“Do you know who owns it?”
“Dick Curtiss out of Saint Martin.”
“Could you describe Mr. Curtis for me?”
“Well, no. I’ve never met him. My buddy Mel brokered the boat for him. One-point-three, but it’s got the big Cat diesels. That’s 3200 horsepower. She’ll do 40 knots easy.”
Well, hell. Ask a question, get an answer. Like this guy.
“Is your friend Mel around?”
The man thought a minute. “He’s probably mid-way into the South Atlantic. Delivering a yacht to Cape Town.”
Okay, then.
“What’s the distance to Saint Martin, about a hundred and fifty miles?”
‘More like one-twenty.”
“Hey, man, thanks.”
Malone backed out to the pier. Bobbi followed him over to a bench, and they sat down. The marina was starting to come alive all around them. Live aboard people taking a look at the day and stretching.
“What now, Oak?”
“Well, we’ve got a name.”
“Probably an alias.”
“No doubt. Let’s see. He wouldn’t do top speed all the way, but cruise at, say 35 knots. That’s about 40 miles per hour. Three hours to Saint Martin.”
“Can we rent a boat?”
“Probably could, but I’m not sure we want to try an interception on the high seas, even if we could catch up with him. Especially if I’m wrong about it being Sherry. Can you check flights?”
Bobbi dug her non-disposable cell phone out, which was smarter than his cell phone. In about five minutes, she said, “There’s a JetBlue flight leaving at 8:45. One stop in San Juan. Two hours and forty minutes to Phillipsburg.”
“I like it.”
She made the reservations.
And they went looking for a taxi.
*
When the door had opened, Hampstead was startled to see Sherry slip into the cabin. She knew it was him immediately because she’d seen his Army picture. Even with the beard, she recognized him. He was huge.
“November?”
“Hello, May. It’s nice to finally meet you in person.”
“Yes, well. . . .”
She had thought it would just be the two of them. What was Sherry doing here?
“I thought you were still in Washington.”
“The Chair told me to come to St. Thomas.”
She wasn’t certain she liked this at all.
“Is there more of that coffee?” he asked.
“I think so.”
He walked past her, moving carefully because the boat was rocking a little, and it looked like he wasn’t accustomed to it. His bulk made him look unstable, and there were only a couple inches of clearance for his head under the ceiling. He rounded the kitchen island, holding onto the counter top. His head disappeared behind the cookware hanging over the island. He opened a couple cupboards before he found a cup, and then poured from the electric pot that was cradled in a holder. Then he came back and sat on the couch at an angle to her.
Kept watching her. Sipped from the cup.
She watched through the side windows at the anchored boats and the shoreline slipping past. The boat picked up speed and initiated a little up and down movement. It made her stomach queasy.
“I’ve never been on a boat before,” she told Sherry.
“Me, either. I mean beyond a rowboat we used to fish from. This one’s pretty slick.”
She felt the boat turning and looked out the side window. The island was still there, which she thought was good, but it was moving away from them.
After a while, the boat slowed until it was barely moving. It rose and fell with the waves.
She heard footsteps above, and then shortly after, the door opened, and he came in.
Alicia smiled at him.
“Now, Alicia, I assume you have your smart phone with you?”
“I do.”
“And you can access your account with it?”
Did she want to answer that?
“Alicia?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see it.”
“Oh, there’s no need. . . .”
“Right now. I want to be reassured.”
She thought Sherry was observing all of this with interest.
“Well, okay.”
Hampstead rifled through her purse for the phone, which was not the disposable she normally used, turned it on, and then logged into her account. She held it so no one could see the password she keyed in. When the screen came up, she turned it around and showed him.
“Damn, you’ve got it all in one place,” he said.
“Yes. It’s very safe.”
“Now, I want the password to that account,” he told her.
“There’s no need. . . .”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a tool. “Do you know what this is, Alicia?”
“Ah . . . no.”
“They’re called wirecutters. I’m going to use them to take off your fingers a joint at a time until you give me the password and I make sure it works. Dexter, hold her!”
Alicia tried to scramble off the couch, but Sherry reached her with one huge hand and grabbed her arm. He stood her up, turned her back to him, holding her tight against his chest, and held both of her arms in a rock hard grasp. She tried to shift her shoulders, straining against him. Sheer panic made her mind go fuzzy.
Felt her left hand lifted.
She screamed. This couldn’t happen!
Felt the tool grip her little finger.
“Once more, Alicia. The password.”
Screamed again.
Felt the agonizing pain in her hand. Almost blacked out.
And after a few seconds, gasped out the password.
“Dexter,” he said, “you can have her for about an hour.”
*
Malone and Galway arrived at Princess Juliana International Airport a little behind the airline’s schedule, at 11:40 in the morning. He figured the Hatteras had arrived at least by 10:00.
Saint Martin had been divided between France and the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1648. The French had the northern part of the island and the Dutch controlled the southern part, actually named Sint Maarten. The airport was located in Dutch territory near the sprawling residential and commercial areas that comprised Phillipsburg to the east.
