The Deadlier Sex Read online

  I was relaxed, listening to the strains of vintage Cole Porter waft across water and airwaves, studying the hulking shadow of mainland coast. Sniper was running a conservative twenty knots, and the silver expanse of sea spread out before us. It was a good night to sip at a cold beer and enjoy the nocturnal desolation only the sea and certain northern forests can offer, and I was caught up in the beauty of it all when the roaring voice of O’Davis snapped me out of my reverie.

  “Back ’er, Dusky! Back ’er now, Yank!”

  At sea you don’t question a command like that—and back her I did, driving both gears into abrupt reverse, cringing with the strain I knew was being put on the transmission. There was a slight clunk against the fiberglass hull, then nothing. I switched the engines off, then went running back to the aft deck.

  “What the hell did you see, you crazy—”

  “There’s someone out there, Yank!” He pointed anxiously to port. “Someone swimmin’—I swear it. Thought it was a bloody dog at first!”

  And then I saw it too. A dark shadow on the silver veil of water. Someone clinging to something. Someone weak. Floundering. And disappearing rapidly astern as the momentum of Sniper carried us onward. In one long step, I was on the transom, then diving headlong into the night sea. I swam with head up, keeping a close eye on the dark shape in the distance. Behind me, I heard O’Davis start Sniper and turn to follow.

  It was a person, all right. Someone hanging onto one of those cheap weekender life vests. The Coast Guard says the vests are fine for a pleasure craft. And they are—if said pleasure craft doesn’t sink. I tried shouting. And got a low moan for an answer. So I made a quick forward approach, grabbed a dangling arm, pulled and took chin firmly in right hand, then switched to a cross-chest carry with my left.

  And that’s when I realized my victim was a woman. A well-formed woman. And almost naked.

  O’Davis came up carefully behind us, reversed engines expertly, and rigged the boarding ladder. I slung her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and pulled her up onto Sniper. He had a blanket ready, and I put her down back first onto the deck. The cabin lights were on, and you could see her clearly. She looked about twenty or twenty-one, though she could have been a few years older. Her blond hair, cut as short as a boy’s, surrounded a fine angular face with a strong nose and full mouth. She was short: all breasts and shoulders with slender hips and thin legs. She wore brief jean shorts and that was all. No rings. No necklace. As surprised as I that she was naked, O’Davis quickly pulled the blanket up around her—an admirable show of character, because, as they say in the commercials, she was a very fullfigured girl.

  “Do ya know first aid, Yank?” We stood shoulder to shoulder staring at the girl in the blanket. Sniper’s engines burbled quietly in the moonlight, and somewhere a wading bird squawked.

  “I do for drowning—but she wasn’t drowning. She had a life vest. I think we may have clipped her with the hull when we went by.”

  O’Davis knelt and gently searched the fine blond hair with his meaty hand. “Aye. There’s a lump here, sure enough.” He looked up at me. “What in bloody hell do ya think she was doin’ at midnight a quarter mile offshore in the Ten Thousand Islands?”

  I shook my head. “Damned if I know. Maybe she was on a boat that went down. Or went for a swim and got caught by the tide. It happens.”

  The Irishman picked her up and carried her down into the forward vee-berth. She moaned softly, stretched her neck as if to yawn, then opened her eyes. The shock registered when she realized that she was on a strange boat, and both hands strained to pull the blanket tightly around her body. “Hey! Where am I? Who are you? What in the hell do you—”

  “Shush . . . shush now, child,” O’Davis said gently. He reached to pat her head, and she jerked violently away.

  “Keep your goddamn hands off me!” She threw herself back on the bunk, twisting her head away.

  I looked at the Irishman. “Like moths to a candle flame, huh?”

  “Ah, she’s young, Yank. Very young. But give’er time and she’ll be baskin’ in me light.”

