Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps Read online

  "No, not anymore," I said. "You better get back to the car now." "I'm going with you into the water." I was going to object, but I didn't have it in me. Another mood had claimed me, and suddenly I was in less of a hurry to leave. I wanted to linger and study that strangely beautiful face with all its secrets. A few more moments and something might have come to me, but there wasn't time. "You'll get your dress all wet," I said. "I don't care." She kicked her shoes onto the sand. Together we walked the kayak into the surf, until the water was just above my knees. I got myself into the kayak, and Vivian handed me the paddle. She stood beside me, steady- ing the Hell Chaser, the dark shine of the water merging with the even darker shine of her dress. I looked up at the sky and saw the faint glow of the moon hidden behind the clouds. There was no wind, and I didn't think it would rain. "Why didn't you fight for me?" she asked suddenly. "It was no contest." I smiled. "Maybe I couldn't take a chance on winning." "You know," she said, "sometimes I hate you." I found my balance and took a few strokes to get going, then turned around in time to see Vivian walking through the breakers toward the shore. I waited till she looked back. I lifted the paddle over my head. She waved at me with one hand and pushed back her black hair with the other. She yelled something out to me, but the waves smothered the sound. I jockeyed the kayak around again and got it pointed north and east into the current, the unchained blood singing in my head with the reckless joy of release, the unmitigated thrill of the doing of the thing at last, the muscles working and rolling like willing slaves. What I wanted. A hundred yards 71

  out, I turned the kayak parallel with the beach and saw the headlights of my car plowing through the dark. I watched her make a right out of the lot, and when she was gone, I turned again myself and headed out to sea. The sea was calm, the breakers rolling lazily into shore as I pulled through the water with slow, even strokes. I hadn't been on the ocean at night for a long time, and I'd forgotten how quiet it could be. I was grateful for the distant company of a cruise ship gliding across the horizon far to the south. There were other, smaller craft as well, but not many. Most of them were fishermen, heading out for deep water where the big fish ran, but I was sure that at least one of them was the Marine Patrol. Several times I had to wait and drift while they crisscrossed in front of me, unaware of my presence. I felt their wakes lifting beneath me; I heard their engines and smelled the diesel fuel. None of the boats came close enough to cause me any worry, but I stayed very alert all the same. Two hundred yards out, I turned north and headed for the yacht. I had nixed the idea of leaving directly from the Colonel's mansion, though it would certainly have made for a quicker trip. There was no particular reason for this deci- sion. In fact, it didn't make sense, the shortest route between two points being a straight line, but that was true only in ge- ometry and not necessarily in the realm of human affairs. I was acting on intuition and could not have explained why I was coming in so far from the south, except to say that I didn't want anybody to know exactly where I was or the exact time I'd started out. Vivian, of course, would know where I had put in, but even she wouldn't know exactly how long it would take me to reach the yacht. Nobody had shown all of his or her cards in this deal yet, and there was no reason for me to show all of mine. The lights from the condos were on my left as I paddled north with the current. The quarter moon had slipped free of 72

  the clouds and was on my right. It gave off very little glare. The water was pale dark, enlivened by minute flashes of bril- liance. When I was perhaps a half mile from the mansion, I began angling in toward the shore, pointing the kayak's nose at the spot where I estimated the yacht to be, though it was still too far off to see. Then the row of condos ended abruptly and there was no more light from the shore, just a gap of blackness filled with the outlines of trees and their billowing shadows. I paddled past it, and soon, beyond the gap, nestled in a cove, I saw the subdued lights of the Colonel's house pulsing faintly against the dark sky and beyond that, at the edge of the light, the vast shadow of the yacht, my silent, looming prey. I laid the paddle across my lap and surveyed the scene. I stretched my arms above my head, then out in front of me. I drank some water and chewed my way through a protein- carbohydrate bar that tasted like vanilla-flavored bread dough and followed it down with some more water, most of which I spit out. I was just about to start for the yacht when I heard the sound of an engine, but it was not the engine of a boat. The faint roar came from overhead. Out of the deep silence of the sky above and just ahead of me to the north came a subdued droning. I looked up and at that moment saw the pontoons of a white seaplane skim the blue-black surface of the sea, sending up a spray of foam before gliding smoothly into the water. Almost immediately the plane wheeled and taxied in my direction, its twin pro- pellers still churning but with less of a roar from the engine. I was about to aim the kayak toward the shore and out of its way when the sound of another engine stopped me in mid- stroke and a red light shot out to sea from the dock at the far edge of the cove that cradled the mansion. It was a speed- boat, wedge-shaped and ebony black, racing toward the sea- plane, skipping and hopping across the ocean, as much out of the water as in. 73

