Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps (8 page)

AN HOUR LATER I sat on the edge of my bed fully dressed, watching Vivian, just out of the shower, drying off with one of my tattered beach towels. If trouble had a body, hers was it. Then I zipped up her dress, and she slipped on her pumps. It had been a great show, but I was feeling impa- tient. A part of me was already out on the water doing what had to be done, and I was anxious to get going. I rechecked my gear and tried to think if there was anything I might have forgotten. I felt like a drawn bow, poised, ready to fire. It was time to go. Vivian sensed my mood and was very quiet. I lifted the kayak up and balanced its weight over my left shoulder. Vivian carried my life vest and held the door for me while I maneuvered the eight-foot-long craft through the door as noiselessly as possible. As usual, I had some trouble on the stairs and had to turn and reposition either the kayak or myself several times, but that was the only hitch 66

with the going-down part. The street was quiet, empty, and Sternfeld didn't poke his head out as we passed his door. It was the time of night when he turned off his hearing aid and let the silence and the sleeping pills put him to sleep. As quietly as I could, I got the kayak up onto the roof of the Thunderbird I'd bought that afternoon from Paul March and lashed it snugly to the bike rack with some bungee cords. "Where'd you get this ghetto cruiser from?" Vivian asked. "From a friend." "I'm not so sure I would call him that." "You'd better hope it lasts one more night," I told her. "You'll have to come back for me in it. The kayak won't fit on the Porsche." "I've never driven a car this old," she said doubtfully. "It's not old, it's an antique." "Antiques usually go up in value." We drove in silence. I was trying to work myself into a state of mind that was matter-of-fact, calm and confident, cut and dried, with no room for conflicting emotions con- cerning the task. The fact that it was Matson who needed burying made it easier. I could still see the leering delight in his eyes and the elfin whiteness of his skin, his pale cock curved like a tusk, but I rejected these images as they arose. I needed clarity now, not conflict. I needed to be alert, not paranoid, a fairly tall order considering the circumstances and the people I was working for. "I never really thanked you for not telling my father about Williams and Nick," Vivian said suddenly, and apropos of nothing. "I never thought you would, though." She was referring to something that had happened at a party at her father's house a long time back, before Matson, when I was still very much in the picture and walking the rapidly vanishing line between hired help and new boyfriend. 67

Out behind the house on the wooden deck, with the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, three hundred people in formal dress were beginning to act informally, men and women naked in the swimming pool, the training wheels of civility getting looser and looser with every glass of champagne. I went upstairs, made a wrong turn, and opened what I thought was the door to a bathroom. It wasn't. If not for the music from the deck below, I might have heard the telltale low moans that always mean the same thing. I flicked on the light and saw Williams lying back on the couch and Nick on his knees, his head bobbing up and down like a monk praying. A moment of surprise and I shut the door, but not quickly enough: They both had seen me. I went on my way, not really caring, but from then on, Williams treated me like an enemy, and Nick, who had never liked me to begin with, had reinforced his air of determined belligerence whenever I was around. "Williams was mortified," Vivian said. "You know how he likes to play that macho thing. He was so worried you'd tell the Colonel that he honestly considered killing you. Can you believe it?" "What made him change his mind?" "Nick talked him out of it." "That doesn't sound like the Nick I know. I was never his cup of tea, you realize, especially after I started in with you." "Nick thought you'd probably blackmail them. He thought he could buy you off." "Why did he tell you about it?" I asked. "I'm not sure. I guess he thought that I might be useful in the negotiations when the time came." I laughed. "What's so funny?" she asked. "You guys," I said. "You're not exactly the Partridge Family, are you?" 68