To the south of the airport was Simpson Bay, and to the north was Simpson Bay Lagoon, a huge body of water around which a lot of the French territory was wrapped. In his study of the map he’d picked up before the flight, Malone figured out that the perimeter of the island offered many resorts and residential areas, but very few marine facilities.
Those were located mostly inside the Lagoon which had both northern and southern entrances from the sea. There was a large marina on the north end of the island outside the Lagoon. Several marinas were located in both French and Dutch regions, and some of the houses that fronted on the Lagoon also sported private docks. They were mainly on the northwestern French side of the Lagoon.
It was still a lot of area to cover looking for one silly boat. But a silly big boat.
In the terminal, once they were through immigration, Oak and Bobbi found their way to the Plantation Grill and Bar in the Arrivals section. The Glock had come through nicely in his bag. Tourists never carried guns.
Over his objections, Bobbi ordered salads and iced tea for both of them, then opened her laptop and logged onto the airport’s Wi-Fi system.
“White Pages doesn’t have a listing for either Dick Curtiss or Richard Curtiss.”
“Probably lives by cell phone alone.”
“Or maybe he’s in residence down here only a few days a year,” Bobbi said.
For Bobbi, that was ceding some of her position on Daddy-in-Law.
“Could just live on the boat,” Oak said. “It should be luxurious enough.”
“I could try to check property sales for the last few years. That might take a while.”
; “I think we’ll just go look at boats, Bobbi. We’re only looking for a Hatteras yacht, which reduces the number considerably.”
“Are we staying on the French side or the Dutch side?”
“Your choice. Common language is English. The French prefer nude beaches and art, and the Dutch lean toward a more boisterous night life.”
Dutch, it was.
So after lunch, they rented a Camry and drove Airport Road south until, near the Sint Maarten Yacht Club, it became Welfare Road. They stayed on that thoroughfare until they reached the Turquoise Shell Inn, which happened to have a room for them. Malone got an address from the clerk, and they stopped at a small international bank to open an account for Fred and Melissa Williamson with a $500 cash deposit.
By 2:30, both of them in T-shirts and jeans, they were sailing northward in a 25-foot Catalina sailboat rented from a Dutch marina. It was a nice little day sailer, sleek and easy to handle. Not bad on speed. There were quite a number of sailboats cruising the Lagoon, so they didn’t stand out at all. Oak had a decent breeze out of the east and was able to tack back and forth to make his way northward.
The sun felt good on his face, and it was a beautiful day. He watched Bobbi sitting forward in the cockpit, training her binoculars on one target then another and thought this was damned close to perfect. Too bad they had thieves and murderers to deal with.
Malone had purchased two good pairs of binoculars so they could stay off-shore far enough to not attract too much attention and still survey the boats docked along the shoreline. There were probably thousands of them, most of a smaller variety than what they were searching for. He had had Bobbi look up the Hatteras website and take a look at the GT54 so she knew what it looked like. It was a pretty fabulous design so they could discount a great many large yachts easily. The Carmelita was designated a convertible, meaning it could be used for general cruising as well as deep sea fishing from the fighting chair mounted in her stern well.
The Isle Del Sol Marina on Snoopy Island was on their left, and sported quite a number of large yachts including a couple Hatteras, but they were much larger, 60 and 70 feet. All along the eastern shore they found dozens of pleasure boats, but not the one they wanted. They passed a few areas where boats of all sizes were moored to buoys off-shore.
He judged it was about three miles from the marina in the south where they had secured the Catalina, skirting a peninsula that jutted into the Lagoon, to the far northeast marina which abutted Marigot, the French capitol. Once there, they had to slip through the passage out of the Lagoon because there was a major, major marina behind a man-made breakwater to the north of the city in the Bay of Marigot.
This honey had some world class yachts docked, way over a hundred feet, as well as some classy other boats. But no Carmelita.
By the time they were back in the Lagoon, it was nearly 5:00. Maybe an hour and a half of daylight left, and it was going to be tough as hell to find the Carmelita in the dark. The major marinas were behind them, though, and he had an eastern wind that allowed him to pick up speed. The western side of the Lagoon was about two-and-a-half miles away.
“This is getting damned boring,” Galway said.
“I didn’t promise all fun and games, love.”
He turned southerly as they approached the far coast, and the pink of sunset was beginning to etch the sky when he saw the distinct shape.
“At your two o’clock, Bobbi.”
She ducked under the boom and crossed the cockpit to the starboard side and braced her elbows on the gunwale. The light chop in the Lagoon made it difficult to hold a sight picture for long.
They closed in, still four hundred yards off the shoreline.
“Carmelita,” she said.
Malone raised his own binoculars to scan. The yacht was secured to a major dock protruding from the rocky coast. The hill behind it was green with foliage, and a stairway made of wooden planks climbed up about forty feet to the deck of a house hanging on the side of the hill. The house was modern, with a peaked roof and a glass wall overlooking the Lagoon. Two wings stretched off either side of the main building. Off to the right of the house was a carport with a roof but no walls. Bright red Lamborghini sitting there. He saw a man sweeping the deck with a push broom. Behind him, through a window to the left side, he could see the top half of a woman. She was wearing a white blouse, and he could tell it wasn’t Alicia. He couldn’t get any more detail unless he moved in closer, and this was not the time for closer.
