Текст книги "Cross Current"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

XXXI

Mike made us sit in the living room, away from the body, to wait for the police, and from the moment the first patrol car arrived, things seemed to shift into slow motion. The head count on law enforcement personnel multiplied exponentially within the first hour, as photographers and crime scene techs wandered throughout the house, but no one appeared to be accomplishing anything, other than gawking at Celeste’s legs as she offered them Styrofoam cups of coffee from the kitchen.

I wanted to yell at them, Get on with it. We have to get out and start looking for Solange. She needs help.

When Collazo arrived, he, too, seemed to be moving as though he were underwater. He questioned us in the living room while several patrol officers searched the house, the pool cabana, the garden shed, and he had each of us slow down and repeat our stories over and over. Agent D’Ugard arrived and she dove right in, asking us to start again, from the beginning. Judging from the angle of the sun, I figured it was nearly eleven o’clock, and I was exhausted, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw that image from my dream. Long black hair floated around the periphery of my vision, and Solange called to me, Help me.

Collazo believed me this time when I told him about his police interpreter, and they sent a car over to Martine’s house. Later, an officer reported to Collazo that Martine Gohin had given the police permission to search her house, not thinking that they would search her whole property as well. In her backyard gardening shed, sleeping on the floor on pallets, the officers found thirteen Haitian girls, aged eight to eighteen. Martine claimed they all were nieces before she asked for a lawyer and stopped answering any more questions. Solange was not among the girls.

On hearing the word lawyer, I excused myself and went to a phone to call Jeannie. After the expected tirade about how I better not scare her like that again, she informed me that B.J. had taken off the day before in Jimmie St. Claire’s partially remodeled Chris Craft, headed for Bimini to join the search.

When I returned to the living room, Celeste was telling Collazo and Agent D’Ugard for the third time that Joe had not returned to the house until four o’clock the day before. He had not said anything to her about a child, and they spent the afternoon and the evening together at home. He had been in a very bad mood, throwing things around and cursing at her for nothing. He became furious when he asked her to pour him a drink and she told him they were out of rum. She offered to go out to the boat and get a bottle out there, but he exploded, screaming at her about her incompetence, and he hit her. She pulled back her headscarf to show the bruise at her hairline.

One minute it seemed as though I could not breathe, as though I were underwater and drowning, and the next thing I knew, I was in my element. I saw her, and I saw where she was. The condensation on the windows, the appointment this morning, Joe not wanting Celeste to go for the rum. I jumped to my feet and said,“Come on,” and ran to the sliding glass doors.

The Donzi’s cabin door was secured with a stainless hasp and a padlock. Rather than look for the key, Mike kicked at the doors with his good leg. On the third kick, the wood splintered, and I had to turn my head aside as the blast of superheated air poured out the companion way.

Every year, I see the stories in the newspapers about some child who got left or locked in a vehicle in the Florida sun, and the result is usually death or permanent brain damage. We found Solange bound and gagged, locked in the forward cabin, behind another door that Mike kicked in. I could not detect any respiration when I tore off the gag. I sat down on the bunk next to her and felt her neck for a pulse. Faint, but it was there. “Solange,” I said as I picked her up and carried her limp body off the boat, “I’m here. Like I promised.” When we entered the living room, Celeste was sitting alone on the couch, her head bowed, her hands covering her face. It had not occurred to me until then that the men had not told her what we had been doing outside. Solange and I were both dripping wet—I’d taken her into the pool to bring down her body temperature. She was now weak but conscious.

“Solange ...” I stopped in the middle of the living room, set her on her feet, and knelt next to her. She looked at me with questioning eyes. She did not recognize this woman, but she sensed I wanted her to try.

Celeste’s head had snapped up at the sound of my voice, and she watched the child, hungry for some reaction.

“Solange,” I said, and raised my hand to indicate Celeste. “This is your mother.”

At first the kid didn’t move. I watched her face, the lines of concentration etched in her little forehead as she tried so hard to remember something from a life she had once known but had long forgotten.

Then, in a soft voice, Celeste began to sing:

Dodo ti pitit manman’l 

Do-o-do-o-do ti pitit manman’l 

Si li pas dodo 

Krab la va manje’l

“Maman!” Solange cried out, and she ran into her mother’s arms.

