Текст книги "Surface Tension"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

XV

When I heard the beeping, I was aware of where I was, and I really had to pee. I’d slept a few hours at the Paradise Hotel just to get away from everyone. The room was spartan and what little was there was tasteless. I’d wolfed down a Whopper with cheese and large order of fries while balancing the food on my lap. Nothing in the room looked clean enough to eat off. In fact, I’d decided to turn the air down and nap on top of the covers. I didn’t want to see what surprises might be on the sheets. The carbohydrate fix had made me even sleepier. I’d set the alarm on my watch for 1:00 A.M., and I was out the moment I was prone.

Now it took all the willpower I could muster to force my body up off that bed and into the bathroom. I sat on the john and wondered if I was a complete lunatic to try to break into a million-dollar yacht tied up to the docks of a United States Coast Guard base. My conclusion: probably. But I didn’t know what else to do at that point. I was certain that everything that had happened during these last four days was connected. Ely and Patty both had been killed because of some secret, and Neal was hiding out because he knew something about it. Men like Hamilton Burns and his clients really valued only money. At the moment, I could use some of it myself, and that was just one reason I was determined to find out if the Top Ten held any of the answers I was looking for.

The motel was quiet and the streets were nearly empty when I pulled out onto the highway. I’d found an old navy blue zip-front hooded sweatshirt balled up in the back of my Jeep, and I pulled it on to cover my bright T-shirt. The dark jean shorts would be okay. I also had a collection of baseball caps under the seat for days when the wind in the Jeep got to be too much. With my hair pulled into a tight ponytail, I chose a dark cap with Sullivan Towing stitched in faded gold across the front. It had once belonged to Red.

It had been a long time since I had last been to John Lloyd Beach State Park. The park was on a long peninsula that formed the southern side of the mouth to the harbor at Port Everglades. This narrow strip of land was really a barrier island that stretched all the way down to South Beach and the Miami Harbor entrance. The ocean flowed on the outside, the Intracoastal on the inside. At the tip of the peninsula, the Coast Guard had their facilities, but you had to pass through the park to get down to their station. The State Parks people manned a security gate there round the clock.

I turned off into the parking lot at Dania Beach and parked in one of the metered spots. The best way to get past the gate would be on foot, going into the brush on either side of the guard station. But then it would be a good two-mile hike down to where the Top Ten was docked. I didn’t think anybody would be on the road through the park at that hour. I grabbed the backpack containing my in-line skates. There was a flashlight under the driver’s seat for emergencies, and I dropped it in the backpack as well.

I pulled my cap down low over my face as I crossed the Whiskey Creek bridge. I was in full view of the ranger station about fifteen hundred yards ahead, but I was guessing that the person on duty either had something to read or some music and he wouldn’t pay much attention to my end of the road. At the bottom of the bridge, I turned off into the forest of tall Australian pines. The thick carpet of pine needles on the forest floor made it easy walking, although the trees didn’t provide much cover. I passed the ranger post about a hundred feet away. I could see the headphones on the young man’s head.

The road took a turn another couple of hundred yards past the guard post, and I sat on a chunk of dead coral on the side of the road and pulled on my skates.

The road through the park was dark and desolate. Pines lined the right side of the road, and on the left, short mangrove seedlings covered the bank before the dark water of the Intracoastal. I skated near the side of the road, ready to jump into the trees if a car approached. The asphalt was rough, and I tried to get into my steady rhythm of side-to-side sweeping strides.

Just across the Intracoastal, the mangroves began to thin out and the bright lights of the busy commercial port lit my way. On one side was the loamy smell of the dark pine woods, while across the water came the noises and machine smells of ships’ engines and generators. Toward the end of the peninsula, the road curved, and through the trees, I could see the lights of the dormitories and buildings at the station.

There were several compounds out on the end of the peninsula that marked the southern half of the entrance to Port Everglades. After I replaced my skates with my sneakers, I checked the whole area over to make sure I was jumping the right fence. The entrance to the Coast Guard station had a closed chain-link gate that operated electronically, but no guard. Not even any barbed wire on top. Up until now, everything I’d been doing had been minor but breaking into a U.S. military installation was a major offense. My pulse was throbbing in my neck as I hooked my fingers through the chain link. It took me several minutes to force myself to make the first step. Once over, I made my way around the perimeter of the compound to where I could see the Top Ten berthed behind a forty-foot cutter.

