by Diane Capri
“We’re going to run for the river and swim for it. I can’t see anybody, but that doesn’t mean they won’t see us. We’re going to be really exposed running across that lawn.”
“You can say that again,” Lex said, and smiled at me.
“Yeah, right. Look, don’t stop for anything. The tide is flowing downriver right now. If somebody sees us, swim to the middle of the river and try to keep your head underwater as long as you can. If we get separated, we’ll meet up again on the far side of the river by the next bridge. Okay?”
Sunny looked so scared.
“You can swim, can’t you?”
They nodded.
“Then let’s do it.”
We took off running across the lawn, jumped onto the wood deck around the pool, and leaped down the three steps to the dock. Right as I passed the Jacuzzi, I heard Crystal’s scream.
“It’s them! Cesar, Zeke, they’re back here!”
I jumped, stretched out, and flew through the air in one of the finest racing dives I have ever executed. I heard and felt the impact of the other two behind me. I was probably a much stronger swimmer than they were, but then, I was weighted down by my clothes. They didn’t have that problem.
The first time I came up for air, I saw Sunny struggling far behind me. She really wasn’t much of a swimmer. She was dog-paddling and looking like she was trying to climb up out of the water.
“Sunny, hold on. I’m coming.”
Back at the dock, I could see three figures on the Hard Bottom, their muffled voices unintelligible across the water except for a few words: “Keys ... assholes ...”
When I was about three strokes away from Sunny, I heard her take one of those desperate inhales, as she sucked water and went down.
I filled my lungs as full as I could and dove. It was so black that there was no point in even trying to open my eyes. She had to be right here. I had lost too many lately, and I wasn’t about to lose this one. She was already deep when my fingers finally brushed through her hair. I twined my fingers in the strands and reached for her as my lungs started to ache. I pulled her to the surface, but mine was the only gasp for air.
I heard the boat rumble to life about the same time the spotlight clicked on. I was almost to the far bank of the river with Sunny. She still wasn’t breathing, but I saw a sportfisherman with an aft swim step and folding boarding ladder. I had a heck of a time when I tried to pull her up onto the swim step. I stretched her out, cleared the airway, and started mouth-to-mouth. Before long she gagged, puking up river water, and I dragged her to the side deck, out of sight of that damn spotlight. She was groggy and confused, and I hushed her and lay down on the deck next to her exhausted, looking up at the stars, watching the spotlight glide along the riverbank and listening to the music of her breathing.
After several minutes, she coughed a little and started to sit up.
“Shh. Lie down. They’re looking for us,” I whispered.
The spotlight lit up the superstructure of the boat and shone beyond into the bushes and pathways of the homes on the riverbank. Sunny lay quiet as we heard the burbling of Crystal’s boat passing just alongside ours. I could tell from the voices that Cesar was up on the bridge, Zeke down on deck level. Although I couldn’t understand most of the words, I knew they were arguing, shouting at one another.
Suddenly, Cesar shouted, “Look! Over there! In the water!” The boat’s RPMs increased, and we heard the swoosh of the prop wash, followed by the creaking dock lines as our boat pulled against her moorings in the turbulent water. I crawled forward and watched over the bulwark as their white boat tied up to an empty dock and Cesar took off running across a lawn. I assumed it was Lex they’d seen or heard. I hoped she wouldn’t get caught.
I turned around, leaned my back against the inside of the bulwark, and tried to think. Sunny was sitting on the deck, hugging her knees to her chest, shivering, and looking up at me like she thought I knew what we were going to do next. Naked and wet, she looked miserable. How the hell was I supposed to get all the way across downtown Fort Lauderdale with a gorgeous, naked fifteen-year-old girl?
I crawled aft on my hands and knees, keeping my head below the level of the bulwark. There was a big white fiberglass deck box on the afterdeck. Under the dock lines, swim fins, tackle box, and snorkels, I found a man’s shortie wet suit. At least this would keep her afloat.
