Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (34 page)

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.”

He pointed the halyard out to me and, after untying the sail ties, I raised the small sail. The sail fluttered and flapped loose in the wind, making loud snapping and crackling noises. It sounded like the fabric was self-destructing. My frozen fingers had a time tying off the little lines on the baby cleats. Everything on the boat was so miniature, and my fingers felt like they had ballooned to three times their normal size. Finally, Zale sheeted it in and the flapping grew quiet.

When the wind first caught that sail, I thought we were going over for sure. I grabbed for my bag of snorkel gear and scrambled for the high side. But somehow that kid kept the boat upright, and all of a sudden we were flying.

At that point, if we both hadn’t been so exhausted, we might have enjoyed ourselves. The seas flattened out and the wind eased off and that goofy-looking little inflatable sailboat sailed like a real rocket. I figured at times we were hitting four or five knots, and it felt as if she were trying to climb up out of the water and plane.

He never even had to tack. The closer we got to the coast, the better we were able to make out what was there along the shoreline. Because it was a national park, the mangroves along the coast had been well preserved. There were no beachfront mansions or high-rises here. From our viewpoint, that meant the coastline in the foreground was dark, a barely visible black line on the horizon, but the yellow phosphorus lights at the park marina could be seen from over a mile out. And he hit it bang on.

Most days you probably lose your wind as soon as you sail into the mangrove-lined system of canals and lagoons, but this night, with the norther blowing, we were able to sail that little boat right into the basin and over to the fuel dock. Several dive and snorkel tour boats were tied up there. Farther down the dock, I saw a glass-bottom boat, and just aft of that a stainless-steel ladder reached down to the water. I pointed it out to Zale.

We tied the dinghy painter to the ladder and climbed up, stretching and walking in circles for a bit, trying to get the kinks out of our bodies. It seemed like we’d been in that dinghy all night, but I had no concept of how much time had really passed. I went over to one of the dock lights and peeled back the wet suit sleeve to look at my watch. It was almost 1:00 a.m. I hoped there was a resident ranger at the park, but as we followed the road in our bare feet, we saw no one.

We left behind the boat and our snorkel gear, though Zale refused to let go of the silver case, and we began to explore the area around the little marina. There was a closed visitors’ center, locked bathrooms, and a broken public telephone—not that we had any money on us anyway. I had thought we might be able to make a 911 call at least, but more and more cell phones were making pay phone repair a low priority.

Just behind the fuel dock buildings was the launch ramp and a huge parking area. I could imagine how, when the weather was fine, the whole lot would be filled with pickup trucks and boat trailers. Tonight there was one lone truck and trailer. The pickup was one of those huge dually trucks with a fancy paint job on the side with the boat name. I wondered who would be crazy enough to be out there on a night like this. Whoever it was had probably decided to hole up at another marina, call his wife, and go fetch the boat later.

There were no cars and no lights on in the small boat marina. The weather had turned the place into a ghost town, so we followed the road that looked like it headed out to the park entrance. The gate was a simple metal bar designed to stop cars, not pedestrians. We ducked under it and started to walk.

I regretted that I hadn’t thought to toss our shoes into the dinghy. The road was covered with sharp little rocks, sticks, and prickly burrs from the dry underbrush that grew along the banks leading down to the mangrove marsh on either side of us. We took it slow, stopping to flick off the stones or burrs that got stuck in the flesh.

The wet suits did a pretty good job of keeping our bodies warm, but my feet and hands were freezing. I had no idea what the temperature was, but I guessed it had dropped into the forties. And it was often colder here in this more rural Homestead area because there was so much less concrete to hold the day’s warmth. The cold felt worse now that we were out of the water. The water temperature had been around seventy degrees, but now this wind felt absolutely frigid.

We’d been walking for about forty-five minutes when we saw a set of headlights appear on the road from the direction in which we were headed. The lights were over a mile off, but coming our way fast.

“Thank goodness,” I said. “My feet are killing me.”
 

“Who do you think it is?”

“I don’t care. As long as their car heater is on.”

The lights were coming closer at a remarkable speed. “What if it’s those guys. The ones who killed Uncle Richard?”

“Do you think?” I started to say, then I grabbed Zale and pulled him into the bushes along the side of the road. From the sound of that boat’s engine, they had been on a high-performance racing boat, and the trailer and truck back there in the marina were for just such a boat.

The vehicle was on us in a matter of seconds, but neither of us saw it as we had our heads tucked down behind the shrubbery. It was marshy down there and our feet and knees were in the mud. I’d just stood and started to step out of the muck when I heard the whining sound of a vehicle traveling in reverse. I considered jumping back into the muck, but decided there was no escape. We’d been seen.

“
Hola
!
Que paso
?” called a voice from the interior of the pickup.

“Damn,” I said, stepping out onto the asphalt “We stink.”

“Are you okay?” The truck’s passenger was hanging his head out the window, a beer can in his hand.

“We’re trying to get to a phone,” I said, then I gave them a heavily edited version of our story—that my nephew and I had gone snorkeling and hadn’t realized the weather was going to get bad. I told them that we had lost our clothes and wallets and we needed to call the boy’s mother. The guys were on their way out to pick up the truck and trailer we had seen, but they offered to turn around and drive us to Florida City first—to the police station if we wanted, but I told them no, just to a gas station would be great. I didn’t want to get mixed up with the cops down here in Homestead. I wanted to talk to Jeannie first. I wanted to get some sleep.

