The captain nodded. “That’s right. They can’t. All they can do, once they determine they have no helm control, is to cut the power. But by that time…”
Uh, huh.The boat would be long gone. It was already out of Lace’s sight.
She and the captain were on their own.
There was no rescue happening from that quarter.
“So, we wait for the Coast Guard,” Lace said, trying to keep her attitude positive.
“We canhopethey find us,” the captain responded, losing all his combativeness. “But you know…needle in a haystack.” He blew out a gust of frustrated air. “Listen. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Lace snorted. “Sorry for dealing on the black-market, or sorry for trying to kill me.”
“For trying to get rid of you,” he told her honestly, not repeating the “k” word. “I’ve been making a lot of money with my Friday catches, and when you wouldn’t keep to that day off…”
“I’m undergoing chemotherapy treatments,” Lace informed him baldly. “My infusions were switched to Tuesdays.” She wasnotgoing to get into the Inez thing, and that it was her choice.
“Well, shit,” the captain swore. “Now I feel even worse. My brother died of cancer. It sucks.”
“It does,” Lace acknowledged, trying not to feel any sympathy for the man.
“If it helps,” Otis went on, “I wasn’t planning on…getting rid of you permanently, until you found out what I’ve been doing.”
“I know,” Lace admitted. “I heard you had some kind of late-lunch surprise ready to give me before you started pulling the lay-lines with your black-market fish.”
He dipped his chin. “It would have knocked you out for a few hours. Just long enough to haul in a good catch and hand it off to my buyers. But you had to go and get nosy.”
“Oh, so you’re blaming me for this?” Lace’s voice rose.
She was so over his bullshit.
Captain Macleen was quiet for a moment.
“No. No. I blame myself.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve been around a long time. I’ve worked hard.” His orbs blinked open. “I hate bureaucracy of any kind. And that’s what you represent to me; all the ways the government can screw me out of my money.”
“You know,” Lace informed him, “what we do is actually protect your future and the future of all the fishermen who follow you. Without monitoring for overfishing the way we do, eventually there’ll be nothing left to catch.”
“Yeah. That makes sense on paper,” he grumbled. “But it doesn’t pay the bills. And I’m old, so I’m depending on things working for me, now.”
Movement in the water a few yards away, caught their attention at the same time.
“What the fuck is that?” Otis yelped, clearly panicked.
Well, it wasn’t a shark.
It took Lace a moment, but…
She gave a huge sigh of relief and smiled.
“Sea turtles. Three of them,” she informed him happily. “Leatherbacks.”
“What do they want?” Otis was trying to kick away from the small group of docile reptiles like they’d bite his face off.
“I don’t know,” Lace shrugged as best she could. “Maybe to help?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“…she instantly knew who I was, and didn’t miss a beat that I wasn’t in costume.”