High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  Two steps later he grabbed both her upper arms, then swung her around so she was headed back toward the shacks.

  “Keep your hands off of me!” she shouted.

  “All right, then go ahead. Be my guest.” With that he moved back, his arm outstretched, and she saw that she had almost stepped into what looked like the foundation of yet another shack. Whatever had been there, it was now only a deep hole barely covered with vines.

  “That’s dangerous,” she breathed.“ Some kid could—”

  “Right. There are lots of places of danger around here, but it takes man power to fix them. And man power costs money. And we get money from tourists who might come to see a mechanical alligator or from investors. Yesterday I had both of those, but today I have only one left.”

  He said all of this in a tone that implied that she was an imbecile.

  “You know,” she said quietly, “I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a man as much as I dislike you.”

  “I can assure you that the feeling is mutual. So now, shall we go before Roy packs up and returns to Texas?”

  Three

  The boat was no yacht. No, it was a beat-up old fishing boat that Roy said he’d had for twenty years. To Fiona’s tired eyes, it was an exact duplicate of Robert Shaw’s boat in Jaws—the one the fish ate. “Caught a lot of fish in this baby,” he said.

  “And I can smell every one of them,” Fiona said under her breath. When Ace gave her a look of warning, she coldly smiled back at him. After she’d walked out of that ruin that was laughingly called a park, Roy had been so overwhelmed by her resemblance to a woman he declared to be his all-time favorite movie star that thereafter Fiona could do no wrong.

  “They don’t make women like her today,” Roy had declared as he ushered Fiona along, leaving Ace to come or go as he pleased, since Roy seemed to have forgotten all about him. “Back then women looked like women. Today the actresses are just girls. Julia Roberts. That Guinevere girl. What’s her name?”

  “Gwyneth Paltrow?” Fiona said. “But you like women who look like women, right?” She said this last over her shoulder loud enough to awaken any birds that were still sleeping, but, gathering from the growing racket around the three of them, they were all awake.

  Roy didn’t seem to miss anything. “You’re just gonna have to tell me all about that first meetin’ you and Ace had. He say somethin’ you didn’t like?”

  “Horrible things,” she said, batting her lashes at Roy. Considering that he was at least four inches shorter than she was, this wasn’t easy. “I do so hope you’ll beat him up for me.”

  With a roar of laughter, Roy tried to put his arm around Fiona’s shoulders and pull her close. But his attempt was not successful because he had to lift his arm up, and besides, his arm wasn’t quite as long as his belly was wide. Easily, she escaped his grasp.

  There was a car waiting for them, and when Fiona bent to get inside, Ace said into her ear, “You want to stop playing the simpering maiden and behave yourself?”

  “What was that?” Roy said when she was inside.

  “What was what?” Fiona asked innocently.

  Ace got in the front seat next to the driver, while she and Roy were together in the back.

  “Ace, my boy, are you all right? I thought I heard you give a holler.”

  “He banged his shin against a hard object,” Fiona said, refusing to give in to her need to rub her heel that she’d used to give him a good swift kick.

  During the twenty-minute ride to the boat, Fiona had done little but ease Roy’s hands off various parts of her body. He would point out things along the highway, then lay his hand on her knee when she leaned forward to look. Next there was something on the other side of the car, so he’d leaned across her that way.

  Each time, Fiona would twist around in such a way that she eluded his many hands. And the one time when the car unexpectedly turned a sharp curve and Fiona went plowing into Roy, Ace had to turn around and see it. He gave Fiona a scowl that was meant to tell her to stop enticing the old man. She had no way to defend herself. What could she do, yell that the dirty ol’ man couldn’t keep his hands off of her? No, she thought as she tried to remember why she was there.

  Because she had been threatened and blackmailed, she thought. Her entire career was on the line. And probably everything she owned, if Ace was to be believed.

