Wreckers' Key (13 page)

When I hung up, I stepped back and glanced down Fleming in the direction of Ocean Towing. Pinder was standing on the street arguing with a man I didn’t recognize. They were too far off for me to hear what they were saying, but their body language made it clear that Pinder was dressing the other down. After pointing his finger in the man’s face, Neville turned, yanked open the door to his office, and disappeared inside. The other man strode off down Fleming and turned the corner at the far end of the block. I wondered briefly what it had been about, but I figured it was just Pinder’s management style. He had to do something to merit his island-wide reputation as a jerk.

I don’t have much of a galley on
Gorda
, but I didn’t want to feel dependent on the
Power Play
on the trip north, so I headed into the grocery store first to buy the fresh stuff, then got some ice for my on-deck cooler, and made my trip out to the boat with a loaded dinghy by four in the afternoon. My dog yelped with joy when I pulled up and did her best to get in my way as I heaved the bags onto the deck. Abaco is a social dog, and these long days alone on the boat were boring for her. She kept running aft and staring longingly at the dinghy as I put my food away, but when I started the tug’s engine, she ran into the deckhouse and mouthed my hand—her way of saying,
Thank you for moving this boat someplace more interesting
.

I had decided to head for the fuel dock at the Key West Bight Marina to take on diesel and water. After that I would motor around to Robbie’s Marina, where I could tie up next to the
Power Play
so that we could work out our lines and take care of all the tow details during the day tomorrow. As I pulled alongside the fuel dock, a familiar figure came out of the office to take my lines.

“Hey, Quentin,” I said, tossing him a spring line. “Thanks for the help.”

He nodded shyly then tied the spring off while I went back into the wheelhouse to give her a squirt in reverse to stop the boat’s slight forward motion. By the time I got back outside, Quentin had secured the bow and stern lines and was readying the diesel pump to hand to me.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, nodding at my bandaged arms.

“No, I just fell and scraped the skin off my elbows.” I grabbed a rag from inside the wheelhouse. “It’s nothing.”

“Dat’s good.”

“It’s nice to be around somebody who knows boats,” I said, taking the pump from him and dragging the hose on deck toward the deck fill.

As I watched the numbers flipping over on the pump, he approached me with the water hose. I pointed to the freshwater deck fill and he climbed aboard, opened it up, and inserted the hose. Watching him, I thought about Jeremy, Drew, and Debbie—my crew for the tow north. “So you’re working here now, Quentin?” I asked. “No, miss, I just help out here because it is a good way to meet the captains and the harbormaster can always use the help.”

“Sounds like pretty good thinking to me.”

He shrugged. “I thought so, too, but no job yet. I think these charter boat captains aren’t interested in a fella who looks like me.”

“You might be right. Maybe Key West isn’t the place for you. Did you ever think about going up to Fort Lauderdale? There are lots more yachts. Maybe you’d do better finding a permanent spot on a boat up there?”
 

“I’ll go where I need to go if it means there is work.”

I wasn’t aware of having made the decision, but next thing I knew I heard myself speaking. “Quentin, I’m leaving Thursday morning to tow a ninety-four-foot yacht up to Fort Lauderdale. If you’re interested, I’d like to hire you to work as my deckhand.”

“I am very interested,” he said, nodding briskly, making his dreads bounce.

“Okay, can you collect your gear and meet me out at Robbie’s Marina on Stock Island in an hour?”

The smile lit up his whole face. “You bet, skipper.”

As it turned out there was no slip available at Robbie’s, so I rafted up alongside the
Power Play
. The crew brought out some enormous fenders to protect the yacht’s paint job and tied off my lines while Jeremy watched from the bridge deck in silence.

Once
Gorda
was secure, I jumped aboard
Power Play
. When I opened the sliding door to the aft salon, Jeremy was standing inside, blocking my path.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I just came to check on Catalina. I want to make sure she’s all right.”

“She’s fine. She’s resting.”

“Look, kid, are we going to have to have a pissing contest every day of this trip? Just let me go talk to her.”

