Deceived - Laura S. Wharton Page 0,12
the high cockpit of the forty-two-foot Hatteras, Sam saw the backside of the large man. His thick, hairy neck peeking out from his multi-colored golf-shirt collar was the color of a lobster just plucked from boiling water. The man cursed into the cell phone nearly hidden in his fat fist. Sam tried hard not to listen, but it wasn’t easy to miss the gist of the one-sided conversation. “What do you mean they found it? Look; your ass is on the line for this one. We’ve got too much riding on it, and somebody is going to pay!” the chunky man yelled. Sam reboarded Lee’s boat and headed down below to get to work on the seacock, but he took two seconds to pop open the starboard portholes so he could hear more of the yelling, just for sport.
This particular “boater” was the bane of the marina. He thought nothing of waking the entrance as he brought his boat in, and he had ripped up more than one piling getting into his slip over the last few months. He claimed he was a yacht broker to everyone in the marina, though there was little evidence that he did any actual work either on or off his boat.
When the fat man was on board sporadically, everybody knew he was there by the volume of his voice and the show of “prospective buyers” aboard, not a few of whom wore high heels and extremely short skirts. And whenever this overweight “captain” did take his yacht out, every other boater in the marina, and probably on nearby waters, cringed. Sam mused that this guy’s expertise must be in selling because it sure wasn’t in boating. Maybe he only had to sell a few a year to keep up with his own boat’s expenses and the yard crew that took care of it for him. Sam didn’t know his name, but this guy was entertaining, to say the least.
Applying WD-40 and elbow grease, Sam was able to loosen the seacock’s handle a bit. He decided to see whether the seacock was fouled, so he kept a tethered six-inch long wooden peg at the ready to plug the seacock when he took it apart. Carefully loosening all of the mounting bolts around the handle, he yanked the fitting off quickly and prepared to plug the hole so water wouldn’t gush in. But there was no water gushing. Not even a trickle.
Training his flashlight on the interior, he saw a secondary block had been cut just large enough to fill the hole.
“What’s this?” Sam wondered, reaching for the wooden circle. A small handle was fitted on the top, just large enough to grip with a pair of pliers. Again, Sam stood ready to stop a rush of water with the long tapered plug, but as he extracted this circular block, there was no water.
Attached with some form of epoxy to the underside of the round wooden peg was a small waterproof dry bag. And further still in the seacock was another smaller plug, also with a tiny d-ring for a handle.
“Lee was thorough,” Sam smiled. He pulled at this smaller plug and at last was pleased to see water rushing in so he could stop it with the long tapered plug. He deftly reinstalled the seacock mounting and handle, tightened all the bolts, and cleaned up the watery mess that the quick job left. Sam hid the blocks of wood in the locker of the port settee and stuffed the dry bag into his pocket. He would study it as soon as he got back aboard Angel.
Turning off Stormy Monday’s engine, Sam could hear with greater accuracy the ranting of the man on the Hatteras as his deep voice rose in pitch. Surely, the entire marina could hear him.
“I don’t care who was at fault. That was my haul, and I want it back. You’re supposed to be handling things, not me. If you’ve got to hire divers, then do it! I’m coming down there.”
With that, the hefty man stormed from the cockpit and was out of sight. The air was still now that his shouting was over. It was as if birds breathed a collective sigh of relief and started chirping again, and a flock of small purple martins flew about the docks, working on their nest-building skills once more.
The quiet gave Sam a moment to think. What time was it? Looking at his watch, Sam realized he’d be pushed to catch the last ferry