  The plane had slowed and was now completing a wide circle, so that it was no longer coming in my direction but curving back out to sea, and as it did so, one of its lights grazed the side of the yacht, briefly illuminating the hull before passing on. The speedboat swung wide and intercepted the plane as it came to a full stop, the two shadows merging. The sounds of their engines overlapped in a muted rumble that quickly faded and then, after a moment, quickly flared again. The seaplane gathered speed and lifted slowly into the sky. It flew very close to the surface, not more than fifteen or twenty feet above the water, like a gull hunting for food. Then the engine of the speedboat roused itself. The long shadow that was the boat itself fishtailed violently in the roiling water. The pulsing red light at the helm gained speed and moved rapidly away from me, then vanished around the cove's northernmost shore. The kayak bucked gently beneath me, then settled. The water settled down, too, but not so my thoughts. I tried to understand what I'd just witnessed and how it pertained to what I had to do. There was one major question: Where in this curious night had the plane come from? A plane isn't a car; you just can't just jump into one and take off and fly any distance--not without a flight plan, not unless you're in a crop duster in the middle of nowhere, where no one gives a damn. Of course, you could fake a flight plan, then fly low, but not for too far. You would have to get up and get down fast before the radar caught you and the coast guard sent the drug helicopters out for you. Drug dealers did it all the time, but it was risky. You would have to be desperate, daring, or lucky. But it could be done--for a reason, and there was no reasonable reason for a plane to pick just this evening for such a maneuver. I thought about turning back; I thought about the money. I thought of Vivian and the yacht and Matson still being 74

  dead off the coast in the morning. I didn't much like either the plane or the speedboat. They were a complication, a pair of high-speed variables that shouldn't have been there. All I knew was that one small section of a very big ocean had, for a few very intense minutes, gotten very overcrowded very fast in what should have been a tight, compact drama, star- ring two men, one of them dead, one of them me, and a yacht that needed to disappear from sight. In the script I had written, there'd been no plane, no black boat, but there they were, a couple of loudmouthed actors without parts, their engines roaring, demanding to be written in. I decided to keep going and hope that neither the speed- boat nor the plane made a curtain call. Enter and exit in the first act, and stay that way. I could see the yacht now, a massive silhouette about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me and off to the right. I began paddling toward it, stopping every so often to listen, but there was nothing to hear, and so I listened to that. The closer I got to the yacht, the more nervous I became, all my senses on high alert, my heartbeat pacing my every stroke. And then, all at once, I was right beside it, like a solitary bird flanking a
behemoth. I moved around to the stern. I intended to keep the boat between me and the man- sion, because I suspected that either Williams or the Colonel might be watching out for me with night-vision glasses, and I didn't want them to know I was aboard until the time came to take her out to sea. I grabbed my flashlight and played the beam along the hull. The Carrousel was written there in gold italics, each letter outlined in black. I touched the white hull the way you might touch a sleeping stranger. I paddled back to the dive deck and used two tethers to lash the kayak to the aluminum ladder, and when I was sure I was in tight, I put the flashlight in a pocket of my life jacket 75