XXXII

When we still hadn’t heard anything from Pit or B.J. by that afternoon, I called my brother Maddy, and he offered to run me over to Bimini on his charter sportfishing boat, the Lady Jane. I met him at the fuel dock, and I was surprised to see his hair had gone completely gray in the few months since I had seen him last. The size of his beer gut hadn’t changed, and I wondered if I would believe he was only thirty-two if he weren’t my brother.

I spent most of the four hours of that crossing slumped in a chair up on the fly bridge, my feet on the dash, looking out to sea, trying to figure out why the world was such a shitty place. Yeah, I know the world is full of ugliness. I didn’t need Joe D’Angelo to tell me that. But I still couldn’t fathom a father who didn’t love a kid as great as Solange. We’re not talking about a crime against strangers here, she was his own kid. I thought of the way the little kiddo had looked up at me all the time, the way her serious face would be transformed when her lips parted and those small, perfect teeth showed in her shy, tentative smile. I thought of her hand, how it slipped into mine and squeezed with a slight pressure that asked me to love her. And oh, damn, how I did.

The June storm had passed several days before, and any traces of that wind and swell were long gone now. As we charged across the Stream at over twenty knots, we created our own wind up there on the bridge. I was wearing a baseball cap to tame my hair and as protection from the sun, and I kidded myself as I tugged the brim lower that the tears on my cheeks were caused by the wind burning my eyes. The still water out in the Stream was back to the familiar luminescent inky blue strafed with golden shafts of sunlight. The current looked both beautiful and benign, though it had been neither when I’d watched the sun set the night before, assuming that sunset would be my last.

On the drive down to Maddy’s dock in Surfside, I had learned from Jeannie that Rusty was still over on Bimini, working as a liaison with the Bahamian government to deal with the illegal immigrants who had been at Joe’s camp on South Bimini. They had reportedly found over four hundred people living there in squalor.

Rusty told Jeannie he had been hiding in the mangroves that night, trying to spy on Malheur, when Solange and I had surprised him by taking his boat. There he was in the mangroves, his binoculars trained inland, trying to figure out how to rescue us from the clutches of Malheur, when we tore past him on our way out of the cut. He saw the smugglers go out the canal shortly thereafter, and he wound up swimming across the harbor back to Alice Town.

“He called me this morning,” Jeannie said, “before I heard from you. I told him not to worry, you were a survivor, and he asked me to call him if I heard anything. He said he was staying at the hotel that has all the Hemingway stuff, what’s it called?” Then she snapped her fingers. “Oh yeah, the Compleat Angler,” she said. “He sounded pretty damned upset, girl. Both that nobody’d heard from you, and that there was no report of his boat showing up at any ports along the Florida coast.”

I had been watching the road outside my window flying past in a dizzying blur of asphalt, cars, and strip shopping malls. “I hope he cares enough not to kill me when I tell him what happened to his boat.”

We got into Bimini just before dark, and Maddy tied up the Lady Jane in a slip at Freddie Weech’s Bimini Dock, moving easily around the boat in spite of his size. The little fifteen-slip marina was where he usually brought his long-term charter guests. Freddy rented the guests rooms, so he offered captains, like my brother, a discount on the dock rental. Maddy took care of Immigration while I hosed the boat down.

When he got back with our papers, Maddy said he wanted to eat dinner on the boat first, but there was no way I could sit still knowing that Pit and B.J. were out there somewhere, worrying that I might be dead. I convinced him that we should go out and have a look around, see if somebody couldn’t tell us where we might find a crazy American windsurfer and his big Samoan friend, maybe spot the Chris Craft B.J. had brought over.

The sun had set behind the island, but the sky above the collection of concrete-and plywood-buildings was filled with salmon-colored furrows of cloud, the sky behind the clouds, a washed-out, waxen blue. The precision of the formation reminded me of the ridges in the sand bottom back at Hillsboro Inlet, and I remembered B.J. standing on Gorda's deck, the water dripping off his bare chest where he had unzipped his wet suit. Was it really possible that was less than a week ago?

