Eve's Men (33 page)

Once again Beaver wanted them all to know what a vital part of the operation he was. “I sure hope Brian remembers everything I told him,” he said, going on then to explain that yachts as large as the
Nomad
often had fuel intakes on both sides of the vessel, which meant that there would most likely be a portside intake somewhere near the top of the retractable stairway. After removing the cap, Brian was going to hook a wire either into the intake or around it and attach it to a gasoline-soaked rag, which in turn would be tied to the end of one of the fuses.

“The first step,” Beaver said, “will be to spread most of the rags outside the pilot house and soak them down with gas and attach the other fuse cord. Then they’re gonna run both fuses down the stairway and light ’em as they take off. One way or another, that baby’s gonna blow.”

“How about finding out if anyone’s still aboard?” Charley asked. “They gonna try to work that in?”

Beaver snorted with scorn. “Well, hell yes, what do you think? But there ain’t anyone. The Chris-Craft made two trips to shore. The captain—who’s probably a combination pilot, mechanic, and janitor—he took the beautiful people in first, then came back for a woman, probably the chief cook and bottle-washer. But Brian’s gonna look anyway, so don’t worry your busted little head about it.”

As the dinghy reached the
Nomad
, they all fell silent. Brian and Chester were only silhouettes by then, one large and the other small. And though they moved with obvious stealth, Charley nevertheless clearly heard the gas can clank as the two men made their way up the outside stairway of the yacht. They disappeared onto the deck for a while, then Charley saw them again as they passed in front of the lighted windows of the main cabin. The larger figure went inside for a short time and then came out and worked alongside the other, next to the pilot house. Less that a minute passed before they retreated to the top of the stairway and went to work again, huddled figures all but invisible in the darkness. Then they went back down the stairway and Charley saw the larger figure untie the dinghy and hold it steady while the smaller man got into it. A cigarette lighter flared in the darkness, lighting the fuses, and suddenly there appeared to be two Fourth of July sparklers climbing the side of the yacht. In their flickering light Charley could see Brian scramble into the dinghy and begin to row. Eve, standing behind Charley, dug her fingers into his shoulders.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”

Beaver laughed nervously. “Not yet it ain’t! But it’s gonna be! A couple more minutes is all!”

A couple more eternities was more like it, Charley thought, as the sparklers continued to crawl upward through the darkness. And though Brian was rowing hard, the dinghy also seemed to crawl, rising and falling with the waves, pushing ahead only a few feet with each stroke of the oars. Still, the two men had almost reached the
Seagal
when the sun seemed to rise up out of the water behind them, in an orange and yellow inferno against which the dark image of the
Nomad
appeared for a millisecond, long and elegant and somehow wraithlike, as if it were already a ghost ship. Then it disappeared in a thunderclap.

“Oh my Jesus!” Beaver cried. “Look at that! Just look at that!”

It was a sight Charley knew he would remember the rest of his life: the blazing pieces of wood and metal—parts of engines and saunas and gold faucets and ancient teak and mahogany woodwork—falling all over the bay and the resort in a gentle rain of fire. Closer to the
Seagal
, pieces of the classic yacht fell hissing into the water. In the harbor a couple of other boats had caught fire, and on the hillside above the main building patches of brush were burning. A siren began to wail at the resort and then a small fire truck appeared out of nowhere and clanged its way toward the marina. People were running about and shouting, some pointing at what had been the
Nomad
, but which now was only a pile of smoky rubble sinking into the sea.

Brian and Chester already had pulled the dinghy onto the transom and secured it to the davits there, and now the two men came up the ladder and onto the deck, Chester first, looking demented with joy. He even danced a little jig.

“We did it! We did it!” he cried. “We shore as hell did it!”

Beaver by then was looking pale and shaky. “You bet we did,” he asserted.

In contrast, Brian seemed impatient more than anything else. “Why aren’t the engines running?” he asked. “And the anchor’s still down. For Christ’s sake, let’s get with it!”

As Beaver hurried inside, Brian looked over at Charley and Eve for the first time. And Charley could see, in the light of the fires, his brother’s anger and frustration—why, Charley wasn’t sure.

“Well, is that it now?” he asked. “Is it over?”

Brian didn’t answer. Instead he came across the deck and took out a pocket knife and cut the duct tape binding Charley’s hands. Then he went inside with Chester and Beaver, as the engines kicked in, followed by the sound of the windlass. And soon they were underway, the boat steadily gathering speed as Beaver opened the throttles wide. Though it was even colder now on the deck, Charley continued to sit there in the canvas chair, with Eve and Terry standing close to him, at the railing. In silence, they all watched as the lights of the resort—and the scattered fires—grew slowly dimmer.

Chapter Fourteen

In time the cold and the sea spray drove them inside, into the dark of the salon, where they sat waiting like relatives at a hospital. For over thirty minutes Beaver kept running without lights, a practice he said he wouldn’t recommend unless one knew the San Juans as he did, like the back of his hand. To Charley, though, the visibility did not seem that bad. There was a three-quarter moon illuminating a thin layer of clouds, which in turn seemed to light up the entire Sound, enough anyway to make out the shoreline on either side of them.

Beaver said that their goal was one of the many coves at the south end of Lopez Island and that they would anchor there through the night and the next morning, so that when they reached Seattle in the late afternoon, the Ballard Locks would be crowded with scores of boats waiting to get through to their moorages in Lake Union or Lake Washington. There was safety in numbers, he said, and he didn’t want the police knowing about the
Seagal
or his “involuntary” participation in the operation until Brian gave the word.

