In Harm's Way (A Martin Billings Story Book 3)

by Ed Teja

  “So you don’t think she is running from this Nate after all?”

  “Not as hard and fast as she pretends. I’m sure she is avoiding him, but something is keeping her here. She has some business that she wants to take care of. All the talk about getting away was just to confuse us — and probably Nate.”

  “And you said this Nate was talking about a clock.”

  “I mentioned that to her and got the impression it didn’t come as news to her. She showed no surprise at all. I don’t know if she came here to do something and Nate came to stop her, or if she came to stop Nate from doing something, or even what the hell any of them are up to, but it is complicated.”

  “I tell you something simple,” Inspector George said. “We are going to find that woman and arrest her. And after I charge her with murder, we are going to find out what all the rest of this is about.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. He gave me a dark look. “I mean it. I hope you arrest her soon. The sooner the better.”

  “For everyone,” Bill said.

  13

  “You look like a man with a world of trouble on his mind.”

  I looked up from my lonely dinner and saw Gazele looking at me. It was a slow night. She’d given Sally the evening off and I was eating alone, not enjoying it much. Actually, I had no idea what I was eating.

  “More confusion than trouble,” I said. “Although sometimes one leads to the other. There’s a lot going on I don’t understand.”

  “With all that is going on in this world, it seems like it must be that way most of the time,” she said, sitting down.

  “That’s probably true.”

  “And most of the time you not worrying about it all, just dealing with it.”

  “But this murder… the inspector thinks I’m involved.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “What?”

  “He talked to Walter, and Walter told me that he called the Port Captain in Trinidad who confirmed your story. He knows you didn’t have time to get here and be involved in this mess.”

  “Then why does he keep asking me where she is?”

  “He has to play by the rule book. If he leans on you and you do the work for him. the stuff he can’t do or ask his men to do, he can solve the case. He can see you trying to do the right thing and he gonna use that to manipulate you.”

  “Damn. I didn’t see that.”

  “A lot of things you don’t see, Marty.”

  “Point a few of them out,” I said. “I’m willing to be educated.”

  “Well, you letting confusion blind you to things always going on around you. People can’t help but make confusion and a smart person, well sir, she does her best to figure out real quick which of them gonna affect her life and which ain’t.”

  “I try to do that.”

  “No, you don’t. You worry about doing the right thing. So all the time you thinking about what you supposed to do, or what you should have done so that folk will know you a good man.”

  “Is that what I do?”

  “For certain. So, say some woman getting herself in trouble, a person who doesn’t even ask for anyone’s help, mind. Now you’d think she ain’t nothing you should be worrying about. If she come here and ask for you to help her, that another thing. But when you have to spend all your time thinking about who you should be helping and no one asking for help — that not doing no one any good. All that fretting is just raising sand.”

  “So I shouldn’t worry about her.”

  “You did too much already. So now, if she goes to the policemen — fine. She don’t — fine. Her choice.”

  “You are wise beyond your years,” I said.

  She patted my hand. “And all this nonsense you bothering with, well, that is hard on poor Gazele.”

  “Hard on you?”

  “Damn right. You are keeping too busy with foolishness you can’t fix or stop, and not leaving room for the kind of foolishness that you could be enjoying.”

  In case I was slow on the uptake she placed a slim, delicate hand onto my thigh and squeezed it. “You see, appreciating a loving friend is the kind of foolishness that should take up a lot of space in a man’s head,” she said. “Admiring a lady proper like, well, I telling you, that takes a clear mind. So, it’s only right that you empty it out of all them unnecessary things.”

  Even without her gentle, sensuous touch, I would have gotten her point. She was tired of being ignored. She didn’t want us concerning ourselves with silly things like crazy people, and people who murder yachties, or even working out who they all were. After all, they weren’t even good customers.

  She looked around the restaurant and sighed. “I’m going to close early. There is no point staying open for the geckos and a couple of boaters nursing a beer.”

  “And then?”

  She smiled. “Well, I was thinking… I never did make love on a big old freighter.”

  “Well, even if I can’t fix the world, I just might be able to fix that.”

  She squeezed my thigh. “If that’s what you think, then I can toss the last of these late-night bums out and shut The Barracuda down.”

  Early in the morning, as the first rays of light slanted in across the bay, creating strangely colored vistas filled with pinks and soft purples, while the air was still fresh, we lay together on my bunk in my stateroom.

  “Another day and it started with a sweet night,” she said.

  “It was sweet indeed.” I hesitated then. Having a naked woman in my arms and not wanting to let her go, while knowing the night had to end, came hard for me.

  She kissed me. “If you had a good night, don’t go messing it up by wondering what all this means,” she said.

  “Mind reader.”

  “It’s kinda natural, but the problem is, for men like you there isn’t going to be a good answer ever, and not with any woman.”

  All that made my head spin. I had to unravel it. “Men like me?”

  “Selfish men.”

