The Deadlier Sex Read online

  “Ah, I kin, I kin. A lovely voice I have, don’t you think?”

  I brushed at my chin, trying not to chuckle. Funny guy, Westy O’Davis.

  Unless things got rough.

  And then I was just happy as hell to have him on my side.

  “Let’s check out some more of those bags. The Coasties should be getting here pretty soon.”

  “An’ I thought we were on vacation, brother MacMorgan.”

  “Like I said—I’m nosy.”

  “Nosy and suspicious, eh?”

  “Right.”

  We found the cocaine in a half-dozen smaller garbage bags. It had been triple-wrapped in those modern magic-lock sandwich bags, then again in burlap. Each of the smaller bags weighed about a pound. There were ten to a garbage bag—sixty of them in all. And probably a hell of a lot more out there in the night sea. Or burned and ruined. It was a gold mine. No, better than a gold mine. While O’Davis went through the bags, I did some mental figuring. Straight from Colombia, the cocaine was probably seventy-five to ninety percent pure, uncut stuff. Everyone who handled it would cut it a little more. They use quinine or some sort of powdered laxative, because cocaine dries out the system. By the time it gets to the street it’s only one to fifteen percent pure. If someone—even a regular user—took a hit of this uncut stuff, or a “hot shot,” it would either kill them or they wouldn’t crap for a week. Which is why they cut it with a laxative. Street value of the cut stuff was what? One to two thousand dollars per ounce, depending on the quality. The uncut cocaine in these bags would go wholesale—but even so, we had fished out two to four million dollars’ worth. And that wasn’t even counting the grass, which wholesales for about a hundred to two hundred bucks a pound. And it hits the streets at over twenty dollars an ounce.

  So someone had planned on getting very, very damn rich.

  It sounds so simple. Buy one of those big longdistance trawlers. Visit South America, party for a week, pick up one load—maybe two—and you’re immediately wealthy enough to retire.

  But something had gone wrong on the vessel Blind Luck.

  Approaching the mainland of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, her crew had probably been worried only about the feds and the Coast Guard—knowing full well that fewer than ten percent of the drugrunners are ever caught, and only about two percent of those ever see the inside of a prison after their day in court.

  But it wasn’t the Coasties or the feds they had to worry about.

  It was an explosion. One hell of an explosion that had scattered their pieces among the fish and their dream-making drug gold.

  Accidental?

  Maybe.

  Or maybe some organized competition had taken them out. The big boys will tolerate the amateur only so long. They don’t mind letting them make small scores. But when certain small fry start getting greedy, the organized-crime boys can come down hard. Hard and deadly. The boats the amateurs use are normally found shot up, bloodstained, and empty.

  Or never found at all.

  The pros are utterly ruthless—I know that all too well. I’m no paragon of virtue, but anyone who would get rich by slowly destroying the minds—and the lives—of others . . . well, a quick death is too good for them.

  So I wasn’t exactly filled with grief for the victims on the late Blind Luck.

  I checked my Rolex again. The Coast Guard would be arriving soon. I had given them loran coordinates, so they wouldn’t have any trouble finding us.

  “O’Davis.”

  “Aye?”

  “Let’s start tossing the drugs back in. I don’t want the Coasties to get any wrong ideas about us.”

  And that’s when I heard it. We both heard it. We stopped, heads turned, straining to listen: a low, agonized groan in the darkness.

  The Irishman jumped for the light. “Someone’s out there, mate!”

  Sound travels well over water, but direction is distorted. So it took us a while to find him among the rest of the debris. But finally, O’Davis brought the light to bear on him: a man clinging to a partially submerged bale of marijuana, face blackened, hair oil-soaked, horribly burned.

  3

  He was a kid, really.

  Late teens, early twenties—stocky, with muscle already turning to fat. He looked like he might once have played guard for some second-rate high school football team before he became a part of the drug culture. He had dark hair down to his shoulders, and one lone earring, and the side of his face that wasn’t burned was covered with the fuzz of a beard that just wouldn’t grow.

