Cross Current (32 page)

“Marry? Why’s everybody got to talk about marriage all the time?”

“Everybody? Seems like I’m the only one around here just now.” She leaned forward and looked past me at Solange. “Tell me, missy, did you discuss marriage with this lady?” 

Solange giggled and hid her face behind my back. Whether or not she understood Jeannie, the tone of voice and the face were enough to make anybody crack up.

“Seems to me, Seychelle, that you are the only other one around here who could have been contemplating marriage just now. Hmm ... Was it to B.J.? Or to Rusty?”

Rusty came bounding up the steps from the docks.

“You ready?”

“Oh, uh, Jeannie and I were just talking. Jeannie, Rusty and I are going to run up to Tugboat Annie’s in his boat and get some dinner. That is, if you don’t mind.”

“You go on. After all, this is just what I went to law school for—to be a babysitter.”

“I’m sorry. Forget it. We’ll stay.”

“Girl, you are taking me way too serious today. You two go on. You’ve got a lot to talk over. Besides, my boys are always with me. And this little thing?” She reached over and poked Solange in the belly button. “She’s so quiet you don’t hardly notice she’s around.”

“You want us to bring you something back?”

“Barbecue? Absolutely!”

I told Rusty I would meet him at the boat after I put a note on the Jeep for Pit. He ran upstairs to grab his wallet. I peeled Solange’s hand out of mine, knelt down next to her, and told her good-bye for now. The look on her face made me feel like a real creep, and I could feel her eyes on me as I crossed the pool deck on my way to the parking lot.

After I’d finished the note to Pit, I noticed the dark clouds gathering out west over the Everglades, and I decided to take the time to snap the side windows back onto the Jeep. I didn’t have a rain jacket, but I did find an old zip-front hooded sweatshirt.

Rusty and I arrived back at the boat at nearly the same time. Without a word, I untied the dock lines while he started the engines. We were like a couple of kids trying to sneak off.

“So,” Rusty said over the noise of the idling outboards when we were about five yards from the dock, headed north up the Intracoastal. “I hardly recognize you without your shadow.”

I turned away from him and looked through the windshield, up the waterway toward the Sheridan Street Bridge. The sun had slid behind the mass of clouds and squalls out to the west, bringing on an early twilight, and the cars driving over the metal grate in the bridge already had their headlights on. The air had that thick, menacing feel of an impending storm.

“I know what it’s like,” I said, “to really want to have a mom. At least when I was Solange’s age I still had my dad.” Rusty put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed lightly. I felt his touch course through my body like heat lightning.

“Hey, I was just kidding,” he said.

“I know, but I can’t get over thinking about how alone she must feel.” I looked into his eyes. “Sometimes ‘alone’ feels really rotten.” I turned away again and spoke to the mangroves on the west bank of the Intracoastal. “The thing is, I don’t know how to be a mom, and I can’t be her mom.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re doing all right with the kid. In fact, it’s kind of neat watching you with her. There’s some kind of special bond between you two.”

“Thanks,” I said, keeping my face toward the mangroves, not wanting him to see how much I wanted that to be true.

XXIII

We squeezed into the last little bit of space at the restaurant’s dock. Before long, boats would start rafting up, tying to the outside of other boats, and later in the evening, they would be three deep in places. The restaurant was already crowded, but we got one of the high bar tables outside with a low powerboat at the dock in front of us. There’s nothing quite like waterfront dining when your view turns out to be the glossy fiberglass sides of fifteen-foot-high sportfishermen. Although we were a little downstream of the port, I sat on the side of the table that looked up the canal and had a great view across the water to Port Laudania. The lights around the port were blinking on as the last traces of daylight were swallowed by a low, dark sky.

Directly across from the restaurant, the pitted concrete dock was empty. The only things tied to it were the huge tires that served as bumpers along its entire length. A hundred feet or so back from the dock was a large white aluminum building with a green sign that read “G&G Marine, East Terminal.” A crane, tractor-trailers, and containers all sat idle. It was well after quitting time, and if there was anybody over there, I sure couldn’t see them. There wasn’t any sign of the
Bimini Express
. But, really, I wasn’t even certain this was where the little freighter was likely to dock. Here or in Miami? For all I knew, Capitaine had already left. On the other hand, would Malheur leave without tying up that last loose end that was Solange?

