Ocean Burning (9 page)

I could see Rigger sitting on the deck, awake now, scanning the beach through my pair of binoculars. Carlos must have brought them down from the bridge, but I couldn’t pick him out anywhere on deck. Carmen’s towel lay exactly where it had before, only now it was empty.

My head snapped around to check behind me.

No sign of Ben Hawking.

I scanned the water between me and the boat, on the lookout for a tell-tale ripple in the water.

“Conway!” a voice yelled. The call came from down the beach. Carmen walked along the shoreline toward me, perhaps a hundred yards away, a conch in her hand. She raised it in greeting and I jogged down to her.

“Since when do you call me Conway?”

“Does it bother you?” She dropped the shell and gathered her hair between her hands, tied it into a loose kind of knot.

“No, it’s just…”

“I’m just fucking with you, Conway,” she elbowed me under the ribs.

I broke into a smile beside myself. Just like old times. An image flashed vividly through my head: my hands twisted in her hair, pulling her to me, her lips red and hot and dry from the sun. I could almost taste her.

I glanced down, and caught one of my hands moving up and out, like it had a mind of its own. I snatched it back, my arms suddenly unwieldy pontoons hanging there, heavy and awkward. I didn’t know what to do with them.

“Frank—”

“Conway’s fine.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I was just joking.” Her face had turned serious. She was even more beautiful.

“Look, can you find me tonight?” I asked.

She frowned. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not like that. Just wait—wait until I’m alone somewhere, and then come find me. Can you do that?”

Her cat-green eyes refocused themselves somewhere back over my shoulder. I didn’t turn, but I knew Hawking must be back there, out of the trees finally. I’d already had more time than I’d expected.

“Now or never, Carmen. Will you find me?”

She nodded, and that was enough for me.

AN INFINITY OF stars twisted in the night sky, bullet holes shot through a heavy black tarp. I perched on the bow, scrunched in the stained canvas chair, and watched the sky turn overhead.

At last light the
Purple
had been allowed to drift within just a few yards of the beach. All the necessary materials for camping had been ferried, bucket-brigade style, up above the high-tide line. Even Rigger had been floated across on a small inflatable raft, the kind used in pools. The equipment included two tents, sleeping bags, charcoal, coolers, and fishing rods, everything needed for a night out on the beach.

The duffel bag had gone across as well, clutched to Rigger’s chest, as part of his “gear.”

Years on the ocean had taught me that there’s always a chance for the unexpected, and waking to find the boat had drifted off while we slept on a near-deserted island would be very bad news. There was no choice, I had explained. I told everyone I planned to spend the night alone aboard the
Purple
, just in case. I’d let her drift forty yards back out into the cove on the outgoing tide, then dropped the anchor lines.

The campfire was easily visible on shore. After a few hours it had gone out. The glow of a lantern lit Carmen and Ben’s tent for another hour or so, and then that went dark too.

I deliberately avoiding looking at my watch, but the stars told me it must be past two in the morning. My cramped joints agreed, and I gave up the fight for a pocket of warm air. I stood, threw off the blanket, and stretched my fingertips up towards the bullet-riddled heavens.

Time to give up,
I told myself.
She isn’t coming.

I’d been convinced of that for the last hour at least, but for the hundredth time I resolved to give her five more minutes.

I perched myself on the edge of the chair.

“Frank,” a voice whispered, directly behind me.

Every ounce of me tried to scream out. The sound climbed up out of my stomach and halfway through my throat before I strangled it. It shot out of me as air streaming between pressed lips, the hissing sound lost in the slapping of the waves.

I leapt off the chair and whirled around.

Carmen’s hair transluced in the starlight, her eyes refracted forest greens. She looked scared, and I had an overwhelming desire to hold her, to pull her to me and tell her that it would be all right. My hand reached out—I didn’t stop it this time, couldn’t stop it this time—and traced a wet tendril of hair down her left cheek.

