Faint. And coming from the sea.
He ran to the water’s edge, desperately scanning the rolling waves for a sight of her. There. A faint smudge. It had to be Vicky. She was halfway across the pass between the two islands! In the very middle of the vicious riptide rushing toward the open sea!
He made a running dive and started swimming as hard as he could, cursing himself furiously for not warning her about the current. Stupid! He never dreamt that she’d go out that far, but remembered how enchanted she was with the pine-forested island. That had to be it. She’d decided to swim over and—
He stopped swimming and raised his head. He could barely make out the dim shape that had to be her.
No…no…no…
Her voice was weaker now, a faint no repeated over and over. She was telling him to stop. Telling him the current would only take him as well. He plowed ahead another fifty yards, feeling the swift pull of the running tide taking him into its grip.
He swam harder. He was strong. Stronger than this bloody current that was stealing Vicky away from him. He swam until the muscles in his legs and arms were burning and then he swam harder still.
Another look. There. She was much farther away now. He saw her go under. Then surface again. He swam toward her, heedless of the wicked pull of the water. Raised his head, gasping for air. A sick, hollow feeling began to steal its way inside him. For every ten yards of progress he gained, she was being swept away another thirty.
He plowed forward, refusing to acknowledge it was hopeless now, unwilling to give up. He swam another thirty yards, feeling himself right on the periphery of where the rip was strongest. He raised his eyes, stinging with a mixture of tears and salt, and looked again.
“I love you!” he cried out, praying she might yet be able to hear him.
He saw her just that one last time, briefly, being pulled past Pine Cay now, and then he saw her go under. Waited. Fought the tide. Waited for that dear little head to surface, please, just once more and maybe he could get to—somehow get to—God—just to see her again…
He knew then that she was gone. Simply. Irrevocably. Gone.
He lifted his face to the heavens and screamed mercilessly at God.
Alex Hawke turned and swam as hard as he could for Kestrel. The edges of the rip had him, fought him, but not hard enough to overcome his rage. In minutes, he was climbing aboard the sloop. He ducked down through the companionway to the small navigation station.
There was a satellite phone hanging above the notebook computer with the GPS system.
Ambrose was on the sat phone speed dial.
He picked up on the first ring.
“I need immediate help,” Alex said, gasping for breath. “Immediate! I need our main launch in the water headed out the cut between Hog Island and Pine Cay. At least two divers aboard. I need you to call the Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Command at Harbor Island. Tell them we need search-and-rescue choppers out here now.”
“Alex. Calm down. What’s going on?”
“It’s Vicky, goddammit.”
“What’s wrong, Alex?”
“She’s gone. Swept out in the riptide. I don’t know! Maybe we can save her! Christ, just get some bloody help out here, all right?”
“We’re coming,” Ambrose said, and hung up.
Alex scrambled back up on deck and hoisted the main and the jib. He weighed his anchor and headed the sloop out into the cut, his eyes fixed on the area where time and speed of current might have put her since he last saw her.
His eyes were burning. He was praying for that little brown smudge he’d last seen drifting away from him.
Praying to see it again. Simply praying for it to still exist.
37
Reel Thing, a brand-new fifty-foot Viking sport-fishing boat, was swinging on her anchor in the dark of a small cove. It was a hot moonless night, and only the lights of a few dim stars were visible. The cabin lights were all off below and above decks, and the sounds of the Allman Brothers came softly from speakers mounted throughout the boat.
The owner, Red Wallace, and his best fishing buddy, Bobby Fesmire, were sitting in the stern drinking Budweiser in the dark. Red was the biggest Ford dealer in South Florida. Bobby was his sales manager. Red and Bobby went way back. They’d gone to Florida at Gainesville together, pledged Kappa Alpha together, and played on the national championship Gator football team together. Both of them still wore their big gold NCAA rings with all the diamonds on their pinky fingers.
They took this little fishing trip to the Exumas as often as they could, which was once every two or three months. Sometimes they took clients so they could write it off, most often they’d bag the clients so it was just the two of them.
Tonight, they’d moored the boat in a small cove, ringed with mangroves. The wind was out of the east, so Reel Thing had her stern toward the small opening to the channel. Not that there was anything to see, but it gave them a view of the heat lightning blooming on the horizon.
“Know what heat lightnin’ is, Bobby?” Red asked.
“Yeah. Lightnin’ that comes from heat.”
“No, it ain’t. It’s ordinary lightnin’ comes from so far away, you can’t see nothin’ but the reflection of it. Ain’t no such thing as heat lightnin’.”
“Why the hell d’you bring it up then?”
“Just tryin’ to educate your dumb ass, is all.”
“I ain’t so dumb.”
“Only guy I ever knew saw a family reunion as a chance to meet girls.”
“You sayin’ it ain’t?”
“Bobby, we had a class of five hundred and thirty-seven seniors graduate.”
“Yeah?”
“You did not graduate in the top five hundred and thirty-six.”
“And your point is? Grades don’t mean nothin’ in my book. Look at us. We’re doing pretty damn good, I’d say. Couple of dumbass crackers sitting on top of the whole damn world. Look at that ring. What’s it say?”
“NCAA National Champions.”
“Bet your ass.”
Earlier that afternoon, Bobby and Red had given up on marlin fishing and found a little cove to put up for the night. At sunset they’d sat out on deck, drinking beer and casting into the mangroves. Didn’t hook a snook or any other kind of damn fish for an hour or so and gave up when it got too dark to see.
They had two big sirloins sitting out on the counter down in the galley but they’d pretty much forgotten about them. They’d wolfed down some boiled shrimp earlier. Good shrimp, too, from the Publix supermarket down the street from the Bahia Mar Marina in Lauderdale.
Red and Bobby had been down here scouring the Exumas and Bahamas for fish for about ten days. Red had been wearing the same T-shirt every day. It said, “My Drinking Crew Has a Fishing Problem.”
That sentiment pretty much summed up the entire voyage. They hadn’t caught a hell of a lot of marlin, but then again, as Red had often pointed out, they hadn’t caught a hell of a lot of hell from their wives either.
Red, who was sitting in the fighting chair on the stern, took a big swig of his Bud and said, “Bobby, lemme ask you another goddamn question. How many fish we catch this week? Total.”
“Three,” Bobby said. “Maybe.”
“And how many beers you reckon we’ve had all week?”
