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.
XXIV
I pulled Rusty’s boat into the haul-out slip at the Playboy Marine Boat Yard and grabbed hold of the rungs of the iron ladder that was bolted to the concrete walls of the slipway. We were at about mid-tide but, even so, when I was standing up in the boat, my head was several feet below the top of the wall. I raised the hatch on the seat locker and pulled out the cast net Rusty had shown me earlier. The weight of the net surprised me. The lead weights attached to the nylon were quite small, but there were enough of them that I worked up a sweat just hefting it around. I threw a couple of hitches around the ladder with the bowline, flipped the fenders over the side, and hoped that the barnacle-covered walls wouldn’t chew too badly into Rusty’s flawlessly painted topsides.