by Melissa Good
“Hi, Mom,” Dar said.
“I’m not going to pretend I have a clue about what’s going on, so I’m just going to wish you a happy birthday.”
Dar chuckled. “Thanks.”
“And I hope you’re having a good, annual, hyper-commercialized, forced exchange of personal resources, too.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too, Mom.”
“Merry Christmas, Mom!” Kerry leaned back and called out.
“Good Solstice.”
“Tell Kerry I said thanks, and thank her for the card,” Ceci said. “You kids be careful, hear?”
Kerry finished her transmission, then scooted out of bed and ambled back over to the table, before Dar’s close, bare proximity spurred her to further amorous adventures.
“We’ll be fine, Mother,” Dar exhaled. “How’s Chino?”
“She’s just fine,” Ceci assured her. “The place is fine, the island hasn’t sunk, your stock is up two dollars, and I do believe your father has just opened a bottle of champagne, so I’ll just have to let you get on with your celebration.”
“Have a great night,” Dar told her. “Call us if you need anything.”
“How about you call us if you need anything?” Ceci countered.
“G’night, Dar.”
“Night.”
Dar had just closed the phone when a knock came at the door.
“Ah. Bet that’s our friend,” she commented. “Let him in.”
Kerry turned, putting one hand on her hip. She gazed at Dar with both eyebrows lifted.
Dar stared back at her, then realized what she was looking at.
Terrors of the High Seas 215
“Oh.” She put the laptop aside and stood up, shedding her bed sheets and padding across the wooden floor. She opened her bag and pulled out a pair of shorts and a shirt.
Kerry went to the door and leaned on it. “Just a second,” she called, peeking through the eyehole to make sure it was Bob and not something even skunkier.
“Okay.” Dar returned the bed and retrieved her laptop, then settled into an armchair.
Kerry opened the door. “Hi.” She stepped back to allow Bob to enter. “C’mon in.”
He was dressed in pressed chinos and a neatly ironed polo.
“Hi.” He gave Kerry an eager smile, his eyes flicking over her head to Dar and then back. “Thanks for calling me. I was hoping I could find you guys again. I really need to talk to you.”
“Ah,” Dar murmured. “That’s good, because we need to talk to you.”
Bob hesitantly walked over and took the seat across from Dar.
“I’m sorry, I’m interrupting your dinner?”
Kerry had returned to the table. “It’s okay. We’re used to eating during business meetings.” She examined Dar’s plate, then walked over and handed it to her. “Bob, you know, I’m really pissed off at you.”
Dar set the plate on the arm of the chair and continued her work, letting Kerry do the talking as they’d planned.
“M…me?” Bob sounded very surprised. “What did I do?”
“You left two friends of ours in a really bad place last night.”
Kerry gazed seriously at him. “They got hurt.” She sat down on the edge of the window and rested her elbows on her knees. “Why did you do that?”
For a moment, the only sound was the soft, rapid-fire rattling of Dar’s laptop keys.
“I thought they’d be fine,” Bob finally muttered. “I thought the thugs would come after me, not them.” He shifted uncomfortably.
“I didn’t mean for them to get hurt.”
Well, Kerry considered, that was actually marginally logical.
“Why did you think they’d go after you?” she asked.
Bob got up and paced, visibly nervous. “Why? I’m the one they’re after. I’m the one who keeps trying to get down to that wreck. If we’d gotten anything, it’d have been on that boat. Sure, I thought they’d go after me.”
“But they didn’t,” Kerry said.
“No, I…” Bob stared out the window. “I thought I got lucky.”
He turned. “Hey, it’d be the third time, you know? Besides, Bud and Charlie looked like they could take care of themselves. What could I have done, anyway?”
Kerry stared steadily at him.
216 Melissa Good
“Hey, I admit it—I’m no hero.” Bob lifted his hands. “I’m not like you. I’ll save my own skin first, and that’s just the truth, okay?”
Kerry looked at Dar. Dar rolled her eyes and shook her head.
Kerry sighed and took a bite of her dinner. “So, why were you looking for us, then?” she asked. “Did you need another diversionary target?”
