Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  But she wasn’t. Nobody was ever ready to take on the world. All anyone could ever do was make a leap of faith and hope that somebody was there to help when the world let them fall.

  * * *

  Sheriff Rainey’s phone was waiting for him on the bathroom counter while he showered, so he had heard the flurry of texts come through. Micco County wasn’t a big place and it didn’t have an awful lot of crime, but he did actually have more open cases than the captain’s death investigation. Nevertheless, he knew in his heart that Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was sending the flurry of texts that was generating constant beeps while he washed the shampoo out of his hair. This theory was based on the fact that very few people had her utter focus, so they weren’t capable of a string of texts the size of an old-school encyclopedia.

  He tried to dry himself off while he read texts alerting him to possible problems with scuba tanks, as well as a shipwreck “south of here” and a mysterious yellow bimini.

  * * *

  Because Sheriff Rainey’s life wasn’t complicated enough, he got an urgent call before he finished drying himself. Lieutenant Baker was still working the missing persons case like a person who didn’t need sleep. Or even a shower.

  “We got him,” she said. “The ringleader of the looters, I mean. And get this. It’s the husband of the missing woman.”

  “I never liked him.”

  “Yeah.” This single syllable communicated the depths of Baker’s contempt for the man.

  “What about the neighbor?”

  “Still no alibi for the first three days after the storm. Still acting suspicious as hell, but he’s walking free because I’ve got nothing to tie him to the looting. Or to the missing woman and kid. Yet.”

  * * *

  Faye’s text to Sheriff Rainey, telling him to talk to a man in south Georgia about some ridiculously old brandy and rum, was interesting. So were her thoughts about the captain’s death, especially the part where she thought someone at the newspaper was “in on it,” but he wasn’t sure what the best thing was for him to do right that minute. And he did think it was important to do something right that minute because the breathless tone of Faye’s texts was setting off his trouble radar.

  He tried to call her, but got a text back saying,

  On the boat going fast. Too loud to talk. Texting is better.

  So she was on a boat, but it was a coin flip as to whether she were coming to shore or going home. He texted her back to say,

  Slow down and tell me what’s going on.

  Her return text didn’t help much.

  If the rich rum-buying guy or the newspaper folks point you in the direction of Manny, LET ME KNOW. My daughter’s running straight into his arms right now. We’re trying to get there. Please meet us at the marina.

  So that answered his question of what to do next. He needed to get the straight scoop from Faye, and Manny’s Marina was as good a place as any to get it. Because he was not stupid, he called Baker, told her he was heading to the marina, and asked for backup. Then he got on the road, listening all the while to Lieutenant Baker, who was not happy at being ordered to waste her time calling Faye’s rum-buying guy. The fact that she was supposed to do that while driving to the marina to be his backup was the last straw.

  He listened to her objections, which were detailed and well thought out, but they changed nothing. Nobody ever said that working in law enforcement was all fun and games.

  * * *

  Amande’s boat was tied in its usual spot. Faye felt a momentary relief. They knew where she was, at least. Well, this was true unless she’d gotten in her car and driven away to parts unknown. Or been stolen away by a murderer.

  She and Joe hurried up the dock toward the bar and grill, the beating heart of Manny’s Marina. Peering through its windows, she could see people inside. They were mere shadows on the window blinds, but they were alive and moving. They gestured with their forks as they laughed. They jostled their way between crowded tables as they made their way to the bar or to the bathroom.

  None of those shadows were her daughter. Faye would have known Amande by her graceful, forthright style of movement.

  She didn’t see Manny, either, but he was probably on the far side of the room, working the bar. Savvy owners knew nobody else could bartend as well as they did. Employees might slip drinks to their friends. They might overpour and destroy the profit margin. They might underpour and leave the clientele peeved. Manny had a mind for business and he was smooth. The bar and grill had been popular under all its owners, but Faye had never seen it this full.