Once again, I flashed on the image of the girl Margot on the concrete floor at the Swap Shop when Collazo had pulled back the tarp. She would still be in the shop, scowling at Madame, if she had not spoken to me.

“What are you thinking?” Rusty asked after the waitress left with our orders. My eyes had been focused on the docks across the way, but my mind was filled with images from the past few days. The sound of Rusty’s voice brought me back to the restaurant.

“Huh? Oh ... I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about the people who are so desperate to get to this country that they’ll get involved with monsters like this Capitaine Malheur. Think about how bad it must be if the alternative to Malheur is even worse than he is. They climb aboard these crowded, rickety boats, leaving behind their families and all that was familiar. For freedom. And then they end up in the hands of a man like Capitaine. God, Rusty, what he did to that girl?” I pressed my hands against my eyes, trying to wipe the images away. It didn’t work. I tried to focus on Rusty’s face. “It probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t talked to her.”

“Hey, stop talking like that,” he said.

“Think of the courage it took. She went against her culture. She spoke to me, told me Malheur killed her brother. She was trying to bring Malheur down for that.”

“See, so if it hadn’t been you, she would have talked to someone else. It certainly wasn’t your fault.”

I propped my elbows on the table and leaned my chin on my clasped hands. “Maybe. But your saying that won’t make this feeling in my gut go away. He’s got to be stopped. I’ve got to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to Solange.” 

“Seychelle, why do you think that hasn’t happened yet? Malheur could have killed her. I mean, let’s go all the way back to why she was alive in that boat. Why did he take the risk that someone would find her?”

“We don’t know that he put her in the boat. Maybe she escaped?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and his eyes focused on something in the distance on the other side of the canal. It was almost totally dark, but across the way, in the branches of a dead tree, I could see the silhouette of an osprey against the pinkish gray sky. “I think if she was just any
restavek
, she would be dead by now.”

He reached across the table and took my hand. I felt that titillating surge of excitement and dread that I get when I know my relationship with a man is about to change from friendship to something else.

“Seychelle, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he said.

“Rusty, the other night—”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about. And I’m not real good at this kind of thing. Talking about it, anyway.”

His “aw shucks” demeanor was incredibly disarming. “I can’t figure you out, Rusty Elliot.”

“What do you mean?”

“You come across as this simple down-home Georgia guy who’s trying to stem the tide of illegal immigration, and then ... I would say that little ‘second home’ of yours back there is worth close to half a million. Either Border Patrol agents make a lot more than I thought, or you’re not who you let on to be. You tell me.”

The way his smile glowed in contrast with his tanned cheeks, it made me want to forget all my questions and just kiss him.

“Okay. I do wonder what kind of thing you’ve been imagining, but here’s the truth. The beach condo was my mother’s. Her second home. We always had a beach house in South Florida, this one’s just the most recent. My mother was a Depression baby and she saved everything. Over the years it mounted up. The real family homestead is up on Jekyll Island in Georgia. I keep that rented out most of the time now. I’ve tried to dodge around it, make my own way in the world, but the fact is, my mother was wealthy, and I was her only child.”

“In other words, you don’t need to work. You just chase after bad guys for the fun of it?”

His grin grew wider. “And to meet beautiful women.”

“Hey, I thought you said you weren’t very good at this?”

The waitress arrived, bringing our appetizer of blackened grouper bites and a couple of beers. He let go of my hand, and I dug in with relish.

After what I had been thinking about earlier, I was worried I might have lost my appetite, but not with Tugboat Annie’s grouper sitting in front of me. Rusty didn’t try to talk as we ate, and he jumped another notch in my esteem as a result. When we finished, he waved to the waitress for two more beers.

