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

  She considered that. “That actually makes sense. But why would you do that? Are you hoping to fuck me again?”

  “Your situation has complicated my life, and I prefer my life to be simple. If I can connect you with the inspector, if you start negotiating with him, then your murder case stops being my problem.” I held out my hands. “Simple.”

  “And I am a problem?”

  “A lady waving a gun in my face in an attempt to get me to help her make a dash for freedom, which would, by the way, ruin my livelihood, is definitely a problem in my categorization of things.”

  She drank more rum, then stood up and dressed. I watched as she walked over to the railing, standing where I’d welded a box to it, near the rope ladder. The box held deck tools, things we needed to keep handy to maintain the windlass, the winches, and so on. She reached behind the box and pulled out a 9 mm Glock, holding it up so I could see it. “Thanks for keeping it for me.”

  “You lied to me. Again.”

  She grinned. “Our relationship is not based on trust, Martin Billings. And why would I want to get caught carrying the murder weapon around?”

  “Because you didn’t plan on getting caught?”

  “How stupid would that be?”

  She hefted the gun, dropping the magazine and seeing it was still loaded, then putting it back in and chambering a round. I didn’t like how comfortable she was handling the weapon — she knew her way around an automatic.

  She turned her back to the railing and leaned against it. “Suppose we did what you suggested… how would it work?”

  “Tomorrow morning, I’m supposed to go ashore and see the inspector and review my statement. He thinks I’m involved somehow, or at least likes acting suspicious. I can explain what we talked about tonight—”

  “Skipping the sex, I assume.”

  “Skipping that. I give him your story and see what he says. If he agrees to be helpful above and beyond the call of duty, then I come out here and get you.”

  She considered it. “Do I seem that stupid?” she asked, finally.

  “That depends on what you are asking about. Going off in a boat in unfamiliar waters without even looking at the charts isn’t the sign of a superior intelligence.”

  She winced. “If I agreed to this shit, you could just bring the cops back here no matter what he said.”

  “I suppose I could. I wouldn’t, though.”

  “Because what we have is so special?”

  “Because I don’t like cops on my boat.”

  She shook her head. “Here is how we will work this. I’m willing to give your approach a shot, but I’m not sitting around here like live bait. I’ll go ashore. Give me your phone number and tomorrow keep it on, in its unnatural state. After you’ve had a chance for your little guy talk with the head cop, sometime later, I’ll call you. If we are going to do anything, I’ll tell you where we can meet.”

  I held out my hands, palms up. “Fair enough. You are in charge, it seems.”

  “The lady with the gun is in fucking charge. Damn right,” she said.

  I wrote the number on a piece of an invoice while she came back and grabbed up her backpack. She unzipped it, grabbed the rum bottle, and stuffed it in the backpack. Then she put the gun in the bag and gave me a meaningful glance. “Aren’t you going to try to take it from me?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ve got another bottle.”

  “I meant the gun.”

  I laughed. “And get my fingerprints all over the murder weapon? No thanks. Besides, if you had come here to shoot me, you would have done it by now and not bothered with the little seduction routine.”

  “That was just because I needed to get off,” she said. “It didn’t have that much to do with you, other than you are good looking.”

  “My male ego thanks you. But I think you came here to get my help, you just didn’t know exactly what form that should be. And, if I was dead, well then the police would have one less suspect for Warren’s murder.”

  “Good point.” She slipped the backpack on. “I’ll call in the morning and see what the inspector had to say.”

  “Not too early. The police station doesn’t open until ten in the morning,” I said.

  “Ten? What the fuck? What is it with this place? Things move like molasses.”

  “It’s island time. Get used to it.”

  As she headed for the railing, I called out: “By the way, it might be nice to know what this boyfriend of yours looks like.”

  She stopped. “Nate? Why?”

  “First of all, I might see him around, and you might want to know that. Also, it will add believability to your story. I’m sure the inspector will want to know what his suspect looks like.”

  She thought for a second. “He’s nothing special, just a nice-looking white boy, about six feet, one-ninety and strong. He’s got short brown hair, and a vaguely New York accent, a hint of one, like he tried to lose it and gave up before he got there. When you first meet him, he seems pretty damn nondescript really — until you see his eyes. He has incredible sexy green-brown eyes with flecks of gold. That’s how you’ll know it’s him. His buddy Nick has about the same build, more muscle, yellow hair, and watery blue eyes. Oh, and Nick has no personality.”

  “They sound like quite the pair,” I said.

  “Yup. Just keep in mind that just because he doesn’t look at all like a killer, or how you’d think a killer should look, don’t mean shit.”

  “How would you think one should look?”

  She considered it. “Hard, flinty eyes, I’d say, with hard jaw, a guy who never laughs… a boring type.”

  “Not looking like killers probably comes in handy in their line of work.”

  Her own large brown eyes showed a measure of surprise. “I suppose it does, now that you mention it. He sure fooled me for a while,” she said.

