Epilogue
We had found a little cove around behind the Berry Islands, and with the small chop slapping us in the transom, I had bumped twice getting over the bar into the still water. But that was at low tide, and the charts for that day in late June said it was unusually low, so no sweat about getting out, getting that absolute jewel of a cruiser out of there.
It was named Odalisque Ill, and it was the splendid playtoy of Lady Vivian Stanley-Tucker of St. Kitts. It was a fifty-three-foot Magnum Maltese Flybridge cruiser, built in North Miami Beach. Twin turbocharged diesels cruised it at an honest thirty miles an hour. Paneling, radar, recording fathometer, air conditioning, ice-maker, tub and shower, huge master stateroom, double autopilot system, stereo music, wine locker, microwave oven, live wells, loran, pile carpeting. I knew it would knock close to a half million without extras, and it was the third time her husband had given her a boat for her birthday.
“The other two were hunuunge!” she had said. “Great vulgar monsters. Had to have a crew aboard at all times. Now this one is cozy, what? Intimate, you might say. The old boy was playing the gold market and got pinched a bit. Apologized for the smaller boat.”
I was over on the beach and had found a sandbar that was supporting more than its share of clams. Lady Vivian and I had been out about two weeks, provisions were running a little short, and soon we would have to decide whether to put in to Nassau or run on over to Miami. I was putting the clams in a string bag. The sun felt needle-hot on my bare back. I was turning saddle brown, and Lady Vivian had turned to a very lovely reddish gold, except for the sunburned tip of her nose.
The deep chord of the air horns made me look out toward the Odalisque. Shave and a haircut, two bits. Then she came out onto the bow, a tiny golden figure in a white bikini, and motioned me to come aboard.
I hung the string bag around my neck, swam out through the warm crystal-clear water, and came up the boarding ladder.
The Green Ripper
“Good nap?”
“Splendid! And I felt absolutely marvelous until, like the dutiful person I am, I turned on the thing- ajiggy at call time, as usual, and damn me if the old bustard wasn’t trying to get me. Baaaaad news, sweet McGeeee. I have to fly on down. His damned awful sister has decided to come out for a visit, and he thinks it would look most odd if Em not there to greet the old party. So what I told him, I would go on into Nassau tomorrow and fly from there, and find some dear friend who’ll take the Odalisque on over to Lauderdale. Who might that dear friend be?”
“Give me a hint.”
‘hymn, I was having such a lovely time. And we’re getting so horribly healthy. All this popping into bed must be awfully good for one.”
Though tiny in the distance, she was substantial up close, a green-eyed, toffee-haired woman just barely on the sunny side of forty, if you could be]ieve her. She gave the healthy impression of someone about to burst out of her clothes, and in fact was willing so to do when the provocation was suffi- ciently explicit. She had very fine-textured skin, gentle as cream, and her body temperature seemed to run permanently at about four degrees above normal. In bed she was like a stove. She radiated both heat and need.
I put the clams away for later, washed up, and then mixed us a pair of the sour rum drinks she
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John D. Macl)onald doted on. We sat out on the afterdeck under the tarp I had rigged for shade.
We touched glasses, and as she sipped, she smiled with her eyes.
“So, there will be another cruise at least,” she said.
“As long as I can last.”
“You are a dear man. I see no sign of faltering, as yet.”
‘Y sneak megadoses of vitamins, Viv.”
“You are the only person in this whole wide world I have ever allowed to call me Viv. Why do I like it when you say it?”