Including selling herself in back alleys.
I shuddered as I slowed down a little to pass under the bridge. Clearing it and the remnants of the old Seven Mile Bridge, I opened the throttle again and turned slightly east of due north to follow the natural deep channel.
The idea of an innocent girl like Cobie or Nancy’s niece being transformed into a near-lifeless shell of a human, to be rented out by the hour to the sickos that frequented those dark alleys, disgusted me. But I’d seen firsthand what certain drugs would do to a person. A crack monster would sell their children for another rock.
I also thought about the kid, Alberto, if that was his name. He’d been starved most of his life, beaten, and put on a leaky boat to die slowly under the baking sun or drown in the Gulf.
These things angered me—a deep, seething rage that I knew I wouldn’t be able to just shake off. It was an irritation to a primal part of my brain, the part that society has tried to bury for thousands of years.
If you boiled down the animal kingdom to its very base, there were really only two kinds—prey and predator. The two were easily identified by the location of their eyes.
Animals that fell into the prey category—like mice, rabbits, deer, and horses—had eyes on the sides of their heads, giving them greater side vision to watch out for predators all around them. Some of these animals had eyes that evolved to have long, horizontal pupils, allowing them even greater peripheral vision. Horses and other animals of the plains became ridiculously hard to sneak up on.
Predators, like wolves, lions, owls, even humans, had eyes in the front of their heads, which could focus on a single object. That gave them a three-dimensional image, allowing them to judge distances better. Cats’ pupils are long and narrow, also, but vertical, allowing them a greater field of view above their heads.
Predators kill prey to survive. It’s the law of the jungle.
But there are some animals that will murder their own kind. A male lion will kill male cubs to maintain dominance. Many species of fish will devour their own young. It’s a natural part of the evolution of a species.
Only humans will kill one another without reason.
Those humans who preyed on weaker people, using them for their own sick purposes, or for financial gain, only to toss them aside when they were finished with them, were at the bottom of the evolutionary scale.
Then there were animals like me.
That deep, dark part of the human brain that society has pushed down for centuries is in all of us. The will to hurt, maim, and kill can be honed, trained, and, as we are thinking creatures, redirected.
Right now, my hostility was directed at an unknown, unseen enemy—a group of people who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered others, whose only mistake was in passing before the forward-looking eyes of a predator.
With a following current, I made good time and was soon idling up to the south pier, packing away the rage I felt; that need to seek animalistic justice.
Clicking the key fob button, I reversed Cazador’s engine, and stopped her alongside the pier as Savannah came down the steps from our house, Woden and Finn following dutifully behind her. There was a time when they’d have run down the steps.
I stepped up to the dock and into Savannah’s embrace, holding the bow line in one hand. The dogs tried to wedge their heads between us from either side, but Savannah wasn’t allowing it. Finn actually whined.
She kissed me, then stepped back. “I know it’s only been a little over twenty-four hours, but I missed you.”
“Me too,” I said, as Finn and Woden vied for my attention. I gave them both a good neck rub, then bent to tie the line off to a cleat. “Being alone in that big bed on the Dog was like being adrift in the middle of the ocean. Only the ocean smelled like you.”
I kissed her again as the dogs moved to the end of the pier to lie in the sun.
“Next time,” she said, “we’ll all go together, or you won’t go at all.”
I laughed and pushed Cazador’s stern away from the dock. She drifted slowly in an arc and, when she’d moved out far enough, I untied the bow line and pulled it the other way, turning her around. With a single inboard engine, it was easier that way.
“I’ll go inside and help you get her into her slip,” Savannah said, then climbed quickly up the steps.
With the outboard boats, backing into a slip was easy—point the back of the motor in the direction you wanted to go, and that’s where it went. Gaspar’s Revenge, with her twin inboards, was even easier. By using the thrust from each prop separately, she could be turned around almost within her own length.
But El Cazador had a single inboard and the rudder was several inches behind the prop—of little use in reverse.
We managed to get the boat tied up alongside the Revenge and I shut down the engine.
“I spoke to Andersen,” I said, handing her the bag from Rufus. “He said the boy might be released this afternoon and he’d phone before he brings him out.”
“What are they calling him in the hospital?” she asked, opening the bag, and inhaling the fragrant mix of herbs and spices. “Mmmm.”
“I didn’t think to ask. I’m sure it’s not ‘boy’.”
“He looked like an Alberto,” she said, referring to the name Deputy Fife and I had found on the transom of the boat he’d been in.
“Names don’t have a look.”
She looked up at me. “Oh? If I mention the name Waldo, what mental image do you get? How about Brutus?”
I clicked the key fob again and the hydraulic pump began to whir, pulling the doors closed.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But I’ve met guys named Alberto who were tall, short, thin, or fat.”
We went upstairs
