by Diane Capri
I nearly tripped on the doorframe when the carrier blew her deep, deafening horn. What, did they think I couldn’t see them?
Then there it was. Turquoise water. Twelve feet or better.
They blew their horn again and again. Five blasts in all, signaling “get the hell out of the way.” I couldn’t see the deck of the ship now, only this titanic gray wall of steel closing the narrow band of water that separated us. Although fine at the bow, the ship fattened amidships to fill the channel. And both in the air and through the deck, I could feel the throb and bite of her screws as they idled into harbor: thunk, thunk, thunk.
I turned the wheel and Gorda slipped around the end of the jetty, from the dark blue channel into the turquoise water. The tug’s squatting stern lifted up and began to surf on the swell of displaced water the carrier pushed in front of her. I eased off the throttle and watched the gray wall slide past. I stepped out of the wheelhouse and squinted up at the deck where small white-capped faces peered over the side. One sailor waved as the great ship filled the harbor entrance behind me. Perry hadn’t followed, thank God.
Now I had a tow to locate.
It was early in the day, but once offshore and clear of the tall stucco windbreaks, the wind was blowing a good ten to fifteen knots out of the southeast. High, clean-looking trade-wind clouds chased each other off toward the Glades. I slid the binoculars out of the case attached to the bulkhead and, steadying the wheel with one hip, I scanned the horizon, first to the north out the wheelhouse window.
I got lucky. It was not difficult to make out the distant bright outline of the Top Ten, apparently adrift. Looked like they’d made it no farther north than the Galt Ocean Mile before trouble stalled them. She was too close to shore. The Top Ten drew over seven feet, and with the onshore breeze, I figured she’d hit bottom within the hour. The problem was, it would take me half that time just to reach her.
I pushed the throttle back up to fourteen hundred RPM and checked around for any of the other boats from the local towing services. Off to the east the Cape Coral was towing a water barge back from Bimini, but this wasn’t her kind of job even if she were free. Perry was still the one I had to worry about.
When my father Red Sullivan, built Gorda over twenty-five years ago, his was the only boat to enter the business of towing luxury megayachts between the boatyards and marinas of Miami and Fort Lauderdale’s New River. Our next-door neighbor, a harbor pilot down in Port Everglades, told my father about the new regulations that would require every motor yacht with a draft greater than seven feet to be assisted by a tug. So when Red retired from the navy, he started building the aluminum hull over in a corner at Summerfield Boatworks. Mother often told us how thrilled she was to get him out of her house. She had grown accustomed to her life as a navy wife, to his long absences, and she was chafing at having him home all the time. Red had never intended the forty-foot tug to be an oceangoing salvage vessel, but as the luxury yachts grew bigger and more numerous, more towing companies jumped into the business. Eventually, he started taking Gorda out on breakdowns and salvage jobs just to stay busy.
The fathometer registered twelve feet when I pulled alongside the big slab-sided yacht. The brisk wind was throwing up quite a chop and, just drifting as she was, it put the Top Ten broadside to the slop. That, with the easterly swell, had Gorda rolling the rails down as we circled the ninety-two-footer. I blew the air horn a couple of times, but I couldn’t raise anyone on deck. There was an inexplicable stillness about the ship.
I drew in close to the swim step aft. Abaco tilted her head up and sniffed the air, then looked at me quizzically.
“I don’t know where Neal is, girl. I wish I did.”
One hundred feet of three-quarter-inch nylon line lay coiled on the foredeck. Backing off from the megayacht, I dashed out of the wheelhouse, threaded one end of the line through the hawser hole in the bulwark, and tied it securely with several hitches around the large aluminum post on the foredeck. The other end of the line I wrapped in a loose bowline around my waist, and I made it back to the wheel before we’d drifted too far.
When I’d eased Gorda’s bow up to within a few feet of the Top Ten’s swim step, a squirt in reverse stopped the tug from colliding with the motor yacht. I shoved the throttle into neutral and ran out of the wheelhouse, climbed up on the bow bulwark, coiled some slack line in my hand, and leaped down onto the swim step at the stern of the big yacht.