  That stung and my reaction must’ve shown it in my face, because she smiled and put her fingers to my forehead. “Marty, don’t go fussing about it.”

  “You said I’m selfish. I don’t think I’m selfish.”

  “They you ain’t paying attention.”

  “I try.”

  “And you also seeing it as a bad thing.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No more than being way too smart, or not very smart, or too tall for a doorway… not bad or good, just what is.”

  “I was taught it was wrong to be selfish.”

  She grinned. “Some folk use words differently. If a person don’t like it when they aren’t the center of things, they make being selfish mean thinking only about yourself.”

  “Then what do you mean by it?”

  “That you want to do the best you can and for you that means whatever you are doing, whoever you are with gets one-hundred percent of you. Last night, Marty was right there with me — every bit of him, and that made it good. I do the same so I understand that when you are working on something important, you go there, mind and body. And if you are hauling a cargo in some big-assed storm, you aren’t going to be thinking about this little brown ass. Maybe later, but then, you are right there, doing what you need to do, and being selfish, being good at what you do.”

  “I call that focused.”

  “That’s okay too, but it still means shutting other things, other people out, don’t it? You need to feel okay about doing it so you call it focused. Some people can’t deal with being shut out, so they call it selfish. Either way, that is what you good at doing things, whether it’s work or making love. But it also means you aren’t there emotionally for folks the way some people like you to be. I bet your ex-wife complained about you ignoring her.”

  “True.”

  “Cause when something comes up, that’s what you do. Some women can’t stand it that you think about
anything but them. It hurts them.”

  “But not you.”

  “No, but that’s because I’m like you. If we decide to hop into bed or go for a walk together, then that’s where we are, and it is wonderful. But life comes along, and we each got things to do and places to be. I know damn well that if you meet some other woman, then your attention gonna be on her, because that’s how you are.”

  “Are you saying you are good with that?”

  She laughed. “I best be, and you too, cause it is who we both are. It isn’t something you change cause you want to. Right now, every part of you is working to figure this out. That’s good. But tomorrow you might be on another island, and it ain’t likely that when some lovely woman sits beside you, your thoughts will be on me. And if you and she have some fun, well, that doesn’t say a thing about what you think about me.”

  “And, if you are chatting with another man, finding him desirable…” The idea suddenly made me feel stupidly jealous.

  “That would have nothing to do with you and me at all.”

  I laughed. “And it isn’t something you care to change.”

  “I had two good husbands. I tried to be what they thought a wife should be because I didn’t want to hurt them. I finally saw that although we got along fine, that meant I wasn’t being the best person I could be. I sure wasn’t as happy as I could be.” She grinned. “If you gonna love me, then you gotta accept that I am like you that way? We can love, but we ain’t ever gonna be married or even a couple the way other people see that.”

  I had my hand on her taut ass, pulling her close. “I think I can. Do we have some time for me to adjust to the idea, to savor the idea that when I make love to you I’ll have one-hundred percent of your attention?”

  “You didn’t think so before?”

  “Oh, sure, but I like to be thorough. I still have you here and now, after all.”

  She rolled over and pulled me close. “We can make time.”

  As we took the dinghy ashore Gazele was beaming and I wondered if it was my exceptional lovemaking, the nice morning, or the fact that she’d put her relationship cards on the table and found it didn’t scare me off. I wasn’t sure it mattered.

  “I’m getting you to the office kind of late this morning. Will the world end?”

  She was laughing. “Not at all. I told Sally she gonna have to open up The Barracuda this morning and to let Jeff know I’d be late at The Boat Shop,” she said.

  “When did you call her? You were busy this morning.”

  “I tell her last night when I sent her home.” She patted my arm. “I had me a little feeling I wouldn’t make it back last night. I told Sally that if she and Bill are enjoying themselves, they gonna have to finish up in time for the breakfast crowd.” She leaned back in the dinghy, stretching out that svelte body. “When we get there, I gonna make us some late breakfast.”

  “So, the fun ends and we return to the world of commerce.”

  “Oh, Marty, that business stuff can be a different kind of fun. Maybe I need to buy into your business as an operating partner, handle the books.”

  The idea was intimidating and exciting. “Maybe you should.”

  I tied the dinghy to our usual spot just down from the Port Captain’s office, where Bill could find it easily if he needed to get out to HARM. Since he didn’t carry a cell phone, and refused to even learn to use one, we still relied on some of our well-established strategies from ‘the olden days,’ as he called them.

  “You must remember, Junior,” he said, “back in the days when a phone call wasn’t always an option to make sure life went along smoothly.” I did. And although there were times when his refusal to adopt modern technology aggravated me, generally, I was just as glad. Bill thought that not relying on technology kept him grounded, and to an extent I agreed with him.