The gangway was down and no precautions had been taken to keep people from boarding. The Coasties probably didn’t expect anybody to get this far without being challenged.

Stepping onto the deck, my memory flashed back to when I had jumped aboard last Thursday. The same eerie feeling came over me as soon as I stepped aboard. Lots of sailors and fishermen get to thinking their boats have personalities and wills of their own. I’ve always been a skeptic about this, but this ship did feel as though she had lost her soul.

I started at the bow on the lower deck and worked my way aft, jiggling all the doors and windows, trying to find my way in. The police had placed yellow crime scene tape across the doorways, but at this point it was the locks that were most effective at keeping me out. On the stern, I made out a dark shape on the side deck that I hadn’t noticed the last time I was aboard. A black oilcloth tarp covered what looked like some kind of machinery. Yachts of this size and caliber didn’t normally need to have machinery stored out on deck. I pulled off the cover and found what looked like a small engine mounted on top of a pair of tanks. Squatting down below the level of the bulwarks, I clicked on my flashlight and examined the aluminum plate on the side of the red steel tank: Powermate Contractor 5.5 HP, 120 PSI Max. Pressure. It was apparently some kind of gas engine-driven air compressor. Red had installed a small compressor on Gorda that we sometimes used for filling tanks. What was this one for? For filling dive tanks? That didn’t make sense. The Top Ten already had an electric compressor in her engine room below deck. I wondered why on earth Neal had brought it aboard.

I heard a loud scraping noise aft, and I clicked off my flashlight. At first I heard nothing but my own heart pounding and the whistle of the air in my nostrils as I tried to slow down and breathe normally. Then I heard the noises of the port across the turning basin, the beeping of forklifts loading containers onto ships, trucks and tugs moving and working. A pilot boat passed on the channel side, and the Top Ten strained at her dock lines. The aluminum companionway creaked as it rolled on the seawall. When my heart finally slowed to a mere gallop, I stood and peered around the cabin on both sides of the yacht. There was no one there.

On the seaward side, I found a window left open a crack for ventilation. I slid it open wider and managed to squeeze through, although I had to leave my pack outside on the deck. I was in the main salon, close to Neal’s cabin.

In the beam of my flashlight, I could see that the police had left the place a mess. They had probably already found everything that was worth finding, but I had to try.

The crew’s quarters were up forward in the bow. I had visited Neal’s cabin several times before we finally broke it off for good. The door stood ajar. Most of the personal possessions in the cabin were the same ones I had picked up and put away over the months that Neal had lived with me in my cottage: his clothing, a machete he’d picked up in Panama for opening coconuts, a scrimshawed whale’s tooth. Nothing there told me anything new about the life he had been leading. I closed the door to his cabin and headed up to the bridge.

Somebody had cleaned up the blood. I began to search through the paraphernalia. Various letters, bills for boat maintenance, marina charges, fuel receipts. Neal never had been very good at bookkeeping. Finally, I picked my copy of Bowditch’s The Practical Navigator. Inside the cover there were some personal letters and some photographs, including several of me.

I leaned against the helmsman’s seat and examined a picture of the two of us taken down at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. We were up on top of the fort, sitting on the ramparts with the various blues and greens of the anchorage in the background. From that picture, you would think those two would never be apart the rest of their lives.

Tucked between the pages of Bowditch, I found some odd sketches. I had no idea what they were. Obviously the police hadn’t thought they were important, if they’d looked at the book at all. Near as I could tell, the drawings delineated some compartment or container. The measurements were sketched in as well as the rough calculations of the square footage of the space. I slid the sketches and the photo back into the book. I felt fairly safe taking it now. I doubted the cops would even notice it was gone.

It wasn’t difficult to find the GPS, but I had never used this model before, so it took me several minutes to figure out how to recall the way points that were stored in memory. Neal had way points for Miami Harbor entrance, Bimini, Marathon, West End, you name it. Each way point was named with a three-letter code name like MIA, MAR, or WND. The last position entered was located just north of the entrance to Port Everglades. I lifted up the chart tabletop and rummaged around inside for a slip of paper and a pencil. I wrote down the coordinates, latitude 26°09.52’N, longitude 80°04.75’W, as well as the name, BAB. What the hell did that mean?

