Deceived - Laura S. Wharton Page 0,14
a day of sailing, I had her slip him a note telling him about Tommy and the trouble he had caught. Well, Lee was on it in a hurry. We met a couple of times, and he took down everything I knew about Tommy, his friends, and the boats.”
“The boats?”
“Yeah, drug boats. They bring the stuff in, right here to Southport. It’s a mean business. Tommy was just a little fish. He was trying to go straight for Emily and me, but his boss wouldn’t let him. Tommy told me he had one more run to do, and then we would be moving to Florida where he could do something else. We talked about running a dive shop or something like that.
“Anyway, on this last run of his, his boat got boarded by a gang and Tommy got killed. Two of his crew were down below in the galley when they heard an approaching boat coming at high speed, so they hid. They both have records, and I guess they thought it was the Coast Guard. Anyway, they heard it all happen, but they didn’t see anything. The boat was holed, and it sank.”
“What about the crew? What happened to them?”
“As the boat was sinking, they slipped into the water and swam to Bald Head Island. I bet those fancy-pants property owners over there didn’t know what to make of them two washing up on their pristine shores. They rode home on the contractors’ boat the next day, and no one was the wiser. When Tommy didn’t come home, I tracked them down and hounded them until they told me what had happened. Then I contacted Lee.”
Sam took it all in. “What about the cargo? What happened to it?”
“That’s the thing. There wasn’t any, according to the two guys who were with Tommy. They were on their way out to meet one of the shrimpers. Tommy had an old beat-up Grady White. It wasn’t much to look at, but it sure could move.”
“You mentioned a key in your note this morning. I’m assuming you wrote the note, didn’t you?”
Del nodded her head. “That’s right. I wrote that note.”
“What did the key open?”
“Oh, it wasn’t that kind of key. Lee was making what he called a matrix, a key to a chart or something like that. He was putting together all the pieces of the puzzle, he said, and the matrix helped him keep the players straight. I figured if I could get it back, maybe I could see what it all meant and find out who killed Tommy and maybe Lee. Tommy sometimes mentioned the number on the scrap of paper I gave you, so I thought it might be important.”
At this, Del looked straight ahead. “Can you help?”
It was a simple question.
“Del, Lee was my friend in addition to being my partner. If what you say is true, then I will find the bastards who killed him and Tommy. You need to focus on Emily. It’s probably a good idea for you two to move, if you can. There’s not much more you can do here.”
Sam turned his back to her, breathing in the moist salt air brushing his face as the ferry moved forward toward Southport’s ferry dock. When he turned around again, she was gone. Her bike was still there.
She couldn’t have gone too far, he thought, as the ferry slowed and lined up with the boarding ramps on the Southport side of the river. Sam walked briskly to his car, checking between the others for Del. No sign of her. He drove off the ferry, and waited by the vending machines, watching to see whether a lone walker came off, but he didn’t see her.
“She must have gotten into a car,” he said to himself, searching each passing car hastily, but none contained a driver or passenger resembling Del.
Stumped, Sam drove his borrowed Altima the few miles into the historic deep-water port town of Southport.
Chapter eight
It had been a while since he’d been there, but Sam headed toward the waterfront and took a seat in the outside dining section of Provision’s Restaurant overlooking the township’s smaller of two marinas. The larger marina, Sam knew from experience, was overcrowded and overpriced, but the smaller one had a longer waiting list, plus a tight anchorage for a few snowbirds heading north or south on their annual migrations via the Intracoastal Waterway.
Sam and Angel had anchored here many a night and had rowed in to Provision’s for shrimp-burgers and