  “You sure are pretty,” Roy said under his breath, and Fiona could have kicked herself for “revealing” her resemblance to an old-time movie star. In her late teens, she’d loved being told that she looked like a glamorous movie star, so she’d studied Ava Gardner’s movies and her looks. She’d learned to make what was a strong resemblance into an impersonation that a drag queen would envy.

  But by the time Fiona hit twenty-four, she was tired of receiving attention because of looking like someone else, so she’d started playing down the resemblance. People didn’t realize that movie stars didn’t look like themselves when they first stepped out of the shower. It took work to look great. And when Fiona didn’t work at looking like someone else, she didn’t look like her. No one at Davidson Toys had ever said she looked like anyone else.

  And with this randy old man pawing her and trying to relive his youth when he’d lusted after a dark-eyed beauty, she wished she hadn’t played up the resemblance. But that odious man Ace had accused her of not being a woman so—

  By the time they reached the boat, she was sick of good ol’ boy Roy, sick of the black looks she was constantly receiving from the Birdman, and, all in all, sick of being blackmailed. In the last forty-eight hours she’d been blackmailed by two men, first by her boss, Garrett, then by a man who would step over anyone to get money.

  So when Ace gave her one of his quelling looks because she’d made an innocent comment about her concern about the safety on the old boat, she was tempted to push him overboard. In fact, she lifted her hands to do just that. But he sidestepped her.

  “Do you always solve everything with violence?” he asked, a curl to his upper lip. “Do you always strike first, then find out what you’ve done later?”

  “Me?” she managed to gasp. “You’re the one who held me against a wall and—”

  She broke off because Roy had called her to come admire his scaling knife—or some other thing he had in his possession.

  “If you mess this up for me, I’ll make you sorry,” Ace hissed as Fiona started toward the end of the boat, where Roy was beckoning her.

  “You’re going to have to cheer me up before you can make me sorry,” she snapped back at him, then kept going. Maybe if she found out why Roy had requested her presence (other than the fact that he lusted after women half his age and a head taller than he, that is), then she could leave earlier. As it was, three whole days of this and she’d be a blithering idiot.

  Roy was still calling her, but as she walked down the rotting old deck, for the first time she noticed the only other person on board. Eric was probably in his early thirties, short and not someone you’d notice or remember after you’d seen him. Even looking at him, she couldn’t describe him.

  “Hi,” Fiona said, giving him her most dazzling smile. Thanks to exorbitant dental bills paid by her father, her teeth were perfect.

  Eric looked up from where he was tying a rope to a shiny metal hook with an expression of, Are you talking to me?

  Fiona didn’t have time for chitchat. “Have you worked for Roy long?”

  “Long enough,” he said cautiously.

  I’m in a bad private-eye movie, she nearly said aloud, then took a deep breath. “I’m trying to find out why he wanted me to come on this trip.”

  The man pulled the rope tighter. “You’ll have to ask him. I just do the work; he doesn’t confide in me.”

  “But you drive a car for him, and now you’re on a boat with him, so you must have heard something.”

  He gave her a little smile as he looked her up and down in a way that let her know that if she wanted to visit his cabin, h
e was willing, but he wasn’t going to talk to her.

  For the second—or was it the third?—time that day Fiona threw her hands up in frustration, then started walking again. “And people say that New Yorkers are crazy,” she muttered. “I’ve got an old man panting after me, the guy who swabs the decks is leering at me, and a bird freak tells me I’m sexless. If this keeps up I’m going to jump overboard and those crocs wouldn’t dare tangle with me. Yes, yes, Roy, I’m coming,” she yelled. “Keep your shirt on.” She lowered her voice. “Pllleeeaaaasssseee keep your shirt on.”

  “Fiona, honey, you’re not eatin’ enough to keep a bird alive,” Roy said, then seemed to think that was the funniest joke he’d ever heard. “‘Keep a bird alive’ and Ace here is an expert on birds, get it?” he said as he nearly exploded in adoring laughter over his own witticism. “I tell you, sometimes I just plain crack myself up.”

