In Harm's Way (A Martin Billings Story Book 3) Read online

  14

  Later that same morning, Gazele and I walked to the police station and told the inspector what we knew, which wasn’t much. His addition to our list of scenarios was the possibility that Nate has fired the shot, knowing who Gazele was, to disguise the fact that he had already killed Donna. “Maybe he wants us to keep hunting her and not looking at him.”

  I thought that convoluted even by the standards of all the other convoluted schemes, but he was proud of it, and we agreed to disagree.

  Gazele decided to go for the jealous lover theory just because it had a romantic flair to it. Seeing it was Gazele, I knew damn well that by nightfall, that would be the story the entire island believed. I didn’t mind that so much, except that then the inspector would learn I’d withheld the story of my amorous encounter with Donna from him. There was no telling where that would go.

  It wasn’t particularly hot, so I wandered around the island, drifting aimlessly as I unsuccessfully tried to put all the mess around the mystery woman out of my head for a little while. I kept seeing myself the way Gazele had described me, selfish, in the sense she meant it. I made a note to talk to Bill about it, because it seemed to be a perverse manifestation of the mindfulness he advocated.

  Inevitably, my mind came back to Donna. Her most recent disappearance had a sense of finality to it. She’d dismissed me, determined I had outlived my usefulness. And yet, I wasn’t convinced that I was in the clear.

  The thing Bill kept trying to make me see was the law of consequences, that when you try to help someone in trouble, that trouble can stick to you, adhere to your very skin, and make you uncomfortable in unexpected ways.

  I stopped and sat on the pier. My cell phone was charged, so I distracted myself by making a few calls to exporters I knew in the hope that, when the inspector let us leave again, I could stir up some business. We had a big job coming in a month or two, but if we could pick up some short runs in the meantime, that would help fill the coffers, and when you own a boat, the coffers always need refilling.

  Unfortunately, my calls came up short, with folks up and down the island chain telling me that either things were slow, or a competitor was running the cargo as we spoke.

  Having accomplished little or nothing, I made my way back to The Barracuda with the idea of having a lazy lunch. On the way, I met Bill, steaming on a course for the same snug harbor. “Great minds…” I said.

  “Where?” he said, grinning and looking around as if he might spot them.

  The place was pretty empty, with a couple of old men occupying seats at the bar but all the tables still empty.

  “Are you serving lunch yet?” I asked Sally, who appeared a little on edge as she brought two icy cold Caribe beers to our table.

  “Sure thing,” Sally said. “Don’t got no conch, but there is some fine squid.”

  “Bless you, my child,” Bill said, hoisting his bottle and taking a drink. When he sat the bottle down, he looked at Sally closely. “Is there a problem?” His fine-honed instincts seemed to sense the same tension I’d felt.

  She grinned. “Not exactly a problem, but the thing is, that Gazele ain’t here.”

  “It’s been a different morning, and her schedule was… altered. But you know that. You opened and were here when she and I came in.”

  “But then, she check things over then headed to The Boat Shop for a spell, like she does.” She glanced at her watch. “She say she be back like normal and that woman always be here by now.”

  “Running late isn’t a reason to panic in the islands,” I said.

  Sally wasn’t having any of it. “That woman always gotta be here, so she can check out that the cook is ready to serve lunch. And if she not coming, she would be calling.”

  That was true enough, but nothing to set off alarm bells. “Is the cook ready?”

  “Yeah, the cook always ready. The business is fine. I am wondering, not worrying. It troublesome that she not here. No matter what happens at night or in the morning, she always here for lunch — every damn day at the same time, right after Jeff takes over running The Boat Shop. She come straight here so she can make sure that the food delivered right, and all dem things is just so.”

  Bill took a long drink from his bottle and wiped his mouth. “I can imagine her wanting to keep a sharp eye on things.”

  Sally wiped her hands on her apron, nodding, seeming glad to have someone she could pour out the trouble to. “You know, Gazele got herself a saying that when a person running any business, they gotta watch every damn thing. You watch your employees careful like, not just so they do right, but also so they know you running that business and keeping an eye on them.”

  “That sentiment is a little long for a bumper sticker,” Bill said, “but I get the point, and she isn’t wrong.”

  “She probably got hung up at the store,” I said. “My fault that she got a late start and then we had to have a chat with the inspector. It probably screwed up her schedule.”

  Sally was way ahead of me. “When she not answering her phone, I called Jeff at the shop,” she said. “Jeff said she was working there earlier, then left like normal right at eleven. So, just before eleven, he came back in and she was gone.”

  “Back in?”

  “Jeff goes out back to smoke a doobie, wanting to mellow out before she leaves, and he has to face all that responsibility,” Bill said.

  I looked at my battered watch. The world has changed a lot lately, and at times I’m convinced that the rapid pace of change is more of an issue than most of the actual changes. I don’t like looking at a phone to get the time — it strikes me as an unnatural act, compounded by the fact that when you see the time, it has numbers instead of a lovely analog dial that still seems more trustworthy to me. And yes, I know you can display an analog dial on the phone, but it isn’t the same.

  “She’s been missing an hour then.”

  “That’s about right,” Sally said.