Bob apparently felt his grilling was over and that he’d won a point. “No.” He gathered his confidence again. “Look, I realized I was going about this the wrong way. I need resources, and help.”
He faced them. “So, here’s the deal.”
Dar rested her elbow on the chair arm while Kerry leaned forward attentively.
“I want to make you my partners,” Bob said. “Is that a good deal or what?”
Blue and green eyes met across the inn room. Kerry sighed.
“Bob?”
“Yeah?” He grinned at her. “I know, it’s a big sacrifice for me, but—”
“Did you get dropped on your head a lot as a kid?”
“Huh?”
“I should have stayed naked,” Dar commented, shaking her head sadly. “He’d never have noticed.”
“Huh?”
“Another explicit reason why stupid people shouldn’t breed.”
“What are you guys talking about?”
“I think we should just tie him up and leave him in the closet,”
Kerry decided.
“Hey!”
Chapter
Twenty
“OKAY. HERE’S THE scenario as I see it.” Dar paced in front of the window, her hands in her pockets.
Bob was sitting in the corner, keeping as far away as he could from Bud, who’d arrived not long before. Kerry was seated on the bed cross-legged, and the only thing missing was a whiteboard and markers.
Dar was actually quite a good situational analyst, as Kerry had decided some time ago. She tended to toss out all the irrelevant details and concentrate on the core issues, and if you were smart, you let her finish before you asked any questions.
“But, wait.” Bob spoke up. “Don’t you think I should explain my part of this first?”
“No,” Dar said. “As I was saying…here’s the scenario.” She paused. “We have a ten-year-old wreck in pretty rough condition, just east of Charlie and Bud’s place. We have one certifiable nutcase trying to bring up bits of it, and another certifiable nutcase trying to blow it up.”
“Hey!” Bob protested.
“Shut up,” Bud drawled. “Or I’ll stick a chair leg down your throat.”
“Nutcase two has the resources to achieve his objective.” Dar consulted a piece of paper on the table, now cleared of its tray. A pot of tea, however, squatted mutely in the center. “He also has the easier task.” She turned to Bob. “Are you ready to tell us what you’re looking for?”
Bob squirmed a little as all eyes fastened on him. “Um.” He swallowed, an audible sound in the silent room. “Well, you know, that’s a… Y’see, I don’t know if I can, um…”
Dar walked over and put her arms on his chair, fixing him with her dourest look. “Kerry risked her life to save your ass. Don’t even think about not trusting us.”
“Uh.” Bob leaned back in the chair. “It’s not that, it’s…
just…I…”
“You don’t know, do you?” Kerry spoke up. “You have no idea 218 Melissa Good what you’re looking for.”
Dar looked at Kerry, then looked at Bob. The expression on his face spoke volumes. “Is that true?”
“Um.” Bob gulped. “Sorta.”
Dar straightened and walked over to the window, lift
ing both hands and letting them drop in eloquent silence.
“Son of a bitch,” Bud snorted. “No wonder you told us to show you everything we done brought up,” he said. “I thought that was a weird-ass story about lookin’ for pieces of some puzzle.”
“See.” Bob sat up. “I told you I shoulda explained first. Here’s the deal.” He took a breath. “My grandma—”
“She’s not your grandmother,” Dar interrupted. “You’re not even related to her. You’re trying to impress her granddaughter, who you want to marry.”
Bob looked at her in consternation.
“You’re from Ohio,” Kerry added with a brief smile. “Your family raises alpacas.”
“Who are you people?” Bob asked, looking from one to the other. “Cops?”
Dar snorted. Kerry just laughed.
“Okay.” Bob sighed. “Yeah, I’m a fraud.”
“Now there’s a damn news flash,” Bud muttered.
“But it’s in a great cause. Listen,” Bob recovered, “it’s true, about Tanya’s grandpa. He hated his kids like poison. Wanted to find a way to screw ’em over any way he could. So his will—”
“Left most everything to charity and his wife,” Dar broke in.
“Except after he drowned, the family brought a suit claiming he was nuts, and they had the will invalidated.” She lifted a sheet of paper on the table. “Everything went to the eldest son.”