I slipped the papers and photos back into the book, let myself out the side door and made my way to the aft lower deck, where I’d left my backpack. I slid the copy of Bowditch in between the skates and zipped the pack closed.

I heard a noise behind me. I whirled around, twisting in a crouched position. The next thing I knew was blinding, searing pain as a blunt object slammed down on my left shoulder. A figure dressed in black grunted and pulled a fire extinguisher back into the air preparing to hit me again.

My attacker looked like a giant Pillsbury Doughboy in blackface. He growled a deep animal-like noise and came at me again. This time I rose up swinging the pack with every bit of pain and fury I had in me. The pack smashed into the black ski mask. I heard him groan, then gag and spit. I raced for the aft deck, looking frantically for another weapon, anything.

He hadn’t stayed down more than a couple of seconds. I tried to turn around at the end of the main cabin area, but my feet slipped on the sharp right turn. I heard him before I felt his hands grab hold of the cap hanging from my ponytail. He threw it to the deck and grabbed my ponytail. He yanked my hair so hard, I could hear some of my hair being pulled out at the roots, and then he slowly pulled my head farther back. I thought he’d break my neck. I couldn’t breathe. Every time I struggled, he pulled harder.

“Bitch,” he breathed in his deep voice.

He forced me to the back corner of the deck opposite the covered compressor. Just as I thought I was about to black out, I felt his other hand reach between my legs and grab me by the crotch.

He yanked my hair back harder and when I tried to scream, nothing but a pain-scrambled gurgle came out. Then I was rising, being lifted by my hair the hand between my legs. I saw the turbulent black water of the inlet beneath me.

“Adiós, bitch.”

He heaved me into space.

Grabbing the swim step would be my only chance to stay with the boat, a lesson my father had taught me since childhood. As I fell, I swung my right arm in the direction of the teak platform. I heard the skates crash onto the wood, and my wrist slammed down onto the steel strip at the edge of the step. My right hand went limp, releasing the strap, unable to grab hold of the swim step, as a new, mightier pain tore up my right arm.

The water was shockingly cold. I let my body go limp, my heavy wet clothes pulling me down. When I didn’t move, the pain was less—maybe, I thought hazily, I should just stay down there in the cold agreeable depths and sleep.

Then my lungs started to burn. My arms were nearly useless. The blackness was closing in, the world was a tunnel. It hurt like hell, but I kicked and flailed my ineffectual arms to struggle to the surface.

Pulling air into my lungs hurt, yet it tasted so sweet.

The Top Ten was about fifty feet away, and the gap was widening. I was thankful for the ebb tide that was sucking me out to sea, away from that fire extinguisher and madman. The fight in me was gone. I just wanted to drift away. The bulky figure on deck pulled the ski mask off, and I didn’t need to see the spiky hair to know who it was. Esposito. He spun around and ran for the gangway.

Because of my sore left shoulder and bruised or maybe broken right wrist, my legs were having to do all the work of treading water to keep my head up. My sodden sneakers were weighing my legs down. I kicked them off and let my legs float. I knew the tide was carrying me alongside the jetty, but I had to rest before I could swim.

Then I heard the high-pitched whine that an outboard makes underwater. Thank God. Some crazy guys are fishing at this hour of the morning. I saw the boat headed out in the middle of the inlet, and I began to raise my arm to wave at them, when I realized the boat looked very much like a certain white Sea Ray I had seen before, only then there had been two divers aboard. Now, a lone man stood at the center console, and he seemed to be slowly searching the surface of the water on either side of him.

Damn.

I ducked my head underwater and pushed my hair forward over my face to cut down on the reflection of the shoreside lights on my white skin. I raised my head just enough to breathe through my nose. And I watched.

He didn’t appear to have seen me, but nonetheless, he was coming straight for me. I waited as long as I thought was safe, slowly hyperventilating. Then I dove.

