Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,22
bones and a handsome face, who’d just had a fight with her boat partner, business partner, and on-again off-again bedmate, Rhonda Lister, and so was feeling weepy and fragile.
Then she looked at A-Dock, where the deepwater boats are moored.
“That’s something else that’s making me crabby,” she said, staring.
“What?”
“That.”
I followed the lady’s gaze to a neat and incremental line of oceangoing sailboats, sails rolled, portholes dark, trawlers, cruisers, and blue-water sports fishermen, most cabins buttoned tight. But a few of the regulars were alive with light: Mike Westhoff’s Sea Ray Playmaker, Dieter Rasmussen’s Grand Banks, Geno Lamont’s Birdsong, a classic Hinckley, and JoAnn’s boat, Tiger Lilly.
Because it was two weeks before Easter, a lull in high season, there were a few open slips, but not many. Two spaces down from Tiger Lilly was a new arrival, a sleek powerboat, thirty-plus feet of Kevlar Stiletto that looked more like a futuristic spaceship. Dark hull, low black flybridge that tapered aft toward a transom compartment which hid two or three mega-horsepower engines. The engine space was decked with plush cushions, roomy enough for a dozen starlets in bikinis. Oval ports showed lights inside. A string of LEDs mounted under the hull transformed the water beneath to lime Jell-O. No name on the stern, either. Unusual.
I said, “In showrooms, boats like that are missing only two options: an ego big enough to buy it and a lackey to start the engines.”
“It showed up last week. Came in at night, the engines so loud it shook the windows. I should’ve got up and taken a look, but I didn’t. You were away on one of your mysterious trips.”
“Tampa,” I replied automatically.
“Whatever,” JoAnn said, giving it a mall-girl inflection. “Sure, you expect some bigmouthed real estate tycoon or a trust fund brat. But we’re two slips down, and Rhonda and I haven’t met the owner or even seen him. Woke up next morning and there it was.”
I was thinking, Mysterious. Just like Tomlinson’s mistress, as my neighbor continued talking.
“At a marina this small, you expect people to be friendly . . . or at least sociable. I’m telling you, Doc, Dinkin’s Bay is changing. This place used to be more of a crazy little family, but now the rich ones come and go, and Mack doesn’t give a damn as long as they bring cash or euros. That, plus Rhonda’s crazy mood swings, I’m starting to feel too old and tired to put up with this bullshit much longer.”
Just then, I saw headlights of a luxury car illuminate the parking lot, then a man get out and open the gate. It was Tomlinson, with his married mistress, returning from South Trail Animal Clinic, where he’d taken the dog.
JoAnn nudged me and said, “Looks like your dog’s home.”
In the two days since we’d returned from the Everglades I’d repeated “I’m not keeping the dog” too many times to count, so I didn’t bother. Instead, I switched the subject to the married mistress by nodding toward the car. “Has anyone seen her? I know she’s been in the lab. There was blond hair in the shower drain, and someone refolded my kitchen towels. Then she neatened up the drawers.”
JoAnn replied, “Except for the towels, it could’ve been Tomlinson.”
“Not a chance. There was still a quart of beer left in the fridge.”
That was enough to convince her. “So he admitted using your bedroom?”
“Why ask?” I replied. “After I’ve been away, I change the sheets and soak my toothbrush in alcohol no matter what. Laboratory grade.”
JoAnn said, “I saw her once . . . at Bailey’s grocery. Just a quick glance, though—I recognized her Mercedes SUV. She’s everything I’ll never be: tall, Nordic, rich, wears tailored clothes—even to grocery-shop—and too damn skinny for tits the size of hers. Plus, she’s married. Not happily, which is obvious, thank god. Otherwise, I don’t think I could bear it. It’s women like her who make me want to curl up in a ball and cry myself into a puddle.”
As if on cue, she appeared with Tomlinson, he laughing at some punch line, full of life and the awareness of a burning fuse in his backside. She was a tall, vertical presence softened by estrogen contours and a halo of golden hair. The two walked up to his dinghy. The dog, at heel, walked with mechanical care—maybe because of the leash clipped to a new collar—but didn’t hesitate to follow the two into the little boat.