Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 43

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On the seaward side, I found a window left open a crack for ventilation. I slid it open wider and managed to squeeze through, although I had to leave my pack outside on the deck. I was in the main salon, close to Neal’s cabin.

In the beam of my flashlight, I could see that the police had left the place a mess. They had probably already found everything that was worth finding, but I had to try.

The crew’s quarters were up forward in the bow. I had visited Neal’s cabin several times before we finally broke it off for good. The door stood ajar. Most of the personal possessions in the cabin were the same ones I had picked up and put away over the months that Neal had lived with me in my cottage: his clothing, a machete he’d picked up in Panama for opening coconuts, a scrimshawed whale’s tooth. Nothing there told me anything new about the life he had been leading. I closed the door to his cabin and headed up to the bridge.

Somebody had cleaned up the blood. I began to search through the paraphernalia. Various letters, bills for boat maintenance, marina charges, fuel receipts. Neal never had been very good at bookkeeping. Finally, I picked my copy of Bowditch’s The Practical Navigator. Inside the cover there were some personal letters and some photographs, including several of me.

I leaned against the helmsman’s seat and examined a picture of the two of us taken down at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. We were up on top of the fort, sitting on the ramparts with the various blues and greens of the anchorage in the background. From that picture, you would think those two would never be apart the rest of their lives.

Tucked between the pages of Bowditch, I found some odd sketches. I had no idea what they were. Obviously the police hadn’t thought they were important, if they’d looked at the book at all. Near as I could tell, the drawings delineated some compartment or container. The measurements were sketched in as well as the rough calculations of the square footage of the space. I slid the sketches and the photo back into the book. I felt fairly safe taking it now. I doubted the cops would even notice it was gone.

It wasn’t difficult to find the GPS, but I had never used this model before, so it took me several minutes to figure out how to recall the way points that were stored in memory. Neal had way points for Miami Harbor entrance, Bimini, Marathon, West End, you name it. Each way point was named with a three-letter code name like MIA, MAR, or WND. The last position entered was located just north of the entrance to Port Everglades. I lifted up the chart tabletop and rummaged around inside for a slip of paper and a pencil. I wrote down the coordinates, latitude 26°09.52’N, longitude 80°04.75’W, as well as the name, BAB. What the hell did that mean?

I slipped the papers and photos back into the book, let myself out the side door and made my way to the aft lower deck, where I’d left my backpack. I slid the copy of Bowditch in between the skates and zipped the pack closed.

I heard a noise behind me. I whirled around, twisting in a crouched position. The next thing I knew was blinding, searing pain as a blunt object slammed down on my left shoulder. A figure dressed in black grunted and pulled a fire extinguisher back into the air preparing to hit me again.

My attacker looked like a giant Pillsbury Doughboy in blackface. He growled a deep animal-like noise and came at me again. This time I rose up swinging the pack with every bit of pain and fury I had in me. The pack smashed into the black ski mask. I heard him groan, then gag and spit. I raced for the aft deck, looking frantically for another weapon, anything.

He hadn’t stayed down more than a couple of seconds. I tried to turn around at the end of the main cabin area, but my feet slipped on the sharp right turn. I heard him before I felt his hands grab hold of the cap hanging from my ponytail. He threw it to the deck and grabbed my ponytail. He yanked my hair so hard, I could hear some of my hair being pulled out at the roots, and then he slowly pulled my head farther back. I thought he’d break my neck. I couldn’t breathe. Every time I struggled, he pulled harder.

“Bitch,” he breathed in his deep voice.

He forced me to the back corner of the deck opposite the covered compressor. Just as I thought I was about to black out, I felt his other hand reach between my legs and grab me by the crotch.

He yanked my hair back harder and when I tried to scream, nothing but a pain-scrambled gurgle came out. Then I was rising, being lifted by my hair the hand between my legs. I saw the turbulent black water of the inlet beneath me.

“Adios, bitch.”

He heaved me into space.

Grabbing the swim step would be my only chance to stay with the boat, a lesson my father had taught me since childhood. As I fell, I swung my right arm in the direction of the teak platform. I heard the skates crash onto the wood, and my wrist slammed down onto the steel strip at the edge of the step. My right hand went limp, releasing the strap, unable to grab hold of the swim step, as a new, mightier pain tore up my right arm.

The water was shockingly cold. I let my body go limp, my heavy wet clothes pulling me down. When I didn’t move, the pain was less—maybe, I thought hazily, I should just stay down there in the cold agreeable depths and sleep.

Then my lungs started to burn. My arms were nearly useless. The blackness was closing in, the world was a tunnel. It hurt like hell, but I kicked and flailed my ineffectual arms to struggle to the surface.

Pulling air into my lungs hurt, yet it tasted so sweet.

The Top Ten was about fifty feet away, and the gap was widening. I was thankful for the ebb tide that was sucking me out to sea, away from that fire extinguisher and madman. The fight in me was gone. I just wanted to drift away. The bulky figure on deck pulled the ski mask off, and I didn’t need to see the spiky hair to know who it was. Esposito. He spun around and ran for the gangway.

Because of my sore left shoulder and bruised or maybe broken right wrist, my legs were having to do all the work of treading water to keep my head up. My sodden sneakers were weighing my legs down. I kicked them off and let my legs float. I knew the tide was carrying me alongside the jetty, but I had to rest before I could swim.

Then I heard the high-pitched whine that an outboard makes underwater. Thank God. Some crazy guys are fishing at this hour of the morning. I saw the boat headed out in the middle of the inlet, and I began to raise my arm to wave at them, when I realized the boat looked very much like a certain white Sea Ray I had seen before, only then there had been two divers aboard. Now, a lone man stood at the center console, and he seemed to be slowly searching the surface of the water on either side of him.

Damn.

I ducked my head underwater and pushed my hair forward over my face to cut down on the reflection of the shoreside lights on my white skin. I raised my head just enough to breathe through my nose. And I watched.

He didn’t appear to have seen me, but nonetheless, he was coming straight for me. I waited as long as I thought was safe, slowly hyperventilating. Then I dove.

I don’t usually open my eyes underwater, but I wanted to try to see when it would be safe for me to resurface. But it was just all blackness, everywhere. It made me feel disoriented, as though I didn’t know which way was up, and which was down. Like most women, if my lungs are full of air, I float, so I had to struggle to stay under. Even moving slowly as he was, it should have taken him only a few seconds to pass over me, but the whine of his outboard surrounded me in the water. I had no idea which direction it was coming from. My chest was already starting to constrict. There hadn’t been time to get a proper breath before diving. I swam in the direction that I thought would take me away from the boat, but the outboard whine only grew louder then overpowering. I thought I was going to get hit by the prop. In my imagination, I could see the whirling, slicing blades all around me in the water. Going against every fiber in my body that was screaming out for air I tried to swim deeper or at least in the direction that I thought was down. In a flash, I imagined this was how my mother had done it, walking into ever-deeper water until it closed over her head, the sheer force of her will refusing to answer all the cues and calls and demands of her body. But deep in the cerebral cortex, at the simplest levels, before thought, perhaps even before instinct, resides the species’ imperative to survive. My self-preservation autopilot took over and reversed my direction. The hell with the props. I needed air. Desperately. Now.

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