  and got ready to haul myself up and out. I grabbed for the middle rung of the ladder and twisted my legs and pelvis until my feet swung free. During the ride my legs had stiff- ened up considerably. The moment I lifted my right knee, the hamstring cramped up so badly that I had to spend a few moments pumping my leg until the blood broke through and I could begin climbing again. I went into a crouch the second I was on deck and looked back at the Colonel's place from behind the door leading up to the cabin. The back of the place was well lit, as usual. The two tall towering spotlights that flanked the property glowed like miniature moons, but the house itself was dark. I listened to the darkness for a moment, then opened the cabin door. It was too dark not to use the flashlight, but I kept the beam away from the windows. The light revealed a large stateroom furnished with black leather couches hugging the walls and a comfortable-looking red leather recliner that had toppled over onto its side across the rose-colored carpet. Next to the central couch sat a long, low, irregularly shaped coffee table made of burnished driftwood that looked like it might still be capable of giving someone a bad case of splin- ters. On it were three glasses. One of them, set off from the other two, had a red flange of lipstick along the rim. Across from the couch on the far wall against a window that looked out into the dark sky was a well-stocked, cop- per-covered bar that looked like it was forged from a zil- lion hammered-down pennies, then polished to a high gloss. There were glasses on the bar and ashtrays full of butts and half a bottle of scotch somebody had forgotten to stopper. Behind the bar the usual panoply of bottles and above them, on the next shelf up, an old-fashioned astrolabe and sextant that looked as authentic as the kind you find in maritime museums. I went around behind the bar and saw the body of a man 76

  sprawled on the floor. It was Matson. I killed the light and stood there, quiet and alone in the darkness, listening to myself breathe. It was real now; there is nothing more real than a dead body, especially when it's the body of someone you know. I inhaled deeply and switched the flashlight on him again, trying to be a cop once more before I went back to being a criminal. Nothing new here, I told myself, just another homicide. It was time to be objective, but my trem- bling hands didn't help. I ran the beam of light up his legs, over his torso. He was lying facedown, and there was much blood under his head but no sign of a wound, which meant he'd been shot from the front. His left arm was extended over his head as though he'd been reaching for something. I moved the light forward and saw a silver-plated .38 on the floor and the cigar box where he'd obviously kept it leaning against the cabinet under the bar. He'd seen it coming, just not soon enough to stop it. There was something sad and deserted about Matson's body, some forlorn, fruitless aspect of his humanity still lin- gering in his final pose of desperation. The will to live was evident in that outstretched arm, the unfulfilled and empty fingers that had reached but not grasped, a semaphore ges- ture broken off by a bullet. I shook my head at the sight of him and thought, Vivian, you stupid, stupid bitch. I had stopped liking Matson a long time ago, but there had been flashes of brilliance in our friendship. There'd been times when I was sure we had something strong enough between us to preclude betrayal. I had believed that Randy Matson was a man who would bail you out of jail with a slap on the back or listen to you over a beer when the hope was gone from you. And for a time he had been just that. Look- ing at him now, I realized that I'd lost more than Vivian had the night I found the two of them together. I had also lost a friend. 77

  There was a stool behind the bar, and I sat down on it and poured myself a scotch. I was in a peculiar mood, and I wanted a drink, an indulgence that, even under the circum- stances, I failed to deny myself. I checked my dive watch; it was three o'clock. Time enough for a last drink with a former friend, even if he had been a prick in the end. Men betray women and women betray men, but when one man betrays another man, something else is lost. Who knows exactly what it is? Maybe what's lost is the illusion that the basic inalienable loneliness of men might be noth- ing more than an illusion, a series of mirages in a desert more imagined than real; that maybe, just maybe, there were handshakes that meant something. When that's lost, the desert comes back, and you have to start crossing it all over again, this time with the burden of wondering if that illusion of loneliness you'd once believed defeated was real after all. Matson, I thought, you stupid ass. I kept thinking of that night in that out-of-the-way bar, the expression on Matson's face when I grabbed him by the shoulder. It was a look of shock combined with a sudden penetrating regret that nothing could contradict, counter- mand, or set right ever again, a fine thing lost irretrievably. Randy, you son of a bitch, I said to myself without rancor, look where it got you. I finished my drink, stood up, and went back around the bar again. I didn't like to do it, but I needed to see his face. There was nothing morbid or spiteful in it, but it's true what they say: Once a cop, always a cop, and I just couldn't bring myself to do what I was going to do without seeing his face. Using two fingers like tweezers, I lifted his head up by the hair. A bloody paste held it to the carpeting, and I had to pull hard. The left eye was a viscous mess of red where the bullet had gone in. There is nothing heavier than a dead 78

