phone. “You look a mess, Seychelle, you know that? That’s a shame, beautiful girl like you.”
“James, Neal’s outsmarted us all. He’s out there collecting Crystal’s money,” I said.
He flipped open the phone and began to dial.
“He took Gorda and went out there over an hour ago. I was going to go out in my Whaler and stop him, but since you’ve been playing games and telling us your life story, he’s probably had time to grab it all and take off.”
“Crystal,” he said, “yes.” He turned his back to us and spoke into the phone. “Yes, sir we’re here at the girl’s place.” He stared straight at me. “All right,” he said, “then you’ll bring the Hard Bottom down here, pick them up, and meet us out there.” He laughed. “You’re right.”
He snapped the phone shut and slid it into his pants pocket. “Zeke, the dive gear, in the car.” He jerked his head, and Zeke Moss hurried toward the front door. “Crystal says you and I are t
o go ahead without them. You find the wreck site, and I’ll take care of Garrett. Our friends will be along to join us later.”
As we rode the tide downriver, I could see the sky lightening behind the houses and trees. The stars were slowly winking out as a watery blue tinged with pink washed in from the east. James sat next to me on the varnished wood midships seat. His thighs showed a tan line—the trunks he had borrowed from Mr. Larsen’s bedroom were too short for his long legs. Between his feet lay the mesh dive bag Zeke had brought in from their car with all the shiny new equipment: mask, fins, and Cesar’s ever-present bang stick. I was more nervous about the firepower of the pressure-sensitive bang stick bouncing around on the floor of the dinghy than I was about the gun that he held low, tucked under his arm, barely visible.
By the time we reached the Intracoastal, dozens of sportfishing boats were headed to the harbor entrance, deckhands readying the baits and outriggers in the growing light. Those big charter boats usually passed me when I was running my tug, but this morning in the Whaler I jockeyed my way between and around them and pounded my way out through the swells in the harbor channel.
At the sea buoy, the charter boats fanned out in all directions, their white wakes etched in the water like the spokes of a wheel. The rim of the sun peeked over the horizon, and within seconds, the whole orb popped into the sky. The sea was flat, and the tiny wavelets reflected back the horizontal rays, making the sea look covered in jewels. The day was shaping up to be hot and almost windless, with no sign of yesterday’s squalls. Summer was nearly upon us. I knew exactly where to head— north, off the condos of Galt Ocean Mile. The coordinates were etched in my memory, the picture of the chart clear in my mind. As we flew up the coast, I tried to come up with a plan, to figure out just what I would do once we got there. When I could make out the Gorda rolling slightly in the little waves, anchored in the same spot I’d found the Top Ten just a few days ago, I still didn’t have a clue.
XXVIII
We were about a hundred yards off Gorda when James waved his hand, palm down, motioning me to slow down. Faintly, across the water and over the sound of our own outboard, we could hear the higher-pitched roar of an engine running. I knew that sound.
“What’s that noise?”
I couldn’t see any reason not to tell him. “It’s a compressor. I use it for filling scuba tanks, hookah diving sometimes.”
He nodded. “I guess we’ll just watch from here. He’ll have to come up sooner or later.”
It was only a few minutes after sunrise, and the heat was already building. I let him sweat for a while before I spoke.
“How far do you think it is to shore from here?” I asked.
“Who cares?”
“I guess that’s the way Neal got off the Top Ten before—you know, after he killed Patty. I guess he used his scuba gear and just swam under the water and came out on the beach.”
James squinted toward the shore.
“He could do the same thing right now, you know. He doesn’t care about the Gorda. Maybe he’s already got the money and he’s swimming for shore as we speak. You may not believe it, but I don’t want to see that son of a bitch get away with that money.”
He raised one eyebrow and swung his head back and forth a couple of times, trying to gauge the distance, to decide if what I was describing was really possible.
“Okay, let’s go over there. Tie up to your boat.”
We tied the dinghy off to the midships cleat and climbed over the bulwark. The compressor was chugging on the afterdeck, making too much noise to permit speaking. The air hose led over the side toward the bow. James stayed behind me, the gun still pointed at the small of my back. I leaned over the bulwark and pointed off the starboard bow to a spot where lots of bubbles were breaking the surface.
“He’s still down there,” I shouted over the roar of the compressor. “Right there.”
James nodded, then searched the horizon to the south, probably hoping to see the Hard Bottom coming out of the harbor entrance.
“One of us could go down, check it out, see what he’s doing,” I said.
He rubbed his chin, staring at the small patch of bubbles off Gorda’s bow.
He motioned with his head. “Rope—where do you keep it?”
“This way,” I said, and passed through the companionway into the wheelhouse. In the passageway heading to the engine room door, I saw that the toolbox was still open on the floor. James was right behind me with the gun, but I reached down and grabbed a big piece of angle iron out of the tin box. I brought the iron up under the gun and tried to carry it through right under his chin.