“He’s got a staff,” Oak said.
“You think?”
“Bet on it. Handy man and a maid or cook.”
“There was no one on the boat that I could see.”
Malone laid the helm over and turned into the east. He was going to have to tack his way back.
“Where are we going?”
“Marigot, I think. We failed to provision this baby, so we’ll go back there for dinner.”
“Why is it that, when things get interesting, you only think of food?”
“I think about sex, too.”
“Oh. That’s better.”
Bobbi got up and came back to sit next to him.
*
Sherry had dressed the stub of her little finger with gauze and adhesive tape he found in the one bathroom. He also gave her two Oxycontin pills from the bottle he found in the medicine cabinet to help her with the pain. She fought him on that, and he had to force them into her mouth, then pour water from a water bottle on her face until she opened her mouth and gulped some.
May was mostly unresponsive. Her eyes were kind of glazed over, and she was staring at nothing he could discern. Her face was pale, almost white. He could hear a little moan, kind of deep in her throat.
The Chair had told him an hour. He slid his hands beneath her back and her knees and lifted her easily from the couch. He almost tripped over her purse, and kicked it under the coffee table. Keeping his feet wide for balance as the boat rocked, he carried her forward, down the stairs, along the short hallway to the cabin in the bow. Laid her on the bed.
Man, she was good looking.
Those tits!
He hadn’t been allowed to mess with the Dixon woman, but May?
“You want to take off your clothes?” he asked, trying to be polite.
Her eyes just shifted toward him, and she didn’t say anything. Still that moan.
He sat on the bed next to her, raised her shoulders, and reached for the zipper on the back of her dress.
Then she came alive!
Flailing with her hands against his shoulders.
“No! No! No!”
He slapped her in the face.
Screaming bothered him.
Her head went back, the imprint of his hand a red mark on her cheek, but she kept batting him with her hands.
He grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it wide open.
Oh, man!
Used both hands to rip the center of her bra apart, and her big breasts spilled out.
Oh, shit, oh dear!
He hadn’t been this excited in years.
He didn’t bother to get undressed, just dropped his pants and his shorts.
She screamed again.
Sherry slapped his big hand over her mouth.
It was quickly done.
Her eyes had lost focus again, and the moan continued.
An hour, the Chair said.
He waited half an hour, and then did it again.
She no longer fought him.
He got up, pulled up his pants, and buckled his belt. Walking to the back of the boat, he pulled the door open, turned to his left, and climbed partway up the ladder. When his head poked through the floor of the bridge, he could see the Chair sitting in a seat behind the wheel. His feet were up on the panel in front of him, and he was drinking from a bottle of Dos Equis.
“Hey, Chair!”
He looked back at Sherry. “What’s up, Dexter?”
“What about May?”
The Cha
ir looked all around. Other boats and ships could be seen, but none were nearby.
“If you’re finished, toss her overboard.”
So he went back down to the cabin. May had pulled the remnants of her dress over her torso, and when she saw him, she seemed to scrunch up. Her eyes went wide and fearful.
He couldn’t look her in the eyes when he picked her up. She banged at his chest with her hands, but it was pretty feeble.
When he got her outside, her head whipped around, looking at the sea surrounding them.
“Oh, no!”
“Sorry about this,” he told her.
He lifted her high at the stern, and then heaved.
She screamed again as she hit the surface of the water.
Sherry looked up at the flying bridge.
The Chair hadn’t bothered to turn around and watch.
Chapter Twenty – Saturday, June 29
At 2:20 in the morning, Malone dropped the sails and let the Catalina glide slowly toward the starboard side of the Hatteras which was docked with her port side against the pier. He moved to the port side of the cockpit. Bobbi was at the helm. Only a quarter moon on the horizon, and the stars were bright overhead. At sea level, it was fairly dark, but the bright white finish of the yacht gleamed in the night. The sailboat’s movement through the water produced the only sound, a soft swish that was barely heard.
He reached out to grab the yacht’s gunwale, which was higher than the sailboat’s, and keep the sailboat from crashing noisily into the other hull. He had the line in his hand, and he quickly stepped up on the side and went over into the stern well of the yacht. Whipped the line around a cleat to keep the sailboat from drifting away.
They had waited off-shore for nearly two hours after the lights in the house went out except for the glow in a window on the southern wing. There was still a fixture burning in the salon of the yacht.
There was a fighting chair mounted to the center of the deck, a built-in cushioned settee against the back bulkhead of the cabin on the port side. Above the settee was a window, and through it and the glass door next to it, he couldn’t spot anyone in the salon. Malone eased up the three steps to try the door handle. It depressed readily and quietly, and he pushed the glass door open, waited a moment to listen, and then stepped inside.
Solid Oak Page 24