“Right.” Bob wrested control back of the conversation. “And he’s a jerk.”
“Common problem we’ve been encountering lately,” Kerry murmured. “Maybe it’s the water.”
“He controls everything, and the worst part is, he took all Tanya’s grandmother’s money away from her because he got the courts to say she’s incompetent,” Bob went on. “Tanya helps her out, but it’s really tough. Her uncle says it’s just too bad, since she, Grandma, I mean, supported Grandpa and didn’t want him to leave any money to the rest of them.”
That, Dar acknowledged, seemed to be the truth according to the two-page, neatly formatted answer she’d gotten from Richard.
The uncle, Patrick Wharton, was apparently really the asshole Bob was describing. Richard had added several footnotes in which he’d laid out the players. None of them seemed to be sterling citizens, but of them all, Wharton was the worst, and apparently the grandma was a witchy, but basically innocent victim.
Terrors of the High Seas 219
The fact that Bob actually wanted to marry into that nest of unpleasant invertebrates sealed his idiocy, so far as Dar was concerned. However… “Okay.” Dar sat on the windowsill. “So we don’t even know if this thing, whatever it is, exists.”
“We think it does. Well, it did,” Bob said. “The thing is, we’re looking to prove old Grandpa Wharton wasn’t nuts, and maybe Uncle Patrick had something to do with his drowning.”
“Do you really think he did?” Kerry asked.
Bob shrugged. “I dunno, but he’s the type that coulda.”
Bud got up and messed with the teapot. “Bullshit chase.” He shook his head.
Dar was inclined to agree. “What makes you think there’s anything on that boat that can prove anything? It’s been sunk for a decade.”
At last, Bob smiled. “’Cause Putrid Pat thinks so,” he said.
“After they shipped the old lady off to a nursing home, they pulled apart the old man’s house. Right after that, Pat went nuts and started trying to hire DeSalliers to go check out the wreck.” His fingers tapped the arms of the chair. “Tanya found out, and that’s how the whole thing got started. We figure he must know something or else why bother?”
Kerry propped her chin up on her fist. “That makes sense,” she admitted.
“So DeSalliers must know what he’s looking for,” Dar murmured.
“And he thinks maybe you found it, that first time,” Bud commented. “Maybe that’s why he keeps pestering you.”
Kerry got off the bed and walked over to the table, examining the pages Dar had printed out. “But we didn’t. All we brought up was an old wooden cigar box, falling to pieces. It was so coral-encrusted, it looked like a piece of sea garbage. There wasn’t anything there.”
“But…he doesn’t know that.” Dar leaned back against the sill.
“And he’s panicking, because unless he can bring back positive proof to Wharton that no evidence exists, he doesn’t get paid. He doesn’t get paid, he’s tapped, and I doubt he can afford the gas to get back to the States.”
“Okay.” Kerry joined Dar by the windowsill, settling next to her shoulder to shoulder. “So there are two different things here. I guess the proof that he was involved in a murder would be more important to the uncle, but if there’s anything proving that Grandpa wasn’t nuts, I don’t think that would be something that would have been on that wreck.”
“No,” Dar agreed. “We have to figure out why Popeye was all the way down here in the tropics, and what he was after.”
“We were hoping to find his log,” Bob explained. “He kept a 220 Melissa Good diary, but it was a paper book, so…unless someone salvaged it and it’s in somebody’s house, or in a shop somewhere…”
Bud sipped his tea, glaring at everyone over the rim of the cup.
“Can ask around,” he said. “We know the freelance salvagers
’round here.”
Dar grunted, giving Bud a brief nod. “All right,” she decided.
“First thing we do is scuttle DeSalliers. I’ll call Pat Wharton tomorrow, tell him I think I’ve got what he wants, and see what he says about it.”
Everyone looked at Dar in surprise. Dar looked back at them.
“What? I’m sick and tired of that bozo smacking my friends around and ruining my vacation.”
“He could freak out,” Kerry suggested.