He was caught by surprise, and as the gun flew up, the noise exploded in the wheelhouse compartment. The starboard wheelhouse window shattered, the safety glass flying in pebble-sized bits and clattering onto the aluminum decks. The gun tumbled to the deck in the wheel- house, and when I tried to duck under his arms and push past him to get at the weapon, his hands twisted me onto my belly, pressing my face to the deck. I was unable to breathe, and he had my left arm behind me, my wrist in his hands. He stepped over me, reaching for the gun. My right hand was free and my fingers could barely touch it, so I pushed it as hard as I could. It skittered across the aluminum deck and slid out the scupper and over the side of the boat. I heard the clunk as it fell into the Whaler tied alongside.
The pressure on my wrist increased, and I waited for the bone to pop.
“I think not.” He pulled me to my feet. “I have something much more interesting in mind for you later. And I want to see your eyes when I do it.”
He used a length of half-inch nylon dock line to tie my hands to the top of Gorda’s wheel. When he was sure the rope was tight enough to cut off my circulation, he said, “The Hard Bottom will be here soon. The more you struggle,” he told me, pointing to my hands, “the more damage those ropes will do.”
As soon as he left to go back to the dinghy, I reached my foot out toward the bottom drawer under the navigation station. After several tries, I got my big toe through the latch ring that locked the drawers, and pulled. It made a loud clatter when the drawer hit the deck, but the compressor noise covered everything. Each movement seemed to draw the ropes tighter about my wrists. Pain wasn’t about to stop me, though.
I pulled the drawer closer and riffled through the junk with my toes: bolts, shackles, old teak plugs, bits of line, and down in the bottom, the stainless-steel rigging knife
Pit had given me years before. I pushed the drawer over with my foot, spilling the contents across the cabin sole, and I pulled the knife closer to me, sliding it across the aluminum deck. It took several tries before I was able to grasp the thick knife with my toes and pick it up. Leaning my butt back, I lifted my foot toward the hands tied to the locked wheel. My toes reached to within about four inches of my hands with the muscles in my back and legs stretching and straining. When I was almost there, the toes let go, and the knife clattered to the floor.
“Damn!”
Finally, on the third try, I got the knife lodged between my toes in a very firm grip. My fingers plucked it right out of my toes, and though I was losing all feeling in my hands and my fingers felt like fat sausages, I eventually pulled the knife out of the handle. The blade cut through the rope in seconds.
I saw that James had taken the Larsens’ tank but used his own mask and fins. His mesh dive bag, shirt, wallet, gun, and keys were neatly stacked in the stern. I could have sat in the dinghy and waited, but even though Neal was a former Seal, James had the element of surprise on his side, and I figured it was about even odds who would be most likely to surface alive. I wasn’t willing to wait and give either of them that element of surprise over me.
The shorts and big T-shirt I’d borrowed back at the house billowed up around me in the water even as I tried to squeeze the air out of the fabric. I wished I could take them off, but I had nothing on underneath.
The water was exceptionally clear. Gorda’s anchor was in the sand off the
port side of the wreck, so the tug was floating just over the stern of the freighter. I could make out the superstructure of the Bahama Belle and see the bubbles rising out of her bow. The top of her mast was only about thirty feet down, but her deck level was a good fifty feet below the surface. I swam slowly toward the bow.
In only a few short months, the sea had already started reclaiming the lump of iron that had once been a working interisland freighter. Dark spots that would become the bases for soft corals were starting to grow around and on top of the pilothouse. Parrot fish, grunts, and trigger fish cruised in and out of the holes that had been blown in the aft cabin areas and around the bridge area. A lone barracuda hovered halfway to the surface, up over the bow.
I heard Neal before I saw him. It was a noise that sounded like a monstrous underwater woodpecker. He was down below the main deck level, visible through a hole that the dynamite had blown in her decks when they sank the ship. The air hose fed into the hole where a yellow dive light illuminated the whole compartment. Debris from his work floated in the water around the light, giving everything a fuzzy appearance. Using some kind of an air hammer, Neal was chipping away at the ballast cement in the anchor chain hold. As he worked, bursts of bubbles emerged from the compartment, and he tossed aside large chunks of cement.
I smiled so wide, water leaked in around the edges of my snorkel. Of course—very clever Neal. It wasn’t unusual for ships to add some cement ballast to make the ship float properly on her lines. Neal had probably chipped out the old cement while in the shipyard, stowed the money, and then cemented over it. Add the anchor chain resting on top of the cement, and who would ever know? Obviously not Customs, the cops, or Crystal and his men.
The noise of the air hammer stopped. The yellow light was momentarily covered by Neal’s body as he maneuvered himself around in the cramped space. He seemed
to be straining, trying to pull something out of the hole he was creating.
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