Kerry exhaled.

"Dar's taking it pretty hard, huh?" Charlie asked.

"Yeah." Kerry glanced at him shyly. "She hates being caught by surprise." Her eyebrows contracted together. "So do I, actually."

"Life does that." Charlie stuffed the last shirt into the small, battered canvas bag and slung it over his shoulder. "She done all right. Guy's nutters." He limped slowly toward the door. "Whole thing's nutters."

"Well, I thought so." Kerry opened the door for him and followed him out. "But Dar's pretty big into situational responsibility."

Charlie grunted. "Just like her daddy."

Kerry thought about that. "That's true," she mused. "Dad does like to make sure everything's just so." She looked up to see Charlie glancing back at her. "I appreciate that about him. I'm glad Dar inherited it."

"He put up with you calling him that?" The ex-sailor seemed amused.

"What?" Kerry asked. "Dad?"

Charlie nodded.

"Sure." Kerry walked slowly next to him. "I don't have a very good relationship with my own family. Dar's folks treat me more like a daughter than my parents ever did, and they know I love them for that." She found a surprising lump in her throat and had to take a moment to swallow it. "Besides, I never got the feeling he minded being a daddy."

"No." The older man smiled briefly. "Andy wore one of Dar's nappy pins on his gear for years, and n.o.body dared say boo to him about it."

258*

Kerry had to smile at the vision. "She'll be all right," she a.s.sured him. "She just has to finish kicking herself, and then we can figure out what the heck we're going to do about this mess." Her hand curled around the door handle at the end of the corridor and she pulled it open. "I'll feel a lot better when we're back on the boat, though."

"You and me both, Kerry." Charlie limped toward the front door of the hospital. Dar's distinctive form was visible through the half gla.s.s. "Me and Bud have some friends out here. Maybe we can get some help from them."

They emerged into the warmth. Dar was standing with her hands in her pockets, her sungla.s.ses effectively hiding her eyes. A battered cab was waiting nearby.

Kerry followed Dar over to the cab and got in, while Dar held the door open so Charlie could ease gingerly into the front seat.

Dar joined Kerry in the back and they drove off, navigating the winding streets in silence.

DAR WENT BEHIND the galley counter and poured herself a gla.s.s of milk, then went into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin from the bottle in the medicine chest. She swallowed them as she emerged to rejoin Kerry and Charlie in the living s.p.a.ce of the boat. Kerry patted the seat next to her on the couch, and Dar detoured from the chair she'd been aiming for and settled next to her partner instead. Now that the shock had worn off a bit, and despite the headache she'd developed, her problem-solving instincts were beginning to kick in again. Facts were starting to sort themselves out from the chaos.

"Okay." Dar took a sip of milk. "First off, Wharton's got no home base here in the islands, right?"

"Not that we know of, no." Kerry had the laptop fired up and had been doing some quick data searches. "Not that he couldn't be anywhere," she added with a sigh.

"True," Dar agreed. "But if he's on the islands somewhere, we should be able to find a record of him doing business." She looked over Kerry's shoulder. "See who has the telecom contract for St.

Thomas."

Kerry's fingers moved and then she pointed. "There."

"Do we have a reciprocal with them?"

Dar's voice had started sounding more normal, and Kerry took a moment to be grateful for that as she searched out the information her lover was asking for. "Better." She suppressed a smile. "We're the outsource."

"Okay." Dar nodded. "Give me the laptop."

She traded her milk for the machine and settled it onto her lap.*259 "All right. Let's start solving this problem by using our heads instead of our a.s.ses for a change." She started up her programming language and began constructing a script. "I'll capture traffic to Wharton's area code and match it against his telco's records database."

"What'll that tell you?" Charlie asked curiously. "We don't much care, do we? They ain't sent Bud all the way over there, did they?"

Dar shook her head. "Probably not. But if we get a hit on Wharton's number, coming from this island, chances are the originating number is DeSalliers'."

"He probably has a cell," Kerry stated quietly.

"If he does, it's probably a sat cell like ours." Dar finished her task, then opened a connection to the managed switches and inserted the program into place. "Pretty simple," she muttered. "I'll just have it dump to a log, and email me with it every hour."

"Is all that legal?" Charlie inquired.

Dar glanced up at him. "What, data parsing? Technically it's all part of the internetwork I'm paid to manage, so if you mean do I legitimately have access, yes. Should I be dipping into that data stream for my own purposes? No."

"Oh."

