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  WRECKERS’ KEY

  CHRISTINE KLING

  Tell-Tale Press

  2012

  About This Book

  Wreckers’ Key was first published in hard cover by Ballantine Books in 2007. The mass market paperback came out from the same publisher in 2008, and Ballantine produced the first ebook in 2007. This digital edition was published in April, 2012.

  This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written consent of the author. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions. Your support of authors’ rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Christine Kling

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.

  Visit Christine Kling at http://www.christinekling.com

  In memory of my father,

  who first taught me to sail

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people:

  I would like to thank the following people for all their support and assistance: Mark Tavani, my editor, who rocks; Judith Weber, my agent; Laura Jorstad, my copyeditor; Fred Rea—who can now be called the Car Guy; Captain Bruce Amlicke, S/V Wild Matilda, for all his ideas and then some; Captain Mark Haskins of the S/V Liahona for his insight into salvage; Captain Ken Bloemker, S/V Thalia, for helping me birth the idea; Captain Kelton Joyner, S/V Isle of Escape, for tales of corporate layoffs; Captain John Verdon, S/V Imagine, for letting me borrow his house; Kathleen Ginestra for her knowledge of Fort Lauderdale—the town and the people; Cindy Gray for her expertise in windsurfing; Mary Barrett, who gave me the title; Melanie Neale and Mike Jastrzebski of the Bluewater Writers’ Group; and finally, to my mother, Pat, and to my son, Tim, both of whom taught me what motherhood is all about.

  I

  “We hit the reef so hard, I’m surprised no one was killed,” Nestor said. “I keep dreaming about it, you know? Hearing the sound of the hull crunching across the coral and then Kent’s screams when his arm broke.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes like he was trying to wipe away the vision. “This situation scares me, Seychelle. My whole career’s on the line here.”

  I couldn’t disagree. When you put a multimillion-dollar yacht on the reef on her maiden voyage, your reputation as a captain is toast. I was there to help with the salvage of the boat, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to salvage Nestor’s career.

  Catalina Frias reached across the table, took her husband’s hand, and focused her large brown eyes on his face. She didn’t say anything for several seconds, but there was a sense of intimacy in that moment that was stronger than if she’d grabbed him and planted a wet one on him. “Hey, we are going to get through this, mi amor, okay?” Her soft voice was accented, but her English was perfect. She squeezed his hand, her other arm resting across the top of the belly that bulged beneath her pretty print maternity top.

  I was sitting with the two of them at an outdoor table at the Two Friends Patio Restaurant on Front Street. I’d arrived in Key West late the afternoon before on my forty-six-foot aluminum tug Gorda, and when I called Nestor on the VHF, I told him I was too tired to come ashore after a four-day trip down from Lauderdale with only my dog as crew. I just wanted to drop the hook and collapse in my bunk, so we’d agreed to meet in the morning for Sunday brunch. Now here I was, sitting under a lush trellis of bougainvillea pushing scrambled eggs and sausage around my plate, my appetite gone.

  “Nestor, this is the first time I’ve taken Gorda this far from home. I wouldn’t do this for just anybody, you know.”

  When he smiled that boyish smile so full of gratitude, my heart ached for him. He was in a hell of a spot.

  “Gracias, amiga. I can’t lose this job,” he said, the backs of his fingers caressing his wife’s belly. “Not now, with the baby coming in just a few weeks.”

  I’d known Nestor much longer than his wife had, and I loved him like a brother. There was a time when maybe that love could have gone another way, but the attraction that might have been had turned into an abiding friendship. He really was one of the good guys. He’d showed up on the docks just before Red died, and afterward, when I started running Gorda on my own and several of the captains were bad-mouthing the only female captain in the towing business, he always stood up for me. I’d watched him work his way up the waterfront, going from being a captain on the Water Taxi to running the charter fishing boat My Way, until now, finally, he’d gotten his big break about four months ago, as the captain of a luxury power yacht. The Power Play was a newly commissioned Sunseeker 94 owned by a local resident millionaire, Ted Berger. Berger had made his money in dot-com-related businesses, and when he’d sold out, he’d bought several South Florida TV stations and sports teams.

  “Do you think Berger’s going to fire you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. He hasn’t said anything yet. Seychelle, this was the first passage I’d made as captain. Other than a couple of sea trials to work on the engines, we hadn’t really taken her out yet. He told me when he hired me to commission the yacht that he wanted her down here in Key West for Race Week, but then he decided to install new flat-screen TVs in all the staterooms, then a new sound system, and we were late getting out of the yard. The festivities down here had already started, and the boss was itching to come down and party. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been going so fast in a squall.”

  “You hit that reef going almost twenty knots in a rain squall?”

  “I know it sounds bad, Seychelle. Especially to someone like you. But let’s face it—you haven’t exactly embraced the electronics age. Do you even have a GPS on that tugboat of yours?”

  “Nestor, what I do is not the point here.”

  “Sey, you don’t even own a cell phone.”