  I approached him from downwind, cutting the wheel at the last moment so that we would take him over the dive platform. The Irishman lifted him like a kid lifting a sick kitten. He swung him around and put him gently on the deck. I had a wool Navy-issue blanket waiting. The wind gusted, rolling Sniper and thrusting the acrid odor of death at my face. I cringed. Couldn’t help it. I had seen and smelled too much of it back in Nam. It’s an odor you never forget. The impact stays with you, even if you can’t recall the finely etched details of the horror. And now it slapped me in the face—the smell of charred flesh, skin burst from flame, hair singed to powder, and, along with it, an odd odor of dryness—like the scent of death itself.

  But I felt no compassion for the drugrunners who had been aboard Blind Luck.

  These lowlifes, many of whom thought of themselves as part of the romantic tradition of pirates and great seafarers—the moonrakers, the smugglers, the rumrunners—were actually nothing more than human leeches. They sold wholesale dreams. They dealt in escape and, in the process, bartered souls for cold cash.

  No, I was damn short on compassion for the likes of organized drug dealers. One of their kind had killed my wife, my two young sons, and my best friend. I knew just how ruthless they were. And at times, when the blind rage of memory was upon me, I knew that a quick death was too good for them.

  And yet, looking down on the charred distortion of this thing which had once been a healthy human being, I felt a rush of empathy. Poor bastard. Hell of a way to go. Back in Nam, that was my great fear—death by fire.

  And it still is.

  Westy O’Davis bent over the kid, checking his eyes and pulse carefully, turning his big Irish face toward me in the periphery of the moon and white deck lights. He lifted an eyebrow, meaning something. He said, “ ’Tis amazin’, it is. Kid’s still alive, Yank. Poor heart’s jest poundin’ away like nothin’ ever happened.” He looked skyward momentarily as if above us, in the silver haze of moon and cold swirl of stars, he expected to see . . . what?

  Something. Just something. Something other than the stark beauty of night and infinite universe. I knew the urge; that instinctive thrust of desire to see just what the hell is up there looking out for all the wronged and beaten and burned.

  “Amazin’,” Westy said again, his voice trailing off.

  “What’s amazing?”

  It was the girl again. In a sweeping glance, she took in the drugs sacked and piled on Sniper’s aft deck, and this new human cargo, too.

  “My God,” she said, hand to her mouth, horrified. She took an involuntary step backward, then forced herself to draw closer. The kid was not a very pretty sight, no doubt about that. He had been wearing a blue windbreaker, or something plastic, anyway, and it had melted onto the scorched skin; the jeans he had worn were now smudges of ash.

  “Is he . . . is he . . .”

  “No, lass,” the Irishman said softly. He still had his big hands pressed to the kid’s wrist, keeping close tabs on the pulse. “No, he’s not dead.”

  The girl hustled down beside us now, bending over him as we settled into that silence which is the equivalent of a deathwatch. No matter how often I see it, that final moment between breath and death still fills me with mild surprise. For all the thought we give it, for all the writing which has been done about it, death is such a simple thing. One moment there is a heartbeat. The next moment there is nothing. And the body’s inhabitant, with its thought and fear a
nd laughter, seems to just disappear, like a parachutist abandoning a disabled plane or a tourist checking out of a hotel.

  But this kid wasn’t about to give up residency yet.

  The girl put her hands on my shoulders and shoved me roughly away. A lot of strength in those arms for such a little girl. “Dammit,” she said, “we’ve got to do something! You—” She shoved at me again. “You get some more blankets. He’s in shock. We’ve got to get his feet up. The shock will kill him faster than the burns!”

  And as quickly as that, she was in charge. She made O’Davis pick up the burned drugrunner and carry him below. She still wore his baggy plaid shirt, short blond hair plastered to her head like Joan of Arc, yammering at the big Irishman like a poodle bossing a bear. He laid him forward, on the big vee-berth. With two single men staying aboard Sniper, you would have expected her to be sloppy down below. But when it came to boats, Westy O’Davis was as fussy about neatness as I. Like fastidious old ladies, we had cleaned and straightened after ourselves, day in, day out, the way it should be done aboard any vessel. So there was no hasty sweeping away of dirty clothes and personal gear when the big Irishman put the kid down. Just the soaking life preserver the girl had clung to hanging on the foul-water rail along the extra bunk, the musty odor of bedding and the fiberglass and diesel reek of Sniper in the single overhead cabin light.

