Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 2

“Seems the Coast Guard patrol boat was sitting back in there,” he said, pointing to the small cove formed by the point. “It was a moonless night. The smugglers prefer that, but the bad news for them was it meant they didn’t see the patrol boat until they were almost into the inlet. When the Coasties turned their spotlight on, the Haitians panicked— tried to push their way to the far side of the boat. The weather was real quiet that night, and the crew had left all their windows and hatches open. She just rolled over and went glug."

“I heard six people drowned,” I said. I also had read in the Miami Herald that two of them were children, little girls, ages ten and twelve, but I didn’t say it out loud. I knew that B.J. knew, just as he knew that I knew most of the details of the events that had taken place here the night before last. It was our habit, though, to talk about these salvage cases, to rehash the details when we were working. All too often when salvaging wrecked boats there were also ruined lives, and B.J. and I usually did what we could to get around that, joking and laughing and avoiding the image of how it had happened. Those images would eventually catch up with me, often in that twilight moment that comes between wakefulness and sleep, when my imagination would sneak in the vision of those girls struggling in the water, surprised at the sudden cold, screaming for their parents, gasping what they thought was air but sucking in the sea in its stead.

“Fifty people is really only an estimate,” he said. “These days, Haitians will do or pay anything to get to the States, and the way the smugglers pack the boats, it could have been more.”

“I hope they catch the bastards and charge them with murder.”

B.J. was staring at the little strip of sand inside the jetty.

“Some of them made it to the beach and managed to lose themselves into the city. Probably got into waiting cars. Immigration picked up twenty-seven. They’re either in Krome Detention Center or already back in Port-au-Prince.”

“The Land of the Free,” I said, “but only if you come from the right island.”

“Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue, over.” The transmission from the tug’s VHF radio was barely audible above the rumbling of the generator on the barge.

“Damn.” I slapped the palm of my hand against the top of the warm aluminum bulwark. “Not again.” When I turned around, B.J. was laughing. “Stop it, you,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

“Bet you he did it again.”

“No way I’m taking that bet.”

I swung around the door into the wheelhouse and grabbed the VHF radio mike hanging above the helm. “Outta the Blue, this is Gorda. You want to switch to channel six eight?”

“Roger that.”

I punched the numbers on the keypad. “Hey, Mike, this is Gorda. What’s up?”

“Hey, Seychelle, isn’t this a scorcher of a day for June? Not a breath of wind out here.”

“Yeah, yeah, Mike. I know you didn’t call to discuss the weather. What’s wrong?”

“Well, I’ve been out here fishing all night with my buddy Joe D’Angelo. Him and me, we go way back. Used to work together. We had some good times back in the eighties, boy.” I made a circling motion with my hand to B.J. when he shot me a questioning look through the wheelhouse window. Mike rambled on.

A former Fort Lauderdale police officer, Mike Beesting had walked in on a disgruntled city maintenance worker who had brought a shotgun to argue an issue with his boss. The end result was that Mike saved several lives but lost his lower right leg to a short-range shotgun blast. Rather than work a desk, he retired from the department and, thanks to a nice settlement from the city, he now lived on his Irwin-54 sailboat at a dock on the Middle River and ran sunset cocktail cruises and chartered day sails.

“Cut to the chase, Mike.”

“Well, we had one light on as we were drift fishing last night, but when we started catching fish, I turned on the spreader lights and kinda forgot and left them on. Joe was nervous about us drifting around out there, so he insisted on watching the radar all night, and then we were playing my whole collection of Buffett tunes ...”

“So you can’t start your engine. Your batteries are dead. Again.”

‘I’ll pay you, Seychelle, you know that. We’re only about six or eight miles out off Pompano. I think.”

“Mike, the last two times this happened I told you to get somebody down to the boat and rewire it so you could keep your engine-starting battery in reserve.”

“And I’m gonna do it, Sey. Next week. I promise.”

Mike was the kind of boat owner—and I’d known lots like him—who would much rather spend his money on stuff he could see, cool new toys like an electronic chart plotter or an ice maker, than something necessary but near invisible, like a replacement for a cracked chain plate or a starter battery. He had his boat so loaded down with gadgets it was more like a floating condo than a sailboat.

B.J. appeared at my side in the wheelhouse doorway. At six foot, he was only a couple of inches taller than me, and for a moment I flashed on how pleasant it would be to slide my hands around his waist and pull his body to mine. Being tall, big-boned, and having the shoulders of a swimmer, I still often felt like the gawky kid I once was, the one who had already grown to five feet eight by the fifth grade, the one other kids called the Jolly Green Giant. But with B.J., since the first time we’d made love, there had always been this sense that we just fit together so comfortably, as though my body belonged in his arms. Maybe that’s what scares me, I thought as I pretended to be interested in the goings-on aboard the barge and stepped to the far wheelhouse window.

B.J. said, “I know you. Somebody’s in trouble, and you’re itching to go out and save him. Even if it is just Mike. Look, it’s going to be at least three hours before these guys get this cruiser up, and then they’ve still got to pump her out. You’ve got the time.”

“I know, and like always, I need the money, but. . .” The fellows on the barge were still clustered in the shade of the crane, arguing. I wanted to do the right thing here. Working with Gilman Marine meant more referral business in the future. I couldn’t afford to screw it up.

Mike’s voice erupted from the radio. “Sey, Joe says he really has to get back. Says he’ll double your regular rate.”

I turned and grinned at B.J. as I punched the button on the side of the mike. “Just give me your GPS coordinates, and I’ll be on my way.”

B.J. untied my bowline and handed me the neatly coiled line. Once I was at the helm in the wheelhouse, he pushed the tug’s bow away from the barge. Watching my stern to make sure it didn’t bump anything, I put her into gear and slid over the top of the sunken cruiser, where she rested in about fourteen feet of water. I still had a good seven feet of clearance above her cabin. Walking to the end of the barge, B.J. followed our progress as far as he could, and at the corner he stopped and waved. Abaco ran to the stern and danced around, barking at his receding figure, as though to tell me I was making a mistake, forgetting someone. Watching B.J. stand there, his hand raised to shield his eyes, bare-chested and flashing me the whitest of smiles, had my stomach doing its own gymnastics routine.

Once clear of the last channel marker, I put the tug on an east-southeast heading, about 120 degrees, running at six knots. I engaged the autopilot, switched on the radar, found a baseball cap in the wheelhouse, and threaded my shoulder-length hair through the gap in the back. For the last few years, after my father had died from one more melanoma, I had been taking sun protection quite a bit more seriously. I hoped it wasn’t too little too late. Red had had the typical redhead’s complexion, and though I took more after my mom, with easily tanned skin and sun-streaked brown hair, I had enough freckles on my nose and arms to keep me slathering myself with SPF 30 every morning before going to work.