Shimmer (16 page)

You had to do a lot more than learn how your boat worked; you had to remember that the rules of the oceans and of Biscayne Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway and the Port of Miami were made to keep you and other ocean-goers in one piece. You had to watch out for the weather, and for great ships and multimillion-dollar yachts and sail-boats, and swimmers and dolphins and goddamned protected manatees – most all, you had to watch out for the Coast Guard and other marine patrols.

For the
law
.

Especially when you were carrying a freshly murdered body on board.

It seemed to Cal, thinking back, that when he'd started out on that earlier journey, he'd been planning on heading right out to sea and dumping the body into the depths. And he'd certainly started out that way, moving through the waters without a hitch, right under the noses of all the Star Island billionaires and even slipping all calm and nice as pie through Government Cut – his face and hair still all silver,
and
with a dead man aboard, if you please . . .

And then he'd seen the rowboat, lit up for just a moment or two by a scrap of moonlight, tied up to a sail-boat anchored out in the middle of nowhere, and no one seeming to keep watch except maybe God, and Cal guessed He must have been looking the other way as he'd dropped his fluke anchor (‘lower the damn thing,' his teacher had cautioned him, ‘don't ever throw it') and had swum across to the rowboat and cut it loose with his Leatherman knife.

Making the small pink-painted boat all his own.

It had felt like a brainwave at the time, he remembered that now, though the
doing
of it all had almost killed him; the tension of it all, and the sheer strength it had taken to secure the little boat to
Baby
so he could weigh anchor again and move farther out to sea and go about the real business of washing down the body and then heaving its dead weight up and over the side of the cruiser. And the physical strain had made him vomit, had made his heart pound so hard he'd believed he might die, but he'd survived.

Not just smarter then, tougher too.

He almost wished he could tell Jewel about it.

Almost.

It mightn't have worked out the way it had. The guy might have missed the rowboat altogether, or he might have capsized it or even smashed it, but then he'd have sunk to the bottom anyway, Cal figured, so it was a kind of win-win situation.

Kind
of.

And it had worked out.

This time, he was playing it safer. He had a change of clothes – black T-shirt and grey shorts and sneakers – eye make-up remover for his silver mascara, soap and moisturizer for his face and the rest. He had latched and fastened the door at the top of the steps – not that a padlock would have kept out the cops if someone had called them, but Cal was an optimistic kind of guy a lot of the time.

Maybe a bit of a gambler too.

Right now, for instance, he was gambling on his dead Tabby staying safely out of trouble on
Baby
while he went, by foot, to find himself another little-bitty boat, and he knew he'd seen a couple of dinghies tied up to bigger boats at the back of some apartment buildings just a few blocks south.

Bingo.

Not one, but two candidates for his purposes. One more expensive looking than the other, so more likely to be alarm-protected. The second a whole lot less special, with a pair of oars on show as well as its outboard motor – and not even tied up to another boat, just tethered to the mooring.

A breeze.

He waited a little while, watching and listening for trouble.

All quiet.

Decision made, he crouched to untie the line, and suddenly it occurred to him that maybe he could keep this boat, maybe toss Tabby overboard into the deep after all and sail
Baby
away with this neat little dink for extra insurance.

But a plan was a plan. And if it all worked out same as last time, Cal found that he was itching to see what went down when this one was found.

If he was found. He might not be, the dinghy might be hit by a big wave and Tabby might sink without trace, which would be OK, too, in its way. Safer, without question, for Cal.

But not as interesting.

The high kept on boosting him all the way to the finish, a constantly growing sense of achievement like nothing else before, better even than the last time because the tension and that touch of beginner's luck had taken the edge off that accomplishment – but this time he
knew
what he was doing.

Paddling the dinghy through the dark water back to Flamingo Marina and
Baby
, then hitching the line to a cleat.

‘Cleat,' he said out loud. ‘Cleat-clit.' Thinking about turning the words into a tap-dance kind of tune, the way he had with the ‘Epistle of the Apostles' – ‘cleat-clit, clit-cleat' – but this was no time for singing or dancing, this was a time for silent concentration as he got back on board the cruiser, and oh, man, he was turning into such a
sailor
, and maybe he could consider renting himself out as a deckhand.

Deck-sex-hand.

Except time was passing, night wouldn't last forever, and day started early in marinas, and Tabby had to be off
Baby
and floating away before dawn, so Cal gathered up his new brilliant discipline, cast off from the dock, started the cruiser's engine and reversed carefully out, and if he so much as brushed another boat's fender right now, he might be in a fucking holding cell by breakfast-time . . .

But he did not. And after that, navigating his way through the markers in the bay, passing under the East Bridge of Julia Tuttle Causeway, staying slow and steady, controlling the impulse for speed, taking
Baby
around La Gorce Island and under the 79th Street Causeway, heading for Baker's Haulover Inlet this time, because getting through Government Cut unimpeded really
had
been more than a little fluky, and Haulover Cut was choppier, but otherwise safer, at least for him; and after all that, after dropping anchor out in the Atlantic, the greatest dangers of all were to his back and arms – and to his mind, perhaps, most of all – when he had to drag another dead weight up the friggin steps and unroll the quilt, exposing that naked, wounded
deadness
, and then hose him down on deck before heaving him over the side into the dinghy, but he got the job done, he really got it
done
.

‘Who's a dumb-ass now, Jewel?' Cal yelled into the remains of the night.

No one except the birds and fish to hear him.

And maybe God.

