The phone went dead; Dar closed it. "s.h.i.t."

Kerry studied the screen. "Looks like he's out on the water, Dar," she said. "Nearest coordinates are just west of St. Johns." She tapped a few more keys. "Jesus, you captured the digitized output?"

"I never do things halfway." Dar sat down. "We've got a problem. He wants twenty-five grand." She studied the phone. "So now, in addition to a relic I don't have, I also have to turn over a suitcase of cash I don't have. This is getting better and better every d.a.m.n minute." Her disgust was evident in her expression. "And to top it all off, a d.a.m.n tropical weather system's headed this way and it might be developing circulation."

Kerry frowned. "At this time of year? Dar, it's December!"

"No kidding." Dar rubbed her eyes. "All right, let's see where*269 these coordinates are."

Charlie got up and walked over, leaning on the couch arm to see what Dar was doing. "Weather means trouble," he commented.

"But not 'til after this d.a.m.n thing's over."

Dar typed in the two coordinates DeSalliers had given her and waited for the program to plot them on a map. The grid drew in, then a sketchy outline of the islands, then a blinking crosshair. It was set in the middle of the water, as she'd expected it to be, in a lonely stretch of water south of the islands.

"No-man's-land." Charlie grunted. "'Bout two hours run out there. Not much but a hole in the ocean."

"So he has to get from here..." Kerry put her fingertip on the place where the cell signal had been tracked from, "...to here. And we have to get from here..." she pointed to where they were in St.

Thomas, "...to here. Much shorter."

"We could get there first," Bob commented. "You think they'll have your friend in the boat with them? I guess they'd have to, huh?"

Dar studied the screen. "If they actually intend on making the swap, yeah." She heard Charlie suck in a breath. "I figure I need to make him show me he's got Bud before I agree to anything."

"You think he'd double-cross... Oh, what a stupid question."

Kerry rubbed her face with one hand. "Dar, if we don't really have anything to give him, what are we going to do?" she asked. "You can only bluff him so far."

Dar folded her hands together and rested her chin against them. "I know that." Her pale eyes became hooded, the lids becoming mere slits over icy eyes. "If it takes us two hours to get out there, we've got until around nine thirty before we have to leave the dock. We've got until then to get something to turn over to him that'll seem real enough to pa.s.s."

"What about the money?" Charlie asked. "Got some people I can call."

"Not that creep from this morning!" Kerry blurted out. "Christ, I'd rather hock the boat than see his face again." She reached forward and pulled over the coffee tray, setting up two cups and starting to prepare them.

"No." Charlie cleared his throat gently. "Somebody else." He stood up and took out the cell phone. "d.a.m.n bill's gonna cost me an arm this month." He limped toward the door and went outside, closing it behind him.

Kerry and Dar exchanged glances. Dar pulled the laptop over and opened another program. "I'll get a wire transfer through, but it won't clear until tomorrow. Maybe if he can get something temporary until then..."

"Expensive vacation." Kerry leaned against her lover's 270*

shoulder. "Next time, how about we just go do something traditional, like visit Niagara Falls?"

"It'd probably stop while we were there and we'd have to fix that, too." Dar finished her request and hit enter with an annoyed click. "Okay." She examined her other running programs. "Nothing else yet."

"You think there will be?" Kerry asked.

Dar shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. And you know something? I'm getting pretty tired of saying that I don't know." She rested her head against her hands again, banging her forehead against her fists lightly as she rocked back and forth.

Kerry put an arm around Dar, rubbing her back with light fingertips. "Okay, Bob, what specifically did you think you'd find here? Really, I mean."

Bob had been staring at Dar in fascination. Now he looked at Kerry with startled eyes. "Um...I dunno, really. I kinda expected...um...well, Tanya thought the old man would maybe work a deal with us if he knew we were trying to rake something up."

"No, huh?" Kerry's brow creased. "Somehow, a guy who would steal from his own mother doesn't seem to me to be the type to deal." She gently moved the laptop away from Dar and cracked her knuckles before opening a database request and starting to type.

"Now, if we a.s.sume Grandpa Wharton wasn't nuts, then he was here for a reason, right?"

"Mm," Dar grunted.

"Okay. I'm going to search the exports from here during that time period and see what I can find. If he was here, it must have been for something worth his while. Since he was a fisherman, I doubt it was timber." Kerry typed quickly and accurately. When she felt warmth on her shoulder, she looked up to find Dar's chin resting on it. Her hand stopped moving for an instant, then started up again. She was very aware of Bob's watching eyes, but the comfort of Dar's cheek pressed against her jaw trumped the mild embarra.s.sment at the intimacy, and she leaned her head against Dar's.