  “Okay, already.”

  “See, the Power Play is loaded with every bit of electronic equipment imaginable. Berger spared no expense. The man is really into toys, and there are backups for the backups. So what we were doing is running on instruments, the same way commercial pilots do with planes full of hundreds of passengers. The autopilot is tied in to one of three separate GPS systems. We were in Hawk’s Channel, and everything had been working great up to that point. I was on the bridge myself because I knew we were nearing the entrance to Key West Harbor. All the instruments showed us more than half a mile from any obstructions when bam! We ran right up onto these rocks off West Washerwoman Shoal. The impact knocked Kent off his feet, and when he tried to break his fall, the bone just snapped—came right out through his skin.” Nestor shuddered at the memory. He’d already told me it had been a nasty compound fracture.

  Nobody said anything for several long seconds while we all saw it happen in our minds, saw the big ninety-four-footer come to a grinding halt on the rocks, the men on the bridge thrown off their feet, the screams and the blood. Nestor grasped the Saint Christopher’s medal he wore around his neck and kissed the face of the saint.

  “So, Nestor,” I said, “what do you think happened?”

  My friend looked at his wife for a moment, as though unsure if he should say what he was thinking. It was amazing to watch how the two of them communicated, saying so much in a glance or a touch.

  “Seychelle,” Nestor started, after a quick look around the dining patio to s
ee if anyone was listening to our conversation. Satisfied, he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Ted Berger these past weeks, and I wouldn’t put anything past him. He calls himself the Other Ted, as though he’s in the same league as Turner. But he’d do anything to get there. Ruthless is the word that comes to mind.” Nestor lifted his shoulders and bobbed his head once, like a bow. “Okay, so maybe you have to be that way to get the kind of money he has, but lately, with the start-up of this girls’ hockey league and buying this boat, I think he’s overextended himself. He wants out of this boat deal, and now he seems more pissed over the fact that he’s getting hit with a big salvage claim than over the business of wrecking her in the first place.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying you think Berger tried to wreck his own boat?” I tried hard to keep the disbelief out of my voice.

  “Jesus,” he said, swiveling his head to look around the empty patio. “Not so loud, Sey. I don’t have any proof— yet. But it just doesn’t make sense otherwise. The only way this could have happened is if the equipment malfunctioned somehow. And I’m just saying that Ted Berger would have been better off with the insurance company cashing him out of an investment that had got out of hand.”

  “Nestor, I’m finding this kind of hard to believe.”

  “You’d understand if you could have heard him while we were in the boatyard. He was constantly complaining about how much things cost. He had no idea what he was getting into when he bought a yacht that size.”

  “I suppose it makes sense in a way. If he’d just put the boat up for sale, it would have signaled to people that he was in financial trouble.”

  “Exactly. And he has the background—he made his money in electronics. I’m going to have a buddy of mine check out the equipment on the boat and see if he can find evidence it’s been tampered with. Get him to come down before we take off to head back up north. I don’t intend to take the fall for Ted Berger’s financial problems.”

  At that moment Nestor’s eyes flicked to the right and focused on something outside the restaurant. The skin across his cheeks grew taut and his eyes narrowed for only a second before his face broke into a huge, forced grin. He lifted his hand and waved.

  I twisted in my seat, glanced over my shoulder. A white-haired man wearing a loud red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt was standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. He waved, and then went in the front door, clearly headed for us out on the patio. An instant later he appeared in the side door and his voice boomed.

  “Good morning,” Berger said, causing the other diners’ heads to turn. When he reached our table, he placed both his hands on Catalina’s shoulders then bent and kissed her on the cheek. He said, “Our mommy-to-be looks more glowingly beautiful every time I see her.”

  Catalina’s body had gone still at his touch, her only movement turning her face away as he kissed her, so his mouth wound up kissing her hair.

  Nestor stood and shook hands with the man. Either he hadn’t noticed or he was choosing to ignore his wife’s discomfort. “Good morning,” he said as he pumped the man’s hand. Then he turned to me. “Seychelle, I’d like to introduce you to Ted Berger.”

  I started to stand, but Berger waved me back down. “So you’re the tugboat captain,” he said as he seated himself in the fourth chair at the table and waggled a coffee mug at the waitress. “I kind of expected a hag with a corncob pipe.” He cocked his head to one side and looked at me from head to as much as he could see above the table. “You’re definitely not a hag.”

  The Tugboat Annie jokes had grown old about the second month after I inherited Sullivan Towing and Salvage from my father. That was more than three years ago.

  “I’m just here to do the job you hired me for, Mr. Berger.”

  He threw his hands in the air in mock surrender. “Oh my, I’ve offended her. Very businesslike of you, Miss Sullivan. Or should I call you Captain?”

  “Seychelle is fine,” I said. Up close, I realized that the man’s white hair was deceptive. He wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought. His face and neck looked like they belonged to a man not yet out of his forties. He was a couple of inches shorter than me, maybe five foot eight, and his forced joviality and loud clothes made him appear to be overcompensating for something.

