Raymond looked at me for several seconds before turning to Perry. “The captain is not hea.”

Perry exhaled loudly. “Shit, and here I thought we’d get some business done. Got some paperwork to take care of.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to ask.

I couldn’t believe it. He had to be talking about a job. They were headed upriver with the schooner for a haul-out, and they were going to be hiring Perry to help them make the trip? I caught Raymond’s eye, and he nodded at me, confirming it.

“So the Brit’s hiring you, is he?”

“Yes sirree, boy. What, they didn’t ask you, Seychelle? Now, what the hell do you make of that, huh?” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Looks like nobody wants to hire a bitch to do a man’s job.”

“Perry,” Nestor said, “why don’t you just shut up? Even if having balls was all it took to be a good captain, you’d still have trouble meeting the criteria.”

“What’re you trying to say?”

“I tink he say it already, mon,” Raymond said, laughing. “Da captain be back later. You come back.”

Perry stood. “Don’t matter what you say, the word is out on Sullivan Towing.” He climbed down to the dock. “Seychelle, honey, you’re gonna be able to sit home and eat bonbons and watch the soaps every day.” He laughed his high-pitched hillbilly cackle, turned, and walked up the dock.

Nobody said anything for several minutes as the two men quietly smoked. Finally Nestor tossed the last of the joint overboard, and it sizzled as it hit the water. Neither man would look at me.

“It must be pretty bad, what they’re saying about me,” I finally ventured.

“Seychelle, I haven’t believed it, especially not now that I see you and talk to you. People are saying you’ve had some kind of a nervous breakdown, that you’re acting erratic, that you can’t be trusted. It’ll pass. You know how rumors fly around the docks.”

“But you also know what it’s like to have boat payments to make. Nestor I can’t sit around and wait for my reputation to clear. It’s all tied to this Top Ten business, I know it is. Is there anything else you guys can think of that was weird about Neal or the boat that day?”

“Well, there is one thing. The only other guy living on board the Top Ten was the engineer, Matt. You knew him, didn’t you, Sey?”

“Yeah, he came on board just before Neal and I split up.”

“Well, he told the cops that Neal had given him the day off, but he told me that morning, right after the Top Ten left the dock, that Neal had just fired him. Said he wouldn’t be needing him anymore. You know as well as I do that you couldn’t find a better engineer.”

“Where is Matt? I need to talk to him.”

“That’s the other thing. He’s gone. Left town awful fast. Said he was headed up to Newport to find a job up there.”

“Man . . . that is strange. Neal was a pretty decent mechanic, but he wasn’t good enough to keep the engine and generator running on the Top Ten. And owners of a boat like that surely wouldn’t cheap out on keeping an engineer.”

I turned to Raymond to see if he had anything else to offer. “Lady, I don’ like da people Neal was workin’ for.”

“Do you know anything about them? Who they are?”

“I don’ know dey names.” He pushed his shades down his nose and looked at me over the top of the dark glass. “But I see dey bad men. Be careful wit dem, lady.”

On my way back home, as I crossed over the Seventeenth Street Causeway, I noticed the soot-colored clouds building up out over the Everglades. It was still sunny here along the coast, but it wouldn’t be for much longer not once the dropping sun slid behind that dark wall. It was early in the year for that summer weather pattern.

My last stop was at Lauderdale Divers. When I pulled the Jeep into the parking space in front of their display window, I saw an example of a typical hookah rig in their window. It was a small compressor mounted inside an inner tube. It was similar to the compressor Red had on the Gorda, although ours was not portable or floatable. These little compressors didn’t have big accumulator tanks like the one on the Top Ten.

A couple of cruise-ship-type tourists were browsing through the T-shirt display, but otherwise, the fellow at the back of the store was alone, immersed in an issue of Scuba Diver magazine.

“Hello?”

He dropped the magazine. “Hi, what can I do for you?” He was about fifty, with graying hair, and he had that grizzled, squinty-eyed, old-time diver look.

“I just want to ask you some questions about compressors.”

“Do you want to use it for tank fills or for hookah diving?”

“I don’t want to buy one. But I saw a compressor on a boat, and I’m trying to figure out what it might have been used for.” I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out the info I had copied off the side of the compressor. I showed it to him.

“That’s not a dive compressor. See, right here it says ‘contractor.’ That unit would be used for running air tools. On a boat, you don’t need to keep the air like they do. We put it right into the scuba tanks, so we don’t use the big accumulators.”

“What kind of air tools?”

“Could be anything: air hammers, nailers, impact drivers. Mechanics use them a lot. You know, like the tools you’ve seen when they change your tires in a garage.”

I nodded. The older woman from the front of the store walked back carrying a Divers Do It Deeper T-shirt and asked if she could try it on. He pointed to the back of the store, then went back to his magazine.

“Do you have any idea what someone would use that compressor for on board a ninety-two-foot Broward?”

He raised his eyebrows and looked out the window across the parking lot. “Not a clue,” he said. “But he sure as hell wasn’t using it to breathe.” He went back to his magazine.

Neal had done enough work in boatyards over the years to know his way around tools. What was he planning? Was he going to build something? I wished I’d had more time to look around on the boat. Maybe the tools themselves would have told me what it was he had in mind.

I wandered over to the glass case the diver guy was leaning on and examined the books and charts on display there. One book, Diving Locations, particularly caught my eye.

“Could I see a copy of this?” I asked him.

He sighed, moved behind the counter, and handed me the book. I flipped through the pages. It was a collection of all the coordinates of the major wrecks and reefs off the South Florida coast.

“They’re not all in there. That’s over a year old now. Been some sunk since then.”

“Some what?”

“Ships, barges, whatever. You know, artificial reefs.” His voice took on a different quality as he launched into this well-rehearsed explanation. “We have some coral off our coast here, but mostly it’s just a sand bottom. In order to have fish, there have to be places for the fish to hide. You take an old abandoned shipwreck, and after it’s been on the bottom awhile, it will be full of little fish—and where there are little fish, there will soon be big fish trying to eat them. Divers love to dive on shipwrecks, and since these days ships just don’t sink often enough, we make our own. They’re sinking new shit out there nearly every other month. Keeps me happy—more places to dive, more people will go diving. It’s good for business. You interested in going out for a dive?”

“No, just curious, that’s all.”

He tapped a newspaper clipping pinned to a bulletin board on the wall behind the counter. “You’d like this one here—she’s new, the Bahama Belle, a nice little freighter. She’s going to be real rich when she gets a little more growth on her. It takes a while, you know. They sink this stuff so the fish will have hiding places, but they also need the food source. Right now, there’s not enough coral or algae growth there to support much of a fish population.”