SURFACE TENSION
CHRISTINE KLING
Tell-Tale Press
2012
About This Book
Surface Tension was first published in hard cover by Ballantine Books in 2002. The mass market paperback came out from the same publisher in 2004, and Ballantine produced the first ebook in 2007. This digital edition was published in April, 2012.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written consent of the author. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions. Your support of authors’ rights is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002, 2012 by Christine Kling
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.
Visit Christine Kling at http://www.christinekling.com
Tim, this one’s for your dad.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people:
Tracy Brown, Ballantine Books; Judith Weber, Sobel/Weber Associates; Red Koch, tug Hero; Marcia Trice and Clio, dancers at Tootsie’s; Mike Springstun, Hollywood Police Department; Mark Meyers, Deerfield Beach Fire Department; Ed Magno, DEA; R. C. White, Fort Lauderdale Police Department; James W. Hall, Lynne Barrett, and Les Standiford, Florida International University; Laurie Foster; Barbara Lichter, Elaine Vannostrand, Carole Lytle, Pat and J. J. Gray, Cindy Gray, Steve Gray, my readers, my family and friends, and finally, my son, Tim Kling.
I
The mayday call broke through some fishermen’s chatter on channel sixteen. Brushing stray hairs back toward my ponytail, I quieted my breathing and listened. I always left the tug’s wheelhouse VHF radio turned up extra loud so that I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about missing any calls. Let’s face it, towing and salvage is a tough business, and if any calls for tows came in, I needed to get on the horn and make the deal before the competition.
I was down in the head compartment, wedged in alongside the Royal Flusher whose display model had operated so beautifully at the boat show, but once installed, it plugged up regularly every time I allowed someone else to use the head. B.J. was supposed to have been here this morning to fix the damn thing, and instead I found myself scrunched up in the tiny compartment, trying to make sense of an exploded diagram of a toilet.
The radio finally squawked again. “Mayday, mayday, this is the Top Ten.”
I dropped a washer under the shower grate and banged my head on the porcelain bowl. The Top Ten. Neal’s boat. And it had been a woman’s voice.
I straightened out my legs and tried to extricate myself from the pretzel-like position required to get at the bolts on the base of the Flusher. Please let him be all right, I thought. He should be the one making that radio call; the fact that he wasn’t was causing the hairs on my arms to lift in spite of the Florida heat. Where was he? Yet, in the midst of my worry, I couldn’t help but wonder who the woman was. Neal didn’t actually own the Top Ten; she was a ninety-two-foot private motor yacht, and Neal Garrett, all five feet eleven inches of sunny, brown-skinned, blue-eyed smiles, was her hired skipper and my former lover.
I backed out of the head and made it up to the wheel-house in three long strides. Coast Guard Station Fort Lauderdale was already on the air trying to get the woman to state the vessel’s position. Several times their transmission got stepped on by local traffic, and she became more hysterical by the minute. You weren’t supposed to call mayday unless someone’s life was in danger. The question was, did she know that? I didn’t recognize her voice, but I had heard in the Downtowner that Neal had teamed up with some young girl he met there in the bar. Where was Neal?
I wiped my hands on my cutoff jeans and kicked the toolbox closed with the toe of my deck shoe. I wanted to break in on her transmission with the Coasties to ask about Neal, but, of course, that would be against regulations. The Coast Guard radio operators could be so exasperating sometimes. It seemed like they had to know everybody’s mother’s maiden name before they could determine the nature of an emergency.
“How many persons are on board?”
“Nobody,” she said, “at least not now. I don’t know what to do. Please, we’re getting closer.”
He finally asked her what was wrong. The boat was drifting, she said, toward some tall white buildings. Then she broke off, and he couldn’t get her to respond.
Now, that’s a big help, I thought as I clicked on the VHF radio direction finder, turned up the radio, and slipped out of the wheelhouse. From her description, she could be anywhere along the hundred miles of tall white buildings from Palm Beach to Coconut Grove.
I jumped the gap from the gunwale of my tug to the seawall and then trotted across the lawn to my little cottage to lock up. I looked around for B.J., usually both my mechanic and the best deckhand I knew. The storm shutters were all closed on the big house, where he had been working in the library the day before. I trotted around the side of the house.
I had met B.J. when I used to work as a lifeguard down on Lauderdale beach. A big Samoan, he often surfed after work with a couple of the other lifeguards. When they introduced us one afternoon, he was one of the few people who had recognized something in my name.
“Hey ... Seychelle,” he said. “Isn’t that the name for some islands?”
When I explained my dad had named all us kids after islands, he wanted to know if I had a sister named Pago Pago.
I walked out to the gate, but his truck wasn’t in the drive. Taking a megayacht like the Top Ten under tow would certainly not be easy as a one-man job, but I didn’t have time to chase around anymore.
Locking the door to my cottage, I whistled for Abaco, my black Lab. She crawled out from under her bougainvillea bush at the side of the cottage and jumped through the gate in the bulwarks.
The noise of Gorda's Caterpillar diesel grumbling to life rolled across the river like nearby thunder. I threw the dock lines onto the grass just beyond the seawall and adjusted the throttle to achieve maximum speed with the least amount of wake. I noted in the log that we were under way at 9:18 A.M., Thursday, March 18. Abaco took up her position at the bow, ears blowing back, tongue lolling out of the corner of her mouth.