  Joe opened the door for her, and she stepped inside. The place was dimly lit for socializing, but it was still brighter than the outdoors. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. She spent that moment looking for Amande.

  When her dazzled pupils had tightened enough for her to see, Faye saw Manny right where she’d thought he would be, elbows on the bar and surveying the room to be sure his customers were happy. Thad and Samantha were sitting at the bar across from him, having an intense conversation, all emphatic nods and eye contact.

  Greta was sitting almost elbow-to-elbow with Thad. Cyndee was perched on the stool beside her with her long limbs arranged uncomfortably in the tight space. Both women had their eyes on their drinks, but Faye could see them stealing glances at the handsome Thad and Manny.

  Nate’s dad Ray sat on Cyndee’s other side, tapping on his tablet computer and drinking. His presence rang warning bells in Faye’s head. Why was he here, instead of at the hospital with his seriously injured son? And why was everybody she could reasonably suspect of murdering her friend in this room, except for Cody? Was the marina some kind of common denominator?

  Of course it was. Thad, Greta, and Manny were all boaters. Ray probably was, too, and Faye knew for a fact that he was a regular in the bar and grill. Cyndee seemed to go where Greta went. Samantha seemed a bit out of place, but she and Thad were sharing some powerful chemistry. Maybe they were simply on a date.

  There might have been many nights when all these people were here. The only missing strands of the net that Faye was trying to untangle were Cody and Amande.

  Then she raked her eyes around the room and learned that she was wrong. Cody was indeed right there in the room with her, completing her roster of suspects. He was standing on the far side of the room, between the bar and the rear exit. And he was deep in conversation with Amande.

  Faye would have run to her daughter, but she was hampered by an obstacle course of crowded tables full of people enjoying Manny’s catfish, not to mention drinkers getting drunker. She slalomed between the tables, swerving from left to right when she really wanted to plow straight through.

  As she stumbled past Manny, she heard him asking Thad if he’d seen a boat with a yellow bimini, and she died a little inside. She was sure that the person who owned that boat was killing people, maybe just to shut them up about it.

  She lurched toward Manny, trying to shut him up. This was her fault. She had done this. She had asked Manny about a yellow bimini. Now he was innocently trying to get her question answered for her. And the fact that he was asking it told her something. It meant that he wasn’t the guilty person trying to make that yellow piece of canvas go away.

  “I’m sure I’ve seen one,” Thad said. “They come in all colors, but my customers like colors dark enough to hide mildew. Burgundy. They like burgundy. And navy blue.”

  Manny repeated the question to Greta and Cyndee. Both women raised their eyes from their drinks and shook their heads no.

  Greta said, “I’ve seen some cool custom ones in the colors of football teams. You know—orange-and-blue for the Gators, garnet-and-gold for the Seminoles, aqua-and-orange for the Dolphins. But I can’t think of anybody who has a yellow one, not off the top of my head.”

  Cyndee said, “Me, neither. Though, you know what? Yellow would look pre
tty awesome with a black boat. Especially if you put some fine little yellow pinstripes on the black. Why’d you wanna know?”

  Before Faye could get close enough to tell Manny to shut his loose lips, she heard one of her favorite voices speaking in its familiar low alto.

  “Hey, let me ask you something. Do you know anybody who has a yellow bimini on their boat?”

  Oh, Amande. No. Don’t be asking dangerous questions.

  She hadn’t reached her daughter yet, but she was close. Cody was closer, leaning in with his ear to Amande’s lips. His hand gripped her side possessively, palm to her waist and fingers splayed from the base of her bra to the curve of her hip. Someday, someone was going to touch Amande that way and she would like it. This was not that day.

  Amande was letting him touch her, despite the fact that Faye could see her vibrating with revulsion. Or maybe it was fear. And maybe Cody was enjoying that fear.

  What was he saying? Faye needed to hear him answer the question, and then she needed to slap him senseless. Better senseless than unconscious, though, because that’s what Cody would be if Joe got to him first.