  They were sitting at the table in the inside of the boat. You couldn’t really call it a cabin, but when you were in a country that had weather that ranged from hot to hotter to hell, what did you need with a back wall? Fiona thought. Roy took up the end of the table, while she was sitting across from Ace. Heaven help her, but he was laughing at Roy’s asinine jokes.

  “Roy,” Fiona said loudly so she could be heard over his self-induced chuckles, “why did you call me here? If you’d wanted someone from my company to go fishing with, I’m sure someone else would have been more suitable. No, thank you,” she said loudly, and pointedly, to Ace, who’d just poured himself more wine from the jug but hadn’t offered to fill her glass.

  This exchange made Roy put his hand over his mouth to hide his mirth. “You two wanta tell me how you met before today?”

  “No!” Fiona and Ace said in unison, then refused to look at each other.

  “Roy,” Fiona said firmly. “I’d like to know why you asked me to come here.”

  “Honey,” Roy said as he reached for her hand, but Fiona moved to pick up her full wineglass and drank some of the awful stuff.

  “More?” Ace asked when he saw her grimace. “It’s a good vintage, at least three months old.”

  “By golly,” Roy said as he slapped the table. “I sure do wanta hear what went on between you two.”

  “You like a good story, don’t you, Roy?” Fiona said, still trying to direct the man’s mind. “After all, you created Raphael, didn’t you?”

  “Ah,” Roy said, and he instantly sobered. “I didn’t think it would be so popular.” His voice was soft, as though he regretted something.

  “But that’s good,” she said, leaning a bit forward and for the first time thinking that there might be a person inside the teddy bear body.

  “Not every person in this world thinks that success is everything, Miss Burkenhalter,” Ace said loudly.

  “No one asked you,” she fairly hissed at him, then turned back to Roy. But Ace’s interruption had broken the man’s mood.

  “Now, now, don’t you two spat,” Roy said, his face once again looking as though he wanted to throw a party. “Why don’t you two tell me about yourselves? What have you done since you were kids?”

  The last thing Fiona wanted to do was stay up all night telling Roy and the scowling raven across from her all about her uneventful childhood. Besides, she’d had no sleep for a couple of days now, plus a great deal to drink, not to mention a stint in a Fort Lauderdale police station and …

  When she stood up, she staggered a bit in fatigue. “Is there a place to sleep on this boat, or do we jump in the mouth of the nearest whale?”

  “I swear you’re a lot like—” Roy broke off, then smiled. “You’re a lot like a friend I used to know.” Standing, he took her arm and looked at her in a way that made Fiona hope that he wasn’t going to bury his face in her chest. She didn’t think she’d have the strength to fight him off.

  Still stumbling, she followed him into the back of the smelly old boat, and when he showed her two sets of bunk beds, she didn’t think about the lack of privacy, she just fell into the nearest one and went to sleep, a smile on her face because she thought that the worst day of her life was finally over.

  She was very, very wrong.

  Four

  Fiona had had the dream before. She was suffocating as she was being held down by something huge. But in the past she’d awakened to find that it was just the covers wrapped too tightly about her. And once when she was staying at Diane’s house, she awakened to find herself underneath the family’s Irish setter. “You’re sleeping in his bed,” Diane had said without the merest trace of humor.

  So now Fiona was reluctant to wake fully. Her head hurt, and she was tired beyond description, so she didn’t want to wake up. “Go away,” she said and tried to elbow whatever was on her off. But the big thing didn’t move, and she found that it was so heavy that she couldn’t move. Also, there was something warm on her stomach. “If that damned dog has peed on me …” she muttered, then gave a good sharp kick, but the thing was too big to allow her to move.

  It took her a moment, but she began to wake more fully, and it slowly dawned on her that it was a man on top of her. As her mind began to clear, she remembered where she was (the smell brought that memory back), so she knew that the big man motionless on top of her had to be Roy.

