If the bull sharks didn't find her first.
Unfortunately, the weather had been splendid during that early leg of the cruise, and every night the outside decks were crowded with moony-eyed couples. Chaz's scheme required seclusion and he'd nearly abandoned hope, when the rain arrived, three hours after leaving Key West. It was only a drizzle, but Chaz knew it would drive the tourists indoors, stampeding for the lobster salad and electronic poker machines.
The second crucial element of his plot was surprise, Joey being a physically well-tuned woman and Chaz himself being somewhat softer and out of shape. Before luring her toward the stern of the Sun Duchess under the ruse of a starlit stroll, he'd made certain that his wife had consumed plenty of red wine; four and a half glasses, by his count. Two was usually enough to make her drowsy.
"Chaz, it's sprinkling," she had observed as they approached the rail.
Naturally she'd been puzzled, knowing how her husband despised getting wet. The man owned no fewer than seven umbrellas.
Pretending not to hear her, he had guided Joey forward by the elbow. "My stomach's a disaster. I think it's time they retired that seviche, don't you?"
"Let's go back inside," Joey had suggested.
From a pocket of his blue blazer Chaz had surreptitiously removed the key to their stateroom and let it fall to the polished planks at his feet. "Oops."
"Chaz, it's getting chilly out here."
"I think I dropped our key," he'd said, stooping to find it. Or so Joey had assumed.
He could only guess what had shot through his wife's mind when she'd felt him grab her ankles. He's gotta be kidding, is what she'd probably thought.
The act itself was a rudimentary exercise in leverage, really, flipping her backward over the rail. It had happened so fast, she hadn't made a peep.
As for the splash, Chaz would have preferred to hear it; a soft punctuation to the marriage and the crime. Then again, it was a long way down to the water.
He allowed himself a brief glance, but saw only whitecaps and foam in the roiling reflection of the ship's lights. The Sun Duchess kept moving, which was a relief. No Klaxons sounded.
Chaz picked up the key and hurried to the stateroom, bolting the door behind him. After hanging up his blazer, he opened another bottle of wine, poured some into two glasses and drank half of each.
Joey's suitcase lay open for re-packing, and Chaz moved it from the bed to the floor. He splayed his own travel bag and went foraging for an antacid. Beneath a stack of neatly folded boxers-Joey was a champion packer, he had to admit-Chaz came upon a box wrapped in tartan-style gift paper with green ribbon.
Inside the box was a gorgeous set of leather golf-club covers that were embossed with his initials, C.R.P. There was also a card: "Happy 2nd Anniversary! Love always, Joey."
Admiring the silken calfskin sheaths, Chaz felt a knot of remorse in his gut. It passed momentarily, like acid reflux.
His wife had class, no doubt about it. If only she hadn't been so damn… observant.
In exactly six hours he would report her missing.
Chaz stripped to his underwear and lobbed his clothes in a corner. Packed inside his carry-on was a paperback edition of Madame Bovary, which he opened randomly and placed for effect on the nightstand by Joey's side of the bed.
Then Charles Regis Perrone set his alarm clock, laid his head on the pillow and went to sleep.
The Gulf Stream carried Joey northward at almost four knots. She knew she'd have to swim harder if she didn't want to end up bloated and rotting on some sandbar in North Carolina.
But, Lord, she was tired.
Had to be the wine. Chaz knew she wasn't much of a drinker, and obviously he'd planned it all in advance. Probably hoped that the fall from the ship would break her legs or knock her unconscious, and if it didn't, so what? She'd be miles from land in a pitching black ocean, and scared shitless. Nobody would find her even if they went looking, and she'd drown from exhaustion before daylight.
That's what Chaz probably figured.
He hadn't forgotten about her glory days at UCLA, either, Joey realized. He knew she would start swimming, if she somehow survived the fall. In fact, he was counting on her to swim; betting that his stubborn and prideful wife would wear herself out when she should have tucked into a floating position and conserved her strength until sunrise. At least then she'd have a speck of a chance to be seen by a passing ship.
Sometimes I wonder about myself, Joey thought.
Once a tanker passed so close that it blocked out the moon. The ship's silhouette was squat and dark and squared at both ends, like a high-rise condo tipped on its side. Joey had hollered and waved, but there was no chance of being heard above the clatter of the engines. The tanker pushed by, a russet wall of noise and fumes, and Joey resumed swimming.
Soon her legs started going numb, a spidery tingle that began in her toes and crept upward. Muscle cramps wouldn't have surprised her, but the slow deadening did. She found herself laboring to keep her face above the waves, and eventually she sensed that she'd stopped kicking altogether. Toward the end she switched to the breaststroke, her legs trailing like pale broken cables.
We've only been married two years, she was thinking. What did I do to deserve this?
To take her mind off dying, Joey composed a mental list of the things that Chaz didn't like about her:
1. She tended to overcook fowl, particularly chicken, due to a lifelong fear of salmonella.
2. The facial moisturizing cream that she applied at night smelled vaguely like insecticide.
3. Sometimes she dozed off during hockey games, even the play-offs.
4. She refused to go down on him while he was driving on Interstate 95, the Sunshine State Parkway or any surface road where the posted speed limit exceeded fifty miles per hour.
5. She could whip him at tennis whenever she felt like it.
6. She occasionally "misplaced" his favorite George Thorogood CDs.
7. She declined to entertain the possibility of inviting his hairstylist over for a threesome.
8. She belonged to a weekly book group.
9. She had more money than he did.
10. She brushed with baking soda instead of toothpaste…
Come on, Joey thought.
A guy doesn't suddenly decide to murder his wife just because she serves a chewy Cornish hen.
Maybe it's another woman, Joey thought. But then why not just ask me for a divorce?
She didn't have the energy to sort it all out. She'd married a worthless horndog and now he'd heaved her overboard on their anniversary cruise and very soon she would drown and be devoured by sharks. Out here you had the big boys: blacktips, lemons, hammerheads, tigers, makos and bulls…
Please, God, don't let them eat me, Joey thought, until after I've died.
The same warm tingle was starting in her fingertips and soon, she knew, both arms would be as spent and useless as her legs. Her lips had gone raw from the salt, her tongue was swollen like a kielbasa and her eyelids were puffy and crusted. Still, the lights of Florida beckoned like Stardust whenever she reached the top of a wave.
So Joey struggled on, believing she still had a slender chance of survival. If she made it across the Gulf Stream, she'd finally be able to rest; ball up and float until the sun came up.
She had momentarily forgotten about the sharks, when something heavy and rough-skinned butted against her left breast. Thrashing and grunting, she beat at the thing with both fists until the last of her strength was gone.
Cavitating into unconsciousness, she was subjected to a flash vision of Chaz in their stateroom aboard the Sun Duchess, screwing a blond croupier before heading aft for one final bucket of balls.
Prick, Joey thought.
Then the screen in her head went blank.
Two
At heart Chaz Perrone was irrefutably a cheat and a maggot, but he had always shunned violence as dutifully as a Quaker elder. Nobody who knew him, including his few friends, would have imagined him capable of homicide. Chaz himself was somewhat amazed that he'd gone through with it.