I lost my balance and collapsed in an awkward heap, slamming my shoulder into the gold-leaf T painted on the yacht’s transom. My heart felt like it was trying to break out of my rib cage, and it was several seconds before I drew a normal breath. Great landing, Sullivan, I thought. Gorda was drifting back rapidly, and if I didn’t hurry, the line around my waist would soon pull me right into the sea. Quickly I stood and untied myself. Apparently the only one who had seen my bumbling arrival was Abaco, her head cocked to one side and her legs spread for balance, watching me from the tug’s bow.
I climbed up the ladder to the aft deck and secured the line, adjusting the slack so that Gorda drifted angling off downwind, about forty feet off the big yacht’s stern. Then I called out, “Hello. Hello. Top Ten.” Neither the engines nor the generators were running, and in the shallow water, beam on to the wind, I could hear the vessel creaking and groaning as the hull wallowed in the swell. Yet even with that noise, the utter lifelessness seemed even more oppressive now that I was actually aboard.
Stepping over a puddle of water, I made my way forward up the starboard side. I hadn’t been aboard the Top Ten since Neal and I broke up, and every detail I observed kindled a small memory.
I cupped my hands to the glass on my left to try to see through the glare. The main salon was empty; a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate and a romance novel with a gaudy cover rested on the glass table. Neal had served us charbroiled dolphin on that table the first night he came aboard as captain. That night we’d been so happy about his new job, and we celebrated on the huge bunk in the owner’s stateroom, blissfully unaware that it was that job that would be the end of us.
A stainless ladder led to the bridge on the upper deck. I held tight to the rungs as the boat rolled, and I swung out, the water visible beneath my back. I used the momentum when the boat rolled back to pull myself up through the bulwarks, grabbing hold of the speedboat in chocks on the upper deck, but my sweaty hands slid across the smooth fiberglass. I dropped to a crouch to regain my balance.
The voice of the Coast Guardsman calling on the bridge VHF radio startled me at the same time I saw the hand at the base of the companionway door. The fingers were curved upward in a distinctly feminine curl, soft and relaxed. As the yacht rolled, the hand rocked slightly, showing a flash of red nail polish on the thumb.
“Hello,” I called out, feeling stupid as I did. Clearly, she wasn’t going to answer me.
Chapter II
Coast Guard Station Fort Lauderdale. This is the Top Ten.” My throat tightened. I couldn’t, shouldn’t look down. I’d had to step over the body to reach the dangling microphone, and it had taken every ounce of willpower I had not to run straight back to Gorda and get the hell out of there. The girl was on her side, resting in a pool of dark blood, the stainless-steel hilt of the dive knife showing below her left shoulder blade. Her long blond hair fanned out across the teak cabin sole and hid her face. She was wearing a thong bathing suit, and her exposed white buttocks looked more like smooth latex than flesh. I kept myself from looking down again, but the picture had been burned into my inner eyelids, and my mind kept flashing the snapshot over and over again.
The sour taste crept up the back of my throat again.
The Coastie’s radioman sounded almost excited when he came back on the air with his mundane questions. I didn’t want to spend any more time than was necessary on the radio. It was possible the killer was still aboard. The very thought made me swivel my head around and check out the windows on all sides of the bridge. I felt so exposed. I kept gl
ancing over my shoulder as I listened to the Coast Guard. The killer must be gone, I told myself. If he had wanted to kill me, there had been plenty of opportunity as I’d wandered around shouting earlier.
Besides, the big boat felt utterly empty. Maybe it was stupid to trust a gut feeling like that, but my intuition and instincts had kept me alive before. Finally I interrupted the Coast Guardsman, identified myself, and got straight to the point.
“Coast Guard Lauderdale, there is a fatality here.” At the time I said it, I wondered at my own words. They sounded official and self-assured even if they were at a slightly higher-than-normal, breathy pitch, and yet I felt everything but. The girl was dead, as in cold, white, plastic-looking, no longer a human being. Is that why cops withdraw into that silly techno-speak on the TV news all the time? Because to use the real words conjures up that slide show on the mind’s big screen, and it doesn’t matter if you looked only once, it’s going to replay over and over again.