We stopped in at the Compleat Angler, and while Maddy was playing at big game fisherman, asking the other American yachties in the bar if they had seen anything, I spotted two Biminite ladies working the barbecue in the courtyard, turning the blackening chicken quarters with large tongs. I admired their cooking and asked after the health of their families, and soon I was on a first-name basis with Charlotte and Liz. When we got around to what I was doing there in Bimini, they told me that they had heard that there was an American camped out on the beach at the north end of the island, off Paradise Point.

“There is an old house out there, we call Rockwell House,” Liz told me. “Nobody live there now. They say he sleep in a tent,” she said, and she chuckled softly, shaking her head as though this were something only an American would do. She said that her son worked on a fishing boat, and he’d told her that the American had been inquiring on the docks about the whereabouts of a young woman who fit my description. Her son told her that this American traveled everywhere on his sailboard, she said, sneaking a nod to Charlotte, confirming this wild report. Whether coming to town or visiting South Bimini, he treated the sailboard like it was his dinghy.

I headed back into the bar to find Maddy and in the entry of the old inn, I literally ran into Rusty.

“Sey!” he shouted, and scooped me up in those football player arms of his, squeezing me in a breath-stealing hug. After holding me just long enough that I was beginning to think I might suffocate, he kissed my ear through my hair and dropped me back to the ground. He was wearing a long– sleeved white T-shirt and worn blue jeans, and he smelled of shampoo and shaving cream. From his days over on Bimini, his tan was even darker, making his deep blue eyes look electric. When he cupped his hands around my face and kissed me gently on the mouth, he fired up all the same tingles as on our first kiss, and I gave in to it, tasting his minty mouth and reaching up and over those strong shoulders of his.

“I was so worried,” he said when I pulled my mouth away and placed both hands on the center of his chest. Brushing his hand against the hair on the side of my head, he said, “I thought I’d lost you.”

I looked around the room at the hundreds of black-and-white photos hanging on the walls from years of Bimini fishing, gray, blurry images of men standing next to their hanging catch. There was a lot of history in that room.

I shook my head. “Rusty, I’m really sorry. Your boat... I shouldn’t have taken it... that was yours, and it really is lost. Gone, sank.” I thought about how to say the rest, and there didn’t seem to be an easy way.

“Hell, Sey, I can replace the boat, but if I were to lose you—” He wrapped his arms around me again and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe, but it wasn’t because of his embrace.

“Rusty?” He let go and held me at arm’s length, staring at my face. “I spent a long time treading water out in the Gulf Stream, yesterday. Had lots of time to think about my life and, you know, think about the big questions, like why are we here and all.” I paused and took a deep breath.

He hugged me again before I could go any further. His lips were next to my ear, his breath hot on the side of my head, when he said, “You’re trying to tell me I never had you.”

I squeezed him tight, thankful to him for saying it for me. I broke the embrace so I could see his face as I said, “Rusty, I’m so sorry.”

He smiled. “I’m gonna miss you, Sullivan. And what might have been.”

“No doubt about it, Elliot. We would have been great.”

The walk to the north end of the island was only just over a mile, but Maddy complained all the way out there. It was past nine o’clock, and he had neither eaten nor had his evening quota of beer. I tried to tune him out. The slender new moon had already set, and the walk through the Australian pines was dark. Little animals scurried in the underbrush, lizards probably.

We smelled the campfire first. The abandoned house loomed dark at the end of a driveway that once had been paved but now was a mass of weeds and broken concrete. Liz had told me this place had been built in the forties and fifties as a private home for an American from Detroit who invented car bumpers. Three stories high with a small tower up top, it looked like a ferryboat perched out there on the limestone bluff. The east side was lit by the firelight from Pit’s camp, and as Maddy and I approached, he looked up from the flames.

“Sis!” He jumped up and trotted over to me and threw his arms around me, lifting me off the ground and twirling me around. When he put me back down, he looked up and nodded at Maddy, who stood off to one side of us. “Cool,” Pit said. “A regular Sullivan family reunion.” Then he collared Maddy in a hammerlock, bringing him into our little circle. We stood there in the firelight together, arms over one another’s shoulders, the tops of our heads touching, each of us lost in thought about those who weren’t there.

Maddy pushed away first. “Okay, enough of this mushy stuff. You got any beer, bro?”

