He’s a trip. Well, good to meet you, Dar. Have a safe trip back, and watch out for that storm.” He lifted a hand and started back down the docks.
“Small world,” Dar murmured in bemusement. “Small, small world.”
“SO THAT’S WHAT happened.” Kerry put the Thermos of coffee on the tray and added some cream and sugar. She picked it up and brought it over to the table. “Whatever it is you’re looking for, Bob—it must really be there.”
Bob exhaled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too, when the cops came after me. No smoke without cigarettes, right?”
268 Melissa Good Kerry looked up with a dubious expression. “Right.” She set down the tray, and then jumped as Dar’s cell phone rang. With a quick glance toward the laptop, she picked it up and opened it.
“Hello?”
“Roberts?”
Kerry considered lying, but discarded the idea. “No,” she answered.
“Put the bitch on the phone right now.”
The door opened and Dar entered. Kerry held up the phone and then directed a rude gesture toward it. Dar’s eyes narrowed as she crossed the deck and took the instrument. “Yeah?”
Kerry dropped to the couch and pulled the laptop over, clicking on the window Dar had running for the cell phone. The program had activated. She noticed Charlie had moved to the edge of his chair, listening intently to Dar’s conversation.
“Write this down, Roberts. If you fuck it up, your little buddy’s toast.”
Dar took a deep breath, willing herself to patience. “Go ahead.”
“I’ll give you two coordinates. You be there at midnight tonight. Bring what you’ve got, plus twenty-five thousand dollars,”
DeSalliers said. “That’s to cover the cost of fixing my boat.”
Considering his demands, Dar pulled her new pocket watch from her shorts pocket and opened it. “Forget it,” she told DeSalliers crisply. “Try again.”
There was a momentary silence. “You’re not really understanding the situation, are you? You don’t tell me what to do, Roberts; you do what I tell you to do.”
“Listen, moron, the bank’s closed,” Dar said. “If you want to recoup the cost of repairs to your hull breach, gimme the bill or rethink your plan.”
“That’s not my problem, Roberts. It’s yours. Bring the cash and the relic, or I’ll chop this piece of shit up and use him for bait.”
The phone went dead; Dar closed it. “Shit.”
Kerry studied the screen. “Looks like he’s out on the water, Dar,” she said. “Nearest coordinates are just west of St. Johns.” She tapped a few more keys. “Jesus, you captured the digitized output?”
“I never do things halfway.” Dar sat down. “We’ve got a problem. He wants twenty-five grand.” She studied the phone. “So now, in addition to a relic I don’t have, I also have to turn over a suitcase of cash I don’t have. This is getting better and better every damn minute.” Her disgust was evident in her expression. “And to top it all off, a damn tropical weather system’s headed this way and it might be developing circulation.”
Kerry frowned. “At this time of year? Dar, it’s December!”
“No kidding.” Dar rubbed her eyes. “All right, let’s see where Terrors of the High Seas 269
these coordinates are.”
Charlie got up and walked over, leaning on the couch arm to see what Dar was doing. “Weather means trouble,” he commented.
“But not ’til after this damn thing’s over.”
Dar typed in the two coordinates DeSalliers had given her and waited for the program to plot them on a map. The grid drew in, then a sketchy outline of the islands, then a blinking crosshair. It was set in the middle of the water, as she’d expected it to be, in a lonely stretch of water south of the islands.
“No-man’s-land.” Charlie grunted. “’Bout two hours run out there. Not much but a hole in the ocean.”
“So he has to get from here...” Kerry put her fingertip on the place where the cell signal had been tracked from, “…to here. And we have to get from here…” she pointed to where they were in St.
Thomas, “…to here. Much shorter.”
“We could get there first,” Bob commented. “You think they’ll have your friend in the boat with them? I guess they’d have to, huh?”
Dar studied the screen. “If they actually intend on making the swap, yeah.” She heard Charlie suck in a breath. “I figure I need to make him show me he’s got Bud before I agree to anything.”
“You think he’d double-cross… Oh, what a stupid question.”
Kerry rubbed her face with one hand. “Dar, if we don’t really have anything to give him, what are we going to do?” she asked. “You can only bluff him so far.”
Dar folded her hands together and rested her chin against them. “I know that.” Her pale eyes became hooded, the lids becoming mere slits over icy eyes. “If it takes us two hours to get out there, we’ve got until around nine thirty before we have to leave the dock. We’ve got until then to get something to turn over to him that’ll seem real enough to pass.”
“What about the money?” Charlie asked. “Got some people I can call.”
“Not that creep from this morning!” Kerry blurted out. “Christ, I’d rather hock the boat than see his face again.” She reached forward and pulled over the coffee tray, setting up two cups and starting to prepare them.
“No.” Charlie cleared his throat gently. “Somebody else.” He stood up and took out the cell phone. “Damn bill’s gonna cost me an arm this month.” He limped toward the door and went outside, closing it behind him.
Kerry and Dar exchanged glances. Dar pulled the laptop over and opened another program. “I’ll get a wire transfer through, but it won’t clear until tomorrow. Maybe if he can get something temporary until then…”
“Expensive vacation.” Kerry leaned against her lover’s 270 Melissa Good shoulder. “Next time, how about we just go do something traditional, like visit Niagara Falls?”
“It’d probably stop while we were there and we’d have to fix that, too.” Dar finished her request and hit enter with an annoyed click. “Okay.” She examined her other running programs. “Nothing else yet.”
“You think there will be?” Kerry asked.
Dar shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. And you know something? I’m getting pretty tired of saying that I don’t know.” She rested her head against her hands again, banging her forehead against her fists lightly as she rocked back and forth.
Kerry put an arm around Dar, rubbing her back with light fingertips. “Okay, Bob, what specifically did you think you’d find here? Really, I mean.”
Bob had been staring at Dar in fascination. Now he looked at Kerry with startled eyes. “Um…I dunno, really. I kinda expected...um…well, Tanya thought the old man would maybe work a deal with us if he knew we were trying to rake something up.”
“No, huh?” Kerry’s brow creased. “Somehow, a guy who would steal from his own mother doesn’t seem to me to be the type to deal.” She gently moved the laptop away from Dar and cracked her knuckles before opening a database request and starting to type.
“Now, if we assume Grandpa Wharton wasn’t nuts, then he was here for a reason, right?”
“Mm,” Dar grunted.
“Okay. I’m going to search the exports from here during that time period and see what I can find. If he was here, it must have been for something worth his while. Since he was a fisherman, I doubt it was timber.” Kerry typed quickly and accurately. When she felt warmth on her shoulder, she looked up to find Dar’s chin resting on it. Her hand stopped moving for an instant, then started up again. She was very aware of Bob’s watching eyes, but the comfort of Dar’s cheek pressed against her jaw trumped the mild embarrassment at the intimacy, and she leaned her head against Dar’s.