  “Well, we’re not going to give her much time, because I’m calling the Coast Guard right now and have them send out a helicopter. A head injury is nothing to toy with—”

  “No!” It was the girl, sitting up again, a wild look in her eyes. “No, don’t call the Coast Guard. Please—”

  I didn’t have time to ask her why she didn’t want me to notify the Coast Guard. Because that’s when the sea turned to fire. And the mangroves a quarter mile away were caught in a stark white light—the same fiery light that showed me the shock wave rolling toward us.

  That’s when the boat—less than eight hundred yards away—suddenly exploded, lighting Sniper in its orange chromosphere, and catching a sudden slight smile on the face of the girl. . . .

  2

  It wasn’t what you would have called a tidal wave.

  Nothing deadly about it.

  But the surge from the explosion was still big and weighty, and the breaker pounded Sniper; it sent my beer crashing in the galley, and threw the copy of International-National Rules of the Road I had been studying across the salon. Every five years I have to renew my Ocean Operator’s License. First time around there were tests on International, Inland, Great Lakes, and Western Rivers, Rules of the Road, plus navigation, basic knots, basic diesel mechanics, and safety rules and regulations. After I had passed the three sections of the test, one at a time, they gave me a physical, fingerprinted me, swore me in, and I was an official fishing guide, duly licensed by the Coast Guard. Now, once every five years, I have to go to the testing center for a Rules of the Road “exercise”—which means an open-book test.

  But I like to stay ahead of the game. You rarely, if ever, need some of the esoteric bits of information they ask you—like how often do you hear a five-second bell and a gong and need to know it signals a vessel over 350 feet at anchor in a fog? I’ve seen plenty of big vessels at anchor, but I’ve never ever heard them use the gong. But it pays to stay ahead of the game, as I said. And after five years, memory is faulty at best. So a month or so before it’s time for me to renew my license, I get the new edition of Rules of the Road and hit the books, driving the bits and pieces of maritime law into my brain.

  So anyway, it was one hell of an explosion. A big orange thermal flare that turned the wilderness darkness of the Ten Thousand Islands to fiery dawn.

  Then a loud diesel whoosh, a wall of heat, and then the fire.

  For the briefest moment, I saw the skeletal outline of the boat: some kind of shrimp trawler, maybe.

  Then there was nothing but flames, three stories high, doing their eerie dance on the full-moon sea.

  The fire—and that low wall of surge, was rolling at us and throwing flames, fuel on the surface burning like a storm wave from hell.

  “Sweet Jesus, look at that bloody bugger!”

  It was Westy. But I didn’t have time for conversation. I ran to the controls and swung myself into the pilot chair. The wave was coming from seaward, where the ship had exploded, and we were between it and the mainland, pointing north. I hit both throttles and the twin 453 GMC diesels roared to action, bringing us around.

  The wave was cresting, still aflame. I idled toward it, knowing what I wanted to do. The size of the wave was no problem. On one trip to the Dry Tortugas, Sniper had handled storm swells five times as big during one long-gone hurricane season.

  But those monsters weren’t burning.

  I kept idling toward it, waiting for just the right moment. I didn’t want any of that burning diesel washing over my decks. And just before it hit us, I popped both throttles full forward, jumping Sniper onto semi-plane, raising the bow and driving us safely through it. I heard glass clattering down in the galley, and I heard O’Davis swear.

  I turned around. The forward thrust had knocked him ass-backward across the fighting deck.

  “Ya might warn a fella, brother MacMorgan!” He had
a ludicrous expression on his big red face, like a heavyweight caught by a surprise right hook thrown by a little kid.

  “Didn’t think a little swell like that would bother a heavy-water sailor like yourself, O’Davis.”

  He climbed nimbly to his feet and grabbed the brace bar beside the pilot chair. “Never been no finer blue-water sailor than meself, ya little snit—it’s this bloody speedboat o’ yers I’m not used to. Stinkin’, smoky things they are, too. . . .”

  “Westy?”

  “Belchin’ their nasty fumes across God’s blue waters, chokin’ the little birds ’n beasties.”

  “Hey!”