“He could grow tail feathers and fly to Bermuda, too,” Dar replied. “Meantime, Bud, if you’ll check with your buddies and see if you can find out what the old captain’s gig was, maybe we can make heads or tails out of this stupidity and I can go back to windsurfing.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Bud agreed grudgingly. “They figure on letting Charlie out of the hospital tomorrow. He’s got a bigger little black book than me. We can call more then.”
“All right.” Dar folded her arms. “I’ll pull as much regulatory information as I can on the old man’s business contracts. I’ve got someone unraveling his public trust filings.” She exhaled.
“Meanwhile, we’ll visit the government offices tomorrow and see what they have on record for him and that damn boat, and what was filed when it sank.”
Bob gazed at her. “Who are you people?” he asked again.
“C’mon. I came clean, now it’s your turn. Are you government agents or something?”
“No,” Dar told him with a severe look. “It’s worse. We’re rampaging techno-capitalists.” She put an arm around Kerry’s shoulders. “Dilbert on steroids, only classier, and with a much cuter dog.”
Kerry snorted, turning and burying her face in Dar’s shoulder.
“Honey, stop it.”
Dar shrugged. “He asked.”
“Right,” Bob murmured. “Okay, well…what do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” Dar told him curtly.
“Really,” Kerry adopted a slightly kinder tone, “we’ve got it covered. If DeSalliers sees you around, it’s just going to complicate things.”
Bob looked at her. “You’re really a spy, aren’t you?” he accused. “Or some international police or something ?” He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it; are you a DEA agent?”
Terrors of the High Seas 221
“No.” Kerry sighed. “I’m a nerd,” she told him, causing Bud to muffle a smirk. “Really.”
“Oh.” Bob still looked very confused. “Like a hacker?”
Kerry was about at the end of her patience. “No. Dar’s the hacker; I’m just a nerd.”
“You really a hacker?” Bud asked Dar with interest.
Dar started chuckling. “Sometimes, yeah,” she confirmed. “A very, very expensive one.” Her hands drifted over the laptop keyboard. “Okay, I think that’s enough intrigue for one night.
Kerry needs to get some rest.” She glanced up at Bud. “You let us know tomorrow how Charlie’s doing?”
Bud nodded. “Yeah.” He fiddled with the room key. “He about chewed that doctor’s arm off when he said he couldn’t come outta there tonight.”
“Know how he feels,” Dar said. “I’ll give you a call in the morning after I call Wharton.”
“What about me?” Bob whined.
“We’ll call you, too,” Kerry told him, trying to ignore the low growl behind her. “Dar’s right. We should all get some rest. I’m sure tomorrow’s going to be busy.” She gently herded them out and shut the door, then she turned and faced Dar, who had taken a seat in one of the armchairs. “Why do I feel like I’m trapped in a bizarro Agatha Christie mystery novel?”
Dar held out a hand and Kerry crossed over to the chair and sat on an arm. “I figure, we get rid of DeSalliers, dig up whatever stuff we can here and give it to Bob and get rid of him, and then we can get back to having fun.”
Kerry leaned over and kissed Dar on the head. “Sounds like a plan, boss.” She only hoped it would work.
Chapter
Twenty-one
KERRY STRETCHED OUT her legs, and then propped them up on the railing of the porch outside their room. The day had dawned bright and sunny, and she had decided to spend the time waiting for breakfast by attempting a little poetry. Dar was off picking up something at the hotel’s sundry shop, and she had a few minutes to simply look out over the harbor and revel in the gorgeous view.
And it was truly gorgeous. High up on the slope as they were, the harbor stretched out below her and curved to either side, cupping a crystal aqua circle of water with just the lightest visible chop on it. Around her, she could hear the rustle of trees, the cry of gulls, sounds from the harbor, but very little traffic or bustle. The air mostly bore the scent of foliage and salt air, and Kerry felt a sense of peaceful well-being as she relaxed in the warm sunlight.
With a smile, she returned her attention to the book balanced on her lap and the heavy, injected-ink writing pen Dar had given her. The pen was hardwood, and warm from her hand, and it balanced well in her grip as she flexed her fingers around it.