Whistler's Angel (The Bannerman Series)

by Maxim, John R.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Just in case it comes up.”

  “Adam, that’s hardly a thing people ask.”

  “Well, yeah…but if some guy says you look like an angel, you shouldn’t say, ‘Well, it so happens that I am.’”

  She looked at him. “Adam, do you think I’m that dumb?”

  “Claudia…far from it. All I’m trying to say…”

  “I don’t really mind that you think I have a screw loose. I don’t even mind if some people think that I’m just some rich yuppie’s bimbo. But please don’t imagine that I’m stupid.”

  “Dean’s list, remember? Of course I don’t think that. And where did this bimbo thing come from?”

  “I…overheard it.”

  “From someone who’s actually spoken to you? Because anyone who’s known you for more than three minutes…”

  “No, just some kids who were walking past the boat.”

  That was one more thing about her. Her senses stayed heightened. She could hear and she could smell many things that he couldn’t, and his own, he’d always thought, were fairly acute. Early on, he’d thought that these were more in her mind, but she’d usually turn out to have been right. So, okay, thought Whistler. Some kids called her a bimbo.

  “Using names like Fluff and Bootsy, what else did you expect? Even without them, I’m still not surprised. I can’t blame them for wondering what a woman like you is doing with someone like me.”

  At that, she softened. “Don’t short-change yourself. I’ve seen the way women look at you. They get goosebumps.”

  “The heck they do. No woman ever has.”

  “There are times…when you’re quiet…you look dangerous, Adam. You look…I don’t know…sort of coiled. It’s a turn-on.”

  He grunted. “Can we get back to you?”

  “Except when you smile. You have a little boy’s smile. Go from one to the other; women melt at your feet.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s been my curse. So many woman.”

  “Of course, with me, that cute smile came first. I had to wait to find out

  what a tiger you are.”

  He was starting to blush. She always did this to him. Whenever he tried to sit her down, be firm, she’d have him stumbling all over himself.

  “Claudia…listen. All I’m trying to say…it’s like when I asked you to cover the scars. You’re hard enough to forget as it is.”

  “That’s all you meant?”

  “I should not have brought it up.”

  They both let it go. They quickly made up. That had been the closest they’d come to a quarrel since…well, those other quarrels weren’t really quarrels either. They were minor disagreements; they’d discuss them and he’d yield. He had yet to win an argument with Claudia.

  The bimbo thing never came up again, mostly because she abandoned those names and took to calling herself by rich girl’s names such as Courtney or Valencia or Brittany. She might have overheard “spoiled bitch” a time or two, but no one calls a Brittany a bimbo.

  That discussion, however, was not all he meant. There were two related subjects that he’d wanted to discuss, but that was not the time to pursue them with her. She’d reduce him to stammering again.

  The first had to do with the guardian part of her being his guardian angel. There had been several incidents – her trying to protect him - that could have led to serious trouble. The first time, off Belize, a passing yacht radioed to say its compressor had shorted out and that it had run out of ice. It was during her watch; he was sleeping below. Claudia, recalling what he’d said about pirates, told the yacht to stand off and send over its dinghy with only one person aboard. They did as she asked and she gave them the ice. But she’d waited at the rail in her kevlar vest with the decksweeping shotgun at the ready.

  That skipper must have wondered what they had on board that commanded that sort of vigilance. He might easily have reported Last Dollar as being a suspected drug runner. Suspicious-looking boats were reported all the time. The motive for reporting them was financial, not ethical. The tipster would get up to twenty five percent of the value of everything seized. But nothing had come of it. That yacht had not reported them. If it had, they would have been boarded soon after. Perhaps that other skipper was a runner himself.

  “Claudia,” he’d said, “please don’t do that again.”

  “They were watching us, Adam. They were watching through binoculars.”

  “More likely, they were ogling a nice-looking woman. Next time, come and wake me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And I wish you’d leave the guns where they are unless there’s a clear and present threat. You know what’s just as good? Hold a cell phone to your ear. That almost always makes people back off if they don’t have the best of intentions.”

  She nodded. “Okay, no more guns.”

  That, however, was only the first time. On shore as well, she’d be watching for signs that any stranger was paying them undue attention. Another time, on Grand Cayman, they were sitting in a restaurant and Claudia noticed that a man outside was peering in through the window. People do that every day. They’re just looking the place over. But this one was wearing a dark business suit and Claudia was especially sensitive to suits, given her experience with Lockwood and Briggs. But he felt sure that anyone who might mean him harm would probably dress less conspicuously. They were, after all, in the tropics. This man, in any case, then entered the restaurant and seemed to be heading toward their table. Claudia tensed; her hand gripped her fork, and she was ready to spring. The man, to make a long story short, had only come in looking for a rest room. He was lucky he hadn’t reached into his pocket or he might have had a fork in his ear.

