Wreckers' Key (26 page)

“Yeah,” he said over my shoulder in a whisper. “You’re very much like her, only better.”

I didn’t say anything at first. Then I realized I’d been holding my breath and when I exhaled a faint moan escaped from deep inside. This wasn’t right, I knew it, but there was a connection between us that was growing harder to ignore.

“You know,” he said. “We have something else in common now, too.”

“What?”

“Our mothers. We’ve both lost our mothers.”

“That’s right. You told me that in Key West. I’m sorry, Ben.”

“My mother was a suicide, too.” I felt his fingers tighten on my shoulders as he said the words.

I didn’t know what to say to that. That it didn’t surprise me? That she was probably better off? You can’t always say the things you’re thinking.

“Your mother didn’t have an easy life, Ben.”

He turned me around to face him and stared at me through narrowed eyes. “It wasn’t what you thought. What you saw that night. I knew you were there. I saw you. But it wasn’t what you thought.” He paused and held his breath as though he were on the verge of doing something explosive. Then he turned around and stalked off toward the Larsens’ gate.

To his back, I said, “I didn’t think anything, Ben. We were just kids.”

He paused at the gate then half turned. When he spoke, his head was lifted as though he was examining the side of the Larsens’ house. “Everyone always blamed him. But women—” He paused as though searching for the words. “They get away with stuff.” Then he was gone.

I thought back to that night and played the memory through, trying to see it from an adult point of view. We’d both been fourteen years old, that age of rapid growth and raging hormones. As a girl, I had matured faster and I’d already reached my adult height of five foot ten. Ben was about five inches shorter and his voice was still high and soft. I had been sleeping that night when I heard tapping at my bedroom window.

“Seychelle! ”

It’s Ben and he’s crying.

The screen is permanently off my window, as Molly and Ben and I frequently use this method of entering and exiting to stay under our parents’ radar. I slide up the window, and Ben props his bike against the wall and climbs through.

He tells a story that’s grown familiar to me. His parents are fighting again, he says, and he doesn’t want to go home. He says he wants to protect his mother, but his father is too big, too strong. As he says this, he wipes the snot from his nose on the back of his hand and he tells me he knows that his father will kill both him and his mother someday. He asks me to help him run away. There’s something about this night that makes it different from all the others. There’s an urgency in Ben that frightens me. He makes me promise that I won’t let his father kill him and I promise, knowing full well that Mr. Baker scares me to death.

Ben is acting crazy. He’s pacing the floor of my room talking to himself. I consider asking him to spend the night on the floor of my room when the window slides up and out of the darkness Junior Baker’s voice speaks a single word.

“Come.”

I’ve never seen such terror in a kid’s eyes. Those eyes are begging me to do something but I can’t breathe, much less speak or move. As Ben crosses the terrazzo floor, I see and smell the trickle of urine that follows his footsteps. I want to grab his shirt and pull him back because I’m afraid I’ll never see my friend again. Then Ben’s father reaches through the window and grabs one of his son’s pant legs and mumbles, “Fuck,” as he pulls the wet denim out the window.

When I can feel my limbs again, I cross to the window, but they are gone. I run down the hall and awaken my father, telling him that I am afraid for Ben, afraid that his father is going to beat him, maybe kill him. My father tells me to go to bed. He says that I am exaggerating, and we cannot intervene. He tells me again to go back to bed, that Ben will be fine, and I know that this time my father is wrong. When I return to my room and see that trail of pee, I pull on clothes over my pajamas and climb out the window.

The street is quiet, the houses all dark. Bugs circle in the cone of light under a street lamp. I move slowly down the walkway that leads to the backyard gate and to his window. I don’t hear any shouting or any crying, and this surprises me.

His room is dark, the window still open. A shaft of light from the streetlight shows the big lump in his bed.

“Ben,” I whisper.

The lump shifts. Two heads pop up. I duck back behind the wall, my heart pounding loud, but not so loud I can’t hear Ben’s mother say, “Ben, who was that?”

I run all the way home.

