Then I cut my hand on something—glass or splintered wood—and then I opened my eyes and saw brighter light. I pulled Zale with me and we swam through the window and began to rise toward the surface.
I inhaled a little water as I broke through into the air because in my hurry I didn’t wait until my mouth was clear. Air. Sweet, sweet air. I was coughing, but it was air, and I was still clutching Zale’s hand. We both floated on our backs, breathing in the sweet taste of air. We’d been so focused on trying to get out, I hadn’t really cared how cold the water was. Now I felt the cold reaching into my body, leaching out the heat.
Then I heard a whoosh sound, and when I looked over at the boat, the sharp point of the bow disappeared under the waves and the flybridge canvas reared up out of the water as the boat settled on the bottom in what must have been twelve to maybe fifteen feet of water.
“Come on,” I said to Zale, and we both swam for the canvas. The day was nearly over, the overcast sky dark and low. The wind chop that had pushed us along as we floated now made it hard to swim back to the boat. My sweatshirt and jeans and layers of T-shirts and turtlenecks also made swimming more difficult, not to mention the debris covering the surface of the water. We had to push aside the bits of wood cabinetry and cushions and clothing that continued to rise to the surface downwind of the boat. When we finally reached the flybridge enclosure, I reached for what I thought was part of the canvas and found instead that I’d grabbed Richard Hunter’s arm. His clothes had caught in the metal framework.
I was startled and I pulled back my hand as though I’d been burned. But I wasn’t frightened. It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d seen a dead body, and a part of me had known they must be around. Earlier that day I’d felt so angry and afraid. But seeing his open eyes, his lips pulled back, baring his teeth in a grimace of pain, his tattered camouflage shirt ripped with holes from dozens of bullets, I was surprised that I felt pity for the man. He may have been the one who pulled the trigger and shot Nick Pontus, but life had made him into a killing machine, and I suspected his sister had pointed him at the target.
I found we were able to stand on the bridge deck in water up to our thighs, though when we stood, the air felt far colder than the water. The forecast for this cold front was for an overnight low in the forties. I knew we would have to get dry somehow or we were going to face hypothermia.
I worked to disentangle the fragments of Richard’s shirt from the metal frame that held the canvas around the bridge. After pushing his eyelids closed, I set him adrift. I supposed the other two had either drifted off or were trapped in the cabin below. I was glad we hadn’t run into them on our way out of the boat. I might never have made it to the surface if that had happened.
“You know this boat,” I shouted as I pushed the body away. “We’re going to need to salvage some gear.”
When I turned back to the helm, he ducked his head underwater, only to resurface a few seconds later with a waterproof flashlight in one hand and an emergency flare kit in the other. His teeth were chattering when he handed them to me.
“Terrific,” I said, taking the box from him. Once we opened it, though, the plastic case was full of water and the flare gun was useless. The cartridges were sodden and fell apart in our hands. There was a sealed packet of two handheld flares, though, and they looked clean and dry inside the plastic.
“Zale, look at the way you’re shaking. Maybe we’ll use one of these later to start a fire onshore. Where did your dad keep his life jackets?”
“I know of something better,” he said, and he took about three deep breaths and dove off the flybridge. As a woman, at least I had a little—okay, more than a little— padding on my body to act as insulation against this cold. Zale was all skin and bones. How could he keep going back into that water like that? Had it been lighter I would have been able to see him down there, but I could only make out the faint yellow glow of the flashlight. He surfaced a few seconds later with two mesh dive bags and two full-length wet suits.
“Kid, you are amazing. I was just starting to think about how the hell we were going to get dry and warm. These just may save our lives.”
“That one’s my dad’s. We used to come down to the Keys during the lobster mini-season sometimes. It should fit you okay.”
We stripped down to our underwear, turning our backs to each other with a modesty that, under the circumstances, seemed a little ridiculous. Then we pulled on the wet suits. Nick’s suit fit me well enough, though it was a little tight round the hips and loose in the shoulders. Even though they weren’t very heavy neoprene suits, we stopped losing heat at such a rapid rate as soon as we zipped them up. We threw our clothes and shoes up on the flybridge console.
“I think we’d better swim to the island,” I said, “while there’s still a little light left.”
Across Biscayne Bay, the lights on the mainland were starting to wink on. The high-rises of the city of Miami were glowing in the evening haze, and while we could make out the lights of the Turkey Point Power Plant, most of the rest of the coast was dark. We’d need to get out of this water as soon as possible. Then we could build a fire, try to find some shelter from the wind.
“Zale, there’s a ranger station a few miles south of here on Elliot. We could try to walk it tonight or wait until first light. Even closer, there are some buildings up on Boca Chita, about a mile away. I’m sure there wouldn’t be any boats out there in this weather, but we’d find shelter.”
Zale shook his head. “We’ve got to get back tonight. Like you said, we’ve got to get my mom out of jail.”
“But there’s no way we can do that, Zale. We can’t swim across to the mainland,” I said, pointing to the dark shape on the horizon speckled with scattered pricks of light. “It’s five or six miles. We’d never make it.”