"Hey," Dar breathed into her ear, "while you're there, do a search in the public archives for smuggling busts during that time period."

Kerry turned her head slightly and looked into Dar's eyes at very, very close range. "Smuggling?"

"Smuggling?" Bob asked.

"And do a public records search on him in Maine," Dar said.

"We're a.s.suming he was here for a reason. Nothing says it had to be a legal one."

"Hey!" Bob protested. "He was a good guy."*271 Kerry nodded slightly as she typed.

Charlie came back in, his face visibly red. He limped over and sat down, juggling the cell phone as though he wanted to chuck it against the cabin wall. "Waste of a phone call."

Dar looked up from a conversation on her own cell and shook her head.

Kerry motioned him over to the galley where she was standing.

"Want a beer?" she offered sympathetically.

Charlie sat down on the stool bolted to the deck and rested his arms on the galley counter. He played with the phone, still visibly upset. "All we done for them, and they tell me to get lost." He rested his fist against his jaw. "Thought after all this time, things'd changed. Guess I was wrong. Wait 'til the next time those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds show up with a busted head, wanting Bud..." He stopped suddenly and his eyes blinked a few times. "d.a.m.n, I hope he's all right."

Kerry set an opened bottle of beer in front of him and leaned on the counter. "I'm sure he will be, Charlie. We'll do our best to make sure of that," she a.s.sured him in a gentle tone.

Charlie looked at her. "I feel like a first-rate fool. Thinking them people'd gotten to be our friends."

Dar walked over and leaned next to him. "All right. I arranged for a draft for tomorrow. When I talk to DeSalliers tonight, I'll have to work a deal with him. I can't get it any sooner. There isn't a big enough supply of cash on the d.a.m.n island. The nearest place I could get it from was one of the cruise ships, and the closest one isn't due in until tomorrow night."

Charlie looked at her. "DeSalliers ain't gonna buy that. He wants to get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"I know," Dar agreed. "So I have to make what I'm gonna give him good enough for him to forget about the cash."

Kerry tapped her on the arm. "Dar, we don't have anything."

"He doesn't know that."

"You can't risk it," Kerry protested quietly.

"Kerry, what choice do we have?" Dar asked, just as quietly.

"The searches came up with zilch. We've got no clue as to why Wharton was here. We have no proof he was nuts, no proof he wasn't. What we have is a d.a.m.n wooden cigar box and my ability to lie through my teeth."

Kerry closed her eyes. "Christ." She exhaled, staring at the counter. Then she looked up. "DeSalliers is probably going to head around St. Thomas and then around the east part of the island to the meet point, right?"

"Probably. Why?"

"Why don't we go dive the site? What do we have to lose? Maybe we can find something," Kerry said. "We've got a couple of hours."

"Hey, that's a great idea!" Bob had joined them. "He won't 272*

even be paying attention to the site now." He sounded excited for the first time since he'd joined them. "Let's do it!"

Dar calculated the times, then turned and headed for the door without a word. Maybe they would find something, maybe they wouldn't, but it was something physical she could do and that sure as h.e.l.l beat the c.r.a.p out of sitting around the boat for four hours pulling her hair out. And sometimes, she acknowledged, she got lucky. Dar hoped this was one of those times.

Chapter.

Twenty-three.

IT WAS VERY quiet at the wreck site. The sun was gliding seaward, and there was just a very light chop on the water. The air was cool and dry, and Kerry tipped her head back to see a cloudless sky above her. "Nice." She was dressed in her shortie wetsuit for the evening dive, the neoprene compressing her body with a slightly annoying snugness that would relax once she was underwater.

Dar, also in her wetsuit, was standing by their gear. She put a bootied foot up on the bench and strapped a dive knife to her leg, then turned and sat down, getting into her BC and strapping it across her chest.

"Are you sure I can't go down too?" Bob asked for the fourth time. "Honest, I think I'd have a better idea of what to look for."

"No." Dar stood up and cinched her straps tighter. She tied an extra dive light to her belt. "You said you didn't have any clue what you were looking for; don't change your story now." She motioned Kerry over to get her tank. "We don't have that much time."

Kerry didn't deny the feeling of half-excitement, half- nervousness that tickled her guts. She walked over and sat down, put her arms through her BC, and stood up. The tank felt heavy, and she had to take a breath before she shrugged it into place and fastened the inner belly strap. She wasn't really used to wearing the wetsuit and she flexed her arms, then ran a finger inside the sleeve constricting her biceps. It seemed snugger than she remembered, but then, the last time she'd worn it had been the previous year, and all those curls at the gym probably had something to do with that.

Dar stepped over to her and tightened the front clasp, then patted her on the side. "Ready?"

