Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (2 page)

The bridge was about twelve hundred yards off, and I didn’t hear any bells or see any movement in the bridge tender’s tower. I reached for the tug’s horn and blew five short blasts, waited about five seconds, and blew another five.

Gorda
had plenty of clearance without a bridge opening, but the Hatteras stood tall. I looked back at her and reckoned that, at worst, she’d lose the hard top over the flybridge, and that was an acceptable loss. If we stopped now, I thought, as I checked
Gorda
’s gauges, we’d lose the whole vessel.

At last, bells started ringing, the traffic gates went down, and the bridge had just started to open when
Gorda
slid under. By the time the Hatteras slipped through, she cleared by mere inches. I doubt she would have made it if she hadn’t already been a foot down on her lines.

As we plowed our way up the New River, past Sailboat Bend, under the Davie Bridge, and through the Citrus Isles canals, we were throwing up an atrocious wake.

Waterlogged as that fifty-footer was, I was still pulling her at better than six knots, though I had to slow her down some as we rounded the hairpin bend at Little Florida. Masts danced and lines groaned as the boats tied up in front of the luxury homes bucked and rolled. One fellow ran out across his pool deck, coffee mug in hand, shaking his fist at me and screaming curses. I knew I’d be responsible for any damage I caused, but I also knew that the Hatteras was sinking fast, and I had only minutes to get her to the slip.

I switched channels and tried to hail River Bend Marine, hoping like hell that someone was in the office at this early hour and had turned on the radio. No luck. After calling three times, I switched to channel 16, the emergency and hailing frequency, and began calling any vessel in River Bend Marine. I finally got an answer from a cruiser, an older fellow who told me after we’d switched frequencies that he’d round up some yard guys and they’d be waiting with the Travel Lift when I got there. I thanked him, and as we ended our conversation, the Fort Lauderdale Marine Patrol broke in, calling
Gorda
. I glanced back at my tow as she swung to starboard, and I tried to correct. The radio crackled again, the officer’s irritation growing more apparent. I didn’t have time to deal with them. I switched off the VHF and got back to the business of trying to keep my tug and waterlogged tow under control as we steamed upriver at a speed that made control purely an illusion.

As I swung round the bend and headed into boatyard row, it looked like an entire fleet of small vessels was there to greet me. Every yachtie in the area who had been listening in on channel 16 had jumped into his dinghy and come out to assist in getting the sinking yacht into the slipway. Charlie, the boatyard foreman, was in the yard launch, and he pulled alongside the aft port quarter of the wallowing sport fisherman to help slow her down. In the basin off the slipway, out of the current, I shortened up my towlines, got
Gorda
back off the starboard quarter, and, together, we eased
Mykonos
into the slings that dangled deep in the slip. The Travel Lift engine blew off a puff of exhaust and the slings tightened under the Hatteras just as the Fort Lauderdale Marine Patrol boat came screaming around the bend, blue lights flashing in the gilded morning light.

II

“What the hell did you think you were doing, Sullivan?”

Skip Robinson, Fort Lauderdale Marine Patrol officer, was standing on the wood dock next to
Gorda
, legs spread slightly apart, hands on his hips, his face redder than a Canadian’s who fell asleep his first day on the beach. I’d docked my boat at the river end of the seawall that led to the slipway, and I’d sat perched on the bulwark, watching as Skip arrived and established a perimeter around the
Mykonos
.

“I was doing what I could to preserve your crime scene.”

He let out a dry bark that was supposed to resemble a laugh. “Right. If that was all you wanted, you could have just left that Hatteras on the rocks where she was, and
my
crime scene
would have
been intact.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Skip. Arrest me if you want. Fact is, she hit in a spot where the riprap was so perfectly sloped she just slid straight up out of the water, and then straight back in.” I shook my head, as I still had trouble believing it. “It was something to see. Anyway, there was nothing for it to hang up on.” Emergency vehicles began pouring into the boatyard: several police cars, an ambulance, even a fire truck that barely squeezed through the gate. I imagined the pack of them wandering all over town, not knowing where their crime scene had gone.

