'I'm turning the air conditioning on,' Quill said. 'I can't stand this.' She got up and closed the French doors, then set the wall thermostat on cold.
'I hate air conditioning,' Meg complained. 'I feel like Spam in a Tupperware container in air conditioning.'
'Tough.' Quill tugged at her hair and wound one strand around her finger. 'The ocean looks quiet, at least.' Heavy, oily swells had been coming in all day. She walked to the doors and peered out, scanning the horizon anxiously. 'Do those look like cumulonimbus clouds to you?'
'Like what?'
'Cumulonimbus clouds. It's what shows up just be- [ore a hurricane. 'Dark, heavy-looking clouds rising like mountains high into the atmosphere, often showing an anvil-shaped veil of false cirrus clouds at the top.' '
'You've been watching the weather channel.'
'While you were in the shower. How come you took a shower before the fishing trip?'
Meg, who was scrabbling through a bright-red tackle box (also borrowed from Luis), held up a spoon-shaped lure. 'Why not? Hey, do you think we might catch anything?'
'Not with that. Luis said there's mainly mullet in the bay. You need a net for mullet. Check those clouds out, Meg.'
'No. We're going maybe a quarter mile off the channel into the bay. We've got a nice little motor on that boat and a pair of nice little oars in case the motor fails. We'll have plenty of time to come back to shore if the wind comes up. If bad weather's corning, I don't want to know about it.'
'There is a rain forecast for later on. It's the edge of Hurricane Helen.'
'Shut up.' She dumped the infrared binoculars they'd purchased at the tackle shop out of the shopping bag. 'Do you suppose these things work?'
'If they don't we'll have spent a whole bunch of time m the water for nothing. We won't be able to see a thing in the dark. They upgraded Hurricane Helen to a three. That's winds of...'
'Shut up!' Meg stored the binoculars next to the lure, closed the tackle box with a snap, and picked up he pair of rods. (They'd been rented from Luis for ten bucks each. He hadn't believed Quill when she said she wouldn't drop it over the side. Meg had made Quill pay him - if he hadn't seen her drive, she'd said, they would have gotten the rods for free.) She crossed to the French doors and peered over Quill's shoulder. 'Those are plain old cumulus clouds. They've shown up like that every afternoon we've been here.'
'There's been a hurricane forecast every afternoon we've been here.'
'Let's go fishing.' She went to the front door, opened it, and Quill followed her out.
Luis was waiting for them at the kiosk. Meg broke into a flood of voluble, cheerful Spanish, for the benefit of anyone who might be watching.
'Cara Luis! Buenas tardes! Comme ca va!'
'That's French, you dufus,' Quill muttered. 'It's como 'sta.'
Quill could almost feel Jerry Fairchild's furious eyes boring into her back. Her disguise wouldn't have fooled Myles for a minute. She wasn't entirely sure where Jerry and his people had concealed themselves - but she knew they must be allover the complex. She was just as sure that he didn't dare come out and stop the two of them from going out in the boat. The risk to Verger Taylor - if he was still alive - was too great.
Luis - used, perhaps, to the vagaries of the rich - blinked several times at the way they looked, but offered no comment. He hadn't wondered at their interest in the number nine buoy, either, just printed out a channel locater map on his PC. He led them past the pool and down to the breakwater, where his little boat lay gently bobbing in the swells.
'Sixteen feet,' he said proudly. 'Belonged to my grandfather.'
'She's beautiful,' Quill said. The name of the craft was printed neatly on the gunwale: The Verity. 'Did he name her?'
Luis nodded. 'He was an avacato. In Cuba. Pre-Castro. Batista, you understand. He did not survive. What are you fishing for?'
'Mullet,' said Meg. 'We want mullet. Have you got a mullet net?'
Luis pointed to a pile of green cord folded under the seat in the center of the boat. He seemed slightly reassured when Quill expertly started the little thirty-five horse motor after she hopped into the boat, and waved them genially off the shore.
The Verity took the heavy swells with ease. Quill kept her right hand on the tiller and her left on the throttle. There were three other boats on the water near the number nine and number twelve buoys out in the channel. Quill had seen two of them several times before: the twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft had a solo occupant, a grizzled old man who spat tobacco over the side with stolid regularity; the eighteen-foot Welbilt carried a honeymoon couple who spent a lot of time horizontal under the gunwales. The third was an Osprey day sailer Quill hadn't seen before. She was willing to bet that the Palm Beach County police didn't use blonde, teenaged girls in brief bikinis as undercover agents. Although anything was possible.
She opened the throttle and increased her speed, looking back to the shore. The waves slapped smartly against the bow, and the breeze was cool. From the rapidity with which Luis's figure dwindled in size, she figured she was going about thirty miles an hour.
'Slow down!' Meg shrieked. 'I want to fish!' Quill throttled back and looked for a good spot to cut the motor and drift. She look for the dimpled ripples in the water that meant a school of mullet was swimming by. The swells were deeper out here. The boat rose steeply, then slid down the far side of the rising water with an eerie slowness. There was an absence of pelicans.
Quill cut the throttle out and then drifted for a moment. The silence was not complete. From their vantage point - about halfway to the number nine buoy - they could see all the way down the beach. The high-rise condominiums and village mansions on Ocean Boulevard were distant, but noise carried over the water: radios, the shriek and chatter of a party, the thrum of traffic. To her right-or starboard, Quill thought - was the long, pleasant