“No, we can’t swim,” he said, and then he grinned at me for the first time ever. “But we could sail,” he said. I’d met this boy by telling him that his father was dead, and other than a few halfhearted attempts at smiles, I’d never really seen him happy. This was a different kid. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ve got a boat. My dad always wanted me to go on these summer trips down to the Keys with him and his friends. It was boring. A couple of years ago he bought me a Metzeler inflatable sailing dinghy, so I could sail while he and his friends went fishing. It’s pretty cool.”
“You’re telling me that onboard this boat there are all the parts for a sailing dinghy?”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff, but we could swim it ashore and put it together there.”
“Let’s do it then,” I said. The top of the steering console was not underwater, and although the wind chop was breaking against the plastic windows, we were fairly protected there. Zale had set the dive bags up there earlier, and now we lifted them down and put on the fins and masks with snorkels. Following his directions, we retrieved two bags out of the cockpit deck box and the two-part aluminum mast that had been lashed to a stanchion on the floor of the cockpit. We piled everything up on the console.
“That’s almost everything,” Zale said. “I just need one more thing.” He grabbed the flashlight, took three quick breaths, and dove. I watched the light disappear into the cabin.
I didn’t like it. So far, we hadn’t tried to go inside the cabin for anything. Everything we’d retrieved had been stored in lockers accessible from the deck area. I was worried that one of the other two bodies might still be in the cabin. We hadn’t seen any sharks so far, but that didn’t mean they weren’t down where we couldn’t see them. I pulled my mask down over my eyes and fit my snorkel into my teeth and started to take a deep breath, but Zale bobbed to the surface before I jumped.
“Here,” he said through his snorkel, shoving the aluminum photographer’s case across the surface of the water. It banged against my knees.
I lifted it out of the water. “Geez, Zale.”
He spit out his snorkel. “Can’t forget what we came for,” he
said.
I took the bag with the folded inflatable dinghy and the two pieces of mast. Zale took the bag with the floorboards, pump, leeboards, rudder, rigging, and sail. He tied one end of a piece of light line to the silver case, the other end to his wrist.
As we got ready to leave for shore, he lifted the case a couple of times. “I don’t think it could be that much money,” he said. “It’s not heavy.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of stock certificates or bonds or something that’s worth millions. You never know with Nick,” I said.
“It’s kinda cool guessing, huh?”
I returned his smile. “Yeah.”
Although the swim to shore started out with difficulty, loaded as we were with gear, we’d not gone a hundred yards before the bottom came up under our feet and we found we could walk the rest of the way.
Wasn’t much of a shore, though—just some rough coral rubble that went up about three feet from the water’s edge. Then the brush started. Years of salt spray and strong winds had stunted the growth of most bushes on the island. Only a few were taller than my armpit.
We decided to inflate the dinghy in the water. With the foot pump right down at the water’s edge, I stomped on the pump’s bellows while Zale kept it from impaling itself on a sharp coral rock. Once inflated, we added the floorboards, the daggerboards, and all the sailing rigging.
It didn’t look like much of a sailing boat. First of all, the thing was bright orange. It was really a typical twelve-foot inflatable sport boat with pointed pontoons aft and a little wooden transom for mounting an outboard motor. But she had a braced mast step on her floorboards and various pad-eyes for tying down her running rigging.
“She’s not really designed to sail in this much wind,” Zale explained. “The good thing is, there are two of us. We need the ballast.”
“Always glad to be counted on as ballast.”
“We’re going to make lots of leeway, though. That’s the bad part. Do you know what’s over there?” He pointed across to the mainland.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “I think we should head for just north of the power plant. That would put us in around the park there at Convoy Point. This whole area, including the island we’re sitting on, is part of Biscayne National Park. The park is mostly water, but there’s a visitors’ center and a little marina on the mainland over there. We should be able to find somebody or walk our way out from there.”
“Okay. We’d better aim farther north, though. Those daggerboards don’t do much. That’ll put us on a reach all the way. I just hope the rig can take it.”
“If we lose the rig, we’ll just get blown down into Card Sound and we’ll end up on Key Largo. At least we won’t be blown out to sea.”
“True,” he said. “But I need to get home.”
“We’ll get you there.”
First, we rowed out to deeper water so that we could inflate the keel. Then we started with just the jib. Zale was on the tiller while I raised the little sail. It flapped like crazy until he pulled the sheet in and got it under control. We started to move forward.
At first, it was great. This is going to be easy, I thought. We were moving on the water at about two knots, and I figured we’d be across in two to three hours. With each little gust, the pontoon on the windward side would lift just a little as we heeled over with the wind. We were taking the chop on the forward quarter, but the soft pontoons rose up easily over the little waves. Only a little water shipped aboard.
But the farther we traveled away from Sand Key, the rougher the water grew. We’d been experiencing some protection from the north winds from Key Biscayne, but as we got out into the channel, the little wind waves grew to three to five feet in height, and they started curling and breaking into the dink.