I don’t usually open my eyes underwater, but I wanted to try to see when it would be safe for me to resurface. But it was just all blackness, everywhere. It made me feel disoriented, as though I didn’t know which way was up, and which was down. Like most women, if my lungs are full of air, I float, so I had to struggle to stay under. Even moving slowly as he was, it should have taken him only a few seconds to pass over me, but the whine of his outboard surrounded me in the water. I had no idea which direction it was coming from. My chest was already starting to constrict. There hadn’t been time to get a proper breath before diving. I swam in the direction that I thought would take me away from the boat, but the outboard whine only grew louder then overpowering. I thought I was going to get hit by the prop. In my imagination, I could see the whirling, slicing blades all around me in the water. Going against every fiber in my body that was screaming out for air I tried to swim deeper or at least in the direction that I thought was down. In a flash, I imagined this was how my mother had done it, walking into ever-deeper water until it closed over her head, the sheer force of her will refusing to answer all the cues and calls and demands of her body. But deep in the cerebral cortex, at the simplest levels, before thought, perhaps even before instinct, resides the species’ imperative to survive. My self-preservation autopilot took over and reversed my direction. The hell with the props. I needed air. Desperately. Now.

I broke through the surface of the water no more than fifteen feet behind his churning outboard. The engine noise was much louder at the surface, thankfully, because I was making a hell of a lot of noise gulping down air in rasping breaths. He seemed to be moving faster, the gulf between us was broadening rapidly. I turned around to swim away from him, thinking I would be swimming back into the inlet, but I saw nothing but dark black sea and sky. The reason he had seemed to be coming from every direction at once above me was because he had been turning his boat around right over my head. Esposito was motoring back into Port Everglades. I was drifting out to sea.

XVI

I could see the lights of Hollywood Beach appearing as I drifted past the end of the breakwater. I estimated the current was running at least two knots. The water grew rougher as the outgoing tide ran into the incoming wind chop. Several waves broke over my head, and I swallowed a mouthful of seawater. My eyes and nose burned, and I still didn’t have much movement in either my left arm or my right hand. There was no way I could swim against that tide.

Lifeguards teach swimmers that if they are ever caught in a riptide to simply relax, let the current carry you out, then swim parallel to the beach and go ashore where there is no outbound current. That would not have been a problem if I had been fresh, but in the exhausted and injured state I was in, I doubted that I would make it back in to the beach. I was having enough trouble just treading water and trying to keep my head above the waves.

On the south side of the channel, I suddenly heard an explosive puff of air, followed by a deep groan. Squinting to clear the water out of my eyes, I made out the green light on a channel buoy. It was farther away than I expected. Clearly, the Gulf Stream was already carrying me north. The buoy’s air horn moaned again as it rose and fell on the waves.

I turned my eyes seaward. There should be another marker, the harbor entrance buoy. The light on that one would be red and brighter, and the buoy itself would be bigger. Maybe, big enough to crawl onto.

On the crest of a swell, I spotted the red light, but it disappeared when I dipped down into a trough between swells. On the next peak, I found the light again, and was alarmed to see how fast I was drifting. I might pass the buoy before the tide carried me out there.

I turned south and started kicking, trying to fight the Gulf Stream, that mighty current that flows with the strength of all those trade-wind seas that pile up in the Gulf of Mexico, only to spill out toward the north. The ebb tide was carrying me out to the buoy, but I had to fight the current from carrying me up the coast before I made it out there.

Trying to ignore the pain, I began to stroke with my left arm, a sidestroke and a scissors kick, trying to hold my hand steady on the wobbly wrist. Half the time I wasn’t even sure I was going in the right direction when for several waves I wouldn’t see the red eye glowing in the darkness. Then it would appear again, I’d adjust my course slightly, and kick with renewed vigor.

The cold water was numbing the pain in my shoulder, and I drank in the brilliant night sky awash in stars, the glistening lights of the coastal condos, the luminous green bursts of the phosphorescent plankton as I stroked through the sea. There was nothing frightening about this night. Some people probably believe right up to the last minute before they drown that they can save themselves, that their efforts will be enough to snatch them back from the precipice. Perhaps they never become aware that it isn’t enough. They fight to the end, and then there is nothing. And then again, there are those, like my mother, who never even try to save themselves.

The next time I saw the light I was startled to see how close it was, and I heard the bell clanging for the first time. I wondered if I had blacked out for a minute or just gone into some kind of dream state. But the buoy was right there. I was slightly to the north of it, though, the stream having pushed me even farther off course than I thought.

