We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging and taking intermittent scans of the horizon. Setting up the laptop in the shade on the main deck, we read everything we could on Deacon Lynch and his band of delusional “white race protectors.”
As the sun dipped into the western horizon, we grilled up a few lobster tails and red potatoes covered in garlic. Nestling into the outside dinette, we enjoyed the meal while watching the sun play a symphony of colors as it made its grand exit. The sky was cast in a wide arc of bright yellow that shifted to gold, deep orange, and then to warm red as the celestial orb vanished beyond the veil of flat tree-covered coastline.
After finishing up our meal and washing the dishes, we applied a generous amount of bug spray, then sat on the sunbed and called Scarlett. Her voice oozing with enthusiasm, she asked us question after question about all that we’d been up to that day. We gave her the PG-13 version of the aggressive encounters, and she seemed most interested in the lost treasure.
“Have you found it yet?” she asked.
Ange and I both laughed.
“We haven’t looked for it,” I said. “The bad guys who killed Harper’s uncle have been searching all day, but it doesn’t look like they’ve found anything yet.”
We asked her how her day was and, in typical teenage girl fashion, she replied with a single word: boring. It took a little prodding to get more out of her, but apparently she’d spent the day hanging out at our house with Isaac, Harper, and Jack. They’d mainly read, and she and Isaac had done homework while taking intermittent breaks to play with Atticus.
“Sounds like a fun day to me,” Ange said.
“I guess,” Scarlett replied. “But compared to what you guys did, my day was like waiting in line at the DMV with just one worker behind the counter.”
We both laughed again.
“You’ll be an adult and off on your own adventures soon,” I said. “Besides, our house isn’t that bad, is it?”
“No, I can’t really complain. I kid, but there’s definitely much worse places to spend a day than a tropical paradise.”
We told her to make sure she got to bed early for school the following morning, then said our goodnights. She was a good kid, and even though she wasn’t our biological child, she had so many similarities with us that it was almost scary.
By nine o’clock, Ange was starting to doze off. I told her that I was fine staying up, that she should get some rest after the long and eventful day we’d had. Walking with her into the main cabin, I kissed her softly, then shut the door behind me after stepping out. I brewed a pot of coffee, filled a mug, then climbed back out into the evening air.
I enjoyed the peacefulness of it all. The quiet, the serenity, and the incomprehensibly big black sky filled with stars. Every now and then, I climbed up to the bow for a look around. I used my night vision scope and scanned the islands and shorelines in all directions. Spending most of the night on the sunbed, I looked out over the surrounding flat water, listening to the various birds and the occasional fish that surfaced for an evening snack.
Should’ve brought my rod and reel.
After four hours, Ange stepped barefoot from the saloon with a mug of coffee. She wore yoga pants and a thin long-sleeved Rubio Charters shirt on account of the skeeters. It was an hour past midnight, and the evening was still calm and quiet, though a ten-knot breeze had picked up. I’d seen a few boats, but none had come within a quarter of a mile from the Baia. And there was still no sign of the pontoon boat.
“No,” Ange said, waving a hand at me before I could object. “You need your sleep too. Besides, you know how much I love dark moonlit nights on the open water.”
I smiled. If we’d been there under different circumstances, I’d have popped open a bottle of wine and given her a few more reasons to enjoy the moonlit night. But with Lynch’s remaining white supremacist posse still on the loose, the last thing we wanted was for them to sneak up on us and catch us off guard.
“Don’t give me any more than four hours,” I said.
During my years of active-duty service, I’d considered four hours sleeping in. “Anything more than an hour is beauty sleep,” one of my SEAL instructors used to yell at us. Back during the notorious stage of training known as Hell Week, we were lucky to get four hours of sleep over the course of the entire week. I remember dozing off while we carried a two-hundred-pound log on our shoulders, or while doing flutter kicks in the sand and crashing surf. A few seconds here, a few seconds there really added up.
After going through hell, I’d conditioned my body to function on just a few hours, so four was more than enough given the circumstances.
I kissed Ange again, then stepped below deck and crashed on the queen-sized bed.
TWENTY
After shutting my eyes for what felt like a grand total of three seconds, I awoke to the main cabin door hinging open. Tilting my head forward and focusing my gaze, I saw Ange stride through. Her posture was rigid. I could only see a faint glow of her face from the moonlight glowing through the port-side window, but I could tell that her eyes were narrowed and intense.
“The utility boat’s on the move,” she said before I could ask what had happened.
I brushed off the blanket and slid my bare feet onto the teak