I had seen dead bodies before. In six years working as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale’s city beach, I’d pulled one heart attack victim out of the surf, there had been several drownings, and I’d found that girl who overdosed, sitting up, back to a palm tree, facing the sunrise. And long before any of that, there had been my mother. But seeing it doesn’t make you get used to it. Besides, this one was different. This was no accident. Someone had intentionally thrust that blade through her skin. Although the hot sun shone brightly through the bridge windows, I shivered.
The boat rolled almost thirty degrees on an oversized swell, and a Heineken bottle crashed over on the console. I jumped back, my hand at the neck of my T-shirt, as the amber liquid spilled across the teak, wetting a chart folded back to reveal about a ten-mile stretch of coast. Weighting the chart down was a copy of Bowditch’s Practical Navigator. I looked more closely at the blue clothbound book, and I realized it was my copy of Bowditch—I’d loaned it to Neal several months before.
That was when I noticed the gun for the first time. It was on the console next to the depth sounder: a black handgun. I had no idea what kind it was. There were some holes in the instruments on the console, too. Obviously the gun had been fired. Then my ankle rubbed against cool flesh.
“Shit!” The sound of my own voice frightened me, and I knew I had to start doing something to get both myself and the Top Ten under control. The yacht was rolling worse, which meant she was getting into shallower water, While Gorda drew only four feet, the draft of a yacht like the Top Ten was closer to eight feet. I couldn’t let either boat touch bottom. Out the port-side windows, the morning sun reflected off the glass and white plaster of the condominiums several thousand yards away. A crowd was gathering at the water’s edge, retirees out for their morning walk and swim, now delighted at the prospect of their daily ritual being livened up by the chance to see a multimillion-dollar yacht about to go into the surf line.
I reached for the engines’ starter switch, but nothing happened. Either the engines needed to be started down in the engine room, or the damage here on the bridge had shorted out some necessary connection. I wished B.J. were here. He would probably be able to get these engines started. If not, at least he would have helped me get a line on this boat. Hell, it felt more like a ship. There was no more time to take the chance that the engines might not start.
I didn’t want to have to step over the body again. Dropping the mike onto the dashboard, I slipped out the port side of the bridge. My boat shoe slid on the deck, and a quick glance down revealed a red smear. I’d slipped on blood. More droplets led aft, and there was a good-sized dark puddle in front of the port ladder. Beyond, I could see the line of breakers, now no more than a couple of hundred yards off.
On the bow I found some yacht braid dock lines. I tied several of them together with hasty bowlines and ran the line from the Top Ten’s bow, outside everything, back to the stern. Abaco yelped and wiggled like a pup when she saw me. I could tell from the tension on the line between the two boats that there was no way I could pull up the Gorda by hand. Fortunately, the Top Ten had an Ideal warping capstan on the stern. I assumed the winch was hardwired directly to the ship’s batteries, but I still breathed a soft “thank you” when I hit the button and the drum started turning. I was able to winch the line in until the two boats were banging together. Gorda's aluminum bow was munching the big yacht’s teak swim step a bit, but it was nothing compared to what a few hours in the surf might do.
I tossed the Top Ten’s bowline onto Gorda’s foredeck and pulled myself up onto the tug. Abaco licked my face once as I came aboard, and then she stood back, out of the way. After untying the line that secured us to the big yacht’s stern, I tossed that line into the water. I wasn’t going to have to worry about Top Ten’s props getting tangled on the line; her engines were out of commission.
I walked the line that was tied to Top Ten’s bow back to the stern of Gorda and tied it to the tow bit. From the wheelhouse, I brought the tug around in a half circle to the seaward side of the Top Ten’s bow, careful not to foul the towline on my own prop. If the Top Ten didn’t touch bottom before I swung the bow around, she must have been missing by just inches. As we pounded our way offshore, away from the breakers, I noticed Perry circling in Little Bitt, probably praying my towline would bust. Then I heard the siren and saw the blue flashing lights of the Fort Lauderdale Marine Police Unit and, behind them, the Coast Guard cutter.