"You wouldn't have lasted so long with the Partridge Family," she told me. "Anyway, it's not like Nick and Wil- liams were ever an item, you know. It was just something casual at a party that people do when they're drunk. Wil- liams just didn't want the Colonel to find out. You can un- derstand that, can't you?" "You honestly think your father doesn't know about Wil- liams?" I asked. "After all these years? Come on. He doesn't care. It probably works out better that way, at least as far as your father is concerned. No family, no wife and kids, on call 24/7--what would he care about Williams being gay or not? And I know he knows about Nick. The kid's been out of the closet since he was twelve. Your father doesn't care because he doesn't care about Nick--or about you either. As for me, who gives a shit? It's South Beach, baby. Williams is just paranoid, that's all, and believe me when I tell you that the steroids aren't helping his mood much." I pulled into a small lot just south of Sunset Beach and found a space behind a row of scrub pines that couldn't be seen from the street. I cut the headlights while the car was still rolling. I wanted to get going as quickly as possible, and I was out of the car and unlashing the kayak as soon as I put the car in park. It was just the kind of secluded place where a policeman might be inclined to take a cigarette break while filling out a report or two, and I didn't want to have to ex- plain why I was there at that hour with a one-man kayak and a pretty girl for a send-off party. I got the kayak off the roof of the Thunderbird and onto my shoulder again and began walking toward the ocean across the fine white sand, Vivian walking in uncharacter- istic silence beside me. As we crossed the dunes, the sand got soft and I nearly tripped, and Vivian grabbed my arm to steady me. At the shore, just above the breakers, I set the kayak down on the sand and did a little stretching to ease the 69

cramp in my shoulder. Then I slipped on the life jacket and handed Vivian the paddle. "I figure it will take me four hours, maybe more, maybe less," I said. "Somewhere around then, I'll call you and tell you where I'm at. The current runs north. Depending on where I dump the boat, I'll make landfall near Fort Lauder- dale. I'll call you when I get close. That way you won't have long to wait. Just make sure you keep your cell phone handy, all right?" Vivian was watching with an expression of confused won- derment, as though resigned to some unforeseen and unwel- come conclusion. She seemed very far off. I put my hand on her arm and gently shook it. "Did you hear me?" I asked. I was eager to go. Already the muscles in my back and shoulders were sending me over the water, through the creases of light. I could feel the kayak, a Burns Hell Chaser, gliding across the sea like a strange and quiet amphibian made of fiberglass. Vivian put her hand on my cheek. A single tear broke loose and fled down hers. "Why is it that when I'm with you, it feels like I always have been, that I should always be with you?" she asked. "I have no idea." "But do you know what I mean? Don't you feel something like that, too? Or is it just me sounding crazy?" I looked over her head, across the sand, to where the scrub pines, lonely in the night air, were waving at the stars. I knew exactly what she meant. I thought of all the times before when I had studied her face, trying to recall where I'd seen it before, as though some clue, hidden in her dark eyes, might be discovered there. At any rate, I'd never found it, whatever it might have been. "I know exactly what you mean," I said. "It used to bug the hell out of me." "And it doesn't anymore?" 70

"No, not anymore," I said. "You better get back to the car now." "I'm going with you into the water." I was going to object, but I didn't have it in me. Another mood had claimed me, and suddenly I was in less of a hurry to leave. I wanted to linger and study that strangely beautiful face with all its secrets. A few more moments and something might have come to me, but there wasn't time. "You'll get your dress all wet," I said. "I don't care." She kicked her shoes onto the sand. Together we walked the kayak into the surf, until the water was just above my knees. I got myself into the kayak, and Vivian handed me the paddle. She stood beside me, steady- ing the Hell Chaser, the dark shine of the water merging with the even darker shine of her dress. I looked up at the sky and saw the faint glow of the moon hidden behind the clouds. There was no wind, and I didn't think it would rain. "Why didn't you fight for me?" she asked suddenly. "It was no contest." I smiled. "Maybe I couldn't take a chance on winning." "You know," she said, "sometimes I hate you." I found my balance and took a few strokes to get going, then turned around in time to see Vivian walking through the breakers toward the shore. I waited till she looked back. I lifted the paddle over my head. She waved at me with one hand and pushed back her black hair with the other. She yelled something out to me, but the waves smothered the sound. I jockeyed the kayak around again and got it pointed north and east into the current, the unchained blood singing in my head with the reckless joy of release, the unmitigated thrill of the doing of the thing at last, the muscles working and rolling like willing slaves. What I wanted. A hundred yards 71