  “Listen, mister,” she said as she pushed against him. “I may be here at your request, but that doesn’t mean—” She kept pushing, but the man wasn’t moving. “He’s passed out,” she whispered. “All three hundred pounds of him has passed out on top of me.” And worse, she was definitely getting wetter around the middle. “An incontinent drunk!” she hissed, then tried to get her legs up so she could use her larger muscles to push against him. Her personal trainer said she had great quads. “So let’s use those babies,” she said, then braced her hands against the sides of the bed to get a good grip in preparation for the push, but her hand grasped something cold and wet.

  “Can’t a man even sleep,” came a voice she had heard too often in the last few days. In the next moment the room was flooded by an overhead light, and she looked over Roy’s big body on top of her into Ace’s handsome face, a face that was now twisted in shock and horror.

  For a moment Fiona didn’t understand anything, not until she followed Ace’s eyes and saw that the thing in her hand was a knife, and when she glanced downward, she saw that she and the bed were covered with blood.

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t make any sound at all, just held the knife up and looked at it. She was vaguely aware that there was activity going on around her. Since there were only four people on the boat—correction, three live people, one dead one—she knew that the people moving were Ace and Eric.

  Minutes later, Roy’s big body was rolled off of her, but Fiona still didn’t move. The cool night air made the blood that was soaking her clothes feel cold, but she didn’t move. It was almost as though her spirit had left her body and she was looking down at herself. She heard a man’s voice say, “… going into shock …” but she didn’t relate it to herself.

  She heard a voice, the deeper one, giving orders to start the engine and head for shore. Then she seemed to hear water running, as though a teakettle were being filled. Oh, goody, a tea party.

  It wasn’t until she could feel the teeth-shaking vibration of the engine that someone threw a blanket over her and tried to help her out of the bed. But her legs collapsed under her, so the man lifted her in his arms. “Trainer wrong,” she whispered. “Quads no good.”

  Moments after he set her on a chair at the table, he handed her a hot cup of something.

  “Listen to me,” he said, leaning toward her. “Can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can. What is this? Darjeeling? Or is it Earl Grey?”

  “I want you to tell me what happened. Why did you kill him? Did he have something on you? Or did he just try to rape you and you let him have it?”

  Fiona looked at him over her mug of hot something or other. “What?”

  “What
did he do to you? I’m a good listener, and we need to get our stories straight to tell the police.”

  Fiona’s head was beginning to clear enough that a few thoughts were coming into it. Gradually, she was beginning to realize what had happened. She had been in bed with …

  She looked up at Ace with his face twisted in an expression of sincerity and sympathy. For all the world he looked like an actor playing a rape counselor.

  She set the mug down. “You think I killed someone,” she managed to breathe. “Murder?”

  Ace sat back in the chair, and his face hardened. “Look, I’m trying to help, but maybe you should save everything for the police.” With that he got up and walked to the back of the boat, where she knew the body was.

  Fiona wasn’t going to let him get away with what he’d just said. Instantly, she stood up, and when she did, the blanket that was wrapped around her fell to the floor. She looked down at herself and saw that she was covered in blood from her neck to her knees, and when she looked back up, she saw Ace bending over the bloody body of a man she’d had dinner with just hours before.

  Fiona had no idea that she made a sound, but the next minute Ace grabbed her and was holding her head over the side of the boat as she heaved again and again, until there was nothing left inside her.

  Gently, Ace set her down on a wooden seat at the side of the boat. “Better?”

  She was trembling, shaking so hard her teeth were chattering. Ace disappeared for a moment, then returned with something in a small water glass.

  “Drink this,” he said in a way that made her obey without question. After she’d drunk the whiskey, he pulled her up to stand in front of him. “Look, I know that I’m destroying evidence, but …”

  She didn’t understand what he was talking about. But then, nothing in the last two days made sense to her. Holding her wrist in a gentle way, he pulled her into the back of the boat, but he was careful to place his own body between hers and Roy’s so she couldn’t see him stretched out on the floor.