O’Brien locked his Jeep and started toward gate 7-F, the dock that led to where he kept his old boat moored. Max ran behind him, stopping to investigate the world with her nose. He walked by the Tiki Hut, an open-air bar disguised as a restaurant, which was adjacent to Ponce Marina. He could smell the scent of blackened grouper, garlic shrimp, and beer. A dozen tourists sat at the wooden tables, ate fish sandwiches, sipped from longneck bottles of beer, and watched seagulls fight for pieces of bread tossed in the marina water. The isinglass, which was lowered on rainy days, was rolled up allowing a cross-breeze to carry the scent of seafood over the marina.
“Well, hello stranger,” said Kim Davis, an attractive brunette who worked the bar. She was in her early forties, radiant smile, deep tan, and jeans that hugged every pore from her navel down. She smiled at O’Brien. “You look like you could use a beer.”
“I’d like that, Kim, but I don’t have time right now.”
She wiped her hands on a towel, stepped out from behind the bar, and knelt down to greet Max, handing her a tiny piece of fried fish. “You are so darn cute!” Max’s tail blurred, gulping down the fish in a single bite. Kim stood, her eyes searching O’Brien’s face. “So, if you don’t mind me asking, did you attend a funeral?”
“An old case of mine has resurrected. I’m just tying to make sense of it.”
“You want to talk about it? I’ll be off in an hour.”
O’Brien managed a smile. “I appreciate that, but I have to run. Come on, Max.”
“If you get thirsty, I’ll deliver to your boat.” She smiled.
O’Brien smiled and stepped to the gate. He worked the combination lock and waited for Max to trot by him. As they walked down the long dock, O’Brien watched the charter fishing fleet churn through the pass. The party boats were filled with sunburned tourists who would soon be posing next to their catches.
O’Brien’s boat, Jupiter, a thirty-eight foot Bayliner, was a boat he’d bought for ten cents on the dollar in a Miami DEA auction. It was twenty years old when he bought it. He’d restored the boat, doing much of the work himself.
Docked two boats up from Jupiter was Gibraltar, a 42 Grand Banks trawler. Its owner, Dave Collins, bought the boat new and spent half his time on it, while spending the rest of the time in a beachside condo, the property he retained from his ex-wife during a territorial divorce war.
Collins was in his mid sixties, thick chest, and knotted arms from decades of exercise, full head of white air, inquisitive blue-gray pewter eyes, and always a four-day stubble on his face. He was chopping a large Vidalia onion in the galley when he saw O’Brien coming down the dock. Collins stepped onto his cockpit.
“Who’s following whom? Miss Max and Sean, just in time for dinner. Is this the weekend you’re replacing the zincs on Jupiter? ”
“ Jupiter needs some quality time. But now something’s come up, and Max needs a dogsitter.”
Collins chuckled. “You don’t even have to ask. Hi, Max.”
Max leaned in toward Collins, her nose quivering.
Dave said, “She smells the sauce I’m brewing. Nick Cronus gave me his special, Old World, recipe when he was in with a catch last week. I’ve got some fresh grouper to ladle it on. Come aboard. We’ll eat and drink. Not necessarily in that order.”
“I can’t drink. I have to meet a priest in a few minutes. Booze probably wouldn’t go over too well, although I have plenty of reasons to get hammered.” O’Brien knelt down by Max and scratched her behind the ears. He looked straight at Collins, his eyes searching his friend’s face. “Dave, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?”
“You want the top-ten list or just the one enormous fuck up I’ve thought about for the last few years?”
“Yeah, that one sounds like a qualifier.”
“Staying too long at a job I didn’t believe in anymore. Everybody is dealt the same deck of time, twenty-four-seven. If you’re real dumb, you waste that deck, holding the cards too close, afraid to really gamble and do what you should. So you stay in the game too long, and in the end you’ve only cheated yourself.” Collins sipped his glass of red wine and added, “All right. Since we’re fessin’ up. Let’s hear your mistake of a lifetime, although I’ve had considerably more time to screw up things than you.”
O’Brien looked at his watch. “In eighty-four hours, I could be the reason an innocent man dies.”