Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“We’ll see when we get outside,” Cattaneo said.

They made the run to the Port Everglades cut, went through, past a rusting inbound Panamanian freighter, and out on the ocean. When they turned north, into the wind, they got some rock and roll, but nothing serious.

“What do you think?” Cattaneo shouted down the hatch.

“If it doesn’t get any worse than this, I’m okay with it!” Virgil shouted back.

“Good man!”

As darkness fell over the boat, Virgil suited up, checked and rechecked all the gear, went topside to look at the water. The rollers were perhaps two feet high, but showing no foam. “Looks okay, but I’m still worried about getting hit . . .”

“We’ll do it a little different this time,” Cattaneo said. “There’s nobody out here, so when I’m coming up to your light, I’ll stay well off to your left as you’re looking at me. I’ll kill the engine a couple of boat lengths farther out. By the time I get to you, we ought to be dead in the water.”

“But still riding up and down,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, but you won’t have any momentum to deal with. Shed your gear, stay well back, and we’ll pull it over the side. Then we’ll take the lift bags and you can stay off to the side, finning, until you’re ready to grab the boarding ladder. We’ll take the fins when you’re ready, and once you get your feet on the ladder, you’re good. We’ll help you up.”

Virgil nodded: “That should work. I mean, this really isn’t much, the rollers.”

Cattaneo said, “Better get your tanks on; we’re ten minutes out.”

Nine minutes and forty seconds later, Virgil took the big step into the water, got oriented as the sound of the boat faded away, and started toward the line of heroin cans.

Rae watched Virgil disappear over the side, then said to Cattaneo, “I’m gonna go lay down. Call me when you turn around.”

“You want somebody to lay down with?” Regio asked, showing some teeth.

“Okay, you win the day’s lame asshole award,” Rae said. “I don’t need some wannabe Tony Soprano climbing on me. I could use a little sniff of cocaine, if you happen to have some in your pocket.”

Cattaneo: “We don’t carry drugs. Or even use them, really.”

Made Rae laugh: “You don’t carry drugs? You mean, except for a hundred kilos of pure white boy?”

“Pure white boy. Sounds like a right-wing campaign slogan,” Lange said.

“Get your sleep,” Cattaneo said. “Gonna roll some. If you think you’re gonna hurl, try not to do it on the bed.”

Rae stretched out in the middle berth, tried to ignore the boat’s motion, and dozed; at some point, she woke, and felt somebody had peeked through the door, checking on her, but the door was closed and the cabin dark when she sat up. The Sig was cold against her leg, and might have been visible while she was asleep, but the room was dark, gun was dark, her leg was dark, and the gaffer tape was black, so, she thought, she was okay.

She straightened herself up, checked the gun, which was solid, left the cabin and climbed the stairs—Cattaneo called it a ladder—into the cockpit. A light mist, little more than a fog, was falling on the boat, dampening her face.

“How are we doing?” she asked.

“We’ll make the turn in a couple of minutes,” Cattaneo said. “Sit down and enjoy the night. There’s a poncho in the locker just below the ladder.”

She went back down the stairs and got it, pulled it on—a piece of plastic with a head hole and a hood—climbed back up the stairs and sat next to Regio. They made the turn, and off to the west, the oceanside condos had an eerie glow in the mist.

“Where are you from, Ally?” Cattaneo asked. “I mean, originally.”

“New Orleans.”

“New Orleans. Only been there a couple of times,” Cattaneo said. “Gotta tell you, I don’t understand the charm, though I had some shrimp thing that was good. My wife knew about it.”

“Well, it’s got beat up the last few years,” Rae said. “Still like it, though. They do got good food there. Good weed, good music.”

“Huh. Used to be a big Mafia town,” Regio said. “Long time ago, not much going on there now. All those ratshit gangbangers selling eight-balls and killing each other. Used to have some nice casinos, nice ladies.”

“You mean whores?” Rae asked.

“That’s ungenerous,” Cattaneo said.

“Ungenerous, but right,” Lange said. “I once spent a week down there and some of those women were flat nasty. I talked to one who had a scar that started between her tits and went all the way down to her pussy. Straight line. Some guys get off on that, I guess. Nasty.”

“If you didn’t get off on it, how do you know it went all the way down to her pussy?” Regio asked.

“She told us.”

“She told you?” Rae asked. “Just like that? ‘Yeah, I got a scar that goes from my tits all the way down to my pussy’?”

“Look. I was in a titty bar with this dufus motherfucker from Queens whose old lady would never let him go to one, so we got to New Orleans and he had to go. Anyway, she was hustling drinks and she was wearing a bikini and dufus saw this scar and asked her where it stopped.”

“And she told you?”

“Yeah. I don’t think he was the first guy who asked,” Lange said.

They rode along on that thought for a while, until Rae asked, “How much longer?”

Cattaneo looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”

“You really gonna pay me’n Willy a million dollars?”

“If Willy keeps bringing up the goods, damn straight. There may be a lot more than that. This was only the first load coming up the coast. We might get them to dump it further north next time, but Willy’s skills are exactly what we’ve been looking for. I like the way this boy works.”

“What happened to your first diver?”

“She decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She was from the Bahamas and she said she was going to go back and visit her mama after . . . the problem we had. But she didn’t do that. When we went to pick her up again, no diver, and no mama.”

“Jaquell was a nervous one,” Regio said. “We’re better off with Willy. And Ally.”

After some silence, Rae asked, “You the fools that shot those Coast Guard sailors last summer?”

Lange glanced at Regio, which was as good as a “Yes, he did it,” but Cattaneo said, “We really don’t talk about that kind of thing. It’s impolite. We don’t mess with the Coast Guard.”

“So it was somebody else who shot them?”

Regio was staring at her, his rattlesnake stare, but Rae had been stared at by worse people when she hadn’t had a gun taped to her ankle.

“We don’t talk about those things,” Cattaneo repeated. He smiled at her. “So, you know . . . shut the fuck up. Please?”

Virgil was floating on the surface. They spotted him a couple of hundred feet out, off to their left, and Cattaneo cut the motor and they glided on forward, slowing as they went, and then Lange threw Virgil a line. Virgil pulled himself up to the boat, which, as Cattaneo had said, was dead in the water. Virgil stayed five feet away, shed his backplate and tanks, passed them up to Regio and Lange. The lift bag line went next, up to Regio, and Virgil said, “Didn’t do so good this time, but I got five. We got a problem.”

“Five is good, five is fine,” Cattaneo called down to him.

When the orange lift bag, followed by the cargo bag, were pulled over the side of the boat, Virgil passed up his fins, then hooked his bare feet in the stainless steel boarding ladder, rode up and down a couple of times, then stood up on the bottom rung. Lange and Regio got him under the arms and helped him onto the boat. As soon as he was on, Cattaneo kicked the engine over.