B.J. leaned in close to examine the photo. “Odd coincidence, huh?”
“I’ll say. But it gets weirder. I ran into him again this morning down on the beach. He told me that he knew Red, but he didn’t mention that they’d been on this.” I pointed to the photo. “He said back when he was with the DEA, when they used to impound drug boats, he’d hire Red to move them around.”
B.J. picked up the photos that had scattered when the rubber band broke, and he was leafing through them. “He’s in quite a few of these other photos, but there aren’t any more of the two of them together.” He straightened the photos into a neat pile and handed them to me. “Do you think this Joe guy was with the DEA back when these photos were taken?”
“How should I know? He was pretty young then.”
“I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, Seychelle, but think about it—DEA, Cartagena, Colombia, you know. What do you know about this trip your dad was on?”
My mind was still trying to comprehend that Joe and my father had been more than just client and captain. It took me several seconds to get what B.J. was hinting at. “B.J., you are out of your mind! You knew Red. Just a minute ago you were calling him a hero. Do you think for one minute that he would get involved with something like that?”
“Money makes people do the unexpected. You know that.” I dropped the photos back in the trunk and slammed the top closed. “We’re not going to talk about this any longer.” I stood up and looked at the clock on the wall over the kitchen stove. “It’s almost nine o’clock already. Where the hell is Pit?”
B.J. came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Sey.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, jerking my shoulders and walking away, out of his reach. “I’m tired, B.J. I just want to go to bed.” I opened the front door for him. “Tomorrow I’ve got to start looking for this kid’s father, and I don’t even know where or how to start.”
He stopped in the doorway and turned to face me, our bodies less than a foot apart. “Seychelle, please. Don’t push me away.” I looked past him at the trunks of the oak trees barely visible in the starlight. I knew if our eyes connected, something inside me would start to collapse, to go soft and cave in.
“B.J., don’t. Not tonight.”
“You know, Seychelle,” he said as he reached out and tucked a strand of my wayward hair behind my ear, “what’s happened between us these past few months has been extraordinary. You’re feeling it, too, and it scares you. I can see that. That’s why you wanted to step back for a little while. You need to breathe. You are a very independent woman. That’s a large part of what I find so attractive about you, and I want you to know, I’m not trying to change you. It’s just that I’ve known many beautiful and amazing women in my life, but not one of them has ever felt like family. Everything’s different with you. When we are together, I feel like I am home.”
My heart had just gone from zero to sixty in under ten seconds, and I felt light-headed. Family! That meant a mommy, a daddy, and one point two children. I didn’t fit in that picture. What kind of mother could I possibly be? I didn’t even know what to do for a ten-year-old girl, much less an infant. And when it came to mothering, what kind of chance did I have? Look at the role model I’d had.
He was going to outwait me. Silence had never bothered B.J. He was just going to stand there, waiting for me to say something. I inhaled the smell of his sweat, his coconut soap, and the faint lingering odor of the Japanese food. Damn him. More than anything I wanted to mold my body against his, take him into my room, rip off his clothes, and lose myself in our lovemaking. And I knew if I did, it would mean I had made a decision I was not yet ready to make.
“B.J., just go. Okay? This is not a good night for this. Tonight, I just need to rest. I can’t—” I couldn’t what? Look at his eyes? “Night,” I said.
I closed the door and leaned back against it, and when I heard the gate close behind him, I wondered if I would ever have a really good night again.
XII
About the time I figured out that the ringing sound was the phone, and I realized I had better pull myself out of the depths of sleep to answer it, the answering machine clicked on, and I heard myself saying, “I’m either not home or out on the boat, so call me on channel sixteen or leave a message here. Bye.”
After the beep, I heard Perry Greene’s voice. “Seychelle, get your butt out of bed, honey. I know you’re there.”
I wanted to bury my head under the pillow and make him go away, but since the only reason Perry would be calling me at home at that hour would be for some kind of work, I reached over and lifted the phone on my nightstand.
“Shit, Perry, what time is it?”
“There’s my darlin’. It’s what, five-thirty? Hell, the sun’ll be up any minute now. I knew I could call you ’cuz I bet a foxy chick like you is up at the gym every morning making your hard little body even harder.”
“Perry, this little body of mine is two inches taller and about the same weight as your scrawny ass. What do you want?”
“I’m offering you an employment opportunity, sugar.”
As much as I detested the thought of working with this sleaze, I couldn’t afford to turn down a job. That Miss Agnes job had been my only work in the past week. “When, where, and how much?”
“I got a job moving some eighty-foot Eye-talian motor yacht from Port Everglades up to River Bend. This is an important dude. We’re talking future jobs here. It’s gonna need boats bow and stem. My cousin Leroy was gonna handle the aft end with his launch, but I just found out he got into a little trouble at Flossie’s last night.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The size of the boat told me the paycheck would be enough to make working with Perry worth it. “A little trouble?”
“Well, Leroy didn’t know the guy had a knife! Anyways, it’s not so bad ’cording to my auntie, just a few slashes. He’s over at Broward General now, but we’re coming up on slack high water at nine this morning.”
“I’ll only do it if you’ll go fifty-fifty.”
“Damn, girl. It’s my job.”
“And you need me. Take it or leave it, Perry.”
He barely paused a beat. “All right. The boat’s called O Solo Mio, and she’s berthed between cruise ships right on the commercial dock. You can’t miss her. Be there by eight.”
He’d given in too easily. That could only mean he was hiding something.
I was famished after last night’s sushi, but I didn’t feel like driving anywhere. I had no fresh milk for cereal and no bread for toast. When all else fails, I turn to a supply of toaster waffles I keep in the freezer. I knocked the clumps of frost off a couple of waffles by slamming them into the side of the sink half a dozen times, then dropped them into the toaster. With the coffee water heating and the waffles sizzling, I walked over and lifted the lid to Red’s trunk and took out the stack of photos. While I ate the waffles with my fingers, licking off the syrup and washing it down with two cups of coffee, I sorted through all the photos in the trunk, dividing them into two piles—those taken on the yacht delivery trip, and all the rest. If I’d had more time, I might have been interested in some of the old pictures of my parents hanging out together before they became my parents, or the photos of Red with his Navy buddies, but right now, I just wanted to learn what I could about that trip back in the spring of 1973.
There were six photos of the trip, and I counted four recognizable characters. Besides Red and Joe, there was a young woman and another man with a big black walrus mustache and one of those awful boxy seventies hairdos. There was something odd about his face, as though it weren’t quite symmetrical, but I couldn’t really identify what was off. He was shorter than Red and bowlegged. He looked a good deal like that character in the cartoons—Yosemite Sam. He seemed to be the head honcho. Maybe he was the hired captain of the boat, maybe the owner. I doubted that last, though. He didn’t look much older than thirty, and even back in 1973, a schooner like the Nighthawk was very expensive to buy and even more to maintain. Trying to keep a wooden hull in that kind of shape in the tropics was like fighting a constant war against marine borers, termites, dry rot, the tropical sun, and electrolysis. Classic boats were beautiful to look at, but I sure as hell was glad that there were other people out there working on them, not me.