Sitting around the fire, I told my brothers about the camp on South Bimini and Solange and my hours out crossing the Gulf Stream. I told them about the picture in the trunk and what Gil had said about our dad and what he had done, and not done, down in Colombia. I was able to tell the whole story without breaking down, but telling the end about the kid and her mother, and how Agent D’Ugard had said they would probably both be able to stay since Celeste had her green card—that part made me miss Solange even more. Pit said B.J. had left that morning, taken the Chris Craft down to South Bimini and Gun Cay to continue searching for me. Maddy promised to take the Lady Jane down there to find him in the morning.

I’d left my brothers chattering around the fire then, told them I was going off to explore the big vacant house, but really I just needed to get away.

The Bahama Islands are made of old coral reefs that once were beneath the sea, but when the sea level changed, these reefs dried out. They are limestone islands, made of the skeletons of long dead animals, and now with a thin layer of soil, a few struggling plants eked out an existence in the salt spray. Out along the edge of the bluff they’d named Paradise Point, the bumper man had built an iron-and-concrete walkway around three sides of his elaborate island home. Salt and rust, and perhaps even hurricanes, had eaten much of it away over the last fifty years, but I wandered out onto one of the remaining sections of concrete and looked down the fifteen feet or so at the ocean that was rising and falling around the rocky bluff. There must have been a small cavern below me, because when the swells came in, the air was expelled with a loud rush.

I didn’t even hear him walk up behind me, but in an instant the scent of coconut soap mingled with the iodine smell of the sea, and I sensed the size of him standing next to me. There was a comfort in his presence. I didn’t need to look to know he was there, leaning on the rail, looking out at the ocean as I was. We stayed like that for the longest time, not saying anything, not knowing what to say, but comfortable in the silence.

In the end, I was the first to speak.

“I found her mother,” I said, breaking through the weight of the humid night air that seemed to be pressing down on me. “They say she can stay in the States now.” The rocks below exhaled with another powerful whoosh. “That should make me feel good, shouldn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said. “That was a great thing you did.”

We both watched as a local fishing boat motored by, her running lights lit, her outriggers heavy with nets.

“So tell me, why does it hurt so much?”

“Because you love her.”

“And I’m going to miss her.”

Neither of us said anything more for several minutes. We stood there watching the stars and their reflections on the blackened swells, listening to the rocks’ rhythmic breathing.

“You’ll still get to see her,” he said. “You know, families come in lots of different shapes and sizes these days. You decide what feels right for you.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts and took a deep breath. “You could be Auntie Seychelle. Make Solange and her mother part of the family.”

I leaned back and looked up at the broad bright band of the Milky Way. “I like that: Auntie Seychelle,” I said, trying out the sound of it. “Come on, we’d better get back,” I said, slipping my arm into his and starting to walk down the concrete toward the campfire. “And what about you?” I asked, turning my face up toward his.

White teeth glowed against his dark skin. “Uncle B.J. works just fine for me.”

THE END

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CROSS CURRENT

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Bonus Material

Read the first chapter from

BITTER END (Seychelle Sullivan #3)

Bitter End

I

The sun wasn’t up yet when I rounded the bend in the river and came upon the fifty-foot Hatteras Mykonos, the yacht that belonged to the ex-husband of my ex-best friend, idling in front of the Andrews Avenue Bridge. The sky was a pale, washed-out blue, cloudless, promising a warmer day once the sun rose. But at that hour the morning was cold enough that wisps of steam rose off the surface of the dark river. Nikolas Pontus, the ex-husband himself, was up on the motor yacht’s flybridge. He was alone, which surprised me, because now that he was a gazillionaire, I didn’t think he ever did anything for or by himself. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my ponytail to drive off the chill that suddenly danced along the back of my neck.

Up on the Andrews Bridge, the bells were ringing and the bridge tender had started lowering the traffic gates. I shifted into neutral, not wanting to get too close to Nick or his boat and hoping the bridge would open soon so the Mykonos could disappear upriver, out of my way and out of my life. Nick was the reason my friendship with Molly had come to an end, and a thing like that you can’t ever forgive.

