Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [29]
I was going to object, but I didn’t have it in me. Another mood had claimed me, and suddenly I was in less of a hurry to leave. I wanted to linger and study that strangely beautiful face with all its secrets. A few more moments and something might have come to me, but there wasn’t time.
“You’ll get your dress all wet,” I said.
“I don’t care.”
She kicked her shoes onto the sand.
Together we walked the kayak into the surf, until the water was just above my knees. I got myself into the kayak, and Vivian handed me the paddle. She stood beside me, steadying the Hell Chaser, the dark shine of the water merging with the even darker shine of her dress. I looked up at the sky and saw the faint glow of the moon hidden behind the clouds. There was no wind, and I didn’t think it would rain.
“Why didn’t you fight for me?” she asked suddenly. “It was no contest.”
I smiled. “Maybe I couldn’t take a chance on winning.”
“You know,” she said, “sometimes I hate you.”
I found my balance and took a few strokes to get going, then turned around in time to see Vivian walking through the breakers toward the shore. I waited till she looked back. I lifted the paddle over my head. She waved at me with one hand and pushed back her black hair with the other. She yelled something out to me, but the waves smothered the sound.
I jockeyed the kayak around again and got it pointed north and east into the current, the unchained blood singing in my head with the reckless joy of release, the unmitigated thrill of the doing of the thing at last, the muscles working and rolling like willing slaves. What I wanted. A hundred yards out, I turned the kayak parallel with the beach and saw the headlights of my car plowing through the dark. I watched her make a right out of the lot, and when she was gone, I turned again myself and headed out to sea.
The sea was calm, the breakers rolling lazily into shore as I pulled through the water with slow, even strokes. I hadn’t been on the ocean at night for a long time, and I’d forgotten how quiet it could be. I was grateful for the distant company of a cruise ship gliding across the horizon far to the south. There were other, smaller craft as well, but not many. Most of them were fishermen, heading out for deep water where the big fish ran, but I was sure that at least one of them was the Marine Patrol. Several times I had to wait and drift while they crisscrossed in front of me, unaware of my presence. I felt their wakes lifting beneath me; I heard their engines and smelled the diesel fuel. None of the boats came close enough to cause me any worry, but I stayed very alert all the same.
Two hundred yards out, I turned north and headed for the yacht. I had nixed the idea of leaving directly from the Colonel’s mansion, though it would certainly have made for a quicker trip. There was no particular reason for this decision. In fact, it didn’t make sense, the shortest route between two points being a straight line, but that was true only in geometry and not necessarily in the realm of human affairs.
I was acting on intuition and could not have explained why I was coming in so far from the south, except to say that I didn’t want anybody to know exactly where I was or the exact time I’d started out. Vivian, of course, would know where I had put in, but even she wouldn’t know exactly how long it would take me to reach the yacht. Nobody had shown all of his or her cards in this deal yet, and there was no reason for me to show all of mine.
The lights from the condos were on my left as I paddled north with the current. The quarter moon had slipped free of the clouds and was on my right. It gave off very little glare. The water was pale dark, enlivened by minute flashes of brilliance. When I was perhaps a half mile from the mansion, I began angling in toward the shore, pointing the kayak’s nose at the spot where I estimated the yacht to be, though it was still too far off to see. Then the row of condos ended abruptly and there was no more light from the shore, just a gap of blackness filled with the outlines