  She probably meant what she said, but I heard less sincerity in that comment than I’d sensed in her rapture about the man’s eyes. Funny what catches a woman’s attention. This was another version of the ongoing mystery of Ugly Bill’s popularity with women, just in a different context.

  I watched her leave then, climbing gracelessly over the rail and going down the rope ladder. The clanking of the rowlocks told me she’d settled in the dinghy, putting the oars back to work, and awkwardly started making her way back ashore.

  As she pulled away from HARM, I turned her story over in my head, the current version, thinking about how it seemed to fit the basic facts — assuming you were willing to believe this boyfriend existed, had followed her, and was a contract killer. As far-fetched as those ideas were, I’d encountered others that were harder to swallow and turned out to be true. If she was trying to pass off a new lie, you’d think she’d be conservative this time. It would be easy enough to say she had no idea who was out to get her, rather than spinning a weirdly complicated yarn that the authorities might be able to check out.

  The biggest strike against her was that in the time she’d been there, I didn’t think she’d looked up at the stars even once. You can’t really trust anyone who gets out under a crystal-clear night sky and doesn’t even look up at the stars to say hello to Orion, or even see the magic up there.

  I went to my chair and sat back, looking up, taking in the grand expanse of sky. The moon had set now, and the stars sparkled with an amazing intensity. “She’s still lying,” I told Orion.

  Orion, being a constellation of few words didn’t waste time arguing with me, or even bother to point out that even if she was lying, that didn’t mean the part about her boyfriend trying to kill her wasn’t true or mean that he didn’t kill Warren Davis. Constellations have a habit of never stating the obvious.

  I drank the last of the rum in my glass, rolling it over my tongue and reflecting on how truth was always a complicated matter, much more complex and nuanced than I liked, and even more so when it involved people.

  8

/>   Things never go the way you expect in the islands. Sure, it’s probably the same everywhere, and it’s been a while since I was anywhere else, but I seemed to recall life in the States as having a certain predictability, a certain inevitability that isn’t present down here. That’s a bittersweet observation; the elusiveness of things here represents the best and worst facets of island life.

  Once you accept that, and get used to it, you realize that even though things need doing and need planning, you can plan all you want, but at the end of the day you have to be adaptable, like I’d told Donna.

  Take my fisherman friend, Jackson, as an example. When they won’t let him fish in one place, he sticks it to them by fishing while doing what he was asked to do — leave the area. The point is that if you go to the trouble to get yourself all set up to do something and then can’t do it, you can’t let that get to you.

  Suppose, just as a random example of how island life is not always linear, you are asked to report to the police station for a heart-to-heart talk about the meaning of life and the possibility of bending the rules. You make the arrangements, get up on time, dress, go have breakfast, and get your butt over there.

  As a paragon of good intentions, and with a desire to extricate us from involvement with Donna’s murder warrant, I went ashore at the right time to have a leisurely breakfast before taking a causal walk that would get me to the door of the police station right about ten.

  After what had happened with Donna, I wasn’t ready to face Gazele yet, so breakfast was a roti on the dock. There was no reason I should feel guilty about the episode with Donna, and it was unlikely it would happen again, but some deep-seated, culturally imposed guilt made me uneasy.

  After my roti, I finished my part of the plan, walking to the station. But, when I got there, the door was locked, and a note taped to it, at about eyes level, written on a piece of a brown paper bag said: “We gone to come back later.”

  The childish scrawl made me doubt the inspector had written the note, but it had his business card, complete with his cell number stapled to it. “In case of emergency,” was written on it.

  A note like that, the major disruption that arises when the other party hasn’t upheld their end of the arrangement, calls for a great deal of adaptability. I’d have to wait, but who knew for how long.

  On St. Anne, as with most islands, the approximate value of “later” was open-ended to say the least. I’ve heard it said that the islander use of “later” is like the Spanish “mañana,” only without the urgency. I’ve heard long-time residents say that such a claim overstates the situation, and that “later” refers to eras, in the sense archaeologists use the term.

  Either way, it doesn’t allow for precision.

  I took out an old receipt that probably should have been in my ledger, rather than in my pocket, and wrote down the phone number. Not that I intended to call. Talking to the inspector, especially under the circumstances, especially considering the subject at hand, would be onerous enough without trying to do it on the phone. When a subject is more serious than an exchange of pleasantries, I prefer to do it face to face, which meant I would have to come back and determine what the current use of ‘later’ meant empirically.

  It didn’t take much brain work to decide that I would probably find Bill enjoying in the delightful ambiance of The Barracuda Bar. He probably had breakfast there with Sally. Given that it was rapidly approaching the bar’s wonderfully long happy hour (starting at eleven, right after breakfast) I decided to head over and wait there.

  After a second lovely morning walk, I spotted Bill sitting with Sally at his favorite kind of table, the kind that lets him look out over the yacht basin. Sailors want to see the horizon whenever possible, and if you love boats, as we both do, you never get tired of seeing other people puttering around in their own craft, even yachts. Sometimes you can learn something from seeing how people deal with their boats.