Dar continued to type. "The cops can request this, with a court order. But we can't call the cops and we're not in a position to pet.i.tion the courts, so I'm just doing what I have to do." She opened another window and considered it, drumming her fingers lightly on the keys. "Let 'em sue me."

"a.s.suming we find it, what are we going to do with the information?" Kerry asked. "Chances are, when he calls back, he'll tell us where to meet him anyway."

"True," Dar agreed absently. "But we've been waiting for someone to make the next move the entire week. I'm over it. I want control back." She opened her cell phone and typed a number off the back into the new script she was building. "When he calls me, this'll locate him to his nearest relay point station." She linked the script to a mapping module.

"Won't do no good to call the cops anyhow," Charlie remarked.

"He'll just buy 'em, if he hasn't already."

"Like the pirates have?" Dar asked without missing a beat.

"Just before he left, Bud was fixing to tell us about your friends."

She felt Kerry stiffen in surprise next to her, heard the faint hiss of indrawn breath.

Charlie turned red, and directed his eyes to the deck of the boat. 'd.a.m.n," he muttered softly. "I know you ain't understanding that at all, huh?"

Dar felt very little satisfaction in her guess being on the mark.

260*

She finished her program and compiled it, finding it very soothing to her jangled nerves to be doing something at which she was comfortably competent. She had a brief, incongruous memory of her mother retreating to her easel after a stressful bout, losing herself in the canvas where she alone had control of what happened, and felt an odd sense of comprehension about that, finally.

"Understanding?" Kerry spoke up. "So, you know those pirates?"

Charlie didn't answer for a bit. He flexed his hands, then rested them on his knees. "It's not what you think," he started off. "Things are tough down here."

Kerry tore her eyes off the coding Dar was doing and concentrated on their guest. "And?" she prompted. "That makes what they're doing okay?"

Charlie shrugged. "Survival is what counts," he said. "Bunch of folks got together and kind of worked out a deal: if you had a little extra, you'd toss it in the kitty; and if you needed a little, you'd take." He shifted, still gazing at the floor. "Worked out okay."

"Okay?" Kerry could hardly believe what she was hearing.

"That's not what those pirates do. I know. I saw them," she said.

"They weren't Robin Hood and his merry men."

He gave her a guilty look. "Didn't start out that way. It was just... One day this guy who was in with us, his cousin came in from the States. Slick guy."

"Bet we know who that is," Dar muttered, her eyes fastened on the screen.

Kerry grunted agreement.

"They'd just been doing little stuff-salvage, selling bits of wood and stuff to the shops, that kinda thing," Charlie explained.

"A little smuggling, just bulls.h.i.t stuff. But this guy talked them into a deal where he could get them big money, he said, if they could get him abandoned boats."

"Abandoned?" Kerry said. "You're not seriously saying anyone believed that those boats were abandoned, are you?"

Another shrug preceded Charlie's continuing. "Anyway, they got him one, nothing big, just a little skiff, and he sold it off for them. Worked out pretty good. Made it nice. Helped out a lot of folks." Charlie still couldn't meet Kerry's eyes. "n.o.body got hurt."

"Except the guy who lost his boat," Kerry said.

"They got their money back," Charlie argued. "Them insurance companies pay off but good. Probably went out and got him a brand new one, like the rest of them did," he said. "He gets a new boat; we get what we need. Who gets hurt?"

"The insurance company," Dar said.

"They can afford it," Charlie said, his voice going harder. "All*261 these folks out here-not the big shots who stay in them hotels, but the rest of us, just trying to sc.r.a.pe out a living-can't." He finally lifted his head. "They never went after little people, just the big rollers with more money than sense. The fat cats."

Dar looked up at him. "People like me." She glanced at Kerry.

"Like us."

Charlie took a breath. "No, that ain't true."

Dar c.o.c.ked her head. "Of course it's true." She lifted a hand and gestured around. "I've got a five million dollar condo to go with this, and four times that in the bank, Charlie," she told him. "I run one of the biggest computer companies in the d.a.m.n world.

h.e.l.l, they came after me the other day."

Charlie sighed. "Jacka.s.ses," he muttered. "Bud told 'em to steer clear of you."

"Gee, thanks," Kerry murmured.

"You don't understand," Charlie told her.

"You're right. I don't," Kerry readily agreed. "So let me ask you this-if these guys are so wonderful, how come you had to get a loan from the greasy b.a.s.t.a.r.d we paid off this morning?"