“But you took the victim away from medical assistance,” Skip said.

I watched as the paramedics climbed first onto the boat. Two guys in blue jumpsuits from the Fort Lauderdale Fire Department climbed up the stainless ladder to the flybridge. “Come on Skip, look at him. It doesn’t take a medical professional to see the guy’s way beyond medical assistance.” The two medics were already climbing back down off the bridge. It had taken them less than fifteen seconds to come to the same conclusion.

“Just don’t go anywhere, Sullivan,” Skip said, turning and walking away. Over his shoulder he added, “You’re not off the hook yet.”

As I set about coiling the lines on deck and calling Summerfield Boatworks on the VHF to tell them why I’d been delayed, my brain kept playing short flashbacks from the good times, when we were kids, when Molly and I had lived inside that secret world of childhood best friends. We’d met in Ms. Winnick’s kindergarten class and discovered that we lived only one house apart. Her family had just moved in the week before school started. For the next twelve years, when it came to female friends, we were it for each other. Molly and I didn’t get along with most of the other girls—the giggly, silly ones who teased the quiet kids and always talked about clothes and TV and things that mattered little in our world. We were essentially both loners, a couple of the peculiar children who are always standing apart from the crowd, and we struck up a friendship out there on the perimeter.

By high school, we certainly made an odd couple when we hung out together. Molly, standing a petite five-foot-two, had flashing dark eyes and long ink-black hair inherited from her Seminole grandmother. She had her own artsy style of dress, and the boys were starting to take notice of her curvaceous shape, while at five-foot-ten, I was a giant gawky tomboy who kept my budding curves well hidden under my constant wardrobe of jeans and baggy T-shirts. She had her passion for drawing nature and always carried her sketchbook as I dragged her along to follow my enthusiasm for boats and the river.

It was in the fall of his senior year that my brother Pit, who had always been far more interested in surfing than girls, fell hard for Molly. As kids, the three of us had often played together, since Molly and I were only a year younger than Pit. He got along with us better than he did with my other older brother, Maddy. We’d be fishing off our seawall, taking the dinghy up Mosquito Creek, and playing pirates or catching pollywogs. It was my junior year when Pit and Molly started dating, and while at first I was a little jealous of the secrets they shared, eventually I realized they weren’t going to shut me out, and I could be happy for the two people I loved most in my teenage world.

Throughout the last thirteen years, ever since she’d dumped Pit just before his senior prom and run off and married Nick Pontus, Molly and I had not spoken a single word to each other. She disappeared from my life without a word, without even telling me that she was getting married or moving out of her parents’ home. We were supposed to be
best friends
, and one day she was there at school, talking about the big dance, then she was gone, married and living in a little Hollywood Beach apartment with her new husband, working behind the counter in his take-out joint. And my sweet brother Pit, the most gentle, sensitive one of us three kids, had his big heart ripped out. He didn’t talk to anybody for a week. Every day he’d head straight to the beach after school and surf until it was too dark to see. Then he’d come home, go into his room, and close the door quietly. He stayed behind that door the night of the prom, playing loud music full of crashing guitars. I waited for her to call me, to apologize, to explain how and why she could have done this to both me and Pit. But that call never came, and I promised myself I would never be the first to make a move.

Over the years, I’d seen her picture sometimes in the papers or on the news as her art career took off and Nick became first the town’s darling as a restaurant mogul, then the demon himself when he brought casino gambling boats to South Florida.

“Miss Sullivan?”

I’d been sitting on the bunk in the wheelhouse, daydreaming, purposely not watching what was going on around the
Mykonos
. I stepped out through the companionway door and checked out the fellow standing on the dock next to my boat. He was wearing a yellow knit sport shirt and light brown Polo chino slacks. He stood about five-foot-six and couldn’t have weighed more than 135 pounds. His hair was bleached white blond and stood up straight in a tall, flattop crew cut. His smile was so white for a man clearly in his forties, I wondered if his teeth had all been capped.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

He bent down and held out a card for me. “I’m Detective Rich Amoretti.” He flashed me that mouth full of Chiclets again. “Mind if I come aboard?”

