The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“I should be so lucky. This one” — Lil jerks her head toward the Scavenger, a daysailer owned by one of the locals — “has got his radio on all weekend. Rap music or whatever their version is called here. Makes Bill grind his teeth.”
Bill wraps fine-grade sandpaper around a wooden dowel and goes to work on the mahogany trim. He and Lil wear the same brand of T-shirt and shorts, Topsiders, matching hooded wind-breakers when they sit out at night. Emmett wonders if they swap clothes.
“I never figured — Whitey and Edna—”
Lil lays out her brushes. “I know. Edna was telling me just last week that they were looking into a condo here.”
“My wife is convinced you can’t live on a sportfisherman,” says Emmett. He can see the tuna tower of the Silver King, Whitey and Edna’s old Bertram, over the forest of masts. “Suppose they’ll auction it right away. Unless Whitey paid their mooring through the year.”
Lil frowns, staring at her varnish. “Condos. They must have been desperate.”
“Well — storm season comes around, some folks like solid ground under their beds. What do you hear about this Cedric?”
Cedric is the tropical storm curling in from the Atlantic, possibly mutating into the first hurricane of the summer.
Lil glances out over the channel. Clear blue sky, flat water. “It’ll blow itself out. Peaked too early.”
“It does hit, it’s gonna ruin your finish.”
Lil shrugs. “Best way to protect the wood.” She chooses a brush, riffling the bristles with her thumb. “No, you buy into that condo life, you’re ready to throw in the towel.”
“They’ve put up some real luxury boxes in the last few years.”
“The ones we looked at, that Pelican Cove outfit? They’d blow down like a stack of cards.”
Bill grimaces. “Pelican Cove.”
Lil jerks her head toward her husband. “Says he’d just as soon ride it out in the marina.”
“There’s gonna be a big one hits this island sooner or later, Cedric or no Cedric. I can’t say they’ve knocked themselves out preparing for it.”
“Cyannot stop de wind, mon,” mutters Bill, mimicking Roderick’s island lilt. “She come, she come.”
Lil dips the edge of her brush into the varnish, careful to avoid dripping as she starts to apply it. “We’ve been thinking about Curaçao.”
“Dutch people.”
“A lot of them speak English. And the prices are right.”
“What’s a rum collins?”
“Less than here, I can tell you that.”
“I suppose. Muriel and I talk about Mexico now and again.”
“Mañanaland.”
Emmett shrugs. “The peso just keeps falling. Our checks could go a lot further—”
Bill wipes the section he’s just sanded with a damp cloth. “Mexico,” he says. “One good case of the trots and you’re history.”
A fishing skiff with a pair of locals aboard chugs around the reef of auto tires that serves as a breakwater and heads for the fuel dock. The marina was nothing much when Emmett first tied up here twenty years ago, rickety, unpainted wood crusted with gull droppings. As the cruisers and their money grew in importance, the mosquito fleet had been driven to shallower harbor farther west and a French corporation built the new jetty and facilities. Now ramshackle boats like this might wander in illegally to sightsee among the yachts or hustle up charters, but when Roderick is on duty they don’t dare tie up. The man working the outboard waves lazily to Emmett and calls out.
“Golden Years,” he smiles. “Bringin’ the chat round.”
A lot of the locals call him by the name of the boat, and Muriel endures being hailed as Mrs. Golden Years. “Could be worse,” he likes to tell her. “If we had that catamaran on C Pier you’d be Betty Bazooka.”
Rut Adams is up on the flydeck of the Squire, nursing a bloody mary and training binoculars on the new arrival at the far end of the marina.
“Anything to report?”
Rut brings his binoculars down, his eyes taking a moment to adjust.
“Emmett. Caught me spying.”
“I don’t suppose they spend their time looking at us.”
It was just there one morning, looking more like a space-age hotel than a boat, dwarfing the Cheoy Lee and Broward hundred-footers in the Land of the Giants. A forty-plus sportfisherman was perched like a toy on the aft deck, and the heliport had been used once so quickly nobody saw who jumped in or out of the chopper.
“They got manned submersibles on that thing — those Jacques Cousteau things? Decompression chamber in the lazarette, satellite dish, large-format screen like a movie theater. Got two Jacuzzis, personal trainer, cook with a full staff—”
“You saw all this?”
Rut shakes his head. “Archibald, the local fella who comes around with the crabs? He’s been onboard a bunch of times. Got a thing going with one of the maids. Filipino gal.”
“I’ve still never seen the man,” says Emmett. “Just people running around in uniforms setting things up.”
“He’s been here once or twice.”
“Imagine being the center of all that. You get a whim to go out and dozens of people jump into action.” Emmett had walked on the pontoon beside it once, pacing off at least eighty yards, staring up at his reflection in the tinted Plexiglas cabin panels. Nothing stirred aboard. Muriel calls it the Mother Ship and says it’s crewed by bulb-headed aliens. “So what’s he look like?”
Rut clears his throat, recalling. “Swarthy fella — remember the one Nixon used to hang out with? Relleno — Refugio—”
“Rebozo.”
“Looks like him.”
“Drug money?”
“Not enough security hanging around. I don’t think he’s Spanish of any kind. Not an Arab either — Arabs don’t dive.”
“They don’t?”
“Hell no. My guess is he’s some Greek, owns one of these international dot-com outfits. Making money out of thin air.”
“What you think it runs him to keep it floating?”
Rut always knows what things cost or has an educated guess. He stands on top of his big Hatteras, calculating, face glowing red with his first drink of the day. “Damn if I can even imagine. Meggy was here the other day” — Rut’s wife, Meggy, lives in their cliff house and only visits on weekends — “her Daddy owned half the state of Delaware and even her jaw dropped when she got a look at it. I’d say crew and staff alone is a good fifty, sixty grand a week.”
Emmett whistles, looks back toward the massive yacht. “A thing that size, hardly know you’re on the ocean.”
“You sail people,” Rut grins, “wrestling a hunk of canvas and puking your guts out.”
“Dacron,” says Emmett. “Things have progressed a little.”
“If there’s no wind you’re still fucked. Hey, what’s the deal with Whitey and what’s-her-name?”
“Edna.”
“Edna.”
“No details yet. I’m hoping to track Roderick down.”
They both look toward D Pier, to the yellow tape cordoning off the Silver King in its berth.
“I think of him sitting out there every evening in his fighting chair, knocking one back.”
“G and T,” says Emmett.
“That what it was? I’m a Scotch man myself. I could see him from up here — he’d raise his glass, we’d toast the sunset.”
“A real gentleman, Whitey.”
“Health problems?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That age, it can go fast.”
“They brought in a black marlin last month. Whitey was in the chair — fought him four, five hours before he made his last run. Boated him, cut him loose, but he just floated sidewise on the surface so they circled around and gaffed him in before the sharks could gather. Good seven, seven-and-a-half feet. You can’t swing that with health problems.”