We had nothing to bail with. Zale had his hands full with steering, so I cupped my hands and started trying to throw the water out of the boat. The water was a couple of inches above the dinghy’s floorboards, and I couldn’t seem to get it any lower than that.
“Can’t you get the water out any faster?” Zale yelled. “It’s slowing us down.”
We had not yet dared to put up the mainsail, but we were wallowing in the troughs of the seas. Another good-sized swell shipped aboard, and I began to worry about the rig. Part of what keeps a sailboat’s rig intact is the fact that the boat can heel over a little. The extra weight of the water in the boat wasn’t allowing the mast to lean over. If it didn’t get some relief soon, the rig would just snap off.
I looked around the dinghy. We had a paddle, the pump, dive bags with our snorkel gear, and tucked next to Zale was his silver case, the line still tied to his wrist. We had nothing to use as a bailer. Even with our wet suits, sitting in the cold water was taking a toll. My fingers and toes were numb, and the skin on my face ached from the salt and the freezing wind. The little rigging lines creaked and groaned as the waterlogged vessel was hit with another gust.
Of course! The face masks! The moment I thought of it, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. My brain must be frozen, I thought, as I dug into the dive bags and pulled out the clear silicone masks. I found a position where I could sit, leaning against the leeward pontoon, and scooped two-fisted, throwing the water over my shoulder back into the sea. I started to gain on it. Then, just when I thought I’d solved our biggest problem, I realized that the pontoon I was leaning against was going soft. We had a leak.
XXVII
I’d brought the foot pump with us, but there was no way I could stand up in the dinghy in that seaway. I wanted to get on my knees and push down with my arms on the pump, but I couldn’t get far enough ahead of the water. The pump needed to rest on the floorboards, completely clear of water. Otherwise, the bellows couldn’t draw in the air. Bailing with the face masks, I just couldn’t get rid of that last couple of inches of water. Finally, I hooked up the air pump and held the bellows between my arms like an old sailor’s squeeze box, only I wasn’t playing a tune. I was trying to keep our boat afloat.
Though we were steering the boat toward a spot on the coastline about a mile north of Convoy Point, we continued to be shoved sideways by the strong northerly winds. I did not want to land on the grounds of the nuclear power plant for a couple of reasons. Given their security there, and their fear of a terrorist attack, they would be more likely to ship us off to jail first and ask questions later. The second problem with the power plant did not come from the human element. The plant was surrounded by cooling canals in the mangroves that worked like a giant radiator to disperse the heat created by the big turbines. These canals had become the nesting grounds for up to forty American crocodiles.
Normally, when people think of Florida and the Everglades, they think of gators, which are strictly freshwater creatures. Along the coast, where the environment is often a mix of fresh and saltwater, is where the crocs survive. Because American crocodiles are endangered, the nuclear power plant had scored some much-needed points with the environmental community when it had made the wetlands around the plant into a preserve for the endangered animals. I did not want to be trying to hike my way out of a mangrove preserve, waiting for the crocs to get me.
“How’re you holding up?” I hollered at Zale, the wind whipping my voice off across the water.
“What?” he yelled back. He sat huddled at the stern of the boat like a little gnome, the tiller under his arm, held tight against his body. His wet suit was black with yellow stripes down the sides, making his body nearly invisible in the night. From time to time he took his index finger and wiped it across his glasses like an ineffectual little windshield wiper.
“I asked how you’re doing. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. But I’m worried about leeway.”
“Me, too,” I shouted back, continuing to bail, scraping my raw hands across the floorboards as I scooped with the silicone masks. “I think the seas will let up a little, though, when we pass the halfway mark. We’ll start to get a little protecti
on from the mainland.”
Zale had sheeted in the headsail, and we were sailing as hard on the wind as the little boat could manage, but we were still sliding past our destination. The worst part of the trip lasted for about an hour. If the whole voyage had been like that, neither the boat nor her crew would have held up. I kept alternating between bailing and pumping the bellows to keep the boat inflated.
The wind and the waves screamed straight down the middle of the channel from some point north of Miami. Since the bay waters were relatively shallow, the waves built up to heights one normally wouldn’t find with such a short fetch. In an inflatable dinghy, a three-foot curling wave looks like a monster. Just one of those could have completely swamped the boat. Zale seemed to have a sixth sense about how and where the waves were going to break and somehow he steered us through them. Waves would break and engulf us in white water that poured over the pontoons, but never did one of those curling monsters dump right on top of us.
To keep my bailing and pumping rhythm going, I sang songs. The only ones I knew all the words to were shanties like “My Father Was the Keeper of the Eddystone Light” and drinking songs like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I’d made it down to twenty-nine bottles of beer when Zale interrupted my song.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yeah?” I stopped bailing and slid closer to him. “What?”
“We’re still headed for a landing at the power plant.”
“We can’t land there. If that’s the case, we’ll have to fall off and sail down to a landing somewhere to the south. Maybe another three miles down.”
“No,” he said. “I think I can do it if we raise the main. The wind and seas have let up a little.”
I thought he was being a bit too optimistic, but after two hours in the dinghy watching the way the kid handled the boat, I decided to trust him. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 26