I hadn’t thought it then, and I wouldn’t have been thinking it now if he hadn’t brought it up. Was it possible? What had I thought back then? That his mother was comforting him after his father had beat the crap out of him. Could it have been something else? I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I motored down the river. I’d always thought I’d had it tough with my mother, with her bad days and over-the-top manic hysterics. But if what I now suspected was true, what was happening inside Ben’s house explained a great deal about his not ever wanting to go home.

I got to Bahia Mar and tied up
Gorda
in an empty slip close to
Wild Matilda
, a Ron Holland 43. The owner had been using my family to look after his boat since Red used to run the business. The owner was an engineer who lived in DC and used the sailboat as his Florida vacation home. He didn’t like to have to come down and waste his precious free time seeing to haul-outs and maintenance, so he hired me to get the boat up to the yard and to keep an eye on it over the next three weeks while the guys at River Bend Boatyard got all her systems back in top working order. Most years, I would just show up and motor the sailboat to the yard under her own steam, but this year the engine had been overheating at the dock when I’d just been doing routine maintenance, so rather than risk losing power on the river, I was going to tow her up.

At quarter after ten, I was beginning to get upset with Quentin. I wanted to get up the river while the tide was still running out so it would be easier to maneuver the two boats when we had to wait in the tight spaces between the bridges. I had already rigged the towline on the bow of the sailboat and readied the dock lines and fenders to make it easier to cast off. I’d also run the engine a few minutes to make sure it would start in case we needed it. I was just waiting on my crew.

By ten thirty, I had shifted from mad to worried. Where the hell was he? Had he gotten lost? Bahia Mar was a huge place; maybe he’d forgotten the slip number and the name of the boat. He’d always seemed to have no trouble getting around without a car, but if he was relying on the bus, there was no telling what time he might show up. If he didn’t come soon, though, I’d have to risk running upriver with the tide behind me or cancel the trip until tomorrow or the next time I could schedule a haul at River Bend.

I paced the dock. “Shit,” I said aloud when I tripped over a cleat and nearly went into the water. I thought about the last time I’d seen him up in Lake Santa Barbara. I had told him to be careful. And then I remembered him giving me the number to his new cell phone. I ran back to
Gorda
, jumped aboard, and grabbed my bag out of the wheelhouse. I slid the door closed and headed down the dock at a run. One of these days, I was going to have to give in and buy myself a cell phone. I was postponing that moment as long as possible, but on days like this I regretted it.

Over by the pool, I found a pay phone, and after the damn thing rang almost ten times, a male voice—with no lilting Caribbean accent—answered the phone.

“Hello? Is Quentin there?” I was breathing hard from the running.

“He’s not able to come to the phone right now. I can take a message.”

There was something familiar about that voice. I was going through the voices I knew that were connected to Ocean Towing and I was drawing a blank. “This is Seychelle Sullivan. Quentin Hazell was going to work for me today. I need to speak to him.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. I was beginning to wonder if the call had been disconnected, when the man spoke. “Miss Sullivan. This is Detective Collazo. I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

I closed my eyes and for several seconds all the sound in the world seemed to recede into the distance, then stop.

“Miss Sullivan, are you there?”

His voice sounded as though he were at the bottom of a deep well. Then it grew louder.

“Miss Sullivan?”

I knew what it meant if Collazo was on the scene, and part of me hadn’t even registered the words when he told me what he was looking at. I didn’t want him to hear the sound of my pain so I had covered the mouthpiece. No, no, not again. Not Quentin.

“Miss Sullivan?”

I uncovered the phone. “I’m here,” I said, though the words came out at a barely audible level. I was leaning against the wall alongside the pay phone, the tears beginning to slide down my cheeks. I tried again to speak. “I’m here, Detective. Sorry.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “What happened?”

Collazo and I had a history. This wasn’t the first time he and I had met up because someone who knew me had turned up dead.

“I’m over here on Sistrunk,” he said. “Behind a chicken restaurant. Employee found the body out by the Dumpster when he came in to work this morning. Single blow to the head.”

The body. That beautiful man with a smile that could just knock you out was now being referred to as the body. Oh, Quentin. What have I done to you?

“Sistrunk?” I said. That was a predominantly black, high-crime neighborhood in the northwest section of town. “What was he doing over there?”