Due to the mud and smell, they had us climb into the back of the pickup. We huddled together just behind the truck cab while they drove at ninety miles an hour through the dark night. Barely ten minutes later they dropped us off at a 7-Eleven store, where they bought us hot dogs and drinks and the driver let me use his cell phone. I walked outside and dialed Jeannie. She sounded more like three-quarters asleep when she answered.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Seychelle? Jesus!” She seemed to be waking up fast. I could hear the noise of her bed creaking and the covers rustling and the phone jostling against her ear. “Where are you? Is Zale with you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, we’re together and we’re both okay. We’re down in Homestead.”

“Thank God, you’re all right. Homestead?”

“Yeah, it’s quite a story, but I’m too tired to tell it over the phone. I just want to get home and I don’t know who else to ask.”

“I’m on my way. I’ll ask my neighbor to watch the boys.”

“And one more thing. Could you bring some towels and blankets? And thick warm socks.”

I gave her directions to the all-night convenience store and went back inside. I thanked the two guys for the ride and learned they were Mexicans who were racing a team boat here during the winter season. I told them to call me on the VHF if they were ever in Lauderdale.

The store clerk was a car guy. I didn’t want to have to go back outside into that cold wind, so I leaned on the counter and asked him a hundred questions about cars and engines and the Homestead Motor Speedway. Zale drifted over to the magazine rack and kept his nose buried in the pages of
Sail
and
Yachting
and the like. Jeannie must have broken all kinds of speed records, as she showed up outside the store—some sixty miles south of Fort Lauderdale—in just over an hour.

She climbed out of the driver’s seat and hugged us both in suffocating Jeannie-style bear hugs. She was wearing some sort of enormous fringed poncho that both looked and smelled a little like a used horse blanket, but I didn’t care. She didn’t say a word about the fact that we were standing there barefoot and in wet suits, smelling like a swamp, at almost three in the morning on a night the citrus growers would be thinking about firing up their smudge pots. She just slid open the side door on her minivan and handed us both clean, cushy socks and two queen-sized comforters. She did pause when she noticed the silver case tied with a thin line to Zale’s wrist and turned to me with raised brows, but she asked no questions right away. Knowing Jeannie, I thought she was showing incredible restraint. Inside the car she had the heater going, and it felt wonderful. I sat in front, Zale in back, and finally, as she sped up the ramp onto the Florida Turnpike, she turned to me and said, “Okay, so dish. What happened?”

I started by asking her if she had talked to B. J., and she told me that yes, he had gone to my house early on what was now yesterday morning and discovered that we had not spent the night there and the Whaler was gone. He’d called around and located my dinghy at River Bend. The yard guys also reported that the
Mykonos
had been taken out of the yard overnight, but that Leon Quinn assured them that his guys had just shown up very early to move the boat, and that the yard bill would be paid in full as soon as they processed the insurance claim. B. J. and Jeannie couldn’t get any law enforcement help on hunting for the boat because they had no evidence that a crime had been committed.

“So, I take it you two were on the
Mykonos
? B. J. was sure of it.”

“Yeah.” I paused for a minute to think about where this story started, what she already knew. I told her about the story Nick had told his son, about the promise the boy had made, and about our belief that whatever was inside that case was going to help Molly.

Jeannie interrupted me. “I’ve good news for you on that count.” She swiveled her head around and looked back at Zale in the backseat. There were hardly any other cars on the highway, but she made me so nervous when she drove like that. “Zale, we’re taking you home to your house, tonight. Your mom’s home.”

“She’s home?” Zale said as he leaned forward, sticking his head into the opening between the two bucket-style seats in the front of the van.

“How’d you do it, Jeannie?”

“I can’t take the credit for it. You know that detective, that Mabry fella?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he’s taken to sort of stopping by my house and letting me know what’s going on with their end of things. Seems he chased down that Wheeler woman you told me about and, though she wouldn’t talk to him at first, she called him back later and said a friend of hers had talked her into helping. They got a good description of the shooter from her and sent her to work with a police artist. Then that other guy, Detective Amoretti, was working with that Thompson woman, and the detectives paid a visit to Kagan over at TropiCruz to talk to him about some shady business with the slots. Turns out these guys at TropiCruz knew nothing about it, and they weren’t at all happy about it, either. ’Bout that same time, three of their employees stopped showing up for work. After taking a good look at Mrs. Wheeler’s police sketch of the guy she thought was the shooter, and noting that the frizzy, big head bore a remarkable resemblance to the missing TropiCruz skipper, the cops issued a warrant for Richard Hunter’s arrest for the shooting of Nick Pontus and released Molly. She got home around five and she’s been worried sick about Zale. I didn’t even think to call her before I left home.”

“Do you want to call her?” I asked Zale.

“No, she might be sleeping. Let’s just surprise her. We’ll get there pretty soon, right?”

“Listen kid, the way Jeannie drives, we’ll get there almost as fast as you could dial.”

Then Jeannie asked me to fill her in on what had happened out on the
Mykonos
.

“The cops might not have been willing or able to track down the
Mykonos
for you, but the Russians had no trouble.”

“What happened?”

It took me the rest of the trip home to bring Jeannie up-to-date on all that had happened to us. She’s a great listener, and when I got to the part about being in that stateroom with the water coming in and the trapped air space getting smaller and smaller, she rolled her eyes and clutched at her chest and finally reached over to grab me by the arm.

“That was too close. I almost lost you, didn’t I?”

I was doing okay, holding it together and telling the story until she touched me like that. Then I just couldn’t hold on anymore.

“Jeannie, we heard them. Jason and Anna. We heard them dying out there. We heard them and we couldn’t get to them. We were locked in that cabin and we listened as they died right outside our door.” Once the tears started, I couldn’t stop the flood. “We couldn’t—”