Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (20 page)

“You can’t just come barging up here like this,” Richard said. When he looked straight at me, I saw the red streaks in the whites of his eyes. His pupils were like black sinkholes.

He might be singing about Jesus, but he had fallen off the straight and narrow tonight.

The stewardess placed a hand in the middle of his chest. “I’ll take care of this,” she said, turning to me. “Miss, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, but,” she said as she got a firm grip on my elbow and steered me back to the door to the guests’ part of the ship, “our security measures will not permit non-employees on the bridge, especially when the ship is under way.” She was probably six inches shorter than me, her hand more like a child’s, but she was solid, strong. I went along with her as she opened the door that led back to the buffet deck, and it was only when she let go of me so I could pass through that I twisted around and took the few steps back to the bridge door.

“Just one more question about your vessel, Captain.” When I came around the corner this time, Richard was holding his cell phone to his ear.

He said quietly into the phone, “Hang on a minute, Sis.” Then he looked up at me and gave me a look that was probably supposed to put the fear of God—or of not being allowed to gamble—in me. Somehow, though, since he looked like a bleary-eyed, bobble head version of the father on
The Brady Bunch
, I just couldn’t take him as a serious threat. “There is a police boat cruising the port twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t get off this deck, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing and removed from this vessel.”

I didn’t know if he could really do that, but clearly he was pissed. I decided it probably wouldn’t be wise to test him. Besides, he was standing in front of me, his arms crossed on his chest, the phone under his armpit emitting a tinny-sounding, “Hello? Richard? Hello?”
 

“Jesus, I just wanted to look around a little. Okay.” I lifted my hands in the universal sign of surrender, and when I backed out of the office, I stepped onto the toes of the stewardess, standing right behind me.

“You,” he said, pointing a finger at my nose, “should not use the Lord’s name in vain.” He turned to the petite woman. “Anna, get her outta here.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I just wanted to ask if you knew Nick Pontus, that guy who got killed. I knew his wife when we were kids.”

The captain took a step back and eased himself into the helmsman’s seat as though he were moving in slow motion. He squinted at me and spoke slowly.

“What are you talking about?”

I tried to keep my voice light, dumb lost tourist that I was. “Yeah, I lived on the same street as his wife when we were kids. We were, like, best friends.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” he said. “My sister’s never mentioned anyone like you.”

“Molly’s your sister?” I crinkled the skin between my eyebrows. “I didn’t know she had a brother.”

He dropped his head backward and sighed loudly up at the overhead. It occurred to me for a moment that his neck might not be strong enough to lift that big head back up again. When his face did rise back into view, his skin was tight and red. His voice seemed to burst out of his mouth.

“You moron! Molly was Nick’s ex-wife. Now get out of here before I call the— Wait a minute. I know you. You’re on that tugboat.”

“By the way, Captain. I really liked that song you sang. Did you write that?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, dragging the word out almost like a question.

“So, that was original. The lyrics were very moving. You know, you have a real talent.”

He nodded like that was a given. “I’m going to be cutting my first CD soon. Do you think I should include that one?”

Anna stepped around me and said, “Captain, it’s getting late.”

“Yeah, right. You need to get off the bridge,” he said, like he’d just remembered who I was.

When Miss Size Six tried to grab my arm again, I yanked it out of her grip and said, “I know my way out.”

I was still laughing when I sat down next to Mike.

“What so funny?”

I told him my story about my encounter with the captain. “Guy doesn’t seem too bright,” I said.

Mike massaged his forehead with two fingers. “Remind me to give you a few pointers next time we go out undercover. Like, the first thing you should not do is walk into the heart of their operation and announce that you’re there. Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Seychelle, what made you think that was a good idea?”

“Uh, I don’t know, Mike.” I felt like an idiot. Of course, he was right. Now we had lost the advantage that anonymity might have given us.

“Well, do you think you could go over there to the bar and get us a couple of beers without telling the bartender who you grew up next door to?”

Glad of the chance to get up and do something, I said, “Sure.”

