I held my fingers to my lips. “Shh.”
“You okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah.” At that moment I heard a car start down the street. “B.J., duck, hide.”
I made my way to the front of B.J.’s truck, where I couldn’t be seen from the street. The car, the same dark blue Camaro with tinted windows, slowed to a stop at the Larsens’ drive. I could hear the radio tuned to a rap music station, and then Cesar’s deep voice. “See anything?”
“Nah, it’s too soon, man.”
The car moved on, making a U-turn and then coming back past the house once more before leaving the neighborhood.
I slid back around to the window. “Come on. Let’s go out back.” He sat up and opened the door. The noise it made when he closed it made me cringe. I hoped they were well down the street. We hurried back through the gate, and I led him down to the dock, where Sunny still waited in the boat.
“Help her up, will you?”
Sunny reached up one arm, and he lifted her out of the boat.
“I don’t think we ought to go into my house. Let’s go into the Larsens’ place.”
“Good idea,” B.J. said, and went for the key hidden by the back kitchen door.
Food smells lingered in the kitchen when B.J. opened the door.
B.J. reached for the wall plate, and I grabbed his hand. “No lights.”
Sunny leaned against the wall, her arms wrapped around her midriff, her glazed eyes staring into space.
“We need to get her into a warm shower. She’s been too cold too long.”
“You, too,” B.J. said. “You need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re shaking.”
I hadn’t even noticed it, but he was right. Taking her by the hand, I led her through the dining room to the downstairs guest bedroom and bath. At first she didn’t want to take a shower in the dark, but once I explained the situation to her, she agreed. I found huge, thick towels folded in the closet, and I set one out for her and another for myself, then turned down the covers of the queen-size guest bed. She didn’t speak to me when she got out, just toweled off and crawled under the covers.
The clothes I peeled off stank of the river: rotting vegetation, oily street runoff, and sewage. The clean hot water felt good, but it restored feeling to my limbs and body, which had been pleasantly numb. Now the many aches returned. In the dark I ran my fingers over the little barnacle cuts on my belly and thighs, the bumps on my head, the deep bruise in my shoulder, the raw blisters on my hands.
After toweling off my wet hair and combing it out, I wrapped myself in a huge white bath sheet and went in search of B.J. I found him standing to one side of the unshuttered entry window, keeping watch over the front of the house.
“Any sign of them?”
“They’ve driven by twice so far. Now they’ve parked. See, down there by the stop sign.”
“What happened to the cops who were out there?”
“They left around seven o’clock. I guess they gave up.” B.J. continued to stare at the vehicle down the street. “I bet they’re talking right now, saying you’ve probably gone somewhere else tonight, but they know you’ll eventually be back. They’ll just wait. And they’re right.” He turned to face me. “You can’t hide in here forever.”
“No, I know that.” I looked around the front room. “Any idea what time it is?”
“It’s just after two. I saw a clock in the kitchen.”
“So we have some time before daybreak. The Larsens shut off the phone when they’re out of town. So I have to sneak over to my cottage and call Mike Beesting in a bit. I know why Neal was out there that day on the Top Ten. We’ll take Gorda out in the morning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what Neal was diving for out there, and I know why people are getting killed.”
He reached out and ran his hand over my slick wet hair. He felt the old bump from the fire extinguisher and then the new one from when they pushed me into the closet.
“Come, tell me the story in here.” He led me into the family room, where a big-screen TV sat opposite a soft, deep nine-foot couch, the kind of couch you sink into and have a hard time getting out of. When we fell into the soft pillows, I made sure we were a safe distance apart and that my towel remained discreetly wrapped.
I puffed out my cheeks and exhaled loudly. “B.J., you can’t imagine what I saw tonight.” My throat tightened. “We’ve got to stop them.”
He chuckled. “Like I said, out to save the world.”
“No, not the world ... just some girls, like Sunny in there. I didn’t save Elysia; in fact, I probably even contributed to her death. I mean, if I hadn’t gone to talk to her that night... I think she’d still be alive.”
B.J. reached over and took my hand in his. There was more compassion than romance in the gesture, yet my body reacted to his touch as though an inner fault line were shifting.
I looked into his almond-shaped brown eyes. B.J. was a man, like Neal, like Cesar. Could I trust this man? I’d made so many bad choices recently, I didn’t trust my own judgment anymore. Was this man any different?
He stared back at me, unflinching. “It’s okay to ask questions,” he said.
I slid over the cushions, wrapped my arms around his waist, and rested my head against his chest. “And that’s why you are different,” I whispered.
We sat like that for a while just holding each other. And then, with those miracle-worker fingers of his, he began massaging my head, easing the pain in the bumps and taking the tension out of my temples. I twisted around until I was leaning against him like a backrest and started to tell him the whole story.
“See, B.J., people don’t normally build compartments into ships to smuggle stuff out of this country. That didn’t make sense to me at first.”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“But then I thought about where they were going, the Cayman Islands, and then it all made sense.” From my head to my neck to my shoulders, his fingers worked, bringing life and warmth and tingling and pleasure.
“What made sense?” he asked.
“What are the Caymans known for?”
“Diving and banks,” he said, and began kissing me on the side of my neck.
“Right. So if you’ve got lots of illegally obtained cash...”
I started to ask him where he thought Neal might have hidden the money on the freighter, but just then his hands reached over the tops of my shoulders.
I needed to check on Sunny, I needed to call Mike, but all that faded with this other need. Leaning back into B.J.’s chest, forcing his hands to slide lower, I pulled loose the bath sheet so that his hands were free to slide over my breasts and down my belly. From deep in his chest I heard a murmur, maybe a groan, and I knew, as surely as he had known the time was wrong before, that this time was just right.
XXV
We lay naked on the couch, our bodies entwined, and I tried to join B.J. in that much-needed world of sleep. I’d had almost no sleep in the last forty-eight hours, and the fatigue I felt was bone deep. But I was too tired to sleep. I wanted and needed the rest so badly, I was trying too hard. My eyes simply would not close, so I lay there staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, willing myself to get some rest.
Once again I had a feeling that we were being watched. All the windows except that one by the front door were covered on the outside with aluminum hurricane shutters. No one could be looking in. I glanced toward the entry, wondering if I was sensing someone coming to the front door. Or was it just paranoia, a reaction to the days of dealing with these wackos?