Steal Me

Chapter One: Ninety-Six at Midnight

The thermometer nailed to the boatyard office door said ninety-six degrees, and it had been saying that since four in the afternoon. Amelia Grantham had stopped believing it around nine. By midnight the air over Tarpon Landing had gone thick as bilge water, and every breath tasted faintly of diesel, dead shrimp, and the flowering something that grew wild along the seawall and only opened its blossoms after dark.

She sat on the transom of the tow rig with her boots off, feet dangling, watching the channel markers blink red and green out past the jetty.

"You're brooding," Gaby Serrano said from the dock. "You brood loud. It's like a generator."

"I'm working."

"You're sitting."

"Sitting is a stage of working."

Gaby dropped down beside her, bare legs swinging, a sweating can of grapefruit soda in each hand. She passed one over. Amelia's cousin was five foot two in flip-flops, ran the office, the invoices, the coffee machine, and the running commentary on Amelia's life, and had never once in twenty-nine years said a thing she didn't mean.

"Colt got the Bertram job," Gaby said.

Amelia drank. The soda was so cold it hurt her teeth. "How much did he bid?"

"Four hundred. Flat. Plus fuel."

"That's not a bid, that's a hobby."

"That's what I said. I said it in an email with three exclamation points, which for me is basically a war crime." Gaby tipped her head back and looked at the sky, which was starless and low and the color of an old bruise. "Amelia. We've got the note on the travel-lift, we've got the insurance, and we've got Curtis Mowry's kid coming Monday to fix the compressor, which we cannot pay for."

"I know what we have."

"So take the ugly one."

Amelia didn't answer. The ugly one had been sitting in her inbox for nine days like a wasp in a jar. She'd read it enough times to recite it. Sixty-two-foot sportfisher, hull number, twin diesels, eleven payments delinquent, borrower unresponsive, vessel believed located at slip B-14, Ravenel Blue Water Marina, Tarpon Landing, Florida.

The boat's name was SECOND WIFE.

The marina belonged to Buck Ravenel.

"You've got the face," Gaby said.

"I don't have a face."

"You've got the face you get when you're about to do something that ends with me lying to a sheriff's deputy."

Amelia laughed, short and unhappy, and hopped off the transom onto the dock. The boards were still warm through her socks. Behind her, the yard slept: the shed with its bad roof, the rack of hulls in various stages of being someone else's problem, the travel-lift standing over it all like a rusted church.

Her father had built this place out of nothing but salvage rights and stubbornness. Hal Grantham, treasure diver, occasional liar, professional optimist. Three years dead. His skiff had gone down in flat calm water on a Tuesday afternoon eleven miles offshore, and the Coast Guard had written it up as an accident, and every person in Tarpon Landing who said the name Grantham said it with a little curl at the corner of the mouth, like they were tasting something.

He'd left her three things: a mortgaged boatyard, a brass compass-rose pendant she hadn't taken off since the funeral, and that curl of the mouth.

Amelia touched the pendant now without noticing she did it. Warm from her skin. Worn smooth on the face, rough on the back.

"Fine," she said. "Pull the file on the sportfisher."

Gaby didn't cheer. That was how Amelia knew it was bad. "Ravenel financed your dad's last dive," Gaby said.

"Ravenel financed half the boats on this coast."

"He sponsors the shrimp festival. He's got a photograph with the governor in his office. He owns—"

"Half the waterfront. I know. I hear it every time somebody wants me to shut up about my father." Amelia crushed the empty can in her fist, felt the aluminum give, and set it down carefully on a piling because she was thirty-one years old and had learned to put her temper somewhere. "The boat's not his. It belongs to a dentist in Fort Pierce who stopped paying eleven months ago. It's sitting in Ravenel's marina because the dentist rented a slip. That's all this is. Diesel and dock lines."

"Diesel and dock lines," Gaby repeated.

"That's the whole job."

"You keep saying that in a way that makes me think it's not the whole job."

Amelia went to get her boots.

She'd learned the trade from her father, the way she'd learned everything else — badly, at night, and by watching. Hal used to say there were two ways to take a boat: the way that made a story, and the way that made money. He'd never once taken the second way. Amelia had built her whole business on it.