“Put this on,” I whispered, handing it to her.
I peeked around the edge of the bulwark. Crystal’s boat was still tied up at that house downriver from us, her engines idling. I couldn’t make out who was aboard, but my guess was that both Zeke and Cesar had jumped ashore to search. I couldn’t be sure though.
“We’re going to have to go back in the water,” I told Sunny, and her eyes opened wider in fear. “I was a lifeguard. I won’t let you drown. Besides, this wet suit is made of material that floats. It’ll keep you up—you couldn’t sink in this. Okay?”
She nodded, her mouth set in a tight line. She was showing more guts than I’d expected.
“Come on.” I led her aft, and we slipped back into the river off the swim step. “Keep your face turned away from their boat. The light reflects off your face, and they might spot us. Just float. Take my hand.”
We pushed our way around the stern and into the current. The river was only about fifty yards wide here, so we would be passing fairly close to the boat, even if we stayed to the far bank. The hardest part was not looking in that direction. I wanted to see who was on the boat and if they had Lex with them, but I knew it would be foolish to turn my face in their direction. As we drifted past an empty dock on our side of the river, a dog started barking up in the yard. We could hear him running, claws scratching against a wood deck.
“Shut up, you fucking dog,” Cesar called across the river.
I felt Sunny squeeze my hand tighter. Neither of us breathed for several long seconds as we floated just opposite their boat. The barking dog raced to the end of the dock. He had finally noticed our dark shadows in the water.
“Come on, Cesar, we lost them. Crystal’s gonna be pissed,” Moss said just before the idling engine revved and we heard the thump of dock lines being thrown on deck. The noise of the boat began to move upriver, away from us.
Sunny was shivering, and I could feel the trembling in her hand. I had to get her out of the water. I began scanning the docks and banks of the river for a small boat. Nearly everything we passed was chained up and locked. The river residents knew better than to leave boats loose in this town. We finally came by a little trawler with a punt tied alongside. The punt was no more than eight feet long, and it was so beat-up and ugly, its owners must not have worried about thieves. There were two oars tucked under the center seat. It would do. I held down the bow as Sunny climbed in over the stern, and I soon followed her. After untying the lines and fitting the oars in the locks, we were off, my back and arms straining to pull those oars as hard and fast as I could.
At the Seventh Avenue Bridge, I pulled off to the side and grabbed hold of a piling. The noise of the cars passing on the steel grate overhead sounded like the rumbling of a jackhammer. This was where I had told Lex we would meet up with her. I waited five minutes before moving on.
The city was dead quiet as we passed under the downtown bridges. A few cars passed on streets parallel to the river. Each time I held my breath, terrified that it might be them. But even along Riverwalk, there were only a few solitary couples far too wrapped up in themselves to pay us any mind as our creaky oars pulled us downriver.
Lex would be fine. She was a survivor, I told myself. Then I remembered the last time I had heard that.
Chapter XXIV
We didn’t say a word to each other. I didn’t know what Sunny was thinking, but I was wondering what I would find at my place. Nervous as I was about what I would find, my hands were grateful as the Gorda came into view on the river. The red ovals on my palms would surely puff up into nasty blisters soon.
Su
nny had nodded off, slumped over in the stern of the dinghy. The wet suit rode up so that the shoulders were at the level of her ears, but the arm holes still gaped at her waist. She’d tucked herself inside, turtlelike, crossing her arms over her breasts. I tapped her on the knee to wake her and lifted my finger to my lips, motioning her not to speak.
After tying the punt’s bowline off to a piling, I climbed on the dock and gestured for Sunny to stay in the boat. I whistled very softly, not wanting to scare Abaco. I heard her get up from her spot in the bushes, a low growl beginning in her throat, but then she saw me and trotted over jumping up on me to be petted. I motioned for Sunny to reach up and let the dog sniff her hand.