  “An’ ya needn’t yell at me either!” He had a look of mock outrage on his face, but underneath it he was smiling. And before I could even ask, he told me what I wanted to know. He said, “The child is still below, doin’ jest fine, I’m thinkin’. Took that little bit of a flashlight o’ yers and checked her pupils. Still wouldn’t hurt ta get her to a doctor, but her eyes looked fine—pretty eyes they are, too.”

  “You’re a dirty old man, O’Davis.”

  “Hah! And I admit it, I do!”

  Behind us, the enormous swell had crashed onto the moonswept beach of White Horse Key, its flames spent. Ahead of us, the remains of the mystery boat still burned. I powered Sniper toward it, full-bore. I had the big 500,000-candlepower deck light on, and the Irishman swept it back and forth before us without my having to ask. That’s what makes a good boatmate—they think for themselves, and do what should be done without having to be told.

  “So did she say anything before you came up?”

  He shook his head. “Nary a word. Jest kept tellin’ me that she wasn’t hurt. Asked her how she happened ta be takin’ a swim out here in th’ middle o’ nowhere, an’ she didn’t even have the courtesy ta answer.”

  “Seems a tad suspicious to me—we find her, then a boat explodes.”

  “If ya have a suspicious mind, it does.”

  “I do.”

  He looked at me, the grin gone in the white haze of moon and the red glow of the control panel. “An’ I do too, Yank. But let’s not be jumpin’ ta conclusions. Poor lass is in shock, naturally. Mebbe someone out there kin tell us more about it.”

  He pointed to where the center of flames flickered before us. Maybe there were survivors. But I doubted it. It was one hell of an explosion. But maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Explosions aren’t all that uncommon around boats. Fuel fumes build up in a gas-engine compartment, and someone tries to start the engines without hitting the ventilator switch first, and boom. You read about them all the time in the newspapers: the Power Squadron types who learn their seamanship from magazines, expecting a boat to be as easy and as safe to operate as their Cadillacs. All it takes is one simple mistake to send them back north in a closed casket with a one-way ticket to some less than heavenly place, where all the dead weekend seamen must sit around and bore each other to tears with their cocktail-party stories of their high-seas exploits.

  So maybe it was all just an accident. And a coincidence.

  Maybe. . . .

  I skirted the aftermath of fire so that I was upwind of it, then I headed toward it at dead slow, letting O’Davis work the light.

  He swept it back and forth on the water, singling out bits and pieces of debris. Chunks of deck. A commercial lifejacket. Two red embers of eyes, and the oil-slick body of a rat swimming toward shore.

  “Hey, do ya see that?”

  I did. A white life ring rolling in the weak sea.

  While O’Davis got the boathook, I cut above it, pulled the throttles back into idle, and drifted down on the ring. It was a bright white corona in the glare of my spotlight, the name on it in bold red letters: Blind Luck.

  On this night, someone’s luck had run out. And there were some very, very dead people around.

  When the Irishman had the life ring aboard, I switched on the VHF and contacted the Everglades National Park Service on my third call. The officer seemed suspicious, and I didn’t blame him. Reporting a false emergency is one of the standard drugrunner ploys. They call the Coast Guard and give fake coordinates to disasters which have never occurred. Then, with the Coasties busy searching for imaginary boats in contrived distress, the drugrunners have clear sailing to load and deliver their contraband.

  Finally, when I repeated the name of my vessel for the fourth time, the officer seemed convinced, and he said he’d contact Key West Coast Guard, have them send up a jet copter.

  “You said you weren’t gonna call, damn it!”

  It was the girl. She had come up from below. She wore one of the Irishman’s huge cotton plaid shirts. It fit her like a sack. She held the ragged lifejacket against the lift of large breasts—obvious even in that shirt and in the flicker of fire and soft haze of moonlight. Her short blond hair had dried, like white spun glass, and her child’s face pouted.

  “You said I wasn’t going to call—I didn’t.”

  “You’re a lying son of a—”

  “Now, now, child.” O’Davis came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, comforting her. She recoiled momentarily then let his big hand stay. “This big ugly brute kin be snappish at times, but ya have ta understand he’s jest doin’ his dooty. He’s required by law—”

  “I don’t give a shit!”

