Under Cover of Daylight (3 page)

Sarah leaned forward toward Kate and half shouted into the wind, “I’m running out of company names.”

“Wait a minute!” Kate unrolled the plastic windshield for the tower platform. The two of them snapped it in place. Now, with the breeze cut off, Sarah felt it, the prickle on her cheek, a puffiness beginning.

“I’m running out of names,” she said. “I come up with one, it’s on the computer already. It’s a janitorial service or a shop sells popcorn. Crazy things.”

“How about Wood Rat Enterprises?”

“Not businesslike. It should sound like it’s for real.”

“Well, you’ll think of something. What’s the big worry about corporate names anyway? You worry about the oddest things.”

“I’m worried about all of it. But the only parts I can focus on, you know, are the small parts.”

They were only a mile offshore, the fiber glass twenty-footers were all around them, Aquasports, Makos full of Miami snorkelers headed out to the reef, chopping up the quiet water.

“I know,” said Kate. “I know what you’re going through.”

“This Port Allamanda thing. It’s not like the others, all this cash. And you can bet Grayson is going to be damned curious to know who beat him out. I want to shield you better than I’ve been doing.”

“Well, you’re the expert on that.”

“Kate, I keep telling you. I’m no expert. On any of this.”

“You’re doing a hell of a job. You worry too much. It’s going to give you something.”

Captain Kate lined up on the wind sock rigged up on her dock, that and Carysfort light seven miles out. One hundred and twenty degrees took her into her own channel. Two degrees off either way and you’d be walking ashore across limestone beds and the backs of stingrays.

Kate cut back to half throttle; their wake caught up with them and rocked the boat lightly. In the narrow homemade channel, a hundred yards offshore.

“I’ll get the lines,” Sarah said, moving toward the ladder.

“Whoa. Let the lines rest.” Kate backed off another notch, took off her dark fishing glasses, examined Sarah.

Sarah tried a smile, said, “I’m just paranoid. It’s just a phase.” She gestured down at the cockpit. “It gets to me sometimes.”

Most of the fifty bales of marijuana were stored inside the cabin below, but four were in ice chests out in the sunny cockpit.

“Hell if it doesn’t get to me, too. It’d be damned strange if it didn’t. And my granddaddy smuggled rum most his life, and my daddy made his share of midnight runs. I keep telling myself it’s my heritage, but that doesn’t seem to help much.” Kate rubbed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, smoothed her forehead upward.

Kate said, “But we’ve gone over this. Again and again. Ends and means, the higher good. I can’t see anything new to talk about. If there’s something else, some way of doing something, change things around, anything you can think of that would take the pressure off, say the word and we’ll do it. Buy the land some other way. Sell melons along the road. I don’t care what, rob a Brink’s truck. You come up with something better, tell me.

“No,” Sarah said, suddenly sleepy and sheening again with sweat now that the breeze had stopped. “I just feel guilty, getting you involved in this.”

“Hey, now.” Kate smiled at her, leaned against the seat. “I got you involved. It may be your contact, but it’s my fight.”

“Let’s don’t bullshit each other,” Sarah said. “I come to your meetings, like the stuff I hear, offer my legal services, and two months later I’m talking you into running dope.”

Kate looked off at a passing dive boat headed for Grecian Rocks. “You didn’t hypnotize me, hon. I’m a big girl. You think I hadn’t thought of bringing in some bales before you showed up? Only reason I hadn’t tried it before was if I went in with anybody down here, the whole island would know the next morning. As it is now, the gossip is we’re a couple of sweethearts. Spending nights together on the boat.”

Sarah laughed.

“I swear to the Lord above,” Kate said. “Sweethearts, that’s the word going around.”

Sarah shook her head, grinning her thanks.

“We’ll make it,” Kate said. She winked at Sarah. “Two more fifty-bale trips. There’s the million. And that’s it. Walk away. Use the rest of our lives earning forgiveness.” She took hold of Sarah’s shoulders and straightened her up, looked up into her face. “But listen, this is
my
passion,
my
fight. You can drop this in a second and I’ll sure understand. Think about it.”

A rumble came from the south, growing quickly thunderous.

Kate pushed the throttle forward, making for the dock. Sarah scuttled down the ladder, cursing.