"Ready." Kerry checked the fastenings holding her various hoses and tapped the inflation valve on her BC. She picked up her mask and followed Dar to the stern gate, already pulled back to give them access to the sea.

"Charlie, if anything's going on up here, use this." Dar handed him a ball peen hammer. "Smack it on the ladder, not the hull, huh?"

274*

The ex-sailor took the hammer and nodded tensely. "If that phone rings, I'll answer it," he said. "See if I can get that a.s.shole to let me talk to Bud."

Dar patted him on the shoulder.

"Good luck." Bob stuck his hands in his pockets, looking spectacularly useless. "Anything I can do while you're down there?"

Dar paused, adjusting her mask. "You any good at heating up soup? There's some in the cabinet. Give us forty-five minutes and we'll be back up here, whether we find something or not."

"Okay, sure," Bob agreed readily. "It's kinda chilly up here.

Good idea."

"Thank you, honey," Kerry murmured under her breath.

Dar smiled, then stepped off the stern and dropped into the water with a light splash, disappearing under the surface almost immediately.

Kerry made a last minute adjustment to her dive knife and then followed, committing herself to the sea.

THIS DIVE WAS different. Kerry felt it as soon as she entered the water and traded the warm sunset for the dim cool of the water.

She could see Dar waiting for her, one hand resting lightly on the anchor line, and she headed toward her as her body adjusted to the change in temperature. The wetsuit really did help ward off the chill. It was only a shortie, but it kept the core part of her body a lot warmer than it would have been in just a swimsuit, and once the neoprene got wet and loosened up, it became fairly comfortable.

She caught up to Dar, and they started downward at a rate faster than they usually went. Kerry had to equalize the pressure in her ears a few times as it built up during her descent. She could dimly see the wreck below, Dar having anch.o.r.ed the boat a lot closer this time than on their previous dive. The sunlight above was already fading, and as they got closer to the wreck, Dar turned on her dive light. Kerry did likewise.

On the bottom, they paused to regroup. Dar clipped her light to her vest, and then spread her hands out to encompa.s.s the wreck.

She then indicated a point halfway, and swept her hand out again and pointed at Kerry.

Kerry nodded, understanding that they would split up and each take half of the wreck. Dar then pointed to the interior of the ship and closed her fist, shaking it. She pointed at herself, then at Kerry, and then clasped her hands together before pointing at the interior again.

With another nod, Kerry agreed that she didn't want to explore inside the vessel without Dar there. Dar held up a thumb and*275 forefinger in an okay sign.

They separated and swam off in opposite directions. Kerry took a moment to do a complete 360-degree turn, just to place herself inside the ocean. She fixed the location of the anchor rope in her mind, just in case, then went to the very front of the wreck debris and started looking around.

The wreck wasn't really all in one piece. Dribbles of it were spread out a little, pieces of wood and iron half buried in the soft, white sand. Kerry slowly swam over them, letting the tips of her gloved hands lightly brush their encrusted surface. There was nothing out of the ordinary that she could see. The pieces of metal were cleats and other marine hardware she readily recognized.

Kerry drifted a few feet further and then she stopped and turned, looking back at the debris. Wait a minute. Her brow creased.

I do recognize all of it. She scanned the wreckage again, and then looked closer. Anchor chains, railings, braces-it was all there.

What was bothering her was what wasn't there. She'd never been on a fishing vessel, and that was the point. Even after all this time, there should have been a lot of junk lying around in pieces that she had no clue about-things like nets, and winches, and whatever the heck fishermen used when they did it on a commercial basis. Kerry paused and thought about what she'd seen inside the hold of the vessel: crates, boxes, bunks.

She flipped over onto her back and studied the wreck as a whole, spotting Dar's light down around the stern area. The sunlight was all but gone, and the boat was settling into a morose gloom, blending in with the reef surrounding it.

With a soft grunt, Kerry went vertical again and continued her search. She spotted a tumbled piece of wreckage off to one side and swam over to it, settling to the sand on her knees as she let the buoyancy out of her BC. She carefully eased the old wood aside, then lifted the piece and examined it. The wood was covered in sea growth, which she gently eased off of one part of it. She could see darker markings underneath, and she worked at it until she'd cleared a small area of the wood. Her light revealed a partial word, or something that might be a word. It didn't mean anything to her, however. She put the piece of wood into her catch bag and continued exploring.

DAR FOUND HERSELF at the back end of the boat, seeing nothing remarkable in the debris trail leading out from it. She drifted down to the bottom and looked at the half-buried stern, where there were still faint traces of the name of the boat on the encrusted metal.

She ran her hands along the slanted deck, jerking back when an eel squiggled out of what had once been the engine exhaust.

276*