  She had a low alto voice, incongruous with the girlish face and baby-fat weight of breasts. It was a gravelly whiskey voice, straight from Bacall—and just as brash.

  “An’ I kin understand that—but lass, you’ve had a strenuous night. Come with meself below and I’ll give ye a tech o’ fine Irish whiskey ta make ya feel better.”

  O’Davis guided her down into the main cabin, gently mediating her protestations.

  I checked my watch. The big luminescent numerals of the Rolex said it was nearly midnight. The full moon was heading westward, following the long-gone sun.

  I swept Sniper back and forth above the flames, searching. More debris: chunks of wood, mangled Tupperware, clots of clothing, and a weak haze of dust that made me sneeze. That’s what’s left when a boat goes down: dust and oil on the empty sea. Westy came back above.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Better, Yank. Better. Took all me charm ta settle her—and that’s sayin’ something. Seems on the edge of hysterics, she does.”

  “Still didn’t say anything?”

  “Give ’er time, brother MacMorgan. She will, she will.”

  The Irishman climbed up to the flybridge to handle the spotlight and act as lookout. I powered Sniper abeam the flames, riding the weak roll of night sea downwind. There was more debris now; odd shapes in the harsh glare of light.

  “What’s that stuff?”

  “Bloody garbage bags. Hundreds of ’em, mate!”

  It didn’t take long to dawn on me. Not many commercial trawler boats carry garbage bags. Call it laziness or call it expedience, but most of them just dump their junk into the sea. You’d think that people who make their living on and from the ocean would treat it with more grace, but they don’t. The idea of the kindly old commercial fisherman filled with reverence for the sea is largely a myth. You see that character in Walt Disney movies but rarely anyplace else. Sixty percent of the commercial crewmen fish because they aren’t smart enough to do anything else—not that you can be stupid and be a consistently good fisherman. You can’t. And many of them aren’t. Gradually, they come to hate their stinking, jury-rigged boats and the bad hours, the rough work, and the low wages—and contempt for the sea which holds them is the natural progression in the unfortunate disorder of their lives. And they take their hatred out on the sea by treating it as if they own it—when, in fact, it owns them. They toss their cans and bottles overboard, and try to punish it with their bilge oil gunk and their engine poisons, and in the end, as the fish head ever deeper and disappear, they just end up punishing themselves.

  So I doubted if those garbage bags held garbage.

  “Let’s have a l
ook, Westy.”

  “Jest thinkin’ that meself, Yank.”

  I brought Sniper down on one of the big floating bags, reversed her, and shut her down. In the new silence, my twin diesels tick-click-ticked with heat and the dying sea fire whooshed with every gust of freshening night breeze. Sniper rolled gently, and rust-colored cirrus clouds scudded beneath the high bright moon.

  As the Irishman scampered his bulk down to the aft deck, I grabbed the long boathook and pulled at one of the garbage bags.

  “Watch ya doona strain yerself there, Yank.”

  “Well, if you’d help instead of standing there grinning it would be a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Jest didna want ta get in yer way.”

  O’Davis climbed down in the diving platform when I had the bag near the boat. He grabbed it in two huge arms, lifted, and swung it aboard with an ease that made me feel like a weakling. O’Davis is one of the strongest men I have ever met, no doubt about that. He stands right at six feet, weighs about as much as me, and looks like one of those Olympic-class two-hundred-pounders, all chest and forearms. He ripped the bag open and pulled out a handful of something that looked like water-soaked hay. He sniffed it experimentally.

  “Is it?”

  “Well now, I’m no expert, brother MacMorgan, but I’d say the poor lads on this boat were either hauling horse fodder ta Kentucky—or tryin’ ta get rich dealin’ in the evil herb.”

  “Horse fodder, huh? Why is it all you Irishmen consider yourselves poets?”

  He winked at me. “ ’Cause we are, mate. We are.”

  “Just like you can all sing tenor.”