“Too late,” Kate called to her as the roaring mosquito plane passed above them, twenty feet, clipping the mangrove tips, its contrail of blue diesel smoke and Malathion settling down, drifting into the mangrove shoots along the shoreline.

Sarah fanned the fog from in front of her, holding on to the chrome railing as she worked her way forward. Kate reversed and cut the wheel hard so the starboard side nudged up to the dock.

They set the spring lines. Sarah got her straw bag from the cabin, took her spinning rod from the rod holder behind the fighting chair, and jumped across.

“He flew right over us.”

“He’ll be back in about five minutes, fifty yards east. The bugs have been brutal lately. All this rain.”

“Could he see anything?”

“What? Ice chests? That’s Jerome Billings. I know his daddy. Known the boy all his life. He’s a friend of Thorn’s from high school. That boy must see more goings-on than God Himself. I never heard a peep of gossip out of him either. What’s he going to see?”

The Sabrosa Seafood truck was parked under the gumbo-limbo beside Kate’s back porch. Sarah hated this part. Her Spanish wasn’t up to anything subtle, anything going wrong, the wrong amounts, a canceled deal. But it was Armando, good-looking in his orange tank top, who’d been the pickup the last two months. His English was better than Sarah’s Spanish.

The mosquito plane was on its next pass, so Sarah waited under the thick tamarind tree until the poison had broken up. Armando joined her and nodded hello, both of them fanning for good air.

“How you live here with poison gas?” Their first personal conversation. She didn’t want to prolong this, encourage anything more than just official exchanges. But she feared being abrupt.

“I live in Miami, but this is awful, no?” Her Spanglish.

“Oh,” he said, checking her out now, lingering at the open throat of her work shirt, a flash of cleavage perhaps.

She said, “In Miami we put out enough poison at ground level.”

“OK,” he said. “That’s OK.”

“You
listo a pesar
?”

“
Sí
.”

“Well,
vamanos
.”

Armando carried the first bale inside the Styrofoam cooler. He dumped it in the back of the seafood truck and waited around for a minute or two in the shade, making eyes at her. Then back to the boat with the empty cooler, loaded the next one, and brought it ashore. The process was slow, but to any passing boat it would appear that someone was merely unloading a hefty catch.

Sarah hated it. The exposure was so great. Down the hundred-foot dock, thirty yards up the terrace to the canopy of trees, Armando making the trip fifty times. She stood in the shade during the whole ordeal, her eyes panning the horizon, her hearing fine-tuned for any passing plane. Their only concealment was their brazenness.

After showers she and Kate sat on the front porch, the Atlantic spread before them. Rum and Coke. Sarah’s face coated with a layer of aloe jelly, fresh from Kate’s yard. Just snap a leaf in half and smear it on. She rested her hands cautiously in her lap. Everything stung. Already the itch. Every time, no matter how thick the sunblock.

“Going to see Thorn?”

“Thought I would.”

“This is his special weekend.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sarah said. “He took me along Friday night.”

“He did?” Kate took a sip of her drink, eyeing Sarah.

“I asked him, and he said yes, and took me along.”

“I’m amazed.” She set her glass on the wicker table. “So, tell me about it. The ceremony.”

Sarah smiled. “That’s what I thought. But it wasn’t anything very special. Sit out beside Lake Surprise, swat mosquitoes, pee in the shrubs, rewire the central nervous system. Just a lot of quiet. Staring at the dark.”

“Not very sympathetic.”

“I hear sad songs all week. I guess I don’t have as much sympathy as I should.”

Kate said, “Well, the boy’s gotten better about it. Was a time his going out there every year made me mad, like he just couldn’t let it go. Mournful, mopey.”

“Losing parents like that. It couldn’t be easy.”

Kate gave her a curious look and said, “He never knew them. Dr. Bill and I took him in, he was only two weeks old. Oh, I don’t know. I always thought he’d made it all into more than it should be. Let his grief steal him away. Like he was glorifying them too much.”

“They weren’t worth glorifying?”

“They were good people. Normal people.”

“But they were his parents,” said Sarah. “It doesn’t matter if they were good or normal or what.”

“Now you’re sympathetic.”

“I am. And I’m not.”

“He tell you how it happened?”

“He hinted around,” Sarah said. “But no, not much.”

“His folks, coming home from the delivery room, a drunk kid ran them into the bay. They drowned, Thorn got bruised up pretty bad, and the kid went free.”

