Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me

56

It didn’t start to rain until we got halfway to Bonnet’s Cut. I again contemplated the subtleness of the sea and how its most dreaded creatures glide under the water. My stomach undulating along with my thoughts.

“You take those pills?” Hawk said.

“Two.”

“Don’t throw up on my shoes,” Hawk said. “I like these shoes.”

He was dressed in black military pants and a black T-shirt. Rain beaded off the top of his bald head. He had the .50-cal Magnum strapped over one shoulder, the gun tightly wrapped in a garbage bag with string.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Hawk and Godfrey inflated a small dinghy with an air pump. Rex would drop us as close as possible to the jetty and then Godfrey on the opposite side. Godfrey would swim his way onto the beach.

As Godfrey was a native of the islands with much more practice, I didn’t argue with the plan.

I wore a navy shirt, navy pants with side compartments for ammo, and a pair of dark running shoes. I didn’t think running around the islands in flip-flops would be practical. Although I might as well have dressed in a neon tuxedo and carried an ooga-ooga horn. According to what Shona told Godfrey, cameras were everywhere.

At least we knew where the guards slept and their routines. And we knew the small cottage where the young girls, including Carly Ly, slept.

I held on to the railing as the boat sliced through a large black wave, taking us up high and then crashing us back down hard. I could barely make out Rex inside the pilothouse, a lump of dark shadow in a trucker’s cap, the glowing tip of a cigar clamped in his teeth.

“What about those other girls?” Hawk said.

I looked around the boat and nodded to the quarters belowdeck.

“You talk to Godfrey about this?”

I shook my head.

“Want me to talk to Godfrey?”

“Better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

“After we lock down that main house and account for the guards,” Hawk said. “Bring the girls down to the docks. Ain’t no time to be rowing.”

“Great minds.”

“Be crazy as hell,” Hawk said.

The rain started to fall harder, stinging my face, and we went inside. Godfrey was there filling a coffee cup, half a sandwich in hand.

“Hungry?”

“He already ate,” Hawk said.

We sat in a little nook by a window, the sky and seas equally black. A row of colorful bottles behind Hawk’s head rattled and shook. A nice collection of whiskeys and rum. The thought of each of them made me sick. I excused myself to the head, threw up, and then ran a trickle of cold water in my hand. I cupped my hand for the water and washed out my mouth.

I soon made my way to the wheelhouse, where Rex checked a computer screen displaying the water currents and patterns of other boats. In the darkness, he pointed to the island and showed we had a clear path that night.

Rex looked at his big diver’s watch and then back to me, grunting and pointing back to where Godfrey and Hawk stood in the rain.

I could barely make out the island as we chugged along, illuminated in cracks of lightning, the rain driving in sheets across the black water. Rex got us closer and then cut the engines, and we bobbed up and down silently.

I could make out the shore better now as Hawk set the dinghy into the water.

Godfrey handed him the oars. I handed Godfrey the rope and set down the ladder onto the dinghy.

“Would you like me to whistle ‘Secret Agent Man’?” I said.

“Will it help keep down your lunch?”

“It just might.”

Hawk nodded and began to row toward the jetty.