Peering through the crack in the gate, I saw the dark shadow of a vehicle parked out in the Larsens’ driveway. I slipped through the gate and, crawling on my hands and knees, made my way to the drive. When I lifted my head to have a look, I saw a black El Camino, B.J. slumped over in the front seat.
I made my way around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was rolled down. I didn’t know if he was asleep or unconscious or worse. I reached in and shook his shoulder.
He started awake, wide-eyed and alert. “Uh... what?”
I held my fingers to my lips. “Shh.”
“You okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah.” At that moment I heard a car start down the street. “B.J., duck, hide.”
I made my way to the front of B.J.’s truck, where I couldn’t be seen from the street. The car, the same dark blue Camaro with tinted windows, slowed to a stop at the Larsens’ drive. I could hear the radio tuned to a rap music station, and then Cesar’s deep voice. “See anything?”
“Nah, it’s too soon, man.”
The car moved on, making a U-turn and then coming back past the house once more before leaving the neighborhood.
I slid back around to the window. “Come on. Let’s go out back.” He sat up and opened the door. The noise it made when he closed it made me cringe. I hoped they were well down the street. We hurried back through the gate, and I led him down to the dock, where Sunny still waited in the boat.
“Help her up, will you?”
Sunny reached up one arm, and he lifted her out of the boat.
“I don’t think we ought to go into my house. Let’s go into the Larsens’ place.”
“Good idea,” B.J. said, and went for the key hidden by the back kitchen door.
Food smells lingered in the kitchen when B.J. opened the door.
B.J. reached for the wall plate, and I grabbed his hand. “No lights.”
Sunny leaned against the wall, her arms wrapped around her midriff, her glazed eyes staring into space.
“We need to get her into a warm shower. She’s been too cold too long.”
“You, too,” B.J. said. “You need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re shaking.”
I hadn’t even noticed it, but he was right. Taking her by the hand, I led her through the dining room to the downstairs guest bedroom and bath. At first she didn’t want to take a shower in the dark, but once I explained the situation to her, she agreed. I found huge, thick towels folded in the closet, and I set one out for her and another for myself, then turned down the covers of the queen-size guest bed. She didn’t speak to me when she got out, just toweled off and crawled under the covers.
The clothes I peeled off stank of the river: rotting vegetation, oily street runoff, and sewage. The clean hot water felt good, but it restored feeling to my limbs and body, which had been pleasantly numb. Now the many aches returned. In the dark I ran my fingers over the little barnacle cuts on my belly and thighs, the bumps on my head, the deep bruise in my shoulder, the raw blisters on my hands.
After toweling off my wet hair and combing it out, I wrapped myself in a huge white bath sheet and went in search of B.J. I found him standing to one side of the unshuttered entry window, keeping watch over the front of the house.
“Any sign of them?”
“They’ve driven by twice so far. Now they’ve parked. See, down there by the stop sign.”
“What happened to the cops who were out there?”
“They left around seven o’clock. I guess they gave up.” B.J. continued to stare at the vehicle down the street. “I bet they’re talking right now, saying you’ve probably gone somewhere else tonight, but they know you’ll eventually be back. They’ll just wait. And they’re right.” He turned to face me. “You can’t hide in here forever.”
“No, I know that.” I looked around the front room. “Any idea what time it is?”
“It’s just after two. I saw a clock in the kitchen.”
“So we have some time before daybreak. The Larsens shut off the phone when they’re out of town. So I have to sneak over to my cottage and call Mike Beesting in a bit. I know why Neal was out there that day on the Top Ten. We’ll take Gorda out in the morning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what Neal was diving for out there, and I know why people are getting killed.”
He reached out and ran his hand over my slick wet hair. He felt the old bump from the fire extinguisher and then the new one from when they pushed me into the closet.
“Come, tell me the story in here.” He led me into the family room, where a big-screen TV sat opposite a soft, deep nine-foot couch, the kind of couch you sink into and have a hard time getting out of. When we fell into the soft pillows, I made sure we were a safe distance apart and that my towel remained discreetly wrapped.