  As I headed over to join them, a man stepped up to me, almost blocking my path. “Excuse me, but aren’t you Martin Billings, Captain Martin Billings?”

  I stopped, backing up slightly. “That depends on who you are and whether or not I owe you money,” I said. It was a stall. I was pretty sure I knew exactly who he was. His nondescript, yet athletic build and those green-brown eyes with flecks of gold, told me all I needed to know. I just didn’t want him to know I knew… one of those games. It seemed smart to be cautious. That let me take the measure of him. Would he admit to being Donna’s boyfriend or choose to play it close to his vest? That would tell me a lot about the man and possibly the situation.

  “My name is Nate Devro,” he said. I almost smiled, hearing the name.

  “Devro?”

  “Yes. I’m here, on this island, trying to find my wife — Donna. Donna Devro. According to the local gossip, you helped her out the other day. But no one else seems to have even seen her. It’s important that I find her and I was hoping you might know where she is.”

  “Her husband?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “What the lady told me was that she had a boyfriend hunting for her — or hunting her.” I wanted to rattle his story a bit, see what came loose, but this was going to take time to tickle out.

  He ran a hand through his short brown hair and then pointed to an empty table. “Her husband. Let me buy you a drink. I know it’s early, but I need to tell you what’s really going on.”

  “It isn’t too early for a drink,” I said. “Not here.”

  We sat, and he waved for a waitress. “You say you are her husband and she says you are her boyfriend… is one of you mistaken or don’t you know?”

  He sighed, dramatically. “My Donna tells stories. Lots of different ones. If you’ve only heard her side of things, you might have an idea that I’m some sort of monster and wish her harm, or a wayward priest trying to convert her.” He shook his head. “It depends on her frame of mind at the time.”

  “She didn’t seem particularly confused to me.” Confusion didn’t seem to be her problem at all.

  “More than that. If you’ll bear with me, I’d love to tell you another story, my version of what’s going on. I hope it will make sense of things.”

  The chaos was getting more chaotic all the time, rather than the hoped-for less chaotic, but I had to admit it was getting interesting. The man’s manner surprised me, and I was torn in trying to decide if he was honest or a great actor. He sounded sincere, concerned, and all the things a distraught husband was supposed to sound like. I couldn’t wait to hear his pitch.

  A waitress came over with a seductive swish. I hadn’t seen this lady around much, but that was because Sally always took care of us when Bill was with me. “What’s your poison?” Nate asked.

  “Rum,” I said. “Clarke’s Court.”

  “Bring us a bottle,” Nate Devro said.

  “Go ahead. Tell me how you lost your wife,” I said as the lovely dark girl smiled and wandered off.

  He sighed as if the truth were some burden that he was glad to put down. “She is. A troubled woman.”

  “Are you talking about old troubles or the new one?”

  “New one?” he asked, seeming surprised. “What’s she done now?”

  He didn’t seem to know. “She is the prime suspect in a murder,” I said, having decided there was no harm in telling him and no advantage in keeping it hushed up. He’d find out soon enough.

  He arched an eyebrow. “Murder?”

  “That’s the charge. She was sailing a boat and ran it aground. The help you heard we gave her was getting it off the reef. After she disappeared, the authorities found a body on board. It was the boat’s owner.”

  “A guy named Warren Davis?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  He shook his head. “But I know who he is, or was.”

  “And that is?”

  “An old friend of Donna’s.” That fit with her story. “She worked for him before we
got married. When she ran off and I started looking for her, I found she had charged our credit card for a ticket to Grenada. I remembered that this guy lived on a boat in the islands and thought maybe she’d run to him.”

  “You knew where he was?”

  “No. But I worked it out. If he was on a boat and she flew to Grenada, then it made sense she intended for him to meet her there.”

  He sat back as the waitress brought the rum and two glasses, put them in front of us and poured lovely shots.

  “So you followed her to Grenada. How did you get here?”

  “I asked around at the marinas until I learned that this Davis character had shown up and she’d gotten on board. Some people knew he had a slip over here. We chartered a bareboat and followed them.”

  “We?”

  Nate nodded in the direction of a square man sitting at the bar. “That’s Nick. He’s a friend, and a good sailor and I don’t know shit about sailing. When I told him I might need to follow her to another island, like a good buddy, he offered to take time off from work and help out.”

  “And what happens when you find her?”

  “I’ll take her back to the States.”

  “And if she doesn’t want to go?”

  “I’ll have to insist. She needs help.”

  “She might be your wife, but she is an adult. If she doesn’t want to be in the States, if she is on an extended vacation, you can’t just force her to go back.”

  “Look, the sad story is that my wife escaped from a mental care facility,” he said. “She’d been having trouble coping. Unfortunately, her doctor put her in a low security place. I didn’t realize that until she disappeared.”

  “Coping is hard.”

  “She developed paranoid tendencies; she’d come up with fantastic scenarios about people wanting to do her harm.”