“I really need to check in with the station, and I left my cell in the truck back at the condo.” He looked around at the interior restaurant. “There’s got to be a phone around here. I’ll be right back.” He headed through the double doors into the bar. Once he was out of sight, I took the opportunity to get up and stroll up the dock to see Port Laudania from another angle.

At the far end of the dock I heard the noise of a large engine firing up somewhere across the canal. Through some shrubbery I saw another terminal building and could make out the outline of a small ship’s bow poking out of the trees. I didn’t remember that the port continued that far up the canal, but they are always building new docks at the commercial ports in Florida. I closed my eyes for several moments to get them accustomed to the darkness. When I opened them, I could easily make out the first few letters of the name on the bow: BIM. Just then the red navigation and masthead lights blinked on.

“Shit!” I said aloud. I began running, dodging between the tables, barely aware of white moon faces and startled eyes staring up at me. I had to find Rusty.

I pushed through the swinging glass doors that led to the inside bar and hollered at the bartender, “Phone?” He pointed at the opening in the wall next to the front door. After shoving my way through the crowded bar, I finally made it to the phone, only to find some young, heavily made-up twenty- something in a miniskirt and tube top screaming into the handset.

“I don’t give a fuck what you say, you son of a bitch,” she said, holding the phone away from her ear and hollering directly into the mouthpiece.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you see where the guy went who was on the phone here?”

“Fuck you,” she said, and turned her back to me.

Try as she might to be intimidating, it wasn’t working. I was tempted to try one of B.J.’s fancy aikido moves on her, but I just used the strength in my swimmer’s arms instead. I grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her around, and pinned her to the wall with my forearm across her throat.

“I asked you a question. Have you seen a blond guy, late thirties, wearing cargo shorts and—”

“He got pissed off waitin’, cussed me out, and took off out the front door. Now let me go, bitch.”

Part of me wanted to take her into the ladies’ room, stick her head under the faucet, wash all that makeup off her face, and continue the soap treatment on the inside of her mouth. Instead, I said, “Thanks,” and pushed my way out the heavy wood front door.

The parking lot was full of cars, but there was not a single person in sight. I called Rusty’s name a couple of times but knew that if he was in a car or on a boat with the air-conditioning running, he’d never hear me. Thinking I’d missed him somehow, I pushed my way back through the bar and out to our table. Still no sign of him there, and I knew that if I searched much longer, the
Bimini Express
would be long gone. I had no desire to take on Malheur myself, but maybe I could delay the little freighter from leaving until Rusty could get there with the authorities.

I saw our waitress standing by another table, and I interrupted her recitation of the daily specials. “When my friend comes back to our table, tell him I took his boat and went across the canal to that big ship down there, okay?” I pointed at the
Bimini Express
, and she nodded, turned to the young couple at the table, and started reciting the night’s specials all over again. I just had to hope she would remember.

I trotted back to Rusty’s boat and breathed a sigh of relief that no one had rafted another boat alongside it. Once aboard, I threw off the dock lines and gave the piling a good shove so the boat would drift into the canal. The engines purred to life at the first turn of the key, and I silently thanked Rusty for taking such damn fine care of the old girl.

My blue sweatshirt was where I’d left it, tucked up on the dash against the windshield, so I pulled it on, zipped it up, and pulled the hood up over my head. When I was a lifeguard, this had been my uniform on cold mornings, and with my broad shoulders, I’d often been taken for a man. I hoped the same would be true tonight.

Pulling up next to the little ship might attract too much attention, so I slowly idled past her bow and into the large basin with the commercial shipping docks on one side and the yacht yard docks on the other. Just a few days earlier, B.J. and I had towed the
Miss Agnes
through this same basin. I tried not to look at the
Bimini Express
as I slowly passed, but out of the corner of my eye I could see three men standing outside the wheelhouse up on the wing deck, two island men close together in conversation, the third man standing apart, talking on a cell phone. I couldn’t see well enough to tell if one of the two islanders was Malheur, but even at that distance, I recognized the third man’s wide mustache and protruding belly. They belonged to Gil Lynch.