I knew that the risk I’d taken had been for the sake of putting another hooker back on the tiles. So I had to believe she had enough essential spirit and toughness to be able to make it some other way, and would.
At three-thirty, after Vangie had sacked out, the wind changed, moving in our direction, making it so hot at the topside controls I had Meyer take the wheel while I strung a tarp for shade. Then we sat and talked about our passenger, agreeing that the talking jag was reaction hysteria.
“Also,” Meyer said, “she has to level with us. She can’t help adding trimmings, but it is essentially true. Maybe she didn’t want to tell a pair of civilians about her career. Maybe she wanted to pretend to be something else. But if she’d pretended to be something else, how would that work when we get to Miami? Say she was going back to the model agency? Back to the husband and kiddies? Back to the old secretarial desk? By leveling she’s asking for help and advice. How does she get out of the range of the people who’ll take another try at her?”
“But without leveling all the way. I had told him about that part of the conversation he hadn’t been there to catch.
“Travis, she keeps walking around it, getting a little closer every time. I think she wants to tell us. I think she wants to get it off her chest. Whatever she’s been doing for the past two years, it makes her feel guilty. But she has a real dilemma. If she tells us enough so we can tip off the authorities, her girlfriends will suffer right along with the men in the group. Even so, if we stay receptive, I think she’ll get around to it, just in the forlorn hope we’ll be able to tell her what to do.”
“Got any guesses about what she’s been doing?” I asked.
Impatiently he said, “You listened to her, just as I did. Blackmail doesn’t upset her. Nor does conspiracy, nor theft, nor extortion, nor addiction, nor mayhem. Let’s say there aren’t too many choices left.”
“At least it upset her.”
“Yes indeed. After two years, it began to make her edgy.”
Tarpon Bay seemed a reasonable halfway point, and after I had moved well off east of the channel, set the big hook in good bottom and killed the engines, she came stretching and yawning up into the sunset light to say that it looked as if we were in a lake, and why were we stopping, was it busted?
I explained that we didn’t want to overtax the captain by running all night, so parking was standard operating procedure.
As it was very still and very hot, I got the big auxiliary generator going, and we buttoned up the boat and put the air-conditioning on high. The fading day put an orange-gold light through the starboard windows of the lounge. I briefed her on the music machinery, and after she couldn’t find anything she liked among my tapes or records, I put the FM tuner into the circuit and she prowled the band from end to end until she settled for a Hollywood station whanging away at what Meyer terms beetle-bug mating chants. She boosted the bass and put the gain slightly below torture level. My big amplifier fed the rackety-bang into the big wall-mounted Bose stereo speakers, giving us all the resonances and overtones from twenty cycles all the way up to peaks no human ear can detect.
I had let her dig into the broad bin. She had left it open, of course, with a strew of discards on the floor nearby, just as she left any empty glass at the place where she finished it, hung the clothes she took off on the floor, left the bourbon bottle uncapped on the galley countertop, cluttered the head with toiletries, lipsticked the towels, left dark hairs in the basin. Though indifferent to all the spoor she left behind her, she spent all the time she was not talking, eating or sleeping in tidying herself. She put in a fantastic amount of mirror time, and was delighted to find a little kit in the broad bin which gave her the chance to work with great concentration on fingernails and toenails, filing the broken fingernails carefully.