  More recently, in Martinique, Whistler had hired a diver to go down and clean the growth off his bottom. He’d neglected to tell Claudia that he’d done so. She heard the scraping noises and she saw the trail of bubbles from the scuba gear the diver was using. True to her promise, she did not grab a gun, but she was waiting to whack him with a spinnaker pole the moment he came to the surface. She didn’t because…and this was the other subject…a pelican swooped down and landed on the deck. It squawked at her and it flapped its wings at her. Whatever that meant in pelican language, to Claudia it meant that the pelican knew the diver and was telling her that he was harmless.

  When she told him about it, she still wasn’t sure. She said that even when the diver came up, he seemed unable to look her in the eye.

  “Were you…still talking to the bird at this point?”

  “I’m serious, Adam.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was doing that cell phone trick that you taught me.”

  “Either way, I’m sure he didn’t want to intrude. Those guys do their job and they go to their next one. So it’s good that the pelican dropped by.”

  First she’s bothered that the skipper off Belize was looking at her; now she’s bothered that a dockworker wouldn’t. With anyone else, he’d have called it paranoia. With Claudia, though, it was more like disappointment. She was his guardian; she was right in there guarding, but there never seemed to be any genuine threat for Claudia to guard him against.

  Eventually, he might have to sit her down and risk her annoyance one more time. The subject wouldn’t be excessive vigilance, however. It would be her thing about animals. He’d seen people watching her, wondering about her. She would speak to any bird that might land on the deck and she spoke to dogs and cats while ashore. Many people talk to animals. Nothing odd about that. But most people don’t have discussions with them. Most people don’t share with dogs and cats, met at random, the good news of the afterlife that awaits them. Most people don’t nod and say thank you to pelicans. Most people don’t take their advice.

  As far as Whistler himself was concerned, if she thought he was an angel, so be it. She was entirely human in all other ways. She had the normal range of moods; mostly happy, sometimes pensive, but he never
saw her sullen or brooding. He never saw a single sign of regret that she’d chosen...been assigned...to be with him.

  She missed her mother, but they’d swapped frequent emails using the Magellan device. And later, as there seemed to be less need for that precaution, they would speak on the phone once a week. Whistler knew that anyone determined to find him certainly could have done so by now, especially if Kate Geller’s phone was still tapped. Days would go by, sometimes a whole week, without Felix Aubrey ever crossing his mind. That chapter seemed to be closed.

  Nor had her mother been pining away back in Cherry Creek, Colorado. Kate had made two more trips to Geneva and she’d spent the Christmas holiday with his father in Paris followed by a stay at Chamonix. That relationship seemed to have a future as well. Like Claudia, her mother was learning French and German. In fact, she and Claudia would test each other’s progress in the course of their phone conversations.

  She’d told Claudia that she was thinking of selling her business. His father had encouraged her to do so, stop commuting, and think about moving to Europe full time. She didn’t say whether they’d spoken of marriage, but they’d surely grown comfortable with each other. And Kate had received several offers for the business. Those offers were increasingly attractive because the garden center’s business had boomed.

  The boom in sales and traffic had come in the wake of all the media publicity that she had received as an aftermath of the drug raid. The wire services had written it up as a classic example of “jack-booted thugs” pounding down the wrong doors on bad information and hurting innocent people. A Denver paper ran a four-part series on the evils of the Federal Seizure Laws. Kate had faxed the whole series to Claudia.

  The Denver paper’s editors were especially incensed by one of the provisions of those laws. That provision was called the “relation-back doctrine.” They called it an affront to any fair-minded citizen, one that turned the constitution on its head. That doctrine went far beyond seizing private property. Briefly stated, it said that all property was forfeit from the moment that it was involved in a crime. This was even if the government didn’t learn of that crime until several years after the fact. For example, it said, say your son once used your phone to buy or sell a couple of joints. You never knew anything about it. But that buy then came to light in a subsequent prosecution. Your house, by law, was no longer yours. It had been used in the commission of a federal crime. It became the property of the federal government from the moment the call was completed. If you had been living in that house ever since, not only could the government put it up for sale, they could also charge you back rent.

  As far-fetched as this example might seem, said the editors, it had actually happened to a family in Iowa. The town in which they lived had hired prosecutors to review old arrests and convictions. Many towns had done likewise once it came to their attention that “relation-back’ was a gold mine.

  The job of these attorneys was to find seizure prospects, and these were not limited to drug crimes. Say your daughter once pled guilty to a shoplifting charge. She’s contrite and has stayed out of trouble. A review of her record has shown, however, that she used your car to get to the mall, intending to shoplift when she got there. Your car, if you still own it, may be forfeit to the town. You may buy it back if you wish.

  What the paper didn’t know was that these scatter-shot events had since become institutionalized. Felix Aubrey, maybe Poole, saw real money to be made by supplying such towns with more lucrative targets and keeping a percentage of the spoils. Aubrey, as Claudia and her mother had seen, was not above planting evidence.

  In her mother’s case, though, there were public apologies. The Police Chief and Mayor, perhaps mindful of those “snipers,” had decried what they called a tragic mistake. Those responsible, they said, had been fired from their jobs and had left Colorado in disgrace. That reference, said Kate, was to those two policemen who hadn’t been seen since the day after the raid.