It was quiet on the avenue for a Monday morning, especially compared to what it would be like an hour from now when the worker bees started filing over the bridge on their way to the courthouse. On the south bank of the river, the Downtowner, my favorite Fort Lauderdale restaurant and bar, stood silent and shuttered. Several white plastic beer glasses littered the tables out front, leftovers from those who had partied past closing last night.

An old woman pushing a baby stroller full of clothing and plastic trash bags emerged from the courtyard next to the restaurant and, after studying my boat for several seconds, turned away from me, passing under the bridge. I often saw her bent body walking the streets downtown, especially along the riverfront, her bones showing through the thin cotton of the plain white blouse she always wore, her white hair neatly pinned up off her neck. This morning, she hugged the ends of a bright red shawl wrapped tight round her shoulders. Beneath her skirt, her bare ankles looked frail above her dirty sneakers, and I wondered where she’d slept during the night.

I was traveling up the river onboard my forty-foot salvage tug, Gorda, bound for Summerfield Boatworks, where I had a 7:00 a.m. appointment to pick up a jittery new boat owner and his recently purchased fifty-seven-foot ketch. The job was a referral from George Rice, a broker friend of mine, who had called and pleaded with me, saying, “Seychelle darling, this is such a goddamn beautiful boat, and this buyer has never even driven a dinghy. The owner says he feels like he’s turning his sixteen-year-old daughter over to a Hell’s Angel, for God’s sake, and he’s refusing to sign unless this newbie gets help getting down the river.” I’d quoted them a ridiculous price, and when they’d said okay, I couldn’t turn it down.

Up ahead, the bridge span began its slow climb. The Mykonos had drifted side-on to the bridge, and Nick began trying to horse her around with alternating heavy-handed squirts to the big twin diesels. He was a lousy boat handler and, to my mind, an even worse human being. I wondered how such a creep could have made it so big in so short a time. When he’d married seventeen-year-old Molly and taken her out of our lives, he’d owned a greasy Greek sub and gyro take-out place on the boardwalk on Hollywood Beach. Now, he was the owner of a chain of high-end restaurants, as well as a fleet of casino gambling boats. I watched as he finally got his yacht lined up with the bridge opening, then gave her too much throttle and flew through the gap on the rising tide. Money hasn’t changed much, I thought. He’s still a jerk.

The Mykonos had just cleared the far side of the bridge, and I was just starting my approach when I heard a loud crack that echoed off the tall high-rises on either side of the river. That was followed by another crack; then from up on the Andrews Bridge came the sound of squealing tires. I caught a quick glimpse of the top of a black car headed north, down off the bridge, and it wasn’t until later that I realized it must have made a U-turn up by the gates. My attention had been drawn to the sight of Nick Pontus slumped forward over the controls.

Nick wasn’t moving, but his boat sure was. My God, I thought, he must have pushed the throttles forward when he fell. The big white sport fisherman’s stern was starting to squat, and her wake frothed as she churned upriver past the shops and restaurants of the Riverfront development, where early-morning employees had stopped what they were doing to stare as the big yacht steamed past the docks, headed for the narrow opening at the railroad bridge.

I jammed the throttle forward on Gorda without thinking. Shit! On smooth water like this, that boat would pick up speed like a Porsche. There was no way my little tug could catch a Hatteras with her cruising speed of over thirty knots, but my years as a beach lifeguard and as a salvage operator had left me with certain reflex reactions to the sight of a person or boat in peril– even if that person was Nick Pontus.

The unmanned railroad bridge always remained in an upright position until a train was approaching. Then a buzzer went off, and a large digital clock told boaters they had five minutes to get clear before the bridge would automatically lower. Fortunately, the bridge was up, and there were no numbers on the clock, but the opening still looked mighty narrow for that Hatteras’s sixteen-foot beam. From my angle, she looked to be lined up pretty square with the opening, but the slightest gust of wind, the smallest wave, or even a shifting of the weight onboard the boat would turn her aside and slam her into either side of that bridge trestle.

None of that happened. Breath exploded from my mouth. Nick still hadn’t moved, and the boat slipped between the arms of the tracks, plowing on toward the huge oaks and quaint historical buildings of Riverwalk. While the boat had not hit either side of the railroad bridge, she was now headed dead-on for the boulders that made up the riprap that rimmed the park in front of the Old River Inn. The converted hundred-year-old pioneer home was Nick’s flagship restaurant, his baby, the last place on earth Nick Pontus would want to crash and burn.