I shrugged. “Be my guest.” I took his card as he climbed down onto the afterdeck, and I examined it. “This says Special Investigations Unit/Vice Squad.” I pointed toward the
Mykonos
. “Isn’t this a homicide?”

He glanced over at the Hatteras and all the men and women working on and around the boat. “Yeah, you’re right.” He sat down on the aluminum bulwark around
Gorda
's stern and crossed his straight legs at the ankles. The contrast between his bleached hair and dark tan told me he’d spent some time this winter in a tanning booth. Nobody who was a permanent resident here looked that color from the sun in February. “But you see, Miss Sullivan, Nick Pontus and his casino gambling boats have been an interest of mine for over two years. I’ll be assisting the homicide detectives in coming up with a list of suspects.”

“A list of people who wanted to kill Nick? Seems to me that would be a mighty long list.”

He laughed, and then proceeded to grill me for details about the shooting, focusing especially on the glimpse I’d had of the black car. Because I was approaching the bridge, I told him, I really couldn’t see anything more than the top of the car. I had no idea what the make of the car might be. I advised him to talk to the bridge tender. I told Detective Amoretti that I suspected the shooter would have had to exit his vehicle to get that shot off, and even at that hour of the morning, someone must have seen something.

“We have officers interviewing the bridge tender and canvassing the area for any other witnesses. You do understand you’re going to have to come down to the station? It was a pretty stupid stunt you pulled this morning. You pissed off some people moving that boat like that.”

I lifted my shoulders. “Yeah, I guess I probably did. You know anything about the salvage business, Detective Amoretti?”

“Not a thing,” he said, crossing his arms and raising his almost invisible blond eyebrows.

“For starters, there are no set fees for services in this business. For towing, yes, but not for salvage. The marine salvage laws go back a couple hundred years, and they were meant to encourage good Samaritans to volunteer to
help
another vessel in peril rather than just pillage it. Today, we call this ‘no cure-no pay’ salvage. When it’s successful, the salver is rewarded a percentage of the value of the boat he saves. This morning, before the shooting, that three-year-old Hatteras over there was worth well over a million dollars. Now she’s busted up her screws, maybe ruined the engines when she nearly sank, definitely holed her hull, but she’s still gonna be worth a lot more than you or I make in a year. In addition, if she had sunk with full fuel tanks in the middle of the New River, it would have been an environmental disaster as well as a hazard to navigation. The owner and his insurance company could have been held responsible for all that. Eventually, if we can’t agree on a sum, it could go to arbitration, and they’ll figure how much I risked and then award me somewhere in the vicinity of ten to thirty percent of the value of that boat as she sits right now. Now, I ask you, Detective, would you have let her sink?”

He flashed me his too-perfect teeth. “I see your point.”

I rode over to the Fort Lauderdale police station with Detective Amoretti in his bright red Corvette. He had a tendency to speed, a habit I’d noticed most cops shared. I hung on to the armrest with both hands when he accelerated.

On the way, he told me something about Nick Pontus that I did not know. He said it had been reported widely in the news, but I hated to admit that, though I loved to read the newspapers when I had the time, there were days, sometimes weeks, when I rarely heard any news other than the fish or weather reports I caught on the VHF. He said that a little over six months before, Nick had sold his whole TropiCruz Casino Line to a group of partners headed up by some guy named Ari Kagan, but that the new guy had had a falling out with Nick. They had each accused the other of cheating, stealing, and lying, and it had got so bad, they each had a restraining order out on the other. Nick had been in the process of taking Kagan to court to get the business back.

“This guy Kagan is American, but he’s linked in business and social circles to some heavy Russian guys who don’t always play nice,” Amoretti said. “It looks like Nick may have gotten in over his head, messed with the wrong people.”

“Are you saying Nick was mixed up with the Russian mafia? That they killed him?” I’d heard scuttlebutt at the Downtowner about how the Russians were making big inroads into prostitution and the drug trade in South Florida. When I didn’t have time for the papers, the Downtowner was my other source of news and local gossip.