She grabbed my wrist, stopped me from touching her face, but didn’t let go. She held on to my hand tightly.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“Just get me a towel,” she hissed, and let her hand drop back to her side.

I gestured, and she followed me below. I slid all the curtains into place, then lit a lantern I keep for emergencies. The boat had electric lights, but I thought better of draining the batteries, or of firing up the generator for that matter.

Carmen started to shiver, and I dug into the storage compartment underneath the seat and came out with the terrycloth robe I’d stolen from the Hilton in Puerto Vallarta last year. She pulled it on, and we settled into the single couch on the wall across from the galley.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

“You first.”

“Something’s wrong with Ben.”

I said nothing.

“He’s acting strangely. He’s drinking for one, which he doesn’t usually do so much of. It’s a vacation, of course, so I’ve been attributing it to that. But tonight…” Her voice drifted off, tiny even in the tiny cabin.

“What?”

“He hit me,” she said, quiet as a mouse.

I went cold all over. Goose pimples prickled at my collar.

She must have seen my face. “It’s not like you think,” she said quickly. “We were arguing, things got out of hand, and he did it.”

I trembled in my seat, muscles knotting and unknotting up and down my arms.

”Just the once though.” She brushed back her hair on the left side, so I could see her ear. It was swollen, and there was a bit of dried blood clinging to the top.

“Does he hit you often?”

“No. Not often.”

“And he’s asleep on the beach?”

“Passed out, more like.”

“Okay.” I stood up.

“Frank, don’t.” She grabbed me around the wrist again. Her grip surprised me, strong as iron. “Please don’t.”

“No promises,” I said, but I sat again, straight-backed, on the edge of my seat.

“How did you know, anyway?”

“I didn’t.”

She frowned. “Then why ask me to find you tonight?” Her hair fit snugly over her ear, covering the damage wrought by Ben Hawking’s fist, and she started at the floor, ashamed of the beating he had given her.

My gut roiled.

“More bad news about the golden boy,” I said, and told her everything. I told her about the duffel and the money and the currency straps banding all the cash together, the ones marked
Banco United.

When I had finished, she shot up and started pacing back and forth in the small space between the couch and the chart table, stopping occasionally to drum her fingers on something or twist a strand of hair around a finger.

“So you think Ben has something to do with the money?” she asked finally.

“Carmen, he actually brought it up, talked about money missing. As far as I”m concerned he’s already bragging about it.”

“The money thing, though, that wasn’t a robbery,” she said.

I looked at her, confused.

“I work in the bank now, remember?”

“It is a little hard to believe.” I smiled, thinking of some of the times we had together. “You never struck me as the office type.”

She sat down again, leaned up against me, and I put my arm around her body. She was still shivering.

“It was just a job,” she said, “but I turned out to be pretty good at it. I was there when they told Ben about the problem, and I understood it all. It’s just a paperwork issue. Banco United is owned by the group Ben works for, and they own a lot of banks, among other things. I hate to tell you this—you being a private citizen with a bank account and all—but this stuff happens all the time. I’ve been working at the office for less than a year and I’ve already seen it more than once. I’m not saying money just falls off of trucks, just that when it comes to reams of boring paperwork, attention wanders, mistakes get made.”

“If there was a robbery, would you have heard about it?”

“In the amount you’re talking about? I don’t see how I could have not heard about it. They would have called Ben. Even if he wasn’t at a phone, they would have tracked him down.”

“Then how do you explain the large bag of money sitting on the beach not two hundred feet from here?”

“A large but legitimate withdrawal,” she said weakly.

I laughed, a short, hard bark. “Wouldn’t the bank take off the marked currency straps? To count it as a withdrawal?”

She thought about that. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Here’s why no one came to get Ben Hawking,” I said. “They don’t know it’s missing. Just now, you filled in a piece of the puzzle for me. I couldn’t figure why they weren’t all over him already. I mean, the Mexican police are corrupt but they’re not incompetent. If anything that means they are more tied into criminal organizations than cops in the States. For the right price,
Federales
can find out anything. And a big American company like this banking group could pull the right strings in an emergency. Say, if a bank robbery occurred.”

