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As if he had heard me think about him, Brian turned around and met my eye. He nodded once and flashed his truly terrible fake smile, and then turned back around to face front again. There was no help there. I was almost certainly the only one of us with his head screwed on properly and wanting to turn around and go home. And I couldn’t help thinking that by a wonderful coincidence, I was steering the boat—my boat. I could do it—just a slow invisible nudge of the wheel to put us into a big circular loop, back to home and sanity. I really should do it—and someday Debs and Brian would realize I had saved their lives, and they’d thank me for it.
Something touched my elbow; startled, I turned and saw that Deborah was standing there. She didn’t look like she was ready to thank me for anything. She just leaned close to my ear and said, “How soon?”
I glanced down at my GPS Chartplotter. We were only a couple of miles out from Toro Key. Too close to turn around; I had dithered too long.
“We should see it in a few minutes,” I said to Debs. She nodded, and for a moment she just stood there, silent. And then surprisingly, perhaps more surprisingly than anything else that had happened lately, she put her hand on my arm, squeezed hard for a moment, and then went up to stand beside Brian.
It was a very touching moment, in both the physical and sentimental sense of the word. My sister, symbolically reaching across the great gaping space that had grown between us, and saying, We are in this together. You and me, Dex, side by side, all the way to the rapidly approaching final curtain. If we go down, we go down together. Very warm, very human, and it really should have made me buck up. I’m sure that’s what it usually does, at least to those of us who have emotions. I don’t, so it didn’t. And I did not want to go down at all, together or alone.
Ahead of me I could see the bright flash from Fowey Rocks Light, which was due east of Soldier Key, a small island a few miles north of Toro. We had to be getting closer, but I just kept steering the boat onward, feeling more and more certain that I was aiming us directly at our doom.
Debs saw the yacht first. I watched her lean over to Brian and say something, pointing at a spot just ahead and to the left. Brian looked where she pointed, nodded, and came back to me.
“That has to be it,” he said, leaning in next to my ear.
I throttled back immediately, bringing us down to a slow and, I hoped, mostly silent glide across the water. I nudged the boat left a few points, and soon I could see it too. At first it was no more than a spot of muted brightness high above the water, the anchor light required by law. This one was a little dimmer than it should have been, probably on purpose, but it passed muster.
Brian went back up to the bow and stared intently at the spot. We moved slowly closer and a vague silhouette appeared under the light and began to take on the shape of a large and expensive boat. And as that shape got closer and clearer, I had to wonder whether I had chosen the wrong profession, because what we were looking at was no mere yacht. This was a superyacht, the kind that sheikhs and Greek arms dealers buy for their summer vacations on the Mediterranean, the kind that can leave Athens while a gourmet meal is served and race all the way to Venice in time for dessert. This yacht was only about sixty feet long, but the lines screamed out speed, class, and megabucks. Whatever else he might be—and mostly really was—no one would ever accuse Raul of being cheap. I began to wonder just how much cash Brian had taken from him. It had to be an awful lot for Raul even to notice it was gone.
They had dropped anchor on the bay side, just north of the key, in the only hole deep enough for a boat that size, as far as I knew. But it was protected from the bigger ocean waves and the prevailing winds this time of year, and if the little launch was in the same class as the yacht, Raul could make it from here to Miami in about twenty minutes. And if he needed a sudden getaway, he was pointed straight out at the Atlantic, and it would be a quick hop back to Mexico in a yacht as fast as this one.
Two hundred yards away, I turned south and sped up a little, running parallel now to the yacht, and hoping they would think we were no more than a passing boat filled with early morning anglers. It made sense; there was a reef just south of Toro that offered good fishing. But it made no sense at all to Brian and Debs; they turned and looked back at me in perfect unison. “What are you doing?” Debs said in a savage whisper.
“We can’t see enough,” Brian said in the same tone.
I shook my head. “We can’t see,” I said, “so they can’t see us, either. That’s a good thing,” I added, since neither of them seemed to understand that.
Debs came back to my side again. “Dexter, we have to know about the guards,” she said. “How many, where they are—we can’t go in blind.”
“If they spot us getting close we aren’t going in at all,” I said.
Brian joined us, standing at my other elbow. “Brother, it would be nice to know—”
“Are you both out of your fucking heads?” I snapped. They looked at me with equal surprise, and I admit I was feeling it, too. I almost never use bad words—there are so many good ones that sting more. But seriously, I seemed to be the only one of us interested in staying alive. Brian and Debs were treating this like a snipe hunt. “We go past like we’re headed to the reef to fish. Then we approach from the bow,” I said firmly. “Quietly. That’s our best chance of staying unseen.” And I think I sounded quite commanding.
&n
bsp; “It’s too high,” Debs said petulantly. “I’m not a fucking chimp—we can’t climb up the anchor line.”
“There’s a boarding ladder in the locker back there,” I said, nodding toward the rear of my boat. “Go get it.” And the first confirmation of my new authority came when Debs turned quickly away and got the ladder from the locker. She returned just as quickly and held it out to me.
The ladder had six wooden steps and two hooks at the top end. I needed it because my boat has high gunwales for offshore use, and if ever I wanted to swim or snorkel, I hooked the ladder on.
“You have a plan, brother?” Brian asked.
“I do,” I said, still sounding very much in charge. “We glide up from the front. You”—I nodded at Brian—“climb onto the gunwale of this boat, and hook the ladder to the yacht’s rail.”
“It’s still too high,” Deborah said.
“Then you and I, Brian,” I said, ignoring Debs and her negativity, “climb up the ladder onto the deck. Debs, you wait with the boat and—”
“Fuck you—I’m not waiting in the boat like some fucking cheerleader!” she said.
I skipped over the obvious fact that neither boats nor execution squads are generally equipped with cheerleaders, and instead just told her, “Deborah, we have to take the kids off at the stern. So you have to bring the boat around after Brian and I take out the deck watch, okay?” She set her face in a fierce, dark pout, and so even though it wasn’t quite playing fair, I added, “It’s got to be done quietly—it’s knife work, Debs.”
She glared a little more, but then she nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But you call me up there right away or so help me—”
“Good, that’s settled,” I said. For the next few minutes nobody had anything to say. I had to think that was a good thing, considering the blather they’d been spouting so far. I didn’t need the distraction and arguments, and I didn’t need anybody objecting that it was still an insane, suicidal plan. Because it was; I was sure there would be somebody on the bridge, and he would certainly be looking out over the bow from time to time. It was just barely possible that we could get ridiculously lucky and time it so that he was looking away when we climbed on board—but I didn’t feel lucky. Nothing about this whole absurd expedition felt lucky. I had only a heavy sick feeling of dread and a cold lump in my stomach and a totally unshakable conviction that we were all about to die—or at least that I was, which is just as bad, as far as I’m concerned.
