Circle of Bones - Kling Christine - Страница 12

When she raised the hinged tabletop and looked inside, it was obvious that her papers, charts and instruments had been disturbed. On a small boat, everything had to have its place, which suited her.

Son of a bitch, she thought, then she wondered if it counted as cursing if you only thought the words.  What had he been looking for? She’d known something was not right about Bob from the first. His injured hand, his shredded feet. The conspiracy gibberish. She didn’t like strangers, especially paranoid, crazy ones, rummaging through her chart table. If she accused him, he’d deny it. Better not to let on that she knew.

She stuffed the ship’s papers into her canvas briefcase. Dimples or no dimples, she was not going to leave this guy alone with access to her boat. She grabbed the boat’s padlock on her way topsides.

“Look. I’ll go in to Immigration and talk to them. Then, once I’ve cleared, I’ll come get you. I’m going to lock the boat up, but you’ve got water and shade here. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

“Take me ashore with you, and I’ll just take off,” he said. “The French will never know. I already cleared in here.”

Yeah, she thought. Right. “And if somebody has already seen you on my boat and reports it to the authorities? No thanks. They could impound my boat for trying something like that. You’re not on my crew list.”

His eyes widened as he looked around the waterfront that fringed the harbor. “You really reckon they’re watching us?”

“I’m not going to assume they aren’t.”

“I thought for sure I’d lost them back there.”

“Lost who?” Now, she wasn’t at all certain whom he meant by them.

“The aliens.” He grinned. “A couple of guys from Uranus.”

The sooner she could get rid of him, the better. He really was one of the tin hat whack jobs. She shook her head. “I’m not going to risk getting charged with doing something illegal. You sit tight and I’ll have you ashore in an hour.” Sooner if she could manage it.

He cocked his head and watched her as she closed the companionway doors and secured the hatch with the combination padlock.

“You don’t trust me alone on your boat, do you, Miss Maggie Magee?”

She sniffed and raised one eyebrow. “Would you?”

“He was right here,” she said. She was standing in the cockpit of Bonefish.

“Oui, Mademoiselle. So you told us, but where is he now?” The French Immigration Officer, Monsieur Beaulieu, stood on her stern boarding platform in his leather shoes. He was looking down his long nose at the stainless rungs on the ladder that led up to the cockpit.

“I can’t believe this.” Riley sat down hard on the cockpit cushion.

“As I told you, Mademoiselle, we have no record of a Robert Surcouf clearing through immigration.”

She looked at the Frenchman standing on the stern, his upper lip curled in disgust. His nose was worthy of a leading role in a production of Cyrano. She could see long black hairs curling up and out both sides of his nostrils.

“You are sure you got the name right, Mademoiselle?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

She should have seen this coming. Was the craziness just an act or a cover? She was supposed to be the security expert and he’d played her. Bob. Yeah, right. Bet he either swam ashore or hitched a ride with a passing dinghy. The fact that she’d been distracted by her “date” tomorrow was no excuse. She thought about the clothes she’d given him. She’d miss that old shirt. Glancing around the cockpit one last time, she realized the handheld VHF radio was gone, too. Damn him.

“So, Mademoiselle,” he said. “We go?”

Monsieur Beaulieu sat on a pontoon in the bow of the dinghy talking into his cell phone and waving his free hand through the air as she ran him back to the inner harbor her chart referred to as La Darse. The brightly-painted hulls of local fishing boats were tied along the eastern wall, so she continued to the head of the harbor in front of the Place de la Victoire and the still bustling fish market. White plastic buckets filled with ice and red squirrel fish were lined up behind the men who displayed the larger kingfish and grouper on their tables. Creole ladies with headscarves and huge shopping baskets were haggling for better prices. Riley smiled at their waving arms and shrill voices, not so different from the man in her dinghy.

Since she and Beaulieu had been speaking in English, he apparently did not realize she spoke fluent French. He was discussing what to charge her with. He snapped the tiny phone closed and sniffed as she turned the boat to come alongside the seawall.

Once Beaulieu had his feet on terra firma, he brushed his hands together as though he had dirtied himself by getting ferried ashore.

“You are certain your mysterious passenger was American?”

Riley stood in her dinghy looking up at him, one hand on the seawall steadying the boat. “Yes, no doubt about it. And he assured me he had already cleared into your country. Why do you ask?”

“The name he gave you. Surcouf. It is French and I am surprised he would use it.”

“Why?”

“There was a very famous French submarine with this name. Surcouf. Named after a pirate. She disappeared in the Caribbean in la seconde guerre mondiale. Over one hundred and thirty men died when she was lost in 1942.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Exactement. You are an American.” He snorted air through his massive nose. “You know so little about l’histoire of the rest of the world.”

Great. A fake name, and a French one, no less. God only knows what he was into. And the jerk stole her only handheld VHF radio.

Beaulieu waved his hand toward the immigration building on the waterfront. “You are coming.”

It wasn’t a question.

“You’ve got my paperwork, and you know where to find me,” she said.

“That is not sufficient, Mademoiselle. This man you brought ashore, the man you insist was American, has not passed through immigration. He is an illegal, undocumented alien. You will come with me.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Marigot Bay, Guadeloupe

March 25, 2008

5:45 p.m.

The Citroen pulled to the side of the road and screeched off again almost before Cole had fully climbed out of the vehicle.

“Thanks a lot,” he said to the red taillights as they disappeared around the next curve.

He reached down to brush the dust off the tropical print sarong. What did he expect when he was out hitchhiking in a dress — and going commando, no less? The driver had made certain assumptions, and he wasn’t exactly happy when Cole turned him down.

He started down the steep dirt road leading to the narrow rocky beach at the head of the bay. He picked his way between the stones since his bandaged feet had started to hurt again during the ride. He’d plucked the cactus needles out of his hand with tweezers he found in the head on Riley’s boat, and he flexed his hand as he walked. Nearly good as new.

The last rays of sun lit the treetops high on the mountain above him, but down in the cove night was descending. A restaurant was perched on the ledge above the dark water, its colored lights illuminating the small grove of coconut palms. When he reached the bottom of the hill, Cole lifted the green T-shirt and grabbed the VHF radio he had clipped to the waist of his sarong.

“Shadow Chaser, Shadow Chaser, this is Shadow Mobile.”

A few seconds later the radio crackled to life. “Shadow Mobile, where the hell are you?”

“Switch?” he said, and the voice acknowledged. They switched to the VHF radio channel they always used. He didn’t want to broadcast his location in case they were listening. Once Cole explained how he had arrived, his first mate grudgingly agreed to pump up the spare dinghy and come ashore to pick him up.