  The girl had been transformed. Before, she was just some foulmouthed stranger who had suffered some unknown accident. One of the distant ones; uncommunicative, aloof—displaying the kind of sensuous indifference shown by a certain brand of teenager toward adults.

  But now she was trying to save this burned kid. And she worked with the professional intensity of a trained medic.

  And by the look on O’Davis’s face, I could tell that he was as surprised as I.

  “We got to get his feet up.” She glanced quickly around the cabin and saw what she needed. She pushed the Irishman, and he propped up the kid’s feet with the two pillows she had indicated, while she covered him with my Navy-issue blanket. Then she turned on me. “And you—you get a big tub or something. A bucket, maybe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And fill it with salt water. Then put all the ice you can find in it. Well move, damn it!”

  So I moved. I’m not one of those lucky people who are smart or energetic enough to develop expertise in a broad assortment of fields. I’m the master of a few, mediocre at most, a complete zero at the rest. But I knew enough about first aid to understand what the girl had in mind. And she was right. This kid had been burned so badly he hadn’t even blistered much. Third-degree burns. Both epidermis and dermis destroyed, with damage extending deep into the charred flesh. If he was to live, he needed someone like this girl to take control. He lay there in the stink of his own injuries. The long brown hair was surprisingly intact. The earring he wore glistened in the light. And the rest of him lay beneath the blanket, breath fluttering, dying.

  I got the biggest container I could find—a fivegallon pickle bucket I used for chum. I swung down on the teak boarding platform, rinsed it quickly, and loaded it with salt water. I noticed absently that we still drifted on the moonlit sea. I’d have to drop the hook soon. The soft heave of sea and tide were pushing us toward the darkness of the Ten Thousand Islands. The Coon Key marker flashed briefly in the far distance. Say what you want about Florida, but there is still wilderness, still places where wildlife and fish outnumber the billboards and condominiums. And short of the Everglades or the gulf stream, this was the biggest wilderness of them all.

  I carried the water below. The girl knelt beside the charred young man. She glanced at me briefly as I got ice from my little refrigerator and transferred it to the bucket.

  “You’ll need some towels, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “And quick.”

  I knew what she was doing. If the kid regained consciousness, the pain would be unbearable. Unless he was covered with cold compresses. Or submerged in cold water. And since it was June and the water was warm, she was going to sponge him with iced water.

  I placed the bucket beside her and got a half-dozen cotton towels from the head.

  She knew what she was doing, all right. One by one, she placed the towels in succession over the kid. And when the last one was in place, she soaked, wrung out, and replaced the first. It was in my mind that she should have cut the remnants of his pants and jacket away and put the towels in closer contact with his skin. But then I realized that I was wrong. Pull his clothes off and the skin would probably come with it. She worked with professional concentration. She was no longer the trembling survivor I had pulled from the midnight sea. Nothing like work to refocus the brain and steady the nerves. And this woman was doing work she seemed to know well.

  O’Davis and I exchanged looks. He lifted his eyebrows, as impressed as I.

  He said, “You have the fine steady hand of a nurse, me dear.”

  She turned briefly. “I should. That’s what I am. What I was. . . .” She stopped, minor irritation crossing her face at having her guard pulled down so easily. O’Davis was a master at that. And she immediately turned her concentration back to her patient. She didn’t want to talk. That was becoming increasingly clear. But why? What was she hiding? Maybe it was obvious. Maybe she had been a part of the drug boat, the Blind Luck. But how in the hell had she happened to go overboard before the explosion? Unless . . . unless she had set it?

