Miller time everybody would be happy as a band of Smurfs, full of stories about the huge fish they had caught or not, and a permanent appreciation for Tyrell’s mystical ability to tell them where to drop a cast. No doubt most attributed this to some kind of island wisdom, or else the dope, but I knew better. Tyrell was actually from Corpus Christi and had a master’s degree in marine bio from Texas A&M. The accent was pure theater, something he had picked up in the Peace Corps.
By two o’clock he hadn’t returned, a good omen, since his party had signed on for only half a day but now had obviously sprung for the full ride, so I decided to kill the rest of the afternoon by driving up to have a look at a boat I was hoping to buy. I say “hoping” because there was no way on God’s green earth anybody was going to loan me the scratch for it, and with Kate planning on medical school—she had her heart set on either UCLA or Dartmouth Hitchcock—I saw nothing but the worst kind of cash squeeze in my future. But this boat! A 1962 38-foot Chris-Craft Constellation with twin MerCruiser Blue Water 350s, totally restored with glossy teak from bowsprit to transom, more varnished wood in the wheelhouse than in all the pubs in Dublin, all of it completely top-shelf right down to the bait wells with custom circulating pumps and enough electronics on the helm to command the U.S. Seventh Fleet: in all my life, I had never seen a boat like this. It wasn’t the best rig for deep sea, or fishing of any kind, as I would spend half my time mopping up the blood and reminding people to use the goddamn coasters. But we want what we want, and I wanted this boat, never mind the price tag, an eye-popping $220,000, about the same as four years of medical school in sunny California or snowy New Hampshire, take your pick. She was docked in Marathon, and the only reason she hadn’t sold was that the owner, a former “labor official” from Providence, was now out of the country “indefinitely” and had left the sale to the yard where she was kept. This was a fox-henhouse proposition if ever there was one, as the slip fees and maintenance on a boat like that easily brought in three times the money they would see from a brokerage commission, so the thing had sat through two winters with nary an offer I knew of.
I parked the truck in the yard lot, ducked into the office to fetch the key, and walked down to the slip where she was waiting, in all her forgotten glory. I had met the owner, Frank DeMizio, once before, when I’d first gone to the yard to take a peek—a tough-looking, squarish little man with a face like a piecrust and enough hair on his back to throw a shadow. He was wearing nothing but a Red Sox cap and a pair of aquamarine bikini briefs, and when I introduced myself and told him I was there to see the boat, he didn’t offer me his hand to shake but simply grunted and went back to wiping down the bait boxes with a shammy cloth.
“Felicity,” I said, reading the name off the transom.
“Means ‘pussy’ in Latin,” he said.
“I think it means ‘happiness,’ ” I said.
He shrugged his big shoulders and wrung his cloth into a bucket. “Same thing, innit?” He rose then and had a hard look at me where I stood on the dock. “You cocksuckers never give up, do you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Fucking IRS. Nothing satisfies you, you parasites.”
“I’m not from the IRS. Ask Carl.” Carl was the yard owner; he knew my business, who I was.
“That lying rat fuck?” He crossed his beefy arms over his chest. “He’s twice as dirty as I ever was. You tell Agent Tortorella to check his books, he wants a good laugh.”
I fished through my wallet for a business card, which I held out to him over the gunwale. “Listen, I’m really not from the IRS. I run a charter service out of Big Pine.”
He rolled his eyes, but then took the card and looked at it. “Joe Crosby.” He frowned and lifted his eyes to me. “That you?”
“That’s right. I just told you.”
His face softened. “Well, fuck it. So you did.” He sat down heavily on the bait box and shook his head