I leaned forward over Gorda’s controls, urging more speed out of the little tug. I had no idea if Nick was still alive, but I just kept thinking of all the fuel that boat must have in her tanks as she drove on, seeming to split the river with her wake.

Again, the boat’s course never wavered. I gritted my teeth and felt every muscle tighten as I anticipated the impact. The Mykonos must have been traveling at better than fifteen knots when she hit the rocks.

I expected an explosion like something out of the movies. Instead, the big white yacht reared up out of the water like a humpback whale breaching in the deep waters far offshore. The thunder shattered the city’s quiet as the fiberglass slid up onto the rocks and the diesels screamed out of control. I thought she was going to drive right across the twenty feet of lawn and into the Old River Inn’s bar. The sight of that boat climbing skyward, her long bow and red bottom paint canted at a surreal angle, was something I had trouble wrapping my mind around. She looked like she was trying to fly. With half her hull clear of the water, the noise of the engines sounded louder than the night freights that crossed the bridge past midnight. Then, her screws must have hit stone, and she found the apex of her climb. Both engines stopped abruptly, and she began a slow, screeching, scraping slide back into the river.

The first thing I saw when I pulled alongside the yacht’s port side was the blood splatter on the inside of the clear plastic enclosure surrounding the flybridge. Then I saw Nick’s face. He’d slumped forward in the helmsman’s chair, his head resting on its side on the steering wheel. His eyes were fixed open, dull as glass eyes from the taxidermist, and there was a gaping hole where his forehead should have been.

I closed my eyes and turned away, hand over my mouth, throat fighting to hold down the bile. Not even Nick deserved that. I blinked, felt the dampness on my lashes, and struggled for control.

Sirens. I probably should have called someone on the VHF, but the cops would make it here before the Coast Guard. The bridge tender must have called 911 as soon as he realized Nick had been shot. I heard them making their way across the quiet morning city. Police, ambulances, paramedics. Too late for Nick. The Mykonos, his million-dollar play toy, had become a crime scene.

The yacht’s waterline was already several inches underwater, her blue boot stripe completely submerged. She’d come loose from where she’d lodged on the rocks and was starting to drift back out into the river. I could hear the whine of her working pumps, but the water was going in faster than it was going out. I didn’t know how badly she was holed, but one thing was clear: the Mykonos was soon going to be on the bottom of the New River.

I guess you could say that’s how I justified it. Taking her under tow, I mean. The cops wouldn’t get it. Once they got here, they’d just string up their yellow tape and watch her go down. It also occurred to me that the insurance company would be more than a little pleased if I could get this damaged vessel to the boatyard before she sank.

It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes to lash Gorda alongside the big yacht’s aft quarter so I could climb aboard. I grabbed a couple of thick hawsers I’d already set out on deck for towing the ketch, and I tossed them into the yacht’s cockpit. While aboard, I worked swiftly, dragging the lines forward and tying them to the windlass and cleats on the bow. I avoided looking up at the flybridge.

I leaped over the gunwales back into Gorda's cockpit and threw off the lines that bound the two vessels amidships. Back in the wheelhouse, I backed off, then eased ahead slow, so that the towlines wouldn’t drop off my decks until the lines grew tight. I glanced downriver toward the Allied Marine Yard. They had a big seventy-five footer in the slings already. I’d do better heading upriver for boatyard row. Increasing the power slowly, I straightened out the two boats and got us on course for the Seventh Avenue Bridge. I was determined not to slow or stop, so I reached for the mike and called the bridge tender.

“Securité, securité, this is the tug Gorda calling the Seventh Avenue Bridge, requesting an emergency opening.”

Onshore I saw flashing blue lights in front of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, and a couple of cops trotted across the lawn toward the river, waving their arms at me, stunned looks on their faces as I pulled away from their location. I called the bridge again as I nudged the throttles forward. “Securité, securité, tug Gorda calling the Seventh Avenue Bridge, requesting an emergency opening. My tow is sinking.”