“Same as most. This looks like a drug deal gone bad.”
 

“Quentin? Drugs? Not unless he was scoring some ganja, and he could find that on the docks.”

“And you know this guy.”

I told him the story of our meeting in Key West and how he had crewed for me on the trip north. “I just saw him yesterday. He had found a job with Ocean Towing.” He had been so eager to help me, I remembered. What had he done? Why did I ever ask him to help? Oh, Quentin. “Collazo, I think I need to talk to you. There’s more to this.”

“Miss Sullivan. I understand you are upset, but this looks pretty straightforward.”

“Collazo, I get what you’re seeing. A black man, worn clothes, dreadlocks. But you aren’t seeing Quentin Hazell.”

“Repeat his name.”

I spelled it out for him, and I could picture Collazo writing it in his notebook in that neat hand of his. “So his wallet is gone?”

“Like I said, it’s pretty straightforward.”

“You’re not looking at it right. Collazo, think about it. When was the last time you ever heard of a drug dealer who left a cell phone behind?”

I sat on the sidewalk under the pay phone, leaning my back against the wall, trying to understand how this could have happened. I didn’t believe for a minute that Quentin’s death had been a random killing. He didn’t have any reason to be in that part of town, but whoever had done this counted on the cops not asking too many questions about a dead black man on Sistrunk. What happened? And why had I encouraged him to do anything? If I had just kept my mouth shut, Quentin would probably be alive. Thinking about that actually hurt; it caused a physical pain in my chest like I was going to collapse inward. I rested my head on my bent knees and cried again.

I wasn’t aware of the passing of time. When I raised my head and looked around, I realized it could have been five minutes or an hour since I’d first heard the news about Quentin. The whole world seemed askew. Time wasn’t working properly, and good people who should live long lives were dying.

I felt something shift inside me. I could breathe easier, the tightness in my chest gone. Two good decent young men were gone. And the son of a bitch who did this was going to pay. I’d told Collazo that I would be in to speak to him in the afternoon. And there was still the matter of the
Wild Matilda
. It was time to get moving. I stood up, reached into my bag for more change, and dialed a number I knew by heart.

“Hi, Mike,” I said when he answered. “I could really use a hand if you’re free.”

XXIII

Mike Beesting was a retired Fort Lauderdale cop who lived aboard his Irwin 54
Outta the Blue
and ran occasional day charters—more out of his need to be social than a desire for income. After losing the lower half of one leg in an incident considered the line of duty, his severance package with the city had been generous. Mike had never been a boater before and he loved gear, so he’d loaded up his Irwin with too many toys that drained his batteries and too many fancy gadgets that frequently malfunctioned. Our friendship had started with me towing him in the first two or three times he couldn’t start his engine. From then on, we rarely went a week without seeing each other.

Thirty minutes later, he was pulling up in his hard-bottomed inflatable dinghy.

“Thanks for doing this for me, Mike.” I held the painter to his dinghy while he crawled out onto the dock.

When he was sailing his own boat, Mike hardly ever wore his prosthetic leg, but today, with his worn blue jeans, he had both boat shoes on. Navigating the metal-runged ladder to climb onto the Bahia Mar dock was a challenge for anyone, but crawling on hands and knees presented different challenges for Mike. After he got to his feet, he wrapped me up in a big bear hug.

 
“It’s good to see you, my friend. Now tell me what sort of trouble you’ve got yourself into this time. Start at the beginning, ’cause I couldn’t hardly understand a word on the phone.”

“Come on aboard the
Wild Matilda
here, and I’ll tell you while I show you around the controls.” I tied his dinghy off on one of the sailboat’s stern cleats.

Mike had known Nestor and had heard about his death already. He didn’t ask me many questions, the way some people had. In his life as a cop on the streets of Fort Lauderdale, Mike had seen enough bloodshed. He didn’t need to hear any more grisly details. As I pointed out the engine controls, the fancy chart plotter, the depth sounder, and the VHF radio, I told him about Nestor’s belief that someone had sabotaged his GPS, Catalina’s certainty that someone had killed Nestor, and all my experiences since with Neville Pinder.