Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ No, no… didn’t say that.”

Again they laughed together, now with the plane coming in over the water at seventy feet above the surface. They saw a few scattered boats, but most boaters had wisely chosen to steer clear of these waters for the duration of the storm retreat.

“ Look, over there in the distance!” shouted Eriq, blowing out their ears through the phone sets.

“ Where?” asked Jessica.

“ Over there!” repeated Eriq.

“ Give us a direction, Eriq. Ten o’clock, two o’clock, what?”

“ Oh, yeah… ahh, three o’clock.”

Jessica and Lansing looked immediately to their right, Lansing leaning in and over Jessica a bit, catching her perfume as he did so. “Small craft, nothing like what you’re looking for,” he advised.

“ How would you know what we’re looking for?” countered Eriq.

“ Hey. I listen to the news reports. I read the papers. They say it was a schooner-class ship, and that thing down there’s no schooner. A schooner has three masts, for one thing, and it moves over the water differently…”

“ How can you possibly tell from this distance?” Jessica wondered aloud.

“ The way she moves in the water. A schooner slices through the water. She doesn’t bounce atop the waves.”

“ You’re sure of that?”

“ I am, so don’t waste your time or our fuel.”

“ Looks pretty impressive to me,” countered Eriq, still staring at the boat below. They were south of Naples now, out over the water, nearing the straits of Florida. “Jess, what do you think?”

She had to crane her neck to see back over her shoulder now, twisting in her seat, showing some backside to Don. Lansing encouraged her to release the controls and rise out of her seat to lean over for a better view while he took in his own better view of her form, all the while telling her that it wasn’t a large enough boat.

“ I can’t tell from here,” she confessed.

“ Then take her in for a closer look,” Santiva said, his voice grating now, giving way to his stress and fatigue.

Jessica brought the plane around, and they gently glided in over the boat and saw her markings clearly enough. There were several people aboard the large two-masted sloop, all waving in wild abandon at the buzzing, puzzling plane some thirty-five-odd feet above them now.

Don Lansing had been right: They needed to pick and choose better. It wouldn’t do to waste fuel on so many red herrings, especially if the killer arrived at Grand Cayman before them and managed to unload his boat for another one while they were uselessly shopping the sea from boat to boat.

“ So you’re Dr. Jessica Coran; damn…” Lansing said as they climbed to a safer altitude.

“ Are we back to that?” Eriq irritably asked.

Lansing ignored Eriq, continuing, “Pete’s just not going to believe this. But I gotta tell you, even if he cans my ass, it will’ve all been worth it. Something to tell my kids someday.”

“ Oh? Do you have children?” Jessica asked.

“ No, not at the moment, but someday I suppose I will.”

Jessica smiled back at her newfound admirer and tried to simply enjoy flying the craft. But his remark stuck with her, that someday he supposed he would have children. Something about him said otherwise. And she thought of her own someday plans, the ones she had made with James Parry. They seemed now like clouds that had dissolved and floated off over the cerulean-blue sea and into oblivion. She felt a pang of loss. To combat the feeling, she concentrated on the sense of power and sheer delight in manipulating the aircraft. She was a beauty, this little plane, and Lansing, smiling over at Jessica, understanding her rush of emotions, didn’t seem in the least concerned about reclaiming the controls.

“ We’ve got to turn her due east, Dr. Coran,” he told her now.

“ For Miami?”

“ It’d be the safest and best route.”

“ But it seems so indirect. Why can’t we refuel in Key West?”

He hesitated a moment. “You don’t want to be with me the next time I touch down in Key West. Trust me on this one.”

She looked into his eyes, saw the sincerity there and relinquished, turning the plane’s nose toward the sun. “Miami it is. We can check in with the MPD while we’re there, Eriq. Let them know of our whereabouts.”

“ Yeah, I suppose that’s a good idea.”

“ Going over Cuban airspace is a little tricky,” confided Lansing. “We’ll do much better getting into the established flight lanes.”

The tropical maelstrom, which the Tau Cross had carefully sluiced through by keeping at the outer fringes of the storm, had been nothing compared with the North Atlantic sea squall that Warren Tauman had endured coming over from England. In the earlier storm, the waves were as tall as houses, and he’d been hurt and had to handle every problem with a sprained ankle and a snapped mast. He and the Tau Cross had limped over the ocean after that for days, and he’d feared that he would never see land again; he’d found no wind for seventy-two hours and had to rely on his diesel motors and his less than keen sense of direction. Somehow he’d gotten hopelessly lost, his ship having passed through the western Caribbean waters and amid any number of small island ports, none of which he had seen until he’d come far to the southeast of America and sighted land- the Dominican Republic. He’d put to port there, but for only a brief few days, finding it less than hospitable, and even before all necessary repairs to his ship could be done-largely due to the fact that he could find no one capable or quick enough-he left this island world only to locate another: Cayman Brae Island, as he came to know it later.

Cayman Brae was like a godsend. He’d been alone for too long with his thoughts and Mother, who taunted him, telling him he was a fool and that he would die alone at sea. But his spirit guide deposited him instead at the Cayman Islands. The Caymans were composed of three islands: Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brae. All were at low elevations, but Cayman Brae rose 140 feet into the sky with its limestone bluffs, and it became a beacon for him that morning after leaving the inhospitable Dominican shore. He saw Cayman Brae rise from the water like some sort of Loch Ness Monster, yet it was nonthreatening, beautiful. He stayed on at Cayman Brae for two weeks while true craftsmen worked on his mast and windows and whatever else needed repair, paying in funds still available to him on his mother’s life insurance policy. As for the more serious problems with navigational equipment-nav, as the seasoned sailors called it-computer hardware and software damage, he’d have to await his arrival in America. In Cayman Brae he learned just how close he was to America, to Florida waters.

While remaining in the safe port during that time period, Warren had wisely restrained from any hunting and killing until all repairs were finished and paid for. He’d stocked new food, fixed broken equipment, beefed up weak points in the boat and rigging, repaired old sails and got some new ones. After that, he began exploring each of the three islands in the chain, and while doing so, he began to collect a handful of willing victims.

Now he raced for this safe port again, low on food but with his boat intact and sound. He sat at the navigation station, studying weather maps. Sitting in this area of the cabin was a bit like sitting at the center of a teacup; at the center of the cup was the nav station. His chair faced a phalanx of electronic equipment, blipping radar screens, computers, radios and instruments towering to the cabin’s ceiling. At the top was a portable CD player strapped in with bungee cords. From here, he could read wind speed true, wind direction and wind speed apparent in the bright red letters of the light-emitting diodes before him.