  “Okay. Seychelle, then. Interesting name.”

  I got ready to go into the usual explanation, but he beat me to it. “Named after the islands in the Indian Ocean, I assume.”

  “Pretty good. Not many people recognize the name.”

  “Trust me, Ted, Sey’s a lot better off than her brothers,” Nestor said.

  “Oh?” Berger asked, his eyebrows lifting into the lock of white hair that had fallen on his forehead.

  I nodded. “Madagascar and Pitcairn.”

  “Oh dear,” he said, laughing. “Parents can be cruel. So, Seychelle, Nestor tells me he’d rather have you tow the boat up to Lauderdale than any of that scum over at Ocean Towing.”

  “Ted, I may have exchanged a few harsh words with those guys, but I didn’t call them scum,” Nestor said.

  “Well, I’ll call them that!” He turned to me. “Do you know what they’re trying to charge me for getting the Power Play off that reef and into Robbie’s Marina on Stock Island?”

  “I can imagine. Nestor told me it took them almost twelve hours to get her free.”

  “They’re goddamn pirates!”

  “No, sir, actually, they probably saved the boat and saved the insurance company a bundle. They’d rather pay the yard bill and salvage than suffer a total loss.”

  He rolled his eyes and turned away from me.

  Out in the street, a tall man with stringy shoulder-length hair, wearing nothing but swim trunks, was trying to untangle the leash of his mangy German shepherd from around his legs and the pedals of his beach bike. He was mumbling to himself. Our table was situated so close to the street, we couldn’t help but overhear the string of obscenities and incomprehensible answers he was giving to the voices he apparently heard in his head. When Berger spoke again, he continued staring out at the man on the street. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or to us. “I like things that are new and shiny. No matter what, now the Power Play is going to be a repaired vessel.” He turned and focused his eyes on mine. “And I don’t like patched-up shit.”

  I smiled, refusing to look away. “Well, welcome to boats, Mr. Berger. If you’re not running them, you’re working on them. As I understand it, the hull wasn’t even holed. You’ve just got damage to rudders, stabilizers, props, and the like,” I said. “You know, I wouldn’t think of it as a patched-up boat. I’d say Nestor was just breaking her in.”

  He tightened one cheek in a half smile. “That’s one way of looking at it.” His tone told me it would not be his view. “So you’re going to help our boy here get the boat back to Lauderdale where they can make proper repairs?”

  I didn’t like the way he called Nestor our boy. “Sure am,” I said.

  Nestor said, “The guys at Robbie’s have put a temporary epoxy patch on the deep scratches in the hull. It will have to be faired and painted later; they just didn’t like the bare glass underwater. One prop was a total loss and the other is slightly damaged, but usable. Rudders were totaled. There was some structural damage to interior bulkheads, and some issues that will need to be addressed up in Lauderdale. I just want these guys to get her in shape for the trip north. It’ll be close, but I’ll bet we could launch tomorrow.”

  “That sounds good to me,” I said. “The sooner, the better.”

  Berger pushed back his chair and stood. He looked down at Catalina. “You gonna get this guy to show you around Key West, relax a little bit? Beautiful woman like you comes down to be with her man—he should show you off. Seems he spends all his time in that boatyard.”

  “I told her I was going to be busy,” Nestor said. “And I didn’t like the idea of her riding the bus in her condition, but she insisted.”

&nbs
p; “My husband says my condition like pregnancy is an illness,” Catalina said to me. She was ignoring Berger’s comments. “Having babies is natural.” She reached for her husband’s hand again. “Stop worrying. I have been trying to talk him into doing a little windsurfing,” she said. “I would like to see him relax, have a little fun. He is very good, you know. When he was in his teens, he was the national windsurfing champion in the Dominican Republic.”

  “Listen to your wife, Nestor. She’s a smart, stand-by-your-man kind of woman. Makes me wonder what she sees in a guy like you.” He punched Nestor in the arm hard enough to rock him back in his chair. “So, how soon do you two think the boat will be ready to head north?”

  “We’ve got a good weather window coming up, and I’d like to leave as soon as possible,” I said. “Nestor and I were just starting to discuss our departure plans when you arrived.”

  “Really?” he said. “You looked so serious. And secretive. Like my crew here was plotting a mutiny.”

  Nestor and I both must have shown our surprise. Berger laughed and punched Nestor in the arm again, harder. “Just kidding, buddy.”

  II

  “So you think he overheard what we were saying about him?”

  We watched his back as he disappeared up the street.

  “He would’ve been hard to miss if he’d been lingering around in that shirt,” I said, but I couldn’t rule it out. I thought about the man on the street with his dog earlier, and how we’d overheard every word he uttered. “I really don’t like that guy.”

  “He’s not usually such a jerk,” Nestor said, rubbing his upper arm where Berger had punched him.

  Catalina looked at her husband and raised her eyebrows.