  Jumping to conclusions again. It happens. You see it in people all the time. Something in their life goes sour, and they begin to look upon the world with sour eyes. Every stranger becomes a threat. And every threat breeds suspicion, and a meanness that is nothing more than a reflection of the viewer.

  And now I was seeing that suspicion, that meanness, in myself.

  Because my world had gone sour.

  And it would never ever be the same again.

  I put my hand on the girl’s shoulder. “You’re doing a fine job,” I said. “Anything more I can get for you?”

  She looked up, surprised at the absence of the antagonism that had already built up between us. Her bright-green eyes shone in the cabin light, and her face was tan from long days in the Florida sun. It wasn’t the carefully nurtured Palm Beach tan, either. No oily softness of creams and lotions. There was only the softness of her youth, and a few sun-track lines about mouth and eyes.

  She shook her head. “No. You said the Coast Guard was coming, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Helicopter?”

  “They said they’d send one.”

  She wrung out another towel and folded it lightly over the kid’s face. He groaned heavily, stirred, then lay still. “Then they’ll be able to fly him right to a hospital. And they’ll probably be carrying some morphine along for the shock. That’s what he needs now. So no, there’s nothing more you can do.”

  Westy stood up as if to leave, looked at the girl, who still bent attentively over the kid, then gave me a meaningful nod. I interpreted it correctly. He wanted to be alone with her. And he was right. O’Davis had the charm to get her story out of her. I didn’t. It was as simple as that. So I went topside. Nice night. High bright stars and tropical moon. Good night for jumping tarpon on light tackle off Dismal Key. Or for beer and songs and old stories. Or for love. But not a fit night for exploding boats and charred bodies and mysterious young women.

  But that’s the way it happens. Like in the song: When you least expect it . . .

  I checked the green glow of my Rolex Submariner.

  A little after midnight.

  And just as I was thinking that the Coast Guard deskman had jotted down our loran coordinates incorrectly, the big Coastie jet copter came zeroing in on us, searchlight sweeping the water with the intensity of a noonday sun. I swung Sniper’s deck light around and snapped off the correct dots and dashes: SOS.

  It was one of the Coast Guard’s big choppers. An H3 twin turbine. Out of Clearwater, probably, and temporarily based at Key
West. The pilot brought her hovering over us, red and green running lights popping through the propeller swirl like some craft from another planet. Then he set her down sweetly in a deafening roar of wind and water. And when she had settled down upon her pontoons, he throttled down into idle—which was only slightly less deafening. But he didn’t switch her off. And I didn’t blame him. The Coasties have to be careful. They work in the middle of a lot of ocean and emptiness, and they never know for sure what they’re dropping in on. So he kept the blades whirling and chose to talk to me first over their PA system:

  “This is Petty Officer Barton of the United States Coast Guard speaking. Would you please identify yourself and your vessel and tell me the nature of your distress.”

  The clear, surprisingly youthful voice seemed to come from the bowels of the big chopper.

  I switched my VHF to PA, picked up the mike, identified myself, and then responded, “Mr. Barton, about thirty minutes ago another vessel—an unidentified vessel—exploded. We’ve picked up one survivor. He’s critically injured. There may be other survivors around. I don’t know. But this guy needs some immediate medical attention. Request permission to transfer him to your chopper for transport.”

  Except for the high turbine roar of the chopper, there was a long silence. I could imagine what was going on within. The pilot would be radioing Key West or Clearwater for instructions. The chopper would be working in concert with a Coast Guard vessel probably heading for us at that very moment. Should they wait and assist? Or should they take the injured man aboard and head for the nearest hospital?—Naples, probably.

  It was just a short formality. There was no doubt in my mind—or theirs either—what they would do. A lot of private boaters don’t like the Coast Guard. They look upon it as troublesome with all its rules and regulations. Until they’re in distress, that is. But when the going gets tough on the water, there’s no one I’d rather have around than a watch of well-trained Coasties. In a month of active duty, they get more experience in heavy-water situations than most boaters get in a lifetime. For my money, the Coast Guard is the one bright spot in an otherwise bureaucratic Department of Transportation.