I smiled to myself. A little late, boys.
Chapter III
“You’re the one who found her.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was asking me or telling me, or even if he meant the girl or the boat. “Yes.” I stuck out my hand. “Seychelle Sullivan.”
He looked at my hand for a moment as though he were being offered a dead fish. Then he reached out and shook it in one brisk stroke.
“Detective Victor Collazo, Fort Lauderdale Police.” Long black hairs curled out from the cuffs of his white shirt, and though it was only midday, his face was already darkened by coarse black stubble. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“When I got there, the boat was unmanned and adrift. No captain, no helmsman, nobody. Nobody alive, at least. The vessel just missed going on the beach by minutes, but then I got a line on her and towed her in.”
“You just happened by.”
“No. I heard the mayday call on the radio. Towing is what I do.” I handed him a business card from my shoulder bag. “Sullivan Towing and Salvage. I’ve always got the radio on.”
We were sitting on the bright tropical-print sofa in the Top Ten’s main salon. With no generators and no air, the atmosphere in the boat was like an overheated engine room. He glanced at my card and dropped it in his coat pocket.
“And the victim,” he said.
“I didn’t touch a thing.” I nodded toward the upper deck. “That’s how she was when I found her.”
The Coasties had swarmed aboard as soon as Gorda nudged the Top Ten alongside the Port Everglades Coast Guard dock. Once I’d tied up the tug, I went back to tell them my side of the story, and they ushered me aboard, telling me to wait. Not too much later, the cops showed up, some in uniforms, others in plain clothes. There was a regular parade heading up and down from the bridge deck carrying suitcases, flash cameras, even video cameras. They all seemed to ignore me. Finally, I got up and asked a uniformed policewoman what they wanted me to do. She, too, told me to sit and wait. At that point, the last thing I wanted was to sit there with nothing to do, allowing my mind to replay the dead-girl slide show in my brain. Over and over, I watched myself approach the bridge, spot the hand, and then slowly, as I come around the corner, see the knife and the blood.
Only this time, I was suddenly on a beach, and there was no blood. The sun was so bright, it leached the color out of everything, and there was the overpowering coconut-sweet smell of suntan lotion. I heard hushed voices as I pushed my way through the crowd, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The only word I could hear was the last wo
rd I’d said to my mother. I was eleven years old again when I reached down and turned her head, brushing the sea grass from pale sandy skin; I knew that face.
Shaking my head as though to pry loose the memories, I refocused my eyes and my brain on the scene at hand. What was taking so long? What were they doing to find Neal? Were they thoroughly searching the boat? The sea? They surely wouldn’t know where to look. They didn’t know him like I did.
I remembered the book then, Bowditch’s Practical Navigator, and those days when we were down in the Keys aboard his little wooden sailboat, and he was teaching me celestial navigation. He was a lousy teacher. He carried it all around inside his head, and he didn’t know how to share it. He recommended I bring the Bowditch along and read it. I tried, but I was always getting lost, because the teacher was more interested in getting his student off the subject (and on to studying human anatomy) than in teaching navigation. Now, maybe that man I once loved was hurt and lost, and I was stuck in that hot salon, waiting.
I’d been sitting there trying hard to turn off the memories for over an hour when Collazo finally showed up. I was feeling irritable, hot, and sweaty. But the few drops on my upper lip were nothing compared to the sweat on that cop. Within minutes he was pressing a linen handkerchief to his face and neck, trying to mop up the rivulets of sweat, but no sooner had he wiped his face and neck dry than more droplets popped out of his skin. The man was an honest-to-God sweat machine. Immaculately dressed, he had taken off his jacket when he first sat down, revealing his perfectly pressed, custom-fitted shirt, but he never loosened his tie. Even so, above his collar I could see the tufts of hair peeking out. I figured he had to be a regular gorilla underneath all his clothes. Maybe, since some women don’t react too well to hairy guys, he tried to keep himself covered, no matter how miserable he might be.