I puffed out my cheeks and exhaled loudly. “B.J., you can’t imagine what I saw tonight.” My throat tightened. “We’ve got to stop them.”
He chuckled. “Like I said, out to save the world.”
“No, not the world ... just some girls, like Sunny in there. I didn’t save Elysia; in fact, I probably even contributed to her death. I mean, if I hadn’t gone to talk to her that night... I think she’d still be alive.”
B.J. reached over and took my hand in his. There was more compassion than romance in the gesture, yet my body reacted to his touch as though an inner fault line were shifting.
I looked into his almond-shaped brown eyes. B.J. was a man, like Neal, like Cesar. Could I trust this man? I’d made so many bad choices recently, I didn’t trust my own judgment anymore. Was this man any different?
He stared back at me, unflinching. “It’s okay to ask questions,” he said.
I slid over the cushions, wrapped my arms around his waist, and rested my head against his chest. “And that’s why you are different,” I whispered.
We sat like that for a while just holding each other. And then, with those miracle-worker fingers of his, he began massaging my head, easing the pain in the bumps and taking the tension out of my temples. I twisted around until I was leaning against him like a backrest and started to tell him the whole story.
“See, B.J., people don’t normally build compartments into ships to smuggle stuff out of this country. That didn’t make sense to me at first.”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“But then I thought about where they were going, the Cayman Islands, and then it all made sense.” From my head to my neck to my shoulders, his fingers worked, bringing life and warmth and tingling and pleasure.
“What made sense?” he asked.
“What are the Caymans known for?”
“Diving and banks,” he said, and began kissing me on the side of my neck.
“Right. So if you’ve got lots of illegally obtained cash...”
I started to ask him where he thought Neal might have hidden the money on the freighter, but just then his hands reached over the tops of my shoulders.
I needed to check on Sunny, I needed to call Mike, but all that faded with this other need. Leaning back into B.J.’s chest, forcing his hands to slide lower, I pulled loose the bath sheet so that his hands were free to slide over my breasts and down my belly. From deep in his chest I heard a murmur, maybe a groan, and I knew, as surely as he had known the
time was wrong before, that this time was just right.
Chapter XXV
We lay naked on the couch, our bodies entwined, and I tried to join B.J. in that much-needed world of sleep. I’d had almost no sleep in the last forty-eight hours, and the fatigue I felt was bone deep. But I was too tired to sleep. I wanted and needed the rest so badly, I was trying too hard. My eyes simply would not close, so I lay there staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, willing myself to get some rest.
Once again I had a feeling that we were being watched. All the windows except that one by the front door were covered on the outside with aluminum hurricane shutters. No one could be looking in. I glanced toward the entry, wondering if I was sensing someone coming to the front door. Or was it just paranoia, a reaction to the days of dealing with these wackos?
My heart rate had quickened, along with my breathing. Thoughts went around inside my brain like clothes in an electric dryer. I felt trapped under B.J.’s arm, so I slowly rolled off the couch, out from under his embrace. He moaned and rearranged himself but didn’t wake.
I had to get to a phone, call Mike, then get out to the wreck site. There would be clothes upstairs. Mrs. Larsen was shorter and heavier but I wasn’t up to crossing the yard in the buff.
Their bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and in the dresser I found some navy shorts and a black T-shirt. With a belt from the closet, I was able to keep the shorts up. The shoes were all too small for my size nines. Padding down to the toilet at the end of the hall, I thought I heard a noise from behind a closed door. I stopped for a moment and listened, but I didn’t hear anything. In the bathroom, I heard it again. It was a creaking metallic sound.
As I pulled up my shorts, I thought about the closed door out there in the hall. I knew the house fairly well; the door led to another guest bedroom. I couldn’t imagine why this door was closed, unless B.J. had closed it for some reason. Reaching for the doorknob, I heard the sound again, much louder, more distinct this time. I froze. I knew that sound. It was the sound of the aluminum hurricane shutters rolling up.
