Jinx came up the companionway ladder with orange juice and coffee on a tray and sat beside him, bracing her feet on the cockpit seat opposite. She seemed to be wearing only a T-shirt; the girl rarely bothered with underwear, and it made Cat nervous. Never mind that he had powdered her bottom and changed her a thousand times; at eighteen, she was tall, slender, and full-breasted, just like her mother, and even more beautiful — heart-stoppingly beautiful. Cat was afraid that some movie agent was going to capture her out of a university theater production and whisk her off to be a starlet. Cat had a theory that beautiful women were at a disadvantage in the world, that once their looks opened a few doors, they would be exploited and used up while they were young and left with no better alternative than marriage to the richest and least unattractive man available. He had seen these women in bars and around hotel swimming pools, worrying about the sag of their breasts and the wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, contemplating the latest cosmetic surgery. Jinx was a smart kid, and he wanted her to have a career that would give her some independence and self-esteem. When she had graduated from high school, he’d taken her aside. She had laughed aloud at his concerns.
“Me a cheerleader, entering beauty contests? Come on, Cat, you know me better than that!”
He was glad to postpone her college for a couple of years and show her some of the world. More than that, he was glad to have her close to him for a little while longer before she flew the coop entirely. Cat didn’t know whether she was still a virgin, and he wasn’t about to ask her, but he thought the chances were good that she was. They’d always kept a tight rein on her, and she had usually accepted their judgment with good grace. Not that she had been unduly sheltered; she’d had a full social life in high school, but none of the weekend house parties with fraternity boys three and four years older, none of the drinking and drug use. She expressed contempt for all that. There was a quiet wisdom about Jinx that contrasted sharply with her line of bright patter and her extraordinary, dark beauty. There was also a naïveté — Cat thought she was still not fully aware of the effect her bun-revealing shorts and tiny bikinis had on the opposite sex, not excluding himself. For all her native intelligence, she was still very much the child-woman. These two years of sailing were going to be precious to him — the rare gift of an extension of what had always been a remarkably close father-daughter relationship.
They sailed along quietly for a couple of minutes, then, without any warning, she said, “Daddy, what about Dell?”
Cat’s stomach knotted at the sound of his son’s name. “What about him?”
“Why don’t you call him from Santa Marta and ask him to meet us in Panama? You know what a great crew he is.”
“I don’t think Dell is interested in sailing these days. Besides, he’d probably get arrested going through customs.”
“Cat, you need to patch it up with him,” she said, gravely.
“Wrong, Jinx,” Cat replied, quickly, “Dell needs to patch it up with the world. How can I possibly patch it up with him while he’s doing what he’s doing? Are we going to have big, family Sunday dinners and worry about the cops busting in on us? Am I going to take him sailing through a dozen foreign ports and have to sweat getting busted in customs every time?”
“He needs your help.”
“I’ll give him my help when he’s ready to ask me for it. It’s been rejected too many times.” God knew that was true; he had given up thinking about the number of scrapes he’d gotten the boy out of, the number of new schools and fresh starts he’d financed. In marked contrast to Jinx, Dell had always been rebellious, lazy, and surly.
Katie appeared in the companionway with two plates of pancakes and they both shut up.
Cat grinned at her. “Now I remember why I married you.”
“You want these in your lap, buster?” Katie grinned back.
Jinx patted his belly. “Yeah, you might just as well apply them directly to the paunch. Why go to the trouble of eating them?”
Three hours later, the entrance to the harbor at Santa Marta loomed ahead. The three of them stood in the cockpit and gazed at the land. To their right, a group of high-rise buildings stood behind a fringe of palms. “That’s the beach area,” Cat said. “The port is over there to the left, behind that little island. The main town is at the port.” An older, more Spanish group of buildings could be seen beyond the beach.
Suddenly Katie said, “Cat, let’s don’t go in here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.”
Cat didn’t speak for a moment. Katie had had bad feelings about things before, and she was usually right. “Oh, hell, Katie,” he said, finally. “We’re half an hour away from getting the alternator fixed. Showers for everybody!”
Katie said nothing.
Glancing frequently at the chart, Cat held his course for the harbor entrance.
2
Cat had expected a marina of some sort, however primitive, but he was disappointed. There was an area to his left that berthed half a dozen modern ships, loading and unloading; there was a mixture of smaller craft around the harbor — a small coaster or two, some fishing boats, and the odd sportfisherman — and tied next to a concrete wharf were four or five sailboats, ranging from roughly twenty-five to fifty feet in length.
With Jinx and Katie standing by with lines at bow and stem, their regular drill, Cat eased the yacht into a vacant spot at the wharf. Jinx had changed into a bikini, and he could almost hear the eyeballs click on the boats around them and on the quay as she hopped ashore and secured her line.
Cat slipped the binoculars from around his neck, deposited them on a cockpit seat, and stepped onto the deck. “Get some clothes on, kid,” he said as he brushed past Jinx. “We’re in a strange place; there might be some strange people.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and jumped back aboard. Cat climbed a rusty steel ladder and came onto an area containing some buildings that appeared to be warehouses. Nothing like any small-boat repair facility. A couple of hundred yards away, traffic bustled through downtown Santa Marta, an orderly collection of white stucco buildings dotted with palms and other tropical vegetation. He could see the spires of a small cathedral over the red-tiled roofs. He turned to see a soldier approaching, bearing an old American .30-caliber carbine, the sort he himself had carried as a Marine officer.
“Hasta la vista,” Cat said to the soldier, exhausting his Spanish.
The soldier asked something in Spanish.
“Speak English?” Cat asked, hopefully. It was going to be tough if nobody spoke English.
“No, señor,” the soldier said, shrugging.
Over the man’s shoulder, Cat saw somebody less Latin-looking coming toward them.
“American?” the fellow asked.
Cat looked at him hopefully. Small, deeply tanned, tousled sun-bleached hair, a little on the long side — faded cutoff jeans, worn Topsiders, and a tennis shirt that had seen better days. Somewhere in his twenties. Cat knew in a moment he had found his man. The kid had Boat Bum written all over him. “Sure am,” Cat smiled.
“Where from?”
“Atlanta.”
The kid stuck out his hand. “My name’s Denny. San Diego.”
Cat took the hand; it was rough and hard. The boy had hauled a few ropes in his time. “Cat Catledge, Denny. Glad to meet you. You don’t know how glad, in fact. My Spanish is nonexistent. Could you say to the soldier, here, that I just want to get my alternator fixed, then shove off?”
Denny spoke in rapid Spanish to the soldier, who replied more briefly. “He says you’ll have to come to the port captain’s office and check in, then you’ll have to clear customs, but the port captain and the customs officer are both at lunch, so it might be awhile before you’re legal.”