  While cell phones had proved incredibly convenient, more than once I’d had to confront the fact that their convenience, any convenience, could be overrated and even a trap of its own. Between us, Bill and I met somewhere in the vague middle ground between high-tech sailors who used satellite navigation, and all manner of gadgetry and Joshua Slocum, who managed to cover a fair bit of the world’s oceans alone and without electricity of any kind. It was a comfortable compromise, all things considered.

  Gazele and I walked down the dock, her arm tucked in mine, her head resting against my arm, a warm and lovely human contact. As we left the dock and turned down Front Street, heading toward the bar, a blur of motion I caught out of the corner of my eye sent ripples of tension surging through me. Although little more than a flash of color, someone’s shirt possibly, I sensed danger and reacted.

  Living on the sea heightens whatever instincts you have; it’s a matter of both self-preservation and the need for constant awareness that isn’t always present ashore. Add that to years of training in covert operations, and then surviving them, and it should be no surprise that this simple flash of colored fabric caused me to shove Gazele to the ground and fall on top of her, covering her tiny body with mine.

  I didn’t even hear the shot until we were on the ground, feeling the cloud of concrete dust that the bullet striking the building beside us showered over us. Lying there, I glanced in the direction the shot had come from.

  I saw nothing. Whoever had fired was long gone, the sign that this hadn’t been an amateur. The shooter fired and slipped away … no one scampered from the scene or tried for a second shot.

  “Someone tried to kill me!” she said as I got off her.

  “Someone sure as hell shot at us.”

  “Some dumb fucker fired a gun at me. I gonna have his head.”

  I helped her to her feet. “I didn’t see who it was,” I told her.

  She took stock. “You covered me.”

  “I like lying on you.”

  “That means you was right there in plain sight. Why didn’t he shoot again?”

  “Did you want him to?”

  “No, but it strange.”

  “There are two possibilities. It’s possible that the shooter only set up for a single shot and then had to run.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I wasn’t the target.”

  That stopped her. “You think someone trying to kill Gazele? What for? I can be a mean lady sometimes, but I don’t give people no reason to kill me. Besides, if someone kills me, Jeff gonna be after their asses. Everyone knows that, for certain.”

  “There is a possibility the killer thought you were someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “That woman I rescued off the reef. She’s about your size and has been out to the boat a couple of times.”

  “You messing around with her too?” I saw a glimmer in her eye.

  “Her husband or boyfriend, this Nate, whatever he is, might think so. They’ve been watching me, thinking I know where she is. Maybe they saw us from a distance, they might think she spent the night with me. If they are trying to kill her, it would be reasonable for them to decide that waiting for us to come ashore would give them a good opportunity.”

  “I got another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “She got jealous. Or maybe by shooting at us she thought it would make you think how you did — that you’d believe that Nate is trying to kill her.”

  About then a constable was running toward us.

  “I love your devious mind,” I told her.

  “Last night it was my soft body and wiggling butt.”

  “I love the whole package.”

  The Constable had heard the shot. We told him what little we knew and he filled out a report. There wasn’t much else he could do. “It was a pistol shot,” I told him. “If you can find the bullet, odds are it is a 9-mm.”

  He looked confused. “That shot was right at head level.”

  Gazele laughed. “That shooter didn’t count on Martin being able to see the damn bullet coming.”

  I laugh
ed. “Not really.”

  “Well, some shit like that happened, cause when I heard the shot you already had me face down on the sidewalk.”

  “A lot of things happened at once.”

  “And you selfishly threw me down and covered me up.”

  “How was that selfish?”

  She grinned. “You wanted to make sure I was around for more loving.”

  She had a point.

  “It’s my training. I reacted before I knew what I was reacting to. I didn’t have time to think.”

  “Seems like some serious Obeah to me.” She nudged my ribs with her elbow. “When the girls hear how you do that reacting, well, I gonna have to stake out a claim.” Then she sighed.

  “You should give an official statement at the station,” the constable said.

  Gazele sighed. “Last thing I want to do this fine morning is waste it explaining to Inspector George how some fool is trying to kill people who look like this crazy woman, or that the crazy woman is shooting at people to make people think they want her dead.. Too much confusion.”

  “That can wait until after breakfast, can’t it Constable?”

  He looked uncertain, but then, this was Gazele. “I suppose it can.”

  “Good, because I worked up an appetite dodging bullets.”

  “One bullet,” she said, holding up a finger. “Just one single bullet, hero.”

  “But the dodging it required was the same as if he’d fired three or four.”

  She laughed. “Well, it don’t seem right to let a stray bullet, misguided as it was, ruin the morning. We gonna get that breakfast now.”

  We walked off weighing another conundrum. Had someone mistaken Gazele for Donna? Did someone want us to think they had? My brain ran through the various possibilities. All the schemes and counter schemes tore through my brain, and all that while my unflappable brown Gazele held my hand and half dragged me to Barracuda as if nothing particularly strange had happened that morning.

  And there we had a phenomenal breakfast of red snapper and told Bill the tale of the morning shooting.