Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [30]
I laid the paddle across my lap and surveyed the scene. I stretched my arms above my head, then out in front of me. I drank some water and chewed my way through a protein-carbohydrate bar that tasted like vanilla-flavored bread dough and followed it down with some more water, most of which I spit out. I was just about to start for the yacht when I heard the sound of an engine, but it was not the engine of a boat. The faint roar came from overhead.
Out of the deep silence of the sky above and just ahead of me to the north came a subdued droning. I looked up and at that moment saw the pontoons of a white seaplane skim the blue-black surface of the sea, sending up a spray of foam before gliding smoothly into the water. Almost immediately the plane wheeled and taxied in my direction, its twin propellers still churning but with less of a roar from the engine. I was about to aim the kayak toward the shore and out of its way when the sound of another engine stopped me in mid-stroke and a red light shot out to sea from the dock at the far edge of the cove that cradled the mansion. It was a speedboat, wedge-shaped and ebony black, racing toward the seaplane, skipping and hopping across the ocean, as much out of the water as in.
The plane had slowed and was now completing a wide circle, so that it was no longer coming in my direction but curving back out to sea, and as it did so, one of its lights grazed the side of the yacht, briefly illuminating the hull before passing on. The speedboat swung wide and intercepted the plane as it came to a full stop, the two shadows merging. The sounds of their engines overlapped in a muted rumble that quickly faded and then, after a moment, quickly flared again. The seaplane gathered speed and lifted slowly into the sky. It flew very close to the surface, not more than fifteen or twenty feet above the water, like a gull hunting for food. Then the engine of the speedboat roused itself. The long shadow that was the boat itself fishtailed violently in the roiling water. The pulsing red light at the helm gained speed and moved rapidly away from me, then vanished around the cove’s northernmost shore.
The kayak bucked gently beneath me, then settled. The water settled down, too, but not so my thoughts. I tried to understand what I’d just witnessed and how it pertained to what I had to do. There was one major question: Where in this curious night had the plane come from? A plane isn’t a car; you just can’t just jump into one and take off and fly any distance—not without a flight plan, not unless you’re in a crop duster in the middle of nowhere, where no one gives a damn.
Of course, you could fake a flight plan, then fly low, but not for too far. You would have to get up and get down fast before the radar caught you and the coast guard sent the drug helicopters out for you. Drug dealers did it all the time, but it was risky. You would have to be desperate, daring, or lucky. But it could be done—for a reason, and there was no reasonable reason for a plane to pick just this evening for such a maneuver.
I thought about turning back; I thought about the money. I thought of Vivian and the yacht and Matson still being dead off the coast in the morning. I didn’t much like either the plane or the speedboat. They were a complication, a pair of high-speed variables that shouldn’t have been there. All I knew was that one small section of a very big ocean had, for a few very intense minutes, gotten very overcrowded very fast in what should have been a tight, compact drama, starring two men, one of them dead, one of them me, and a yacht that needed to disappear from sight. In the script I had written, there’d been no plane, no black boat, but there they were, a couple of loudmouthed actors without parts, their engines roaring, demanding