I turned the wheel and Gorda slipped around the end of the jetty, from the dark blue channel into the turquoise water. The tug’s squatting stern lifted up and began to surf on the swell of displaced water the carrier pushed in front of her. I eased off the throttle and watched the gray wall slide past. I stepped out of the wheelhouse and squinted up at the deck where small white-capped faces peered over the side. One sailor waved as the great ship filled the harbor entrance behind me. Perry hadn’t followed, thank God.
Now I had a tow to locate.
It was early in the day, but once offshore and clear of the tall stucco windbreaks, the wind was blowing a good ten to fifteen knots out of the southeast. High, clean-looking trade-wind clouds chased each other off toward the Glades. I slid the binoculars out of the case attached to the bulkhead and, steadying the wheel with one hip, I scanned the horizon, first to the north out the wheelhouse window.
I got lucky. It was not difficult to make out the distant bright outline of the Top Ten, apparently adrift. Looked like they’d made it no farther north than the Galt Ocean Mile before trouble stalled them. She was too close to shore. The Top Ten drew over seven feet, and with the onshore breeze, I figured she’d hit bottom within the hour. The problem was, it would take me half that time just to reach her.
I pushed the throttle back up to fourteen hundred RPM and checked around for any of the other boats from the local towing services. Off to the east the Cape Coral was towing a water barge back from Bimini, but this wasn’t her kind of job even if she were free. Perry was still the one I had to worry about.
When my father Red Sullivan, built Gorda over twenty-five years ago, his was the only boat to enter the business of towing luxury megayachts between the boatyards and marinas of Miami and Fort Lauderdale’s New River. Our next-door neighbor, a harbor pilot down in Port Everglades, told my father about the new regulations that would require every motor yacht with a draft greater than seven feet to be assisted by a tug. So when Red retired from the navy, he started building the aluminum hull over in a corner at Summerfield Boatworks. Mother often told us how thrilled she was to get him out of her house. She had grown accustomed to her life as a navy wife, to his long absences, and she was chafing at having him home all the time. Red had never intended the forty-foot tug to be an oceangoing salvage vessel, but as the luxury yachts grew bigger and more numerous, more towing companies jumped into the business. Eventually, he started taking Gorda out on breakdowns and salvage jobs just to stay busy.
The fathometer registered twelve feet when I pulled alongside the big slab-sided yacht. The brisk wind was throwing up quite a chop and, just drifting as she was, it put the Top Ten broadside to the slop. That, with the easterly swell, had Gorda rolling the rails down as we circled the ninety-two-footer. I blew the air horn a couple of times, but I couldn’t raise anyone on deck. There was an inexplicable stillness about the ship.
I drew in close to the swim step aft. Abaco tilted her head up and sniffed the air, then looked at me quizzically.
“I don’t know where Neal is, girl. I wish I did.”
One hundred feet of three-quarter-inch nylon line lay coiled on the foredeck. Backing off from the megayacht, I dashed out of the wheelhouse, threaded one end of the line through the hawser hole in the bulwark, and tied it securely with several hitches around the large aluminum post on the foredeck. The other end of the line I wrapped in a loose bowline around my waist, and I made it back to the wheel before we’d drifted too far.
When I’d eased Gorda’s bow up to within a few feet of the Top Ten’s swim step, a squirt in reverse stopped the tug from colliding with the motor yacht. I shoved the throttle into neutral and ran out of the wheelhouse, climbed up on the bow bulwark, coiled some slack line in my hand, and leaped down onto the swim step at the stern of the big yacht.
I lost my balance and collapsed in an awkward heap, slamming my shoulder into the gold-leaf T painted on the yacht’s transom. My heart felt like it was trying to break out of my rib cage, and it was several seconds before I drew a normal breath. Great landing, Sullivan, I thought. Gorda was drifting back rapidly, and if I didn’t hurry, the line around my waist would soon pull me right into the sea. Quickly I stood and untied myself. Apparently the only one who had seen my bumbling arrival was Abaco, her head cocked to one side and her legs spread for balance, watching me from the tug’s bow.
I climbed up the ladder to the aft deck and secured the line, adjusting the slack so that Gorda drifted angling off downwind, about forty feet off the big yacht’s stern. Then I called out, “Hello. Hello. Top Ten.” Neither the engines nor the generators were running, and in the shallow water, beam on to the wind, I could hear the vessel creaking and groaning as the hull wallowed in the swell. Yet even with that noise, the utter lifelessness seemed even more oppressive now that I was actually aboard.
Stepping over a puddle of water, I made my way forward up the starboard side. I hadn’t been aboard the Top Ten since Neal and I broke up, and every detail I observed kindled a small memory.
I cupped my hands to the glass on my left to try to see through the glare. The main salon was empty; a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate and a romance novel with a gaudy cover rested on the glass table. Neal had served us charbroiled dolphin on that table the first night he came aboard as captain. That night we’d been so happy about his new job, and we celebrated on the huge bunk in the owner’s stateroom, blissfully unaware that it was that job that would be the end of us.
A stainless ladder led to the bridge on the upper deck. I held tight to the rungs as the boat rolled, and I swung out, the water visible beneath my back. I used the momentum when the boat rolled back to pull myself up through the bulwarks, grabbing hold of the speedboat in chocks on the upper deck, but my sweaty hands slid across the smooth fiberglass. I dropped to a crouch to regain my balance.
The voice of the Coast Guardsman calling on the bridge VHF radio startled me at the same time I saw the hand at the base of the companionway door. The fingers were curved upward in a distinctly feminine curl, soft and relaxed. As the yacht rolled, the hand rocked slightly, showing a flash of red nail polish on the thumb.
“Hello,” I called out, feeling stupid as I did. Clearly, she wasn’t going to answer me.
II
Coast Guard Station Fort Lauderdale. This is the Top Ten.” My throat tightened. I couldn’t, shouldn’t look down. I’d had to step over the body to reach the dangling microphone, and it had taken every ounce of willpower I had not to run straight back to Gorda and get the hell out of there. The girl was on her side, resting in a pool of dark blood, the stainless-steel hilt of the dive knife showing below her left shoulder blade. Her long blond hair fanned out across the teak cabin sole and hid her face. She was wearing a thong bathing suit, and her exposed white buttocks looked more like smooth latex than flesh. I kept myself from looking down again, but the picture had been burned into my inner eyelids, and my mind kept flashing the snapshot over and over again.