“So why haven’t they?”

“Because they don’t know they’ve been robbed, and until then no one goes looking for the missing money. That paperwork you mentioned—could Ben have fudged it intentionally?”

“You mean hide the fact that the money was there, so that when it got taken no would realize?”

She was as quick as I remembered her being. “Exactly.”

“Yes, of course. He’s a vice president of the parent company. Technically he ranks higher than the president of Banco United. He would have access to the paperwork, even the vault if he could give a convincing reason.”

I nodded.

“But he wouldn’t do it. You don’t know him. He’s a good man.”

I reached out, touched her torn ear, and she looked at the floor again. “There’s no way, Carmen. There’s no way that money and that man ended up together in the middle of the ocean by anything other than design. What’s the alternative?”

“Coincidence,” she said, and her mouth hardened into a thin white line. Carmen had never been a big believer in coincidence.

“I think he covered the paper trail, set up some cover to get accomplices access to the vault, and then sent the three of them in to get the money the same morning we left.”

“You said the three of them.” She tapped a front tooth with her fingernail. “What three?”

“There were three of them. When I was on their boat, just before it went under, I saw a body.”

“Someone drowned?” Her eyes sprang open.

“No,” I said. “He’d been shot in the chest.”

“Oh God.” She covered her mouth. “He’s involved in a murder.”

“Involved? Carmen, he could very well be the man who killed him. Let’s just hope it was an accomplice and not some poor dock worker. But probably he was an accomplice—that’s the best angle on it I can figure. Why else would he be out here on the boat with them? If I had to guess I’d say there was some argument over the money, and the argument turned violent.”

She started to pace again, rapping her knuckles incessantly on the walls, the table, the backs of her own hands. I just stayed still, said nothing, gave her a minute to let it all filter through.

“But why would any of them be on the boat,” she said under her breath, a statement, not a question.

“What do you mean?”

“You put your finger on it, Frank. You asked why else the dead man would be out here if he was just a dock worker. That’s a good question, but it applies to all of them. Why should any of them be out here on the ocean after a robbery?”

I said nothing, just watched her think. Eventually, it stumped her.

It had stumped me, at least for a while.

“Why, Frank?” she asked again.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Don’t even try to feed me that little shrug, you pretending to be casual,” she said. “I know you, remember? Your face has that hard look it gets whenever we get into a tight place.”

I said nothing.

“You know exactly why—don’t you?” Her pacing increased in speed, back and forth, faster and faster. Energy radiated off of her. She was practically jumping up and down.

I stood, grabbed her by the shoulders, made her be still. “Do you love him?” I asked.

“What does that have to do with anything? I know this has been tough on you—”

“Forget about me,” I cut her off. “This might be hard for you to hear, and I can’t be sure, but—the paperwork, the vault access, he had the ability to set all that up. What about you?”

“Me?” Her nose crinkled up like it always had when she didn’t understand something.

“Yes, Carmen. You. Why did he bring you along during all this?”

I saw understanding flare in the backs of her eyes. She scrunched them shut and started shaking her head back and forth. I just kept talking. I had to get it all out.

“It strikes me that Ben Hawking has a lifestyle. Now, I’m willing to bet there’s some parts of that lifestyle we don’t know about, like a gambling habit or drugs, that would make him try to pull this off. But I don’t see him taking the money and going on the run, do you?”

She refused to open her eyes.

“That money going missing is going to look pretty suspicious, and they’re going to find the person who did it. Unless…” I trailed off.

Her eyes popped open, frantic, like a wounded animal. “Say it,” she hissed.

“Unless they already know who did it. A trusted administrative assistant with the necessary access.”

“Me,” she whispered. For a second, I thought she might collapse. “But it would never work. I’ll just tell them I’m innocent.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m thinking the plan is that you never get to tell your side of the story.” I paused, let that sink it.