out, I turned the kayak parallel with the beach and saw the headlights of my car plowing through the dark. I watched her make a right out of the lot, and when she was gone, I turned again myself and headed out to sea. The sea was calm, the breakers rolling lazily into shore as I pulled through the water with slow, even strokes. I hadn't been on the ocean at night for a long time, and I'd forgotten how quiet it could be. I was grateful for the distant company of a cruise ship gliding across the horizon far to the south. There were other, smaller craft as well, but not many. Most of them were fishermen, heading out for deep water where the big fish ran, but I was sure that at least one of them was the Marine Patrol. Several times I had to wait and drift while they crisscrossed in front of me, unaware of my presence. I felt their wakes lifting beneath me; I heard their engines and smelled the diesel fuel. None of the boats came close enough to cause me any worry, but I stayed very alert all the same. Two hundred yards out, I turned north and headed for the yacht. I had nixed the idea of leaving directly from the Colonel's mansion, though it would certainly have made for a quicker trip. There was no particular reason for this deci- sion. In fact, it didn't make sense, the shortest route between two points being a straight line, but that was true only in ge- ometry and not necessarily in the realm of human affairs. I was acting on intuition and could not have explained why I was coming in so far from the south, except to say that I didn't want anybody to know exactly where I was or the exact time I'd started out. Vivian, of course, would know where I had put in, but even she wouldn't know exactly how long it would take me to reach the yacht. Nobody had shown all of his or her cards in this deal yet, and there was no reason for me to show all of mine. The lights from the condos were on my left as I paddled north with the current. The quarter moon had slipped free of 72

the clouds and was on my right. It gave off very little glare. The water was pale dark, enlivened by minute flashes of bril- liance. When I was perhaps a half mile from the mansion, I began angling in toward the shore, pointing the kayak's nose at the spot where I estimated the yacht to be, though it was still too far off to see. Then the row of condos ended abruptly and there was no more light from the shore, just a gap of blackness filled with the outlines of trees and their billowing shadows. I paddled past it, and soon, beyond the gap, nestled in a cove, I saw the subdued lights of the Colonel's house pulsing faintly against the dark sky and beyond that, at the edge of the light, the vast shadow of the yacht, my silent, looming prey. I laid the paddle across my lap and surveyed the scene. I stretched my arms above my head, then out in front of me. I drank some water and chewed my way through a protein- carbohydrate bar that tasted like vanilla-flavored bread dough and followed it down with some more water, most of which I spit out. I was just about to start for the yacht when I heard the sound of an engine, but it was not the engine of a boat. The faint roar came from overhead. Out of the deep silence of the sky above and just ahead of me to the north came a subdued droning. I looked up and at that moment saw the pontoons of a white seaplane skim the blue-black surface of the sea, sending up a spray of foam before gliding smoothly into the water. Almost immediately the plane wheeled and taxied in my direction, its twin pro- pellers still churning but with less of a roar from the engine. I was about to aim the kayak toward the shore and out of its way when the sound of another engine stopped me in mid- stroke and a red light shot out to sea from the dock at the far edge of the cove that cradled the mansion. It was a speed- boat, wedge-shaped and ebony black, racing toward the sea- plane, skipping and hopping across the ocean, as much out of the water as in. 73

The plane had slowed and was now completing a wide circle, so that it was no longer coming in my direction but curving back out to sea, and as it did so, one of its lights grazed the side of the yacht, briefly illuminating the hull before passing on. The speedboat swung wide and intercepted the plane as it came to a full stop, the two shadows merging. The sounds of their engines overlapped in a muted rumble that quickly faded and then, after a moment, quickly flared again. The seaplane gathered speed and lifted slowly into the sky. It flew very close to the surface, not more than fifteen or twenty feet above the water, like a gull hunting for food. Then the engine of the speedboat roused itself. The long shadow that was the boat itself fishtailed violently in the roiling water. The pulsing red light at the helm gained speed and moved rapidly away from me, then vanished around the cove's northernmost shore. The kayak bucked gently beneath me, then settled. The water settled down, too, but not so my thoughts. I tried to understand what I'd just witnessed and how it pertained to what I had to do. There was one major question: Where in this curious night had the plane come from? A plane isn't a car; you just can't just jump into one and take off and fly any distance--not without a flight plan, not unless you're in a crop duster in the middle of nowhere, where no one gives a damn. Of course, you could fake a flight plan, then fly low, but not for too far. You would have to get up and get down fast before the radar caught you and the coast guard sent the drug helicopters out for you. Drug dealers did it all the time, but it was risky. You would have to be desperate, daring, or lucky. But it could be done--for a reason, and there was no reasonable reason for a plane to pick just this evening for such a maneuver. I thought about turning back; I thought about the money. I thought of Vivian and the yacht and Matson still being 74