  Cody’s tone was quiet, romantic even, but Faye’s ears were tuned to it. He said, “No, I don’t know anybody with a yellow bimini. Never seen one, actually. I don’t think they even make ’em that color.”

  The answers banged around in Faye’s head. Greta had said, “I can’t think of anybody who has a yellow one, not off the top of my head,” and Cyndee had said, “Me, neither.” Thad had said, “I’m sure I have,” before he said he couldn’t think of any specific boats. Way back when she’d mentioned it to Manny, he’d said, “Can’t say for sure, since you wouldn’t believe how many boats come through this marina, but I’m gonna say no.”

  Cody, and only Cody, was denying that there even was such a thing, which beggared belief. Maybe most people didn’t choose that color, but manufacturers surely made it. Cody did boat repair, so he must get catalogs that showed all the colors of paint and canvas that he could use to customize a watercraft. Also, he pumped Manny’s fuel, which meant that he probably saw more boats in a day than anybody in the room. As far as Faye was concerned, he protested too much.

  Cody’s fingers pressed hard into the soft flesh of Amande’s side and the young woman flinched.

  “Why do you care about boats or biminis or anything yellow? Why are you asking me this question, little girl?”

  Faye needed to press her fingers into the soft flesh of his throat. She lunged in his direction and struck her shinbone hard on an empty stool.

  Faye yelped as she felt the nerves in her shin scream. The oak stool crashed onto the wood floor with a terrible clatter.

  “Faye? Is there a problem?” The question came from behind her.

  It was the sheriff speaking. As he pushed his way into the bar and grill, he let the screen door slam behind him, and its wood-on-wood bang echoed the sound of the stool hitting the floor.

  Faye saw the panic on Cody’s face and she knew it could be deadly. He stood straighter and pulled his jaw down toward his collarbone. It was a reflexive defensive motion designed to protect his throat, but it made him look like a cornered cobra spreading its hood. Amande let out a small squeak as he dug his fingers even further into her side, and the sound enraged him.

  “Shut up.”

  She twisted toward him and opened her mouth to speak.

  “I said shut up.” Smooth and fast, the hand that wasn’t grasping Amande dipped into his pocket and came out with a dive knife.

  He flipped it open, pressed it to her throat, and said, “I’m out of here. I didn’t want to go until I got that ship picked clean, but I’ve hauled up enough stuff to support me for a real long time. ’Specially if I go to some cheap-ass country where my dollars go a real long way. Maybe I’ll take this pretty girl with me. Seems like she thinks she’s too good to go anyplace with me when I’m being nice.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Cody wrapped his arm tighter around Amande’s midsection, still holding a six-inch blade to her throat. The young woman’s eyes darted from Manny’s face to Joe’s, but they settled on Faye’s. There was terror in Amande’s eyes, but trust, too. Faye, who was fighting against the shock wrapping its cold blanket around her shoulders, knew that she would rather die than betray that trust.

  If something happens to Amande…

  She forced herself to fully acknowledge her fear.

  If he kills Amande and leaves me alive, I’ll go to my grave remembering that look on her face.

  Faye wasn’t going to let that happen. If this man took her daughter’s life, he was going to have to take Faye’s, too.

  She took stock of the situation. The sheriff was behind her and he was certainly armed, but it would be almost impossible for him to shoot Cody without taking the risk that his knife would sink into her daughter’s throat. Besides, between the sheriff’s gun and Cody sat a room full of people who had been innocently enjoying their drinks just five seconds before. Shooting Cody was too risky.

  Cody yelled, “Everybody stay right where you are.”

  Faye watched the terrified eaters and drinkers weighing their next moves. Should they drop to the floor and hide under their tables? Should they run for the door? They didn’t know and so, for the moment, they were frozen in place.