  man's head, and I felt every ounce of it. The rest of his face had been terribly distorted from having lain for so long on a flat surface. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and the con- stant pressure of the floor had transformed the skin of his left cheek into what looked like a solid mass of melted wax. Death had turned his long, sunburned neck into such an inflexible stalk that had I dropped his head, it would have slammed down onto the floor like a rock hurled by a cata- pult. I estimated that he'd been dead for not much more than a day and a half. It wouldn't be long before the stench would set in, but he'd be way out deep by then. That is, if every- thing went according to plan. I put Matson's head down as gently as I could. I didn't get up right away, though. I just knelt there next to him with the light on the back of his head for a few moments, trying to regain my focus and thinking of the time when he and I had been friends. After a while I stood up. I went out of the cabin and up the stairs to the helm and sat down in the bucket chair in front of the controls. The keys, as I'd been told they would be, were still in the ignition. But I spent about five minutes familiarizing myself with the setup, because it had been a long time since I'd last piloted a boat this size, and I needed to jog my memory so as not to make mistakes. I used the flashlight at first, but only until I was sure where everything was. When I was satisfied, I took one last look at the sea around me and saw nothing. Just darkness everywhere, except for the soft glow of the stars and the halfhearted light of the young moon that fell softly and without effect on the water. I turned on the engine and hit the switch that raised the anchor. It made a soft grinding sound coming up. When the red light on the dashboard stopped flashing, I opened the throttle, and the big yacht surged forward as the water boiled around the stern. I went swiftly and without lights, 79

  but I would need them farther out. My concentration was as keen as it had ever been, and I used it to open a channel through the darkness that would exclude everything except me and The Carrousel. In that world not even the fish were welcome. I was in a closed system, flying no colors. The coast guard cutters were out there somewhere, but there was nothing I could do about them. I was playing a lone hand against common sense, not to mention the law, and it was already too late t
o pass. I needed to get out about six miles from shore, out into the deeper waters of the Gulf Stream where a sunken boat would never be found, where ancient ships and lost continents were said to rest beyond the power of memory to exhume them. At a fair speed, it would take about an hour. I found a pair of binoculars under the dash and scanned the horizon. When I turned around and looked toward land, the lights of the mansion were receding into the darkness behind me until the entire spread, seen from the distance, was no wider than a doorway and shrinking fast. Ahead of me there was noth- ing. I put the boat on autopilot and went below to get another drink. I poured myself a scotch and looked out at the sea, the only sound the muted rumble of the engines, and tried not to think about Matson dead behind the bar. I checked my watch. There wasn't much time, and I was glad for that. If it's true that the spirits of the newly murdered linger in shock around the crime scene, then what I felt in that cabin was Randy's anguish and astonishment, his final betrayal. Randy--death had put us on a first-name basis again--had not expected to die. He'd assumed he had the upper hand, the same mistake Goliath had made. Then the gun had come out. Even then he might not have believed he was a dead man. Death takes a while to sink in, especially when you think you have the 80

  world by the balls and assume immortality is your birth- right because you're young and rich and handsome and have never been shot in the head before. That is an experience from which it is very hard to extract a useful lesson. I raised my glass to Randy's ghost and wished him peace in the af- terlife. I finished my drink and checked my watch again. It was time to sink the Bismarck. I left the cabin and went up to the helm. It was so dark by then that I had no choice but to switch on the yacht's lights. I kept an eye out for other boats, but it seemed I had the whole ocean to myself. After about an hour, when I was sure I was out deep enough, I cut the engine and pushed the button that lowered the anchor. Then I headed for the engine room. I have had many a teacher in my time, and some of them taught me things that I never expected to use. One of those teachers was Captain Tony, whose dangerous and dubious business, as I mentioned, was the repossession of boats, which can be even more dangerous than the repossession of cars, de- pending on the clientele. Occasionally, however, he also had to sink boats, sometimes for the insurance money and once for a drug dealer attempting to fake his own death on account of the fact that half the cops in North and South America were looking for him. I hadn't been with Tony on those particular occasions, but he had told me how it was done. The method used is quite simple. Every boat has open lines, narrow pipes called sea cogs, leading from the vessel to push waste water out of the boat. They have pressure valves on them that keep the ocean from flooding into the ship. Uncork them all at once and the boat fills with water and sinks. I opened the door that led down into the engine room, and the smell of diesel dilated my nostrils like a dose of smelling salts. I got out the flashlight, climbed down the ladder into the pit, and found the light switch. 81