Ensign Doheny came up to the bridge to report to Skye.
“Nothing, Ensign?” asked Skye.
“No, sir. Said the speedboat stopped for some bottles of cold water, that’s all. Just a guy out from Hialeah fishing.”
“Oh, well,” said Skye as he left the bridge, “carry on.”
Skye disappeared below decks and Rafael went over to the helmsman.
“Where to?”
“Back to Miami, sir.”
“Very good.”
Doheny walked over to Rafael, who had walked out onto the flying bridge and was looking through is binoculars as Big Fish IV began trolling for fish again.
“Nothing, huh, Ensign?”
“No, sir. Nothing. Clean as a whistle.”
“Looks harmless enough.”
“Funny thing, though,” Doheny said.
“What’s that?”
“The bonito he pulled out of the well—the fish they said they caught today?”
“Yes?” Rafael turned to look at the ensign.
“I know my fish, and that bonito was at least two days old.”
Rafael raised his binoculars and had a longer look at Big Fish IV.
* * *
Down in his cabin, Skye threw himself onto his bunk and breathed out deeply, emptying his lungs.
God, how I hate that asshole, he thought.
He knew the first thing Raven would ask him when they got back into port was: Did you make life miserable for that little fucker?
And, of course, he would say Yes, he had, even though there wasn’t too much he could do without being so obvious it would reflect badly on him. He was sensitive enough to the mood of his crew that he knew they were on Rafael’s side. This limited the number of things he could do. If he went too far belittling Rafael, it could come back to bite him in the ass.
He got up and splashed his face with water. He looked into the mirror. He knew he was handsome. Why did life have to be such a torture for him with Raven? He ran his hands through his blond hair and noted the odd looking black streaks that ran through it. It was as if instead of having “salt and pepper” hair that middle aged men got, he had “black and blond” hair. It looked like it had been dyed, but there was no reason for a good-looking healthy man of 32 to dye his hair, not when it was as gorgeous as his.
Maybe it was time to think about ditching Raven. It was always one miserable experience after another with Raven. (Except when they were in bed, where she always redeemed herself, and where her violent personality and passionate emotional explosions found a suitable release.)
As Raven’s boyfriend, whenever she attended certain social events, he had to go with her. And it never ended well. The last time they’d had dinner at Flagler Hall, he’d had too much to drink and took a swing at Jack—they’d both ended up falling into Biscayne Bay. Not a pretty sight for the dinner party to come out to see the Secret Service pulling them out of the water like two dueling hard-dicked teenagers fighting over—nothing.
But how could he leave Raven?
With all the negative baggage that came with her, she had totally won him over with her exotic allure, her wild passion, the slightly kinky sex. He found himself wondering when they were in bed if she’d done the same things to Jack that she did with him. (Like the creative ways she used the three different-sized dildos she kept in the freezer…)
The very thought of it drove him mad, so that when he was with Raven, the two of them became wild animals clawing their way toward each other’s bodies.
Yes, she was jealous. He knew that’s what had driven Jack away. But Skye liked it when Raven was jealous over him. It drove him mad with desire.
When she got into bed with that attitude, she was like an ancient Greek goddess with a score to settle.
Sometimes those scores ended badly for the object of desire, which, Skye thought with some sense of trepidation, in this case just happened to be him.
* * *
From the bridge, Rafael watched through his binoculars as Big Fish IV trolled lazily along, the fisherman sitting in the seat aft occasionally winding in his line and letting it out again in that endlessly repetitive, rhythmic manner that went with any kind of fishing.
Going through the motions, he thought.
The thing that seemed strange to Rafael was the direction the boat was taking. It was heading back toward the Keys when this early in the day the captain would normally still be pushing out to deeper water.
“Excuse me, sir?” said Ensign Doheny.
“Yes?”
“Are you seeing something I might have missed on the charter boat?”
“No, just curious, Ensign. Why would anybody set out to fish with a two-day old bonito in his fish well? Could it be bait?”
“The bait would be in the bait well. The crewman snatched it out of the fish well to show me what they’d caught.”
“Well, then, if they’re out here with two-day old catch to show people like us, what the hell are they really doing out here?”
“There’s no contraband on that fishing boat, Lieutenant,” said Doheny, “unless it’s built into the gunwales or underneath the boat itself.”
“Which would have nothing to do with the go-fast boat. The report said the two boats were only together three or four minutes.”
“Maybe they handed off something to the go-fast boat,” said Doheny.
“Or the go-fast boat handed something off to them,” said Rafael.
“But what? We were here just a half hour after getting the position from HITRON.”
“Guess we’ll never know,” said Rafael.
Doheny went back to his business.
Skye had set a course back to Miami and while Rafael wanted to track Big Fish IV for a while, he didn’t dare issue an order countermanding his paranoid, angry captain.
He went back to the radio
