The Water Keeper(35)

He was in the process of explaining how he couldn’t give out that information when the real harbormaster walked out of his office. “Can I help you?”

When I repeated myself, he shook his head. “Sir, I can’t give you that information any more than I would relay that information to anyone about you.”

“You got CC video of the marina?”

He nodded. “Of course. But—”

“Can I see it?”

The harbormaster was in his sixties. This was not his first rodeo. His forearm tattoos told me he’d served in the navy. Emboldened by the presence of his boss, the kid stiffened and raised his voice. “Captain, you’re not hearing me—”

I stepped closer and forced him to focus on my eyes. “They’ve kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl and they’re planning to sell her to the highest bidder when they hit South Florida or maybe Cuba. Then they’re going to use her body for whatever they like and dump her in the ocean or a snowbank in Siberia. The clock is ticking.” Scooter’s eyes grew wide as Oreo cookies. I pointed at his computer. “The video would be a great help.”

Scooter stuttered and finally spoke. “You mean it’s a—”

I finished the sentence while looking at the harbormaster. “A flesh ship.”

The harbormaster pointed at the computer and said, “Tim, bring up last night about midnight when Fire and Rain eased out of here under thick cloud cover.”

Scooter, aka Tim, clicked a few buttons and brought up a remarkably detailed video of a large, sleek, black yacht darkened with mirror-tinted windows that stretched about a hundred feet as she slid out of the marina, causing barely a ripple on the water. I saw no one aboard. No faces. No lights. No nothing. The only helpful information occurred when she turned south and I got a good look at her tender—a matching black, thirty-six-foot, quad-engine Contender with blue LED lights and trim. The tender’s name was Gone Girl.

I shook the harbormaster’s hand. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “If we can be of any help . . .”

I walked slowly back to Gone Fiction. I needed a few minutes to myself. The situation with Angel was getting worse, and now I was ferrying a dying old man to his grave.

When I dialed the number, he answered after one ring. “You in the Keys yet?”

I stared at Daytona Beach. “Not by a long shot.”

He told me what he had on slave ships moving up and down the ditch. Which wasn’t much, which told me these guys were pros. Not their first rodeo either. I told him what Clay had said about the two captains, their identifying tattoos, and about Fire and Rain and Gone Girl. He muttered as he talked because he was holding the pen cap in his mouth. When he finished writing, he said, “How you doing?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“It’s too much. Plus, I need you to look up Barclay T. Pettybone. Seventy-eight years old. Did sixty for murder somewhere in the South. Released in the last month or so. Admitted himself to Baptist Hospital in Jacksonville about a week ago. Then checked himself out. Prognosis bad.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“He’s on the boat.”

“Thought you worked alone.”

He knew better. The comment was rhetorical.

“Clock’s ticking. Wake somebody if you have to. I’ll check in with you in a day or so. I need to get to West Palm by tomorrow at the latest. I think the clock is ticking faster than I can hear.”

“Keep it between the markers.”

“I intend to.”

Back on Gone Fiction, I cranked the engine and we idled out of the marina. Clay sat in his beanbag and stretched out his legs and tipped his straw hat down over his eyes. In the miles ahead, I would learn that he hummed or whistled constantly, had a beautiful singing voice, and must have been a giant of a man at one time.

Summer stood next to me. She was clutching her book and staring down over the console at Clay. Gunner had dug himself a hole in the bag next to the old man. She put her hand on my arm. “Thank you.”

I was lost in the chart in front of me, trying to calculate time on the water and how much I could push it and where we might take on food and fuel. She tugged on my arm. “You been on the water a long time?”

The downtown area of Daytona is one long no-wake zone, which meant we had a while before I could put her up on plane. “All my life.”

“You love it, don’t you?”

I stared into the water. Through it. Back to my beginning. “I do.”

“Why?”

I waved my hand across the sea of rippled glass in front of us. “Thousands of knife-edged keels and spinning razor blades have cut this water right here. Sliced it into ten billion drops that somehow come back together again. No scar. Nothing can separate it. You could drop a bomb right here and within a few minutes, it’d look like nothing ever happened. Water heals itself. Every time. I like that. And if I’m being honest, maybe I need that.”

She slipped her hand farther inside my arm. Now she wasn’t tugging on my sleeve so much as winding her arm inside mine like a vine. She said nothing as the prop cut the water for the umpteen-millionth time. But despite the damage and the terror we inflicted on that spot of liquid earth, when I looked behind us, the water had come back together. It had healed. Farther on, there was no sign we’d ever been there.