At the moment, though, it appeared a good deal of time would have to pass before Brian gave anyone the word about anything. Like a man under arrest, he stood with his hands pressed up against the glass doors at the back of the salon, leaning there and staring out at the night and the water as if they were old enemies of his. From his mood, one would have thought that both fuses had fizzled out and left the
Nomad
riding peacefully at anchor.

Chester for some reason had put his cowboy boots and hat back on. Despite the darkness and the motion of the boat, he kept walking about the salon, whipping off his hat and lashing the furniture with it, crowing about the firebombing and pestering Brian about television. When could he turn it on? When would the news coverage begin?

For a while Brian tried to ignore him. But when that proved impossible, he went out onto the deck, only to have Chester follow him there. And though Charley couldn’t hear their voices over the roar of the engines, he could see in Chester’s reaction that the exchange had not been a friendly one. Coming back in, the little man did his best to shatter the sliding glass door, throwing it closed so hard it bounced back open.

“What in hell’s eatin’ him anyways?” he complained. “Din’t we jest do a job of work together, huh, didn’t we? Who’s he think I am anyways, some kinda candy-ass he kin jest chew on every time he gits the notion? Does he think that, huh, does he? Cuz if he does, then by God he’s got another think comin’!”

When no one answered, Chester kicked an ottoman and began to whip the bartop with his hat. Looking uneasily over at him, Beaver suddenly slowed the boat and flipped a switch, which made the lights come on, inside and out. Chester asked if this meant he could watch television, and Beaver smiled his tight little smile.

“Why not?” he said.

The little cowboy immediately turned the set on and pulled the kicked ottoman over to it, sitting down in front of it like a caveman huddled over a fire. He kept turning from one channel to another, as if he wouldn’t know for sure what he and Brian had done until he saw it confirmed on television. But there was no report of the incident, not until the regular eleven o’clock news broadcasts, and then most of the stations only reported that a large yacht had exploded and burned at the exclusive Romano Resort on Orcas Island. The Bellingham channel, though, added that arson was suspected and that the state police were looking for a suspect.

None of this satisfied Chester. He wanted to
see
the explosion, he said. And what about all the fires they had started, on the other boats and up in the trees? And what about Stekko himself? Chester wanted to see the man. He wanted to hear him piss and moan.

“Them candy-ass reporters,” he groused. “They jest ain’t doin’ their job. Why, they ain’t even got enough smarts to connect it all with Brian. Shit, we prob’ly got to do it ourself—phone in nominously and tell ’em.”

Brian, watching from the doorway, said there would be no phoning in, not until they reached Seattle.

“Why not?”

At the helm, Beaver gave a weary sigh. “If we phone from the boat, they’ll know who we are. We have to wait till we can use a pay phone, and not an island one either.”

Chester again whipped the TV with his hat. “Well, shit, that means we jest gotta sit here and stew. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to,” Brian told him.

A few minutes later, Beaver throttled down and headed the
Seagal
into a cove where several other boats were already anchored for the night. As usual, he seemed to know just what he was doing, maneuvering the yacht around into the wind before dropping anchor, then reversing a short distance, making sure the thing dug into the cove’s bottom. He then killed the engines and jumped up from the pilot seat, announcing that it was time for champagne and food.

“I’m so hungry I could eat dirt,” he said. “Terry, why don’t you get the stuff out of the fridge while I break out the bubbly.”

Charley didn’t want to have anything to do with any of them, Beaver the same as Chester and Brian. But at the moment he was too hungry to stand on principle. Eve, though, wondered if he should have anything to eat at all, considering that he might have suffered a concussion.

“Don’t they recommend no food for twelve hours or something like that?” she asked.

“I feel fine,” he told her.

“The devil you do.” She took him by the hand and led him forward. “Come on, I want to look at that head again. And your ribs.”

On the way, Charley asked Terry to bring their food and drinks to the bow cabin. “And you stay with us tonight,” he added, not wanting to leave her to the vagrant impulses of a drunken Chester. The girl nodded eagerly.

Charley followed Eve into the head, where she had left the boat’s first-aid kit. Sitting on the toilet, he leaned sideways over the sink as she cleaned the cut with soap and water. After drying it, she daubed on antibiotic ointment, complaining that his hair was too thick for her to see the cut properly.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“Well, you should be.”

She had him stand and hold up his shirt and jacket while she delicately fingered his swollen ribs.

“What d’ya think, Doc?” he asked.

“That your brother’s a maniac, that’s what I think.”

“So does he, I gather.”

“It’s a little late. Tell me, does it hurt when you breathe deep?”

“Hell, yes.”

She looked worried. “That could mean a punctured lung, couldn’t it?”

Letting his shirt and jacket fall back into place, he put his arms around her. “I’m not coughing blood. I’m not wheezing. And probably haven’t even got a cracked rib, just bruised ribs, like quarterbacks get, every Sunday afternoon. So stop worrying, all right? I’ll be fine.”

She looked at him through sudden tears. “You bastard, Charley. Why would you take a chance like that over a
boat?
”

“At the time it seemed easier than doing nothing.”

“But to go up against
all
of them!”

“It was stupid.”

“It was
insane
.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, but it worked, didn’t it?”

“How can you joke about it?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m still pretty numb. I can’t believe he actually did it.”

Eve sagged against him. “God, when I think of trying to tell it all to the police—
explain
it, you know?—why we’re here, with him again. They’ll think we’re either crazy or lying. It’s just too much.”

Holding her close, Charley began to kiss her lightly, working from her forehead down to her lips. “It’ll come out all right for us,” he said. “We’ll get a couple of decent lawyers and tell them the whole story, that we were stupid and incompetent but never participants, never co-conspirators. And they’ll make a deal for us, probably get us suspended sentences if we turn state’s evidence against Brian and the others. Something like that. It’s done all the time.”