When we were passing alongside the Coast Guard station, I told Mike about the captain’s eyes, about how Zale had said he was an intermittently reformed alcoholic. We were making our turn to head out through Port Everglades inlet when Mike said, “Thanks a lot. Thanks for waiting until we’re on our way out into the Gulf Stream to tell me that the captain is an addict of some sort in addition to being an asshole.” He still hadn’t forgiven me for my stupidity. I hoped I could make up for it somehow before the night was over. I hated it when Mike was mad at me.

The musician finished playing his rendition of the song “Kung Fu Fighting” and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the casino will be opening in approximately twenty minutes.” He punched at his computer keyboard then and launched into his version of the Commodores’ “Brick House.”

“What do you think about TropiCruz’s customers?”
 

“I don’t know. I haven’t paid much attention.”
 

“Change that,” he said.

Mike was right again. I had been looking at the boat, memorizing the layout, mentally marking the doors that were labeled restricted so I could go back later and explore, but there was probably just as much to be learned from the people onboard.

Right off, I decided that the majority could be put into one of two groups—first-timers who had come to celebrate a birthday or an anniversary, and regulars. The first-timers were in couples or groups of couples, dressed in carefully chosen Florida tropical prints—what they thought of as cruising clothes. The regulars weren’t dressed up or smiling. They could have been sitting on the train going to work. They sat slouched over, reading the paper or smoking a cigarette, and they were either singles or couples. Regulars did not travel in packs. Their only movement other than smoking or drinking was checking their watches. They knew the timing of the trip out. They knew how long it took to reach the three-mile limit and exactly when the casino would open.

The ship’s decks started a slow roll when we cleared the breakwaters and began to feel the swell. Some of the first-timers giggled nervously at the motion, and the younger girls clutched at their boyfriends’ or husbands’ arms. Mike and I watched as the red and green lights of the pilot boat overtook our little ship and headed out toward an incoming freighter. Once clear of the land, there was a fairly brisk breeze out of the east-southeast, and although the night had seemed almost balmy for February back at the dock, out here the wind was already trying to freeze-dry my nose.

The music man announced that it was only ten minutes until the casino would open, and all the regulars rose in unison and began shuffling toward the stairs.

“Shall we?” Mike asked, offering me his arm.

I hoped that meant we had made up. I linked my arm in his and we started after the herd. “So, you like gambling?” I asked him.

“Sure, don’t you?”

“Never done it. It’s never interested me.”

“Why, Seychelle Sullivan, do you mean to tell me you’re a casino virgin?”

“That I am, Officer.”

“Well, we’ll just have to bust your cherry on the dice tonight.”

“Oh, you do have such a way with words, Mike.”

XVI

I stood at Mike’s elbow nursing a plain Coke I’d ordered over half an hour ago, shaking my head when Mike ordered his second rum and Coke of the evening. This was going to be a five-hour cruise, and I wanted to stay clearheaded. I’d already goofed up once this evening, and Molly deserved better than that.

No matter how fascinated Mike was with these games, I could neither understand what was going on at the craps table nor enjoy it. Sometimes they gave him more chips and sometimes they took them away, and I think I could have figured it out if I had cared to, but that essential element—
interest
—was missing. My mind kept wandering, thinking about other things that seemed so much more important to me than the little numbers on the dice. I left Mike to his fascination with dice and wandered over to the blackjack table.

Now this was a game I could understand. Not that I wanted to play, but at least I could add up the cards and understand why somebody won. The table I was watching had six players sitting on high bar stools, and on the other side the dealer a dark-skinned black woman nearly as tall as me, stood smiling, making it all look so easy. She stood with perfect posture, her long neck swooping up to the bun perched high on the back of her head. Her nametag read LaShon, and she filled out the white tuxedo shirt beneath her black bow tie near to bursting. That may have accounted for the fact that her table was populated by five men and only one woman, but her joking manner and helpful attitude made her the sort of voluptuous woman that other women liked. A rarity, indeed.

