Nothing from my lifeguard training told me how long it takes a body to swell. Had she drowned? I couldn’t tell without a closer examination, nor could I tell whether the skin on the side of her head had been broken by some blow or simply ravaged by the gulls that had been feeding on her. And I wasn’t about to roll her over. I would deliver her to the authorities as I had found her.
I tied two long nylon lines to the bow bitt and climbed back aboard Gorda. After securing the towlines at the stem, I put the tug in gear and got us on a heading for Port Everglades. In the logbook, I made my entry, noting the time and date and the exact GPS location where I had picked them up—Latitude 26° 11.67 Long 79° 58.12.
Abaco had been cooped up in the head a long time and I could hear her whining. I eased her out and introduced her to the girl. She put her paws up on the bunk, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, breathing dog breath all over the kid. The child’s eyes popped open and she reared back against the bulkhead. But when Abaco licked her hand, Solange’s mouth spread in a tentative toothy smile, and I knew they would be friends. I opened a bottle of Gatorade this time, gave her a little, and left them to get better acquainted.
Out on deck, I made a quick check around the horizon for boat traffic, cleaned up, coiled the lines, and checked on my tow. The fishing boat was riding well, given that the Gulf Stream was like a lake. I was glad I wasn’t towing in a following sea. The weight of the body in the back of that fishing boat was making it ride very low in the stern. I checked our progress toward the red-striped stacks of the power plant that marked the entrance to Port Everglades. We’d be in all too soon, and I knew I’d better get a hold of Jeannie so she could meet us at the dock.
I called Outta the Blue on the VHF and asked Mike to call Jeannie on his cell phone and tell her to meet us at the Lauderdale Marina fuel dock in front of the 15th Street Fisheries Restaurant. I knew I’d have to get myself a cell phone one of these days, but I was postponing the inevitable as long as possible. “Tell her it’s an emergency,” I said.
“You okay?” he asked over the party-line airwaves.
“Yeah, sure.” I tried to make my voice sound light and unconcerned. “You know Jeannie—it’s hard to get her moving unless you tell her it’s an emergency.” I laughed and held the mike open long enough for him to hear. When I turned from the radio to check on my passenger, she and the dog were curled up together in the bunk, both fast asleep.
Jeannie Black was my lawyer and best friend. Though she worked out of her home, and her six-foot height and nearly three-hundred-pound figure didn’t fit the image of the high-powered corporate lawyer, I would match Jeannie’s brains and heart against anyone’s. Legal entanglements were a given in the world of no-cure, no-pay marine towing and salvage. The client promises you anything to get his boat off the rocks, but once he’s safely hauled at the yard, he often has second thoughts about the agreed-upon terms. Just recently Jeannie had helped me settle a salvage claim that paid off my boat loans and made Gorda mine, free and clear. She’d shown me how to use the rest to set up a college fund for a young girl we’d met on that job. I knew Jeannie would figure out a way to keep Solange safe.
The rocks at the end of the harbor jetty were abeam before we passed the first pleasure boat on her way out of the harbor. The twenty-foot center console open fishing boat was bristling with dozens of rods and antennae. She was piloted by high school boys. As it was Wednesday, just past noon, they were probably skipping school. Shirtless, they looked like they were wearing white tank tops as their chests still bore the tan lines from their last time in the sun. They hooted and hollered at what they must have thought was a drunk, fat lady facedown in the skiff behind Gorda.
Once inside the harbor, I slowed the tug in the turning basin and pulled my tow alongside. With a small tarp I’d pulled out of the deck box, I covered the body enough so that when we tied up at the pier at Lauderdale Marina, the dock jocks couldn’t speculate on the contents.
The dock in front of the restaurant parallels the Intracoastal and serves as fuel dock space for most of its two- hundred-foot length. Late in the afternoon, the restaurant sends someone out with fish scraps to feed the pelicans, and hundreds of the birds flock to the dock. The nearly tame birds often hang out on the pilings, waiting for an unscheduled handout, and the antics of the greedy pelicans bring the tourists. Some days you had to elbow aside the families in matching mouse T-shirts just to tie up your dock lines. Fortunately, there were no tourists on the dock this afternoon.
No one came out to take my lines. The dock jocks recognized the boat and knew that I preferred to handle my own docking, tie off my own lines. Once the tug was close enough to the dock, I used the boat hook to drop a midships spring line over a piling cleat, then I slowly idled the engine in forward, helm hard over, until she eased in and nudged alongside the bleached-wood dock pilings. When Gorda was secure, I turned off the engine and checked on my tow. I was considering whether or not to tie a stem line on the fishing boat when I saw Jeannie hurrying through the opening between the 15th Street Fisheries Restaurant and the small bait shop. As always, she was wearing a billowing tropical-print muumuu—today’s was decorated with huge red hibiscus flowers; the voluminous straw handbag over her arm had a matching yarn flower sewn on it.
“Seychelle, we’re here!” she called, as though I could miss her. Her twin sons, Andrew and Adair, waved to me and then ran to the bait tank and leaned over to watch the fish, their identical blond heads ducking under the wood lids, rumps in the air as they pointed into the water.
I climbed up onto the dock just in time to be enveloped in a Jeannie hug.
“Are you okay? When Mike called, I was so worried! The boys stayed home from school today with the flu, so we came straight here.”
My face was pressed against a huge red blossom, and I could barely breathe. “Jeannie, let go, I’m okay.” She released me, and I took a deep breath.
“So tell me, then, what’s this emergency?”
I knew it would be hard to explain. “Do you think you can get down onto the boat?”
She eyed the three-foot drop to Gorda's deck and gave me an exasperated look. “It won’t be a pretty sight, but I can do it.”
She was right on both counts. Once she was down on deck, I led her to the wheelhouse, and while I went in, she stopped at the door. Abaco was still curled up with the girl, but the dog lifted her head when she saw us, and her tail thumped against the aluminum bulkhead. The girl awoke with a start and tried to pull away from us, back into the shadowy corner of the wheelhouse bunk.
“It’s okay. Shhh. It’s okay,” I said to the child. “This is Jeannie. She’s my friend.” The girl’s head dropped, chin to chest, as though the effort of holding her head up was just too much for her. I turned to Jeannie. “We’ve got to get her to a hospital. She needs IV fluids. She’s severely dehydrated.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Whoa. Time out.” She was making referee signals with her hands, and for a moment my mind flashed on the image of her billowing muumuu racing up and down the sidelines of a playing field. “Stop grinning at me.” She pointed at the girl. “Where did she come from?”
“I found her out there.”
“Oh,” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm. “You just found her.”
“Yeah. I saw what I thought was a half-sunk boat, adrift, and when I went to investigate I found her in it. I have no clue how long she’s been out there.”
“And apparently you haven’t called the Coasties or they’d be here by now.”