  That didn’t seem a cause for alarm. “Maybe she stopped in to chat with a friend along the way.” Sally gave me a look that said she found that absurd. “Can you handle things for a time?”

  The question lit her face up. “Course, I can,” she said. “It ain’t like it’s all that hard to serve beer and such. It’s a lotta work, but plain simple, you know.”

  “That’s my girl,” Bill said. “Get us a beer, for fuel. Then Martin and I will take a look around and see if we can find where she got off to. Shouldn’t take us long to track down the woman on such a small island.”

  “Somebody will have seen her,” I added. “You don’t miss Gazele.”

  “For certain,” Sally said. “The one thing that woman isn’t, is invisible.”

  I sank back in a chair, running through ideas of things to try, places to look that we hadn’t thought about, hoping my concern didn’t show.

  Bill reached over and grabbed my arm — tight. “We will find the lady, Junior. You need to relax.”

  I tried. Bill means well, but this time his best effort left my beer tasting sour.

  15

  Sitting and waiting is hard. When you are uncertain about what happened to someone you care about, it can drive you mad, have you climbing the walls. It can push you to do stupid things, like rushing out and chasing your tail, trying to learn something when you know damn well you aren’t going to find out that way, that you have to let it come to you.

  Bill and I went to the store, talked with Jeff, and then retraced what we thought Gazele’s steps had been. People remembered seeing her leaving the store, heading to the docks. A cousin of hers who sold fish had seen her walk by and said hello. Gazele seemed happy, and the woman had no idea where she’d gone from there. Down the dock a bit, the lady who sold flavoring chilis on the bottom of an upturned basket said Gazele had asked after her granddaughter who’d gone off to school in England and then said she needed to get to the bar to get ready for lunch.

  After that, we didn’t find a
trace of her.

  “Somebody grabbed her,” I said.

  “And you think you know who…”

  “Well, sure. It’s my fault. After what happened this morning, I should have — ”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Bill said. “Just because you two had a fling, no matter how much you care for her, that doesn’t make you her babysitter or bodyguard. She’s a grown-assed woman. Besides, we are gonna find her and make her buy us drinks for scaring the shit out of us.”

  I wasn’t so certain and doubted Bill was. Whoever had grabbed her had done it in a competent and professional manner, or someone would have reported seeing it happen. That meant that running around the island asking the whereabouts of a certain petite black woman wasn’t going to turn up any useful clues.

  Still, after we called Inspector George so he could inform us that she wouldn’t be considered missing until she’d been gone twenty-four hours. The tone of his voice suggested that he wasn’t pleased about that any more than we were. Too many bad things were connected here. “I got all my free men working on this damn protection job, but I can get the beat constables asking around. Let me know when they contact you.”

  “Maybe this has to do with why these people came here in the first place,” I said.

  “You think they came after Gazele?”

  “No, but it isn’t a coincidence, and I think it is related to whatever they came to the island for. It has something to do with what is going on between Donna and Nate.”

  “Must. But what?”

  None of us had a reasonable answer for that and finding one wasn’t going to help us get Gazele back. At least it didn’t seem so.

  While we waited for the inevitable word from her kidnappers, Jeff and Bill and Sally and I took turns checking and double checking her room, the store, and all the closets and storage spaces of Barracuda. We had no idea what we were looking for, and it was just frantic searching.

  We reached out. I called Walter, and he volunteered to poke his nose into the boats docked at the marina. Sally called about everyone on the island and Jeff paced the routes between store and home, home and bar, bar and store repeatedly, peeking in doorways and alleys as he went.

  “I even looked in the damn dumpster,” he told us. You could see that he was torn up by the bittersweet nature of not finding her there. Jeff’s concerns went beyond worry, and when you worry you do a lot of things that, under other circumstances, say, if it was someone else who was missing a loved one, for instance, you’d cluck your tongue and point out that all that frantic and frenetic searching was a useless waste of time and energy.

  But when you are the one doing the worrying, when you are the one anxious to learn the fate of someone you love, you feel compelled to do something… anything. It doesn’t matter if it is pointless. You need to act, even if it is just to burn off the anxiety and energy that worry generates you need to do it.

  Professionals know how to do that well. That is why, or so I was taught when the Navy sent me to a hostage negotiating class years ago, kidnappers make you wait. They use your anxiety against you. By making you crazy with waiting before they make a call to tell you the person is still alive, they gain an upper hand. When they tell you what you need to do to get them freed, they hit you when you aren’t thinking clearly. They look for that sweet spot where you are so glad to know that the person is alive and that there is something you can do, whatever they demand seems reasonable.

  The tension was thick when my phone rang, and the stupid tune it played had never sounded more idiotic. I grabbed the phone, but it was Walter.

  “That boat those two men came in on left the marina,” he said. “They didn’t check out, but I walked the marina and saw it had left. Some folks on another yacht said they slipped away late this morning. I know that ain’t much help—”

  “It’s a lead,” I said.