At that moment, Ted Berger emerged from the companionway that led to Catalina’s cabin. With both his hands he was smoothing the white hair at his temples. “What’s going on out here?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Catalina. This asshole is trying to stop me.”

“I told him not to let anyone disturb her. She’s resting. She was very upset when she returned to the boat this afternoon. It seems something happened in town.”

Jeremy was grinning and I wondered for a moment if his could have been the face behind the tinted glass in that monster SUV, then dismissed the idea. I was really getting paranoid. Berger had just met this guy; I doubted he could convince him to attempt murder for him within twenty-four hours.

I held up my gauze-covered elbows. “It happened to the both of us. Some asshole almost ran her over, and I pulled her out of the way.”

The concern in Berger’s face appeared genuine. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, but I just wanted to talk to Catalina, to see if there was anything else she remembered about the vehicle.”

“Sure. Come on,” Berger said.

Jeremy stepped aside, and Berger led me to the closed cabin door. He knocked softly, and Cat came to open the door herself. She frowned when she saw Berger and looked as though she was about to let loose with some harsh words when she saw me.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re back.”

“Yeah, can I come in?”

“Sure.” Without looking him in the eye, Cat thanked Berger and closed the door in his face.

We sat on the edge of her bunk, quiet at first. Finally, I broke the silence. “Is everything okay over here, Cat?”
 

“Yes, it’s fine.”

“When I tried to come aboard, it seemed as though Jeremy had been assigned to run interference to let Ted Berger have some time alone with you.”

“No,” she said. “It was not that.” She twisted the hem of her blouse in her fingers. Then she looked up at me. “Seychelle, tomorrow we will go back to that place and get Nestor’s ashes, and then we will leave Ted Berger and this island for good, yes?”

Abaco and I met Quentin at the boatyard gate. His gear amounted to a single duffel, but he had changed into a long-sleeved, collared white shirt that he wore buttoned to the neck. With a different pair of plaid shorts and orange flip-flops, the man exuded a certain dignity. I liked the look of him, and I knew that on this trip north I was going to need a strong ally. My dog jumped up and put her paws on his shirt; rather than scold her, he kneeled and scratched her ears while she looked adoringly into his eyes. Any doubts I had harbored about hiring a man I barely knew disappeared at that moment. I knew no better judge of character than Abaco.

Wednesday passed in a flurry of preparations. I barely saw Catalina. The only words we exchanged came when I gave her my handheld VHF and made her promise to call me if anything or anyone bothered her on the trip home. We set up a schedule for radio checks on channel seventy-two.

The weather held and we made good time Thursday on the trip north to Marathon, a fact I was thankful for due to our late departure from Robbie’s. Berger had shown up just before we were supposed to leave, and he got into some kind of disagreement with the yard over the final bill. With
Gorda
towing
Power Play
, we weren’t going to be traveling any faster than five or six knots, and we had almost forty miles to cover. When we got under way at ten o’clock, I was fuming.

The anchorage outside the entrance to Marathon’s Boot Key Harbor offered little protection from southeast winds, but as the daylight faded out of the sky, the winds dropped to a near calm. I always get a little nervous when the weather cooperates to that extent. I wonder what kind of havoc is ahead. We approached the anchorage just south of the harbor entrance and cast off
Power Play
to drop and set her hook first. Quentin stowed the towline aft while I circled, and then he went forward to drop our anchor. I positioned us alongside the motor yacht and signaled him to let the chain fly as I backed down. Quentin’s teeth glowed in the light from the big yacht when he turned to give me the thumbs-up, the anchor was set, but the smile faded from his face when I shut down the engine and we heard a panicked voice from the VHF radio.

“Mayday, mayday! This is the sailing yacht
Rendezvous
!”

XII

For the next several minutes it seemed like everybody in Marathon harbor was attempting to answer the guy. They all tried to talk at once, and the result was garbled static and squealing from the radio. Quentin and I stood in the wheelhouse listening to the occasional bits of intelligible talk, and within less than five minutes a boat came roaring out the Marathon entrance channel. He passed close under the stern of the
Power Play
, and we could make out the bright yellow-green of an Ocean Towing boat. Near as I could tell, we didn’t even know where the guy was yet, but the Ocean Towing craft swung around the point and turned northeast. The Coast Guard finally came on the air and told everybody to be quiet.