A repossession, done right, is boring. You show up when the marina is empty. You know which lights are on a timer and which ones a night watchman actually walks past. You have your paperwork in a dry bag in case someone asks, and you have your mouth shut in case they don't. You cut the shore power, you bleed the fuel line, you slip the lines one at a time, bow spring last, and you let the tide do the first twenty feet of pushing so nobody hears an engine.

At 2:40 a.m. she idled her little skiff into the shadow of the Ravenel Blue Water fuel dock with her running lights off and her heart going like a bird in a sack.

The marina was beautiful, which she resented. Composite decking. Brass cleats polished by somebody's paid hands. Pilings wrapped in white vinyl, uplit so the whole pier glowed like a hotel lobby. Down at the head of the main dock sat Ravenel's own boat, a hundred and ten feet of white steel called BLUE COMPASS, lit up bow to stern, humming with generator power, the kind of vessel that never went anywhere and never had to.

B-14 was in the dark corner, which was the only kindness the night gave her.

SECOND WIFE was a big ugly beauty of a thing: flybridge, tuna tower, outriggers folded back like the legs of a dead insect, hull the pale blue of a swimming pool. Eleven months of neglect had grown a green beard along the waterline. Amelia tied off, went up the transom door, and stood a moment on the cockpit deck listening.

Nothing. Air conditioning ticking on the boat two slips over. The slap of water. Somebody's halyard tapping a mast a hundred yards away, patient as a clock.

She pulled the shore power cord and coiled it on the dock, neat, because she wasn't an animal. She popped the helm panel, found the ignition circuit, and did the thing with two wires and a screwdriver that her father had taught her when she was fourteen, in a boatyard, on a Sunday, both of them laughing.

The port engine caught with a low wet cough and settled into a rumble.

The starboard engine did nothing at all. Not even a click.

"Of course," she whispered. "Of course you don't."

One engine on a sixty-two-foot boat in a tight marina is like driving a bus with one hand. Amelia slipped the lines, took two full minutes to walk the stern out on a spring line, and then eased the throttle forward and let the big hull find the channel by itself.

No running lights. No radio. She stood on the flybridge in the hot dark with her hand loose on the wheel and the whole marina sliding past her, glowing, oblivious, and she felt the thing she always felt at this exact moment of a job, which was not guilt.

It was joy. Ugly, private, unspeakable joy.

The channel markers went by. The jetty. The last light of Tarpon Landing dropped behind the mangroves and the Gulf opened up ahead of her, black and flat and breathing, and Amelia Grantham throttled up to twelve knots on one engine and pointed the stolen boat at the horizon.

At ten miles out she put it on autopilot, took her hands off the wheel, and finally let herself shake.

Then she went below to get a cold drink.

The salon was worse than she expected — stale, sour, a dead lime on the counter, the fridge running on inverter power with three beers and a jar of olives in it. She took a beer she wasn't going to drink and stood there letting the cold breathe on her face.

And she heard, from behind the stateroom door forward, a sound.

A man breathing. Slow. Deep.

Amelia set the beer down without a sound. She took the fillet knife out of the sheath on her belt — nine inches, thin as a promise, sharpened that afternoon while she pretended she wasn't going to do this job — and she put her shoulder to the door and pushed it open.

The master stateroom smelled like cologne and sweat and, faintly, like perfume.

There was a very large, very naked man asleep on the bed.

He was on his back with one arm flung up over his head, and that wrist was handcuffed to the bed rail — real cuffs, police cuffs, steel, not the fuzzy kind. He was maybe six foot three. Long-boned and thick through the shoulders, dark hair a mess, four days of beard, a chest and belly that had been built by work and not by a gym, a bad scar under one rib, a tattoo of an anchor chain wrapping his left forearm.

Across his chest, in bright coral lipstick, in a big looping girlish hand, someone had written:

BACK IN AN HOUR, SUGAR. BE GOOD.

He was not, Amelia noted with a detachment that lasted about one second, remotely covered by anything.

"Oh," she said.

The man opened his eyes.

They were pale — gray or green, she couldn't tell in that light — and they went from asleep to entirely awake with no stops in between. He looked at her. He looked at the knife. He looked past her, at the porthole, where there was nothing but black water going by at twelve knots.

Then he looked back at her, and he smiled, slow, like a man in a bar who has just been told the drinks are free.

"Well," he said. His voice was gravel poured slowly out of a bucket. "You're not Monique."