  And it was. They’d tipped their hand and now we were certain who grabbed Gazele. But it also was a smart move. When I’d thought about Nate trying to find Donna, I’d gone on about how hard it was to hide on this small island. Nate and Nick had seen that; when they took Gazele, they realized the solution was obvious. They didn’t have to hide her on the island at all — they could sail away. It also explained why no one saw her leaving the dock, walking toward The Barracuda. They’d grabbed her and shoved her on their boat.

  “Shit,” Jeff said. “Is a big ocean out there. Where they gonna take her?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. Some pieces started falling into place. Everyone looked at me, wanting an explanation. “From what Nate and Donna both told me, there is a reason they want to be here, on this island, for a time yet. There is some important reason, so important that even though Nate is trying to kill Donna, she isn’t willing to leave. I don’t know what the hell is going on, or how kidnapping Gazele fits into it, but I’m sure they will stay close by.

  Jeff nodded. “If they around the island, we got eyes and ears.”

  Bill smiled. “Indeed we do.”

  They were both staring at the UHF radio behind the bar.

  Like most places that cater to the boating community, yachties, smugglers, and fisherman alike, The Barracuda had a UHF radio. It sat there, monitoring Channel 16, the hailing channel used by yachties and the coast guard. A yacht could hail another one, then they agree to switch to different channel to carry on a conversation. Similarly, an incoming yacht might hail The Barracuda and make reservations for lunch. A yacht in trouble would broadcast distress calls, a Mayday, on that channel.

  But there was another channel, one even more important to islanders. Not enjoying all the chatter of yachts, the fisherman had taken over another channel. Like truckers on CB radios, they used it for passing messages back and forth about fishing and weather and coast guard sightings.

  Because of all this useful information, the channel has been adopted by smugglers as well. From our perspective, that was fine. It made it even more useful — the sailors listening, the merrier. And Gazele had friends among the smugglers, you could bet on it.

  If Nick really was a competent sailor, they would be monitoring 16, but without local knowledge, they wouldn’t know about the other channel and we could put out the word that we were looking for them. Even if they expected us to be looking for their boat, without hearing the traffic, they couldn’t be certain of what we knew, and wouldn’t know when we were closing in on them.

  I went over to the radio and switched to that channel. “Attention. This is Capt. Billings over at Barracuda. Some foreigners on a yacht named DANCER might have grabbed Gazele and have her prisoner on board. We aren’t sure, but she sure as hell is missing, and that boat is gone. It’s a plastic rental yacht, about a 40 footer. Keep an eye out. If you see her, pass the word on this channel. Don’t chat on 16 and don’t get close to the yacht.”

  “Good thinking,” Sally told Jeff. “Them men always out there, and Gazele got a lot of friends on the boats. For sure, somebody gonna see something.”

  Bill sighed. “That should get results. How hard could it be to find a yacht in these waters? There aren’t an infinite number of places to hide it.”

  “If she’s on that boat, we have a real lead,” I said.

  Almost immediately, Jackson came back. “We gonna be looking, mon.”

  “Like I said, don’t go after them, just let us know where they go. Jeff is here with us and when we get the men, he wants to kick their asses personal like.”

  “I want to watch,” Jackson said.

  Knowing the word was spreading made me feel better. We were doing something. That sailboat couldn’t go fast enough or far enough to not be spotted by the fishermen. They’d be relaying the message up and down the island chain — the way they saw it, Gazele was one of them.

  Then, once again with nothing left on the to-do list, I sat back down to resume my fidgeting.

  It seemed reasonable that if Nate had Gazele, he’d be calling me. For once I didn’t want to mi
ss a call, so I took my phone to the bar and plugged it into Sally’s charger.

  Next, I used Sally’s phone to call Inspector George and bring him up to date. The fact that Nate and Nick had sailed off at the same time finally had him thinking we weren’t wasting police time.

  “I’ll get my men checking around, talking to people,” he said. That was good. Without anything obvious to do, they’ll just be going through the motions.

  Then I called Everett.

  “I’m on a training exercise in Barbados,” he said. “All I can do is put out an alert for the boat,” he said. “That won’t help at home, but it will set off red flags if they try to go into any port.”

  Having done everything I could think of, sitting back in my chair and staring at a horizon without seeing it, I felt the numbness that comes with feeling helpless, not having a clue what you can do to make things right, seeping deep into my bones. I focused my attention on being ready. I worked to get myself into the mindset required when the Navy sent me to wait the word that a mission was launched — the trick was to simultaneously be alert, primed, on edge, and ready to go.

  I wanted a drink but, needing to be clear headed, I sipped water. I guess the others felt the same because, for once, although the bar was nearly filled with people, not one person was drinking. I almost smiled at the thought that Gazele would be horrified.

  A layer of dark tension lay over us. Other than repeating some of our headless chicken activities I mentioned, we all did nothing together at The Barracuda. Every half hour or so, someone checked their phone, and then, moving casually, walked by mine that sat on the bar and glanced at it as if they could make the call happen.

  About dinner time, the call finally came — an almost surreal event that we’d already played over many times in our imaginations. Despite that, it unfolded as a very dull and predictable sequence of rather ordinary events. My phone sang its song, and I went to it, seeing that Nate had reached out. With everyone staring at me, I brought it to the table, put it on speaker and sat down. I had no intention of filtering whatever I learned.