Dar's eyebrow inched up at Kerry's tone. She set the laptop down on the table, all its programs busily running, and leaned back. "Good question."

Charlie sucked his lower lip for a moment, then shrugged again. "Same old story," he said quietly. "After they started this all up, they'd put up with us taking a few bananas. But when it came to hard cash, it was 'just say no to the dirty f.a.gs.'" His eyes held theirs steadily. "They tolerate us now. Took a while. Bud just refused to ask 'em to pay down the loan, though."

Dar just shook her head.

"Like I said, you don't understand," Charlie said. "You got it all." He got up and walked to the door, going out onto the back deck and closing the portal after him.

"Whoo," Kerry murmured. "This is getting really icky."

Dar found herself relaxing, despite the truth of that statement.

She took Kerry's hand in hers and clasped it, then brought it up to her lips. "He's right, though."

Kerry's blonde eyebrows hiked up almost to her hairline.

"Huh?"

"I do have it all." Dar looked steadily into Kerry's eyes, watching the expression on her face soften as warmth crept into the green orbs. "I don't agree with what they did, but I understand what drove it," she added. "It's been tough for them out here, and I think they were looking for a way to survive more than anything else."

Kerry nodded briefly. "I know. It's not like they got rich off it,"

she admitted. "But I can't go along with the fact they think no one 262*

gets hurt. Someone does, Dar. People could get hurt; they could even get hurt themselves."

"Like they almost did the other day." Dar sighed. "Let's save that problem for after we solve this one, huh? I'm about out of crusader coupons at the moment."

Dar had a point. "Okay," she concurred. "Let me go talk to him.

I know he's under a lot of stress. I can imagine how I'd be acting if I were in his place." She got up, leaned over and brushed Dar's lips with her own, then eased past her partner's outstretched legs and headed for the door.

Dar exhaled heavily, the air puffing her dark locks up off her forehead as she slumped back into the couch and regarded her laptop. She still felt like an idiot for getting into the situation, but her more practical side had taken over and put itself in charge-at least for the moment. Logic made a lot better platform for problem solving than hysteria.

Dar let her head drop back against the couch, easing a hand behind her neck and rubbing the tense muscles just at the base of her skull. "What next?" she asked the ceiling. Her instincts were urging her to action, but aside from the digital searching her programs were doing on her behalf, she wasn't sure if there was anything else she could do until DeSalliers called again.

Calling the police captain crossed her mind, but Dar rejected that idea out of hand. Even if she thought he might be on the up and up, and would keep the contact under wraps, she had no such confidence in anyone he worked with. Besides, she wasn't sure he was honest, and she wasn't about to risk Bud's life on it. After all, the people there had no reason to trust or help her any more than they did DeSalliers. We're both just rich Americans, aren't we? Dar's face scrunched into a frown as she applied that label to herself and didn't like the sound of it.

Charlie was right, she realized, but not for the reason he thought. She really didn't understand condoning piracy, but it had nothing to do with not knowing what sc.r.a.ping by was. She'd spent her whole childhood knowing that intimately. Maybe she'd just never bought into the whole Robin Hood thing.

That brought up the question of whether DeSalliers would make good on his threat. He'd avoided using brutal force in their first encounters, but as things had progressed, she'd gotten a sense that he was getting closer to crossing the line.

Okay, Dar, she lectured herself, let's think of this in more familiar terms. She got up and picked up her milk gla.s.s, carrying it back to the galley. "DeSalliers has a contract he's got to execute. He makes good on it, and he wins-he stays in business, he's got the money to keep going, life is good." She poured another gla.s.s and stood there sipping from it. "He probably figured this to be a no-brainer. He's*263 got power, he's got people, just head down here and rope off the wreck, dive it, destroy it, bring back proof, and he's home free."

She poked in the basket and retrieved one of the cookies Kerry had made earlier, dunking it in her milk and taking a bite of it.

"Think of it from his perspective, Dar. You think you're frustrated? Picture how he has to feel-he's got Bob to deal with, then he runs into you and you wreck his boat, then you keep him from Bob again, then your friends enlist with Bob to mess him up, then you call his contract holder and tell them he's a loser." Dar finished the cookie and fished around for another one. "Bet he's got a stuffed Rottweiler with my name pinned to it that he's using for target practice."

The thought put her in a slightly better mood. "Okay-so now I've got to convince him I've really got something he's looking for, long enough to trade it for Bud or at least find out where he's got him." She licked her lips. "Just like bluffing out a compet.i.tor, Dar.

You can do that."