Circle of Bones - Kling Christine - Страница 30

“Checking her out. I got on a local wi-fi network and checked the Coast Guard documentation database for her boat name. She’s Marguerite Riley, from Washington, DC. Found some stories about her and her family. Her old man’s some kind of big cheese with the government, like a ambassador or something, or leastwise, he was. Nothing recent on him.”

“I don’t give a fuck who she is. She’s nothin’.” Spyder walked over to the coffee table in front of the couch and stared at the little black and stainless gun sitting there. When they’d first searched the boat, they found the little Ruger 22 in the owner’s cabin along with a couple of magazines of ammo. He’d hid it in a towel drawer in the forward head so it would be easy to get at without being seen. “What you get that out for?”

“Just lookin’ at it.”

“You don’t know shit about guns.”

“Like you do?”

“More’n you, dumbass. Enough to know we don’t want anybody seeing we got a gun.” He lifted the gun up and pointed it out the back window of the yacht. He sighted down the barrel, imagining he was pointing it at the bitch on her sailboat. He made a soft “Pkew” noise and bounced his hand up in recoil from the imagined shot. The day would come when he would show her. With a curt nod, he bent down and scooped up the ammunition and returned it and the gun to the bottom of the towel drawer in the head. Then, he went into the kid’s cabin and grabbed some clean clothes before his brother had a chance to notice the torn shorts and dirty shirt.

“There’s something here, Spyder,” Pinky hollered so his brother could hear him down in the master cabin. “Something bigger’n just getting paid a few extra bucks to follow this chick. First, they pay us to go for the doc, a guy we know from back home is after some kind of treasure. They want some gold coin. Then they change and it’s this woman. There is something here, brother. This one might be the jackpot. We do not want to mess this one up.”

Spyder stepped back into the salon zipping up the new clean shorts. “What ch’you talking about. We ain’t gonna mess up nothing.”

Pinky stared at him without blinking, looking at the clean shorts and shirt. Spyder had to turn away. He didn’t want to look at that ugly face. His brother knew he could always win in a stare down. The little fucker looked like a tarpon his underbite was so bad and with all those pink patches on his brown skin and the clumps of frizzy white hair — sometimes Spyder just wanted to smash his fist into his brother’s face.

“I’m just saying,” Pinky continued, “that sometimes you don’t listen to me and when you go off and try to do things your way, it don’t always turn out so good. Like back in Oriental.”

“Fuck that shit, you little freak. You’re always making out like I’m the stupid one. Like I’m the fuck up. You just wish you was me, that you wasn’t some raggedy-ass, patchy-lookin’ nigger. You just lookin’ up that shit on that woman ‘cuz you seen her and you want to fuck her. Shit. You never touched a woman in your life, ‘cept maybe Crazy Matilda back home and she don’t count.” Spyder crossed to the galley, grabbed a beer and stole a quick glance at his brother to see if his words were having any effect. As usual, Pinky was ignoring him which pissed him off even more.

The little freak lived in his own world with that computer and his headphones. Spyder collapsed onto the couch. Fact was, he knew his brother was a whole lot smarter than him, but he’d never admit it out loud. Though they looked nothing alike, Spyder was barely a year older than his half-brother, and growing up with that crack-head they called Mama, they’d learned to depend on each other for survival.

 Spyder chugged his beer and then squashed the can in his fist and threw it behind the settee. “I ain’t no dummy. I figure, why walk all over town? She’ll be back to her boat soon.” Spyder leaned forward and examined his blistered toes. He wasn’t about to tell his brother that the bitch had jumped him, and he’d had to bolt before she kicked his ass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Iles des Saintes

March 26, 2008

6:25 p.m.

After more than an hour in a hot, airless room, the Gendarmes finally came in to talk to her. Turned out she was a “person of interest” thanks to the still-missing Bob. Seemed they’d decided Bob was the fellow she had been rolling in the dirt with. After repeating the same questions over and over hoping for different answers, they cut her loose with a fifty euro fine for disturbing the peace. She stomped her way through the streets of the quaint village headed toward the quay, muttering half sentences to her brother.

“French flics are even worse than in New Haven. Mikey, you know.”

When she’d enlisted, before heading off to boot camp at Parris Island, she’d spent a couple of weeks in New Haven talking to the cops about what really happened to Yale student Michael Riley. The way the local and campus police stonewalled her made her certain they helped cover up the whole thing due to prestigious old family names (some of which were on campus buildings). One piece of evidence had pointed toward another on-campus organization, but every time she tried to get someone to talk, her inquiries were blocked. Riley hadn’t had a high opinion of cops ever since.

Now, she was worried about her boat. When she’d left it around noon, thinking that she would be in view of the anchorage most of the day, she hadn’t bothered to lock it. She also had left no anchor light on, nor did she have a flashlight in her dinghy. It was late enough that several shops were closed, but the restaurants she passed were full of talking, laughing people, and their waterfront patios were strung with colored lights and vibrating with music. Along the main street, couples strolled arm in arm reading the menus posted in the front windows of all the restaurants. God, the food smelled good. She hadn’t even stopped for the lunch she’d dreamed of while sailing over here.

The sky was still a pale, whitish blue when she arrived at the waterfront, but the boats in the anchorage were mere dark silhouettes against the lighter sky. She searched the fleet for the familiar outline of her Bonefish, and she almost looked right past it because something wasn’t right. She looked back at the cutter rig with two roller furling headsails. She had been searching for an empty boat, but there was a dark shadow moving under the bimini in that cockpit. Someone was on her boat.

Riley ran for her dinghy but decided against using the outboard. Though she couldn’t make out the features of the person, she was certain it had to be Ponytail. She was finished messing around with this guy. She wanted to confront him, talk to him, and she wouldn’t mind knocking him on the side of the head a few times as payback. As she untied the dinghy painter and stepped into the little boat, she saw the figure open the double doors, slide open the main hatch, and proceed down the ladder into the cabin. He was lucky she didn’t have any firearms on her, because though she hadn’t been to a range in months, she’d once been able to outshoot every Marine at every post she’d been assigned to. She shoved the boat away from the dock, fitted the oars into the oarlocks and began to pull.

As she rowed out, the inflatable bounced over the wind chop. She remembered that she had left the forward hatch over her berth open. She decided to go in that way. As she pulled alongside the Bonefish, she noticed that the intruder hadn’t brought a dinghy. What did he do? Bum a ride? Swim out? She headed her own inflatable to the anchor chain.

Her boat’s foot-wide teak platform extended out from the bow, supported beneath by stainless steel tubing called a dolphin striker that ran from the platform down to the hull at the waterline. Riley tied her dinghy to the anchor chain with a quick bowline, then stepped up onto the rubber boat’s seat. Bonefish was rocking gently in the swell that wrapped around the point, and she used the boat’s natural motion to help her as she boosted her belly onto the anchor platform by stepping on the striker. She slid under the bow pulpit and pulled herself to a stand with her hand on the roller furled sail. She stood for a moment waiting to see if the intruder noticed the change in the boat’s balance as she came aboard. After several seconds, she figured she was in the clear.