49

Grace came downstairs with Joshua a few minutes after seven to find Claudia's note propped against a marmalade jar on the kitchen table.

Grace burst into tears, which started Joshua off, too.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, sweetheart,' she told him, and stopped her own weeping to comfort him. ‘It's OK, baby, Mommy's fine.' She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, then kissed the tip of his nose, which often made him laugh.

No laughter now, neither in her son nor herself.

She waited until he was soothed, then put him in his highchair, picked up the phone and pressed the speed dial key for her sister's cell phone.

Switched off.

50

Cal didn't like the way he was feeling now.

Real shaken up. Nowhere near as good about himself as the last time.

No singing in the blood.

This was different. Premeditated and, perhaps partly because of that, starting to feel more than a little scary.

Wicked.

He had cleaned and cleaned
Baby
while they were still at sea, and except for the scrubbing brush, all the evidence was gone, sunk deep in the ocean same as the first time, and after he'd finished that hard labour, he'd considered that maybe this was the moment to take the cruiser someplace new. But in the end he'd brought her back through Haulover to Flamingo because it was, after all, paid for. And because even if he'd aimed at some really distant destination, he'd have had to stop for fuel in a bunch of places, and each time he'd be risking attracting attention to himself, and so far as he'd been aware there had been no one around last night when he'd cycled in with Tabby, so it made no sense . . .

Not that anything much
did
make sense anymore.

He couldn't really remember now if it ever had, and most of his coherent thinking had been done out there on the water, all of it gone now, intelligence being squeezed out by pain.

Not really the physical kind, that wasn't what was getting to him. The stabbing in his neck and shoulders and spine was no more than he deserved, though the pain had been bad enough to stop him from getting off
Baby
yet again and going back to his hideaway.

The stink of the bleach down below in the small cabin was worse than the pain, he thought, because it brought it all back. The memory of what he'd done, and what had been done to him. It all seemed one now, one overwhelming agony cut too deep in his mind for him to reach and eradicate it.

Only one way he knew of – short of killing himself, and Cal didn't want to do that, not yet at least – only one thing that would blot out those memories, those feelings, for a time.

So Cal picked up the big brush that was intended for scrubbing decks, its hard bristles layered now with the shreds of three humans, and he pulled off the clothes he'd changed into earlier, after he'd finished . . .

Don't think
, he told himself.

All the images were still there, scalding his mind.

‘Please,' he said, beginning to weep. ‘I don't want to.'

You have to,
Jewel said, inside his head.

So Cal picked up the brush and did it again, opened up his own still-fresh wounds, and then he took his T-shirt and stuffed it in his mouth to muffle the screams that would come.

When he picked up the container of bleach and poured every drop that was left over himself.

51

Sam was in the office at eight fifteen when his phone vibrated with a new text.

From Mildred, telling him that she'd seen the silver angel again.

‘Think I'll grab ten minutes later on,' Sam told Martinez. ‘Check this out.'

‘She's an old lady,' Martinez said. ‘Might be seeing stuff.'

‘More down-to-earth than a lot of us,' Sam said.

With Claudia's phone still switched off, Grace didn't know what to do for the best.

She felt so badly for her sister, heading back to what would inevitably be a traumatic confrontation, travelling alone and surely filled with all kinds of trepidation and fears. Yet Grace felt proud of her, too, for reaching that decision and acting on it right away; she accepted that speed and the rejection of more procrastination must have seemed the only way for Claudia.

Proud, and afraid for her, too.

What Grace wanted was to be able to tell Claudia that she was proud of her courage, because she knew her sister well enough to realize that a little approval right now might help her just a little, but for now Grace couldn't even do that much for her, could only wait.

The house felt strangely empty with her gone. Which was, she decided abruptly, a good reason for her to get right back to the process of returning to work; anything to take her mind off Claudia for a while – and there were still a few more hurdles to jump before she could actually hang up her shingle again, get back to doing what she loved, what she was good at.

The phone rang and she picked it up quickly.

‘Grace, it's Magda.'

‘Magda, you're psychic,' Grace said. ‘I've just been sitting here wondering if I ought to have a couple of sessions with you before I start seeing patients again.'

‘Would you like to arrange that now?' asked Magda, getting straight down to business, which was one of the many things Grace admired about her psychologist friend.

‘Sounds good to me,' Grace said.

Her sister was in pain, yet she was about to take a major step forward.

Silver linings, she guessed.

52

‘
Sam, did you guys hear it all the way down there?'

Saul's call at nine fifteen to Sam's cell phone came less than ten minutes after the police department's phones had all started ringing off the hook.

There had been a third explosion. In broad daylight this time, but at sea again, somewhere further north.

‘We didn't hear a thing,' Sam told his brother, ‘but we're starting to hear all about it now.'

‘It was pretty loud up here,' Saul said.

‘You and Dad OK?' Sam checked.

‘Sure,' Saul said. ‘Want me to call Grace?'

‘I just spoke to her,' Sam told him. ‘But I'm sure she'd be happy to hear your voice anyway. Claudia left in the early hours.'

‘So soon?' Saul was surprised.

‘Homesick, I guess,' Sam said. ‘Listen, bro, I gotta deal with stuff here.'

‘Be safe,' Saul said.

‘Love you,' said Sam.

Confirmation came in ten minutes later that the new explosion had happened on another boat – out of Miami Beach jurisdiction again – somewhere off Dania Beach.

There was more solid news, too, on the subject of the Leehy yacht.