My arms and legs felt leaden. The water was so much warmer than the chill wind on my face. The water wrapped me, blanket-like, comfortable, appealing. I wanted to stop swimming, to rest, to sleep. Forget the damn buoy.

A wave slapped my face and drove salt water up my nostrils. The pain seemed to explode white hot and searing in my brain. No, dammit. Swim, stroke, go, go. I’m better than this, I can do it. In an all-out frenzy of flailing limbs and thrashing water I covered the last hundred feet straight up into the current.

The bell was clanging, deafening. Red flash, one-two-three, red flash. I reached up and grabbed one of the bars that supported the fight and the battery pack. The buoy was rocking and rolling in the swell. On each rise, my body was lifted out of the water to the waist, and my injured hand nearly let go. It was several minutes before I had the strength to pull myself out of the water. I was dimly aware that my forearms and belly were getting sliced up by the barnacles as I dragged my body out of the water. The wind numbed my face as I curled my body into a tight ball on the narrow platform beneath the flashing red light and clanging bell. I wrapped my arms around the bars so as not to fall off as the buoy rocked in the swells and closed my eyes. I was still alive.

Far, far off in the distance, as though down at the end of a long tunnel, I heard an outboard running at a good pace and then idling down. I had no idea how long I had been curled up on the buoy, shivering in the wind, trying to conserve body heat. I knew I should open my eyes, but I felt like the little kid who closes his eyes and thinks he is hiding. If it was Esposito, I didn’t want to know about it. There was no place I could go to escape, and back in the water meant hypothermia, death for sure.

Even with my eyes closed, the whole world suddenly seemed to turn red as a spotlight lit up the buoy and shone through my eyelids. I lifted my head and squinted toward the light.

“Hey!” a voice called. A deep voice, a male voice. “Hey, lady, are you okay?”

Stupid as it may sound, I started to laugh. What was I supposed to say? No, go on, I’m fine, thank you?

“Hey, lady?” he called again. “Jason,” he said more softly, “move in a little closer okay?”

“Dad, are you sure we oughta? She looks kinda scary. Like, do you think she might be crazy or something?”

I lifted up my head and tried to shield my eyes with my forearm. “The light,” I called out, waving my arms and pointed at their spot. The bell drowned out what I said, but apparently they understood the pantomime. The spotlight went out, leaving the world dark, but my eyes were still blinded by bright red spots.

I followed the sound of their idling engine as they drew closer. Then I heard the crunch of crushed barnacles as their boat eased alongside. Out of the darkness, a hand touched my arm and pulled me to the edge of the buoy. I went willingly, still blind.

“Thanks,” I said as someone wrapped a thick, warm beach towel around my shoulders. I began to be able to make out their faces. I didn’t think I’d ever stop shivering.

“Jason, we’d better head back in with her.” The driver turned the boat around, and we headed for the inlet. My vision was clearing rapidly now. The man who handed me a Styrofoam cup of coffee had gray hair and a beard and looked about fifty years old.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

Nodding, I answered, “Yeah, now I am. Thanks to you. I don’t know how much longer I would have lasted out there.”

“What happened to you?” he asked.

Even with only half my wits about me, I knew better than to try to explain the whole story. This guy’s son would really think I was crazy if I tried that.

“I fell overboard,” I said.

“Where’s your boat?”

I pointed out to sea. “I think she went down. She was taking on water, and when I went up forward to get an extra pump, I fell overboard. I guess I kinda panicked.”

“Well, you’re mighty lucky we came along.”

“I sure am.” I smiled at him. I meant it.

Then we were approaching the Top Ten, and I craned my neck to see over his shoulder. The interior lights were all on, and I saw several uniformed police officers in the main salon.

“That sure is a pretty vessel, isn’t it?” the man said, turning to look at what was distracting me.

On the swim step I saw a black shadow against the glistening white hull.

“Hold up,” I said. “Could you swing by there so I could pick up that bag?”

The kid driving looked where I was pointing, then to his dad for permission. The man nodded.

“Sure,” the kid said, and spun the wheel.

The father reached down and picked up my back

pack. “Oof, this thing is heavy. Better not be cocaine or some damn thing in here.”

I smiled at him and unzipped the top of the pack, revealing the contents. “No, just my roller skates.”

Father and son exchanged a look that seemed to say, Son, you’re right—she is nuts.