Sarah swirled the ice in her drink, shifted in her chair.

“And Thorn? How old was he when he found out the details, the drunk getting off?”

“Just thirteen, fourteen.”

Sarah nodded, considering it.

In a moment she said, “How’d he react? What’d he do?”

“Nothing,” Kate said, her eyes on the horizon. “Oh, maybe he got a little more quiet after that. But he was always quiet.”

“If somebody killed my parents, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“What
could
you do?” Kate said. “Dr. Bill and I, we were angry for a while. I think the doctor stayed angry for years. We even talked to a lawyer about it. But there was nothing to do.”

“I’d want justice. Somehow. I would’ve located the guy, confronted him, camped on his lawn, done something.”

“No,” Kate said, bringing up a hazy smile. “You think you would, but you wouldn’t. My God, you and I are having trouble justifying smuggling that grass.”

“I don’t see it,” said Sarah, “just letting something like that go.”

“Thorn did,” Kate said. “Goodness, is this a public defender I’m listening to?”

Sarah said, “You defend enough of them, you get cynical, you develop an appreciation for vigilantes.”

Kate leaned away from Sarah and appraised her. “What in the world are we arguing about?”

“Nothing,” Sarah said. She repeated it, almost a whisper.

Kate said, “I don’t see you two, you know. I have trouble putting the two of you together. In the same room. Talking. Or anything.”

Sarah swallowed some of her rum and Coke, raised her eyebrows. Smiling, she said, “I’m not right for your boy?”

“You’re a city girl. I like you, but you come around here and I feel the screens vibrate. The Geiger counters all go berserk. Something’s always humming ninety miles an hour with you. Maybe you act like Miss Placid, but there’re those little pulsing arteries running up into your temples. Like it’s all you can do to keep from screaming out something.”

“The arteries, those are to keep the brain going,” she said. “Occupational hazard.”

Kate took a sip of her drink, carefully as though it might burn her lips.

“On the other hand,” she said, “you seem to be helping Thorn come back to earth.”

Sarah was silent, looking out at a brown pelican coasting low across the smooth Atlantic, its belly nearly skimming the surface.

She said, “I’m not sure I want that responsibility.”

“He’d slunk off,” said Kate. She stared down into her drink. “What’s it called? Burned out?”

Sarah swung her head around. “Thorn! Burned out?”

“Well?”

“Look at me. Look at my face.” Sarah let her expression go slack. “This is burnout. You get burned out from working too hard. Not from sitting around.” Sarah smiled again, shook her head. “Thorn’s something else. Stoned on silence. I don’t know what, but it’s not burned out.”

Kate said, “Whatever it is, you seem to be having some effect. He’s been coming around a lot lately. Talking. Got a haircut last week. First time since I can’t remember when. And you won’t believe this. He’s coming to the public hearing Thursday night.”

“Well, that
is
something,” said Sarah. “At least that’ll make three of us against the project.”

“I wouldn’t count on him cheering or stomping his feet. One step at a time.” Kate fanned a mosquito away from her face. “But he does seem ... I don’t know what it is. Energized.”

“He might be coming down with something,” Sarah said.

“Yes,” Kate said, a faint smile forming, “it looks as if he is. And he’s very concerned about his looks all of a sudden. What do you suppose that could be?”

Kate held out her glass for a toast. Sarah clinked hers to it.

Sarah said, “You still don’t want to bring him into this? Tell him what we’re doing. Have him help with the dope.”

“We’re managing.”

“You don’t think he’d approve,” Sarah said. “What? He’s too moral?”

“No,” Kate said, “he’d help. But it would be for the wrong reason. You do something like this, take these risks, get your hands dirty, it should be for the right reason. Because it’s worth doing whatever it takes to protect your home.”

“You mean if he helped, it’d be because he loved you, wanted to protect you? Like that?”

“Yes,” said Kate.

Sarah said, “That seems like a pretty good reason to do something to me. ’Cause you loved somebody.”

Kate, watching the pelican make another pass, said, “I think of him as something of an artist. Those flies he makes.” She took another sip. “They’re not like anybody else’s. I know that may not mean much to you, but, well, he’s got something. A vision. Something.” Kate watched a mosquito hover over her arm. She let it land and set its drill. With her fingernail she nudged the mosquito back into flight.