All the blackjack dealers had their backs to the center of the room, and in the middle, the tall thin man with the walkie-talkie—the one I’d seen earlier on the dock— wandered from dealer to dealer, watching them. He glanced upward a couple of times, and I noticed that the ceiling was polka-dotted with little smoke-colored domes: the eyes in the sky—video security.

I didn’t know if his interest in me stemmed from the fact that I was watching him and not gambling, or if he had heard from Captain Richard that I was a person of interest. But his eyes kept darting my way, then moving on so that we never really stared into each other’s eyes. I felt like I was always just catching him looking away.

There were only six blackjack tables and one roulette wheel in the center of that little casino. The two craps tables were against the outside walls. Windows ran the length of the port side of the casino, but it was difficult to see out at night. Through the slats in the mini blinds, with my face pressed close to the glass, I could see a deck walkway outside that was off-limits to passengers. The aft bulkhead inside the casino was lined with slot machines, and in the center of the room, rows of machines covered all the space not taken up by the gaming tables. I wandered the floor, checking out the other dealers as well as LaShon, and I calculated that she was making about twice as much in tips as the others. I saw over a hundred dollars in chips go into her kitty in the time I stood by her table.

After I’d been standing there about forty-five minutes, observing the game and learning as LaShon gently taught a neophyte lady how to play, one of the players got up and left the table. LaShon invited me to play with a look and a nod toward the empty chair. I shook my head to decline. She shrugged her shoulders, and a man with a belly that reminded me of Maddy’s slid into the seat.

My oldest brother is four years older than me, and he would have been in his element on that ship. Maddy loved to gamble. Unfortunately, he didn’t often win, and his wife, Jane, had grown adamant that if he didn’t go to Gamblers Anonymous meetings and stay away from the track, she would divorce him and take their son and daughter with her. I must admit, though—having babysat my niece and nephew several times through the years, I tended to think that that might not be such a bad deal.

“Thompson, take a break.” I heard a man’s deep voice say the name, and it jerked me out of my memories. I swung my head around the room, trying to figure out who had spoken. What with the dinging and clanging of the slots and the strains of pop Muzak on the PA system, it was difficult to tell where the voice had come from. From the corner of my vision I noticed an unusual movement back at the blackjack table, and I turned to look. Dealers don’t usually make big movements with their arms. It’s all in their hands. LaShon was balancing a covered chip tray on her hip and patting the back of a stocky man with African-American features and skin as light as mine. His white shirt was pulled so tight at the shoulders, I feared LaShon’s pats might tear it open. When the man greeted the players at the table, his voice was the same deep bass I had heard earlier. It took several seconds for me to put it together. I’d had my mind so fixed on the Thompson I thought I was looking for, that I had a little trouble shifting gears at first. LaShon was Thompson.

She was standing on the far side of the pit area, exchanging a few words with the skinny security chief. They were both tall, so I had little trouble watching them as I wormed my way through the crowd. I wanted to cut LaShon off before she disappeared through one of the off-limits doors. The security chief’s shoulders bowed forward and his chest was so concave, his tie seemed to dangle and swing in midair as he stepped from one foot to the other in a nervous little dance. He was clearly talking to LaShon, since no one else was around, but he never once looked right at her. His eyes constantly flitted all over the floor, jumping from one dealer to the next.

“Excuse me, pardon me,” I said as I pushed my way around through the onlookers. Though I was on the receiving end of several harsh glances and whispered curse words, I made it to her just as the security man moved off to take up his post by the blackjack tables.

“Miss Thompson?”

She turned round and smiled, and it was genuine. She was in a plastic business, but her friendliness was real. I didn’t even know her and I liked her already.

“I’m a friend of Molly Pontus. I’d like to talk to you if you have a minute.”

She glanced over my shoulder to where the security guy with his walkie-talkie was, but the look on her face never flickered with concern. Suddenly she laughed and reached out and patted me on the back as though congratulating me on something. As she leaned in close, she said in a barely audible whisper “Meet me in the top deck ladies’ room in five minutes.” Then she pulled back, saying aloud, “Nice seeing you again. You take care now,” and she turned and disappeared through the door.