“Sailing vessel
Rendezvous
, what is your location?”
 

“Hard aground close by Coffin’s Patch.”

“What is your vessel’s description?”

“
Rendezvous
is an eighty-four-foot ketch drawing nine feet.”

Quentin turned to look at me. We’d been checking the chart all afternoon, and I figured we were both thinking the same thing. How the hell had he done that? He’d gone aground at dusk, but there was a light out there off Coffin’s Patch. No skipper in his right mind would take a boat drawing nine feet across that patch.

We listened to the
Rendezvous
rescue play out on the radio as we prepared our meal. We had considered inflating the dinghy to dine on board the big yacht, but we opted instead for soup heated on the single gimbaled burner in
Gorda
’s makeshift galley and pointed the dog toward her Astroturf. The tide was dropping, and the big sailboat was hard aground. The Ocean Towing boat got to her and started to rig lines to pull her free, but they decided not to try right away because of the damage they might inflict on the marine environment dragging the yacht across the coral. The morning high tide around dawn would not be nearly as high as the tide that had put her aground. Looking at the numbers on our tide chart, Quentin and I thought they’d likely not get her off until the next evening.

A friend of the
Rendezvous
captain hailed him on the radio to offer his assistance, but the tired voice of the stranded captain replied that there wasn’t much more that could be done at the moment.

“I don’t know what happened. It was some kind of glitch with the instruments. We were going around Coffin’s Patch, man.”

The friend replied, “Bad luck, buddy. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ll stand by this frequency.” The radio went quiet.

“There’s too much bad luck going ’round these days,” Quentin said as he sliced some cheese to go with our crackers.

“Is it bad luck or just stupidity?”

“It’s both to count too much on GPS.” He pointed to his eyes. “I count only on these.”

“I guess GPS is amazingly accurate—but it’s only as good as the charts, and some of the islands are several hundred yards out of their charted positions. My only GPS is just that old handheld one because I usually don’t go where I’d need it.”

“When I come up from down-island, boat I was on almost wrecked by following GPS. Down in the Dry Tortugas. Fella on watch was staring at the chart plotter when I showed him we were headed for the breakers.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

Later in the evening, once the dishes were done and the decks had been sluiced down with fresh seawater, we sat in my folding captain’s chairs on the aft deck and watched the stars in a companionable silence.
Gorda
was not designed for long overnight trips; she had only the one berth at the aft end of the wheelhouse. When my dad took on crewmen, they generally had to bunk down out on deck or on the floor inside the wheelhouse. I hadn’t made many changes to the boat since I’d inherited her, and Quentin had said he didn’t mind sleeping on deck.

Abaco got up and nudged her nose at Quentin’s hand until he reached out and began to stroke her silky head. From time to time the radio broke the silence as fishermen or live-aboards hailed one another and then switched to another frequency on what is essentially the boaters’ big party line. The
Power Play
was anchored about a hundred yards off our beam, and with her big generator that ran all night and day, she was lit up like a parade float. We could see her crew sitting around the table under the bright lights on her afterdeck. Catalina was not in sight. I watched as Jeremy stood and headed into the salon. Through the windows, I saw him continue forward toward the bridge. I wondered if I had been too hasty to judge him. A serious captain would take some time this evening to look over tomorrow’s course, noting the dangers and possible trouble spots for the following day’s run. Just because he was a pretty face and a suck-up to the boss, it didn’t follow necessarily that he had to be incompetent.

“I like your boat,” Quentin said. His voice startled me. We’d been quiet for so long. “Someday I would like to earn enough money to buy myself a small boat for such a business in Dominica.”

“Really? Is there that much yacht traffic down there?”
 

“Yes, my island is located between two French islands. We have our own fishing boats, and there are many charter boats. They like to sail from Guadeloupe to Martinique, and my home is in between. Where I live in Portsmouth, I could find plenty of business towing boats between the islands with the better boatyards and going on rescues.”