  Since Cody was armed with a knife, not a gun, running for the hills was a high probability proposition for everybody in the room who wasn’t Amande. Still, everyone knew that all bets were off if the sheriff opened fire. And they knew that sudden moves on their part could startle the man holding a knife to the delicate skin just below Amande’s mandible.

  For now, they were motionless, but it wouldn’t take much to send them stampeding to safety. A few of them had toddlers and babies in their laps. Those people slowly, very slowly, folded forward, wrapping their arms and torsos around tender little bodies.

  * * *

  Amande was having trouble finding a place to focus her eyes. Cody had jerked her to him so roughly that her head had whiplashed hard, and she was dizzy. The sharp knife edge against her throat awakened something primal in her that wanted to scream, vomit, cry, collapse. The knife’s edge made her see dark spots floating through the darkened room, and it kept her from believing that a uniformed man wearing a badge could do anything to help her. The floating dark spots meant that she couldn’t see him, not really, not with a dark room between them and a dark night behind him.

  The room was silent except for the hushed breath of dozens of people. No clothing rustled. No shoes scuffed.

  Cody’s voice was deafening in her ear. “Nobody needs to get hurt, not even this little bitch.”

  He took a step backward. The only way to keep the sharp edge from slicing her skin was to take a step with him, so Amande did.

  She could feel the people who loved her more than she could see them. There was the shadow of her dad, standing near the door where the sheriff was. He was dim and far from her, but she held her gaze until the very sight of him pushed the dark spots out of her field of vision. Knowing he was there made her feel stronger than she really was. Amande knew that her dad was good all the way through. He believed the best of people until he just couldn’t. It took a lot to push a man like that to vengeance, but she knew in her bones that if Cody hurt her, her father would track him like an animal until he had nowhere left to hide.

  She felt Cody dragging her toward the bar’s rear exit. Everything in her said that she shouldn’t pass through that door. She shouldn’t let him take her into the dark.

  As they shuffled backward together, Manny came into view to her right, just inside her peripheral vision. She had known him all her life, but she’d never seen tears on his face before now. He stood at the open cash register, with shining glasses and liquor bottles arrayed behind him, just as she’d seen him stand since she was a little girl. Manny knew how to ma
ke people happy. Long ago, he had explained to her that what he did was very important. He helped people enjoy the great blue sea without a care, and he greeted them with a cold drink and a smile when they came home to a reality that often wasn’t very pleasant. If Cody took her out into the dark and she didn’t come back, she would be sad to leave Manny.

  Amande’s grandmother had loved Manny in the special way that old women love charming young men who bring them daisies and bourbon. She had paid him the compliment of trusting him with her granddaughter. Amande missed her grandmother and she wondered what it meant to die. If Cody pressed harder on the knife handle, hard enough to slice her jugular vein, would she see her grandmother again? What about her mother, Justine, who had run away from baby Amande? Justine had kept running until cancer stopped her dead. If the knife did its job, would Amande finally meet the mother who gave birth to her?

  She would rather stay with the mother she had, the one who cared about her so much that Amande sometimes chafed under her love, the one who was standing so nearby but not quite near enough to touch.

  Amande’s eyes found Faye’s and she comforted herself with what she saw there. If she had to die, it would be in the company of someone who saw her and knew her and loved her anyway.

  * * *

  Manny, standing at the bar, was the only person in the room who could see Cody’s back, so he was the only person who saw the bulge under his jacket. The bulge was the shape and size of a handgun, some kind of semiautomatic unless Manny missed his guess.

  This bulge complicated Manny’s life considerably. His first priority was Amande, and it would always be Amande. He simply loved her, as much as if she were his own baby girl. More than that, he admired her. Nobody east of the Rockies would have expected that the abandoned child of two heroin addicts, raised by an old woman with no education and no money, could have grown into the vibrant, loving, dynamic person standing just out of his reach. Setting aside his own feelings, he owed it to Amande’s grandmother to save her precious baby.