I spread my hands wide. “Just like that? You’ve hired this redneck pervert and I’m fired?”

Hightower reached down and turned the key. The old boat’s diesel rumbled to life. He walked out and around the deckhouse and jumped to the dock. He looked like an idiot in his pale blue polyester slacks, white shirt with epaulettes, brand-new Top-Siders, and Greek fisherman’s cap.

“Miss Sullivan,” he said, raising himself up to his full six feet and trying to look down at me, “I made the effort to contact you after I spoke to your brother.”

“What do you mean, after you spoke to my brother?”

“I happened to see your brother at Gulf Stream yesterday.”

“Oh, great. My brother was at the track.”

He nodded. “We got into a casual conversation, and when I mentioned that you were going to be towing the Ruby Yacht today, he told me that you had been having financial difficulties. You hadn’t been meeting your responsibilities, he said, and I would be well advised to find myself another towing company. Well, I’ve done that, Miss Sullivan.”

“What? Maddy said what?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I blocked the finger pier, and Hightower couldn’t get past me to untie his bowlines.

“Move aside, Seychelle. This is business. If you can’t play with the big boys, then get out of the business.”

He started to brush me aside.

“Perry is one of the big boys? He’s nothing but a slimy—”

I was suddenly grabbed from behind. Perry had jumped off the bow, and he took me by the forearms and marched me off the finger pier. I looked down at the hands that held my arms. The thick, callused fingers were topped by half crescents of black grease.

“Now, be a good girl and go on home, honey pie.” He swatted me on the behind and cackled. “Perry’s in charge now.”

Collazo suspected I was capable of murder, and at that moment I realized I could kill. If I’d had any kind of weapon at hand, anything to wipe that goddam smirk off Perry’s face, I would have been seriously tempted to use it.

“This isn’t over, Perry.” I looked over his shoulder at Galen Hightower, standing with his hands on his hips, watching us with a look of disgust, as though we were a lower order of mammal. “Dr. Hightower, I would say what you’ve got here”—I jerked my head toward Perry— “is exactly what you deserve.”

I threw off the lines before I started the engine. The old cat purred to life when I turned the key, and I jockeyed her around in her own length, hotdogging it just a little to show Hightower that he had given up the better captain.

As I headed back up the Intracoastal, just off the Fort Lauderdale Yacht Club, Nestor Frias pulled up alongside in the thirty-eight-foot Bertram sportfisherman My Way. Aside from casual hellos at the Downtowner I hadn’t seen Nestor very much since Neal and I had gone our separate ways. He ran the charter sportfisherman out of Pier 66, and he was looking to break into a job as captain of one of the big luxury yachts like the Top Ten. He was always hanging around Neal hoping for news of some big job.

He waved me out of the wheelhouse. I throttled back and stepped out to the side decks.

He shouted down at me from his flybridge. “Hey, Seychelle. Sorry about Neal.”

I closed my eyes for a few seconds and nodded. “Thanks, Nestor.”

“A bunch of us are going to have a little service at dawn tomorrow, just outside the inlet. You know.”

“He’s missing, Nestor. Nobody knows what happened to him at this point.”

“It’s been forty-eight hours, Seychelle. There’d be no reason for him to just disappear” I thought of Big Guy and Shorty on the beach and what happened to Ely. He could have very good reasons, and I was quickly learning that I didn’t know who to trust.

“Neal’s never been very reasonable, you know,” I said.

“I just thought maybe you would like to be there.” For the first time I found myself thinking about what people would see in my actions. If I didn’t show, would I look guilty? In my business, reputation was everything. “Yeah, okay, I guess I would.”

He waved a hand in the air and pulled away from Gorda.

I waved back. “Thanks, Nestor.”

On the aft deck of his boat a couple sat together in the fighting chair, an older man with graying hair and a young, firm blonde in a thong bikini on his lap. She was probably five foot two and a size three. And definitely not his wife.

"Outta the Blue, Outta the Blue, this is the Gorda.” When he didn’t answer, I hung the microphone back on the side of the VHF and pushed the throttle forward to prevent the boat from drifting onto the sandbar at the mouth of the river. Just when I was about to give up, figuring that either Mike didn’t have his radio on or else he wasn’t monitoring channel sixteen, I finally got an answer.

“Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue. You want to switch to channel zero nine?”

“Roger that, zero nine.”

Mike Beesting was a former Fort Lauderdale cop who had quit the force four or five years before and now lived aboard and ran sunset charter cruises on his Irwin 54, Outta the Blue. I wasn’t sure of all the details, but I knew that back when he was on the force, he had heard a call for help and walked into a situation in progress where some disgruntled city maintenance worker had decided to use a shotgun to pay back his boss and coworkers for all his perceived ills. After it was over, two people were dead and Mike’s leg had to be amputated at the knee. He was feted as a hero for taking down the guy, but when they offered him a desk job, he said no thanks and walked away from the department for good.

Mike knew nothing about boats at first, and especially about diesel mechanics, but he always attempted to work on his own engine. More often than not, he screwed things up and it ended up costing him more than if he had just called a mechanic in the first place. However his settlement with the city had been quite generous, allowing him to buy his sailboat outright and still have enough to feed his daily need for generous amounts of Pusser’s Rum. The net result was I’d towed him home more than a couple of times when his engine quit with guests aboard.

I punched the numbers onto the keypad of the VHF radio and changed channels. Mike was already there, and I just caught the tail end of his sentence.

“... thinking about you as I’ve been watching the TV. How are you holding up?”

“I’m managing, but I’ll be honest, things aren’t good. I need your help with something, over.”

“Sey, you know we are on an open channel here, over.”

“Roger that. A young girl, a friend of mine, drowned in the river last night. I’m really feeling lousy about it. Is it okay if I come over a little later? I sure could use a friend like you.”

“Say no more. I have a charter at four-thirty, but I’ll be here with shoulders to cry on until then, over.”

“Thanks, Mike. I’ll be seeing you. This is Gorda clear and going back to sixteen.”

Whether or not Mike understood what I was really asking of him remained to be seen.

I cursed my brother, all the way back up the river. So he was back at the track again. That explained a lot. Not that I hadn’t expected as much. Maddy was a compulsive gambler and Jane had finally got him to agree to join Gamblers Anonymous a couple of years ago. They

had started to work off all those credit card balances, and I thought he had overcome this handicap, so to speak. Obviously not. So Maddy needed money immediately, and he knew where to get it. There had been offers for Gorda in the past, and Maddy knew several people who would be happy to buy her if the price was right. I was tempted to drive right down to his place to have it out with him. How dare he sabotage my business to make sure that I wouldn’t be able to make my payments? Typical of my brother. He was going to get his way no matter what.