My face broke the surface at the corner of Gorda’s transom. The Hard Bottom was rafted up to the tug’s starboard side, and even with the calm seas and lots of fenders, the two boats were grinding and bumping awkwardly. Someone had let out more line on the dinghy’s painter so the Whaler now floated just off the stern of the two boats. Both the engine and the generator were running on the sportfisherman, and I could hear voices from inside the air-conditioned cabin.

I ditched the tank and let it sink slowly to the bottom. Keeping my head below the level of the gunwale, I eased forward alongside the dinghy. If I could get into the Whaler, cut myself loose from the Gorda, and drift off, I could probably go for help.

I lifted my body over the bow, but weighted down as I was by the big T-shirt and shorts, it seemed to take forever. My arms nearly gave out as I pulled my legs into the boat. At the same time, I heard the aft cabin door slide open on the sportfisherman. My foot slipped from the oversized fins I was wearing, and I stumbled as I grabbed at the pistol and rolled onto my back, sighting down the barrel. It nearly dropped from my wet hands, but I got my finger on the trigger and pointed it at the aft deck of the sportfisherman as a diver stepped through the door.

He moved awkwardly, lifting his knees high to flop his fins onto the outer deck. He was clad only in BC, backpack, boxers, and body hair. He pushed the blue silicon mask up to the top of his head, spit out the snorkel, and smiled, showing that huge gap between his front teeth.

“It’s not real smart to go pointing guns at cops, Seychelle,” Collazo said as Mike Beesting hopped out of the cabin, followed by a bandaged and grinning B.J.

XXX

I holed up in my cottage for days, just sitting on the couch, rubbing Abaco’s belly and watching it all on the TV news. South Florida went a little crazy as hundred-dollar bills washed up on beaches from Pompano to Palm Beach. Several Haitian women got into a brawl with some blue-haired retirees. Vendors flooded the beaches hawking T-shirts with photos of hundred-dollar bills and the words Florida Sand Dollars. The reporters were having a grand time covering the little festival of greed.

They recovered both bodies eventually. There was a hell of a hole in Neal, probably from more than just the bang stick. I remembered the bull shark. On TV I saw Crystal, Cesar, and Zeke all being led into the courthouse wearing handcuffs and smirks, and the news anchors bantered back and forth wondering if this time the authorities would be able to make a good case against Benjamin Crystal. State officials raided Harbor House and seized records, then brought in a new interim staff while they tried to figure out what to do about the place.

I’d found out later that Mike had been up all night and had finally gone to the police station and raised Collazo out of bed sometime around 4 a.m. They had busted into the Larsens’ house at daybreak expecting to both save me and then arrest me, but instead they’d surprised Cesar Zeke, and Crystal preparing to board the Hard Bottom with Sunny. The cops had then jumped aboard the Hard Bottom, and refusing to be left behind, B.J. had joined them, helping them pilot the Hard Bottom to the Gorda offshore. When they found Gorda and the Whaler both abandoned, Collazo decided not to wait for the regular police divers who were on their way, and he put on the dive gear himself.

When Collazo took my preliminary statement the next day, he told me that once they knew what questions to ask, they had indeed found a couple of witnesses who had seen what they described as a “crazy man all wrapped up in towels” panhandling on A1A the day the Top Ten nearly went aground. Apparently, after swimming ashore, Neal had begged for bus fare and then ridden Broward County Transit to within walking distance of the Larsens’ place.

There were reporters camped outside the gates to the estate for a couple of days, trying to get me to tell my version of what happened beneath the surface that day. I didn’t even go out to pick up the newspapers or the mail. Eventually the story became old news and they left.

It had been five or six days—I’d lost count—when I heard a knock on the door followed by Jeannie’s voice hollering, “Seychelle! I know you’re in there. Open this door it’s damn hot out here.”

When I opened the door, she clucked, shook her head, and said, “I knew it. He wanted to come over here by himself, but I told him he’d better let me come first and talk to you. Look at you. Your hair . .. have you even bathed once this week?” She was wearing another of her muumuus, this one with maddeningly perky bright yellow daisies. She had a grocery bag under each arm.

She marched me into the shower and when I emerged, combing out my dripping hair, she was cooking something that smelled pretty good.

“Girl, you don’t have any real food in this place. What have you been eating?”

I was surprised when I managed to get down a bowl of her homemade chicken soup, along with two slices of whole-grain bread and some fresh fruit salad. B.J. would have been shocked to see such healthy food pass my lips. It tasted like seaweed or old hemp rope. Nothing appealed to me anymore.

“He’s going to be here in less than an hour so we’d better talk fast,” she said.

“What? Who’s coming over?”

She waved her hand in the air. “Don’t worry about that. Listen. While you’ve been in here drooping around, I’ve been working my tail off. Collazo said the prosecutors wanted to come talk to you right away, but I’ve fended them off.”

“But I already gave a statement after it happened.”

“Yeah, yeah, but that’s just the start, honey. They have been trying to build a case against this Crystal guy for years, and they think that now, with your help, they can do it. The stuff they found on the hard drives at that house included at least six snuff films. It seems they solved several missing-persons cases, too. At this point they’re even looking at the fire that killed Long’s grandmother when he was only twenty-something. And of course, the feds are technically the owners of the Top Ten now, so I’ve been dealing with them about your salvage claim. I think I’ve figured out a deal that will make everybody happy, so you just give me the go-ahead, and I’ll see if it will fly.”

Across the room, my mother’s painting of the bird-of-paradise and the dark, angry sky drew my attention. It was as though I were seeing it for the first time. My breath rasped in my throat as I choked on a chunk of bread.

“What is it? Seychelle? Are you okay?”

I now understood what she had painted, what had sent her into her “bad days.” Mother was trying to show evil.

I nodded. Then, still facing the painting, I asked, “I’ve been wondering about Sunny. Where is she? Is she okay?” Jeannie chuckled. “She’s great, Sey. She’s with a foster family, and she’s back in school, tenth grade. She asked about you, too. She’d like to see you.”

“Good. I’d like that.” I turned away from the painting and faced her. “Okay, what deal?”

“Well, thanks to you, the government is over four million wet dollars richer and they’ve seized a multimillion- dollar yacht to boot—on top of which they got their bad guy. So I just tell them that you will be happy and cooperative as their star witness in the case against the kiddie porn king, and they will give you a very lucrative salvage settlement on the Top Ten. I think we could probably go for the hundred thousand figure or close to it.”