  She said, however, that dark rumors persisted. It had been whispered that the two missing cops were nourishing some of the fruit trees she grew.

  She emailed him, “Adam…tell me they aren’t.”

  He answered, “Not the fruit trees. Just the beeches.”

  She responded, “Adam…please say that you’re kidding.”

  “I am. Copper Beeches. Sorry, Kate. Bad joke.”

  “Adam…this is serious. And since when do you joke?”

  He assured Kate Geller that he was just being silly and that no one was buried on her property. Truth be told, he really didn’t know where they were. Using those two to fertilize Kate Geller’s soil did have a certain poetic appeal, but he knew that his father would not have allowed it. Those two cops were most likely in the trunk of a car that was sitting at the bottom of a lake. Even so, with those rumors, Kate’s garden center was becoming a tourist attraction. The resulting new business was all well and good, but as Kate had said, “I’m not running a waxworks.” The relentless attention was beginning to wear thin. Whistler thought that she’d probably take one of those offers. However, if a quieter life were her goal, she was not yet convinced that moving to Geneva would be that great an improvement.

  Kate Geller had asked, “Since when do you joke?” Whistler was a little taken aback. He knew that he’d never been the life of the party, but he didn’t think he’d been some humorless plodder who couldn’t loosen up if he tried. He supposed, however, that he’d always been a bit distant, never quite comfortable with people he’d met who came from more conventional backgrounds. Especially after he was sent off to school. He never felt superior. It was not that at all. The truth is that sometimes he envied them. He had more in common with a…well, a Carla Benedict than he had with his fellow students and professors. His view of the world had already been formed. Their opinions, their ideals, had seemed hopelessly naïve. His father had said, “Keep your own thoughts to yourself. You’re there to absorb, not to teach.” So he never got over feeling like an outsider. He had never really made any friends.

  But Kate’s question made him realize how much he had thawed since he had been living with Claudia. Okay, he still wasn’t a barrel of laughs. But he was much more congenial, less guarded with people. He smiled more readily and people responded. He found himself able to make small talk with strangers without needing Claudia to first break the ice. And yes, he even made a joke now and then. But yes, copper beech was pretty lame.

  As for their daily lives, they were active and full. The boat was their home, but it was often in port. They would keep in shape by running, biking and swimming, all of which were Claudia’s triathlon events, but she tried not to show him up too badly. Most evenings while in port they would dress and go out, often with other couples they’d met. They would try different restaurants, catch up on new movies, or Whistler would take Claudia shopping. He would have to take her shopping because if he didn’t, she would seldom buy anything for herself. He would have to watch her browse, memorize what made her smile, then go back later and buy it.

  And yet Claudia loved to dress up and look good. She loved going out, she liked being with people, and people liked being with her. She just didn’t like to spend money.

  “Claudia…I’ve told you. You’re a long way from broke.”

  “I know, but we need it to last.”

  “If you’re worrying about me, I’m not exactly broke either. What else is bothering you?”

  “If we did run short, how would you earn more money?”

  “Not with a gun, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll never go back to that life.”

  “But it’s all you’ve ever done…and it’s all that you’re good at.”

  Whistler grumbled. “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “You’ve never missed the excitement, the danger?”

  Now and then. But he answered, “Not in the slightest.”

  “Then we need to decide what we’ll do with your new life. Maybe we should think about planting some roots. W
e’ll need to if we’re going to start a family someday.”

  “A family?”

  “We’re supposed to. I told you.”

  “Oh, of course. The white light.”

  “That’s the plan, but don’t sweat it. You’re not ready yet. Don’t get me wrong, Adam. I love our life together. But if there doesn’t seem to be much need to protect you, I need to figure out what else the light had in mind.”

  “The light never spelled it out in detail?”

  “No, just the big picture. Let me think about this.”

  “Let me think” often meant that she would have a discussion with either

  a bird or the wind. He was never really clear on what role she thought they played. He didn’t think she saw them as surrogate white lights or as actual messengers from the world beyond this one. They were more like good listeners, non-judgmental and unbiased. He supposed that it was better than talking to herself.

  Whatever the case, it was during one such session that Claudia decided it was time to head north. Her consultant, however, wasn’t much more specific than the white light apparently had been. The bird or the wind didn’t lay out a strategy. It just told her, or agreed, that it was time to move on and start looking for a place of their own.

  This was after their uneventful stay in Antigua, during which he had used his real name. Other boaters had offered suggestions. They told her that springtime was especially pretty all along the Sea Islands of the Georgia coast and in South Carolina’s inland waterways. They suggested exploring them until early May, and then sailing up to Maine for the summer. To Claudia, this began to sound like a plan. They could also decide on a place enroute where her mother could fly in for a visit. Perhaps his father could join them as well. She hoped so. She’d often spoken to him via satellite phone, but she hadn’t seen him for almost a year.

  Whistler knew that his father wouldn’t go for that idea. His father would be pleased to have a family reunion but he’d want to host it in Europe, on his turf. Put another way, he wouldn’t like the idea of the two of them being in the same place at once. At least not in the states. Too tempting a target.