Kerry’s fingers moved and then she pointed. “There.”
“Do we have a reciprocal with them?”
Dar’s voice had started sounding more normal, and Kerry took a moment to be grateful for that as she searched out the information her lover was asking for. “Better.” She suppressed a smile. “We’re the outsource.”
“Okay.” Dar nodded. “Give me the laptop.”
She traded her milk for the machine and settled it onto her lap.
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“All right. Let’s start solving this problem by using our heads instead of our asses for a change.” She started up her programming language and began constructing a script. “I’ll capture traffic to Wharton’s area code and match it against his telco’s records database.”
“What’ll that tell you?” Charlie asked curiously. “We don’t much care, do we? They ain’t sent Bud all the way over there, did they?”
Dar shook her head. “Probably not. But if we get a hit on Wharton’s number, coming from this island, chances are the originating number is DeSalliers’.”
“He probably has a cell,” Kerry stated quietly.
“If he does, it’s probably a sat cell like ours.” Dar finished her task, then opened a connection to the managed switches and inserted the program into place. “Pretty simple,” she muttered. “I’ll just have it dump to a log, and email me with it every hour.”
“Is all that legal?” Charlie inquired.
Dar glanced up at him. “What, data parsing? Technically it’s all part of the internetwork I’m paid to manage, so if you mean do I legitimately have access, yes. Should I be dipping into that data stream for my own purposes? No.”
“Oh.”
Dar continued to type. “The cops can request this, with a court order. But we can’t call the cops and we’re not in a position to petition the courts, so I’m just doing what I have to do.” She opened another window and considered it, drumming her fingers lightly on the keys. “Let ’em sue me.”
“Assuming we find it, what are we going to do with the information?” Kerry asked. “Chances are, when he calls back, he’ll tell us where to meet him anyway.”
“True,” Dar agreed absently. “But we’ve been waiting for someone to make the next move the entire week. I’m over it. I want control back.” She opened her cell phone and typed a number off the back into the new script she was building. “When he calls me, this’ll locate him to his nearest relay point station.” She linked the script to a mapping module.
“Won’t do no good to call the cops anyhow,” Charlie remarked.
“He’ll just buy ’em, if he hasn’t already.”
“Like the pirates have?” Dar asked without missing a beat.
“Just before he left, Bud was fixing to tell us about your friends.”
She felt Kerry stiffen in surprise next to her, heard the faint hiss of indrawn breath.
Charlie turned red, and directed his eyes to the deck of the boat. ‘Damn,” he muttered softly. “I know you ain’t understanding that at all, huh?”
Dar felt very little satisfaction in her guess being on the mark.
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She finished her program and compiled it, finding it very soothing to her jangled nerves to be doing something at which she was comfortably competent. She had a brief, incongruous memory of her mother retreating to her easel after a stressful bout, losing herself in the canvas where she alone had control of what happened, and felt an odd sense of comprehension about that, finally.
“Understanding?” Kerry spoke up. “So, you know those pirates?”
Charlie didn’t answer for a bit. He flexed his hands, then rested them on his knees. “It’s not what you think,” he started off. “Things are tough down here.”
Kerry tore her eyes off the coding Dar was doing and concentrated on their guest. “And?” she prompted. “That makes what they’re doing okay?”
Charlie shrugged. “Survival is what counts,” he said. “Bunch of folks got together and kind of worked out a deal: if you had a little extra, you’d toss it in the kitty; and if you needed a little, you’d take.” He shifted, still gazing at the floor. “Worked out okay.”
“Okay?” Kerry could hardly believe what she was hearing.
“That’s not what those pirates do. I know. I saw them,” she said.
“They weren’t Robin Hood and his merry men.”
He gave her a guilty look. “Didn’t start out that way. It was just… One day this guy who was in with us, his cousin came in from the States. Slick guy.”
“Bet we know who that is,” Dar muttered, her eyes fastened on the screen.
Kerry grunted agreement.
“They’d just been doing little stuff—salvage, selling bits of wood and stuff to the shops, that kinda thing,” Charlie explained.
“A little smuggling, just bullshit stuff. But this guy talked them into a deal where he could get them big money, he said, if they could get him abandoned boats.”
“Abandoned?” Kerry said. “You’re not seriously saying anyone believed that those boats were abandoned, are you?”
Another shrug preceded Charlie’s continuing. “Anyway, they got him one, nothing big, just a little skiff, and he sold it off for them. Worked out pretty good. Made it nice. Helped out a lot of folks.” Charlie still couldn’t meet Kerry’s eyes. “Nobody got hurt.”
“Except the guy who lost his boat,” Kerry said.
“They got their money back,” Charlie argued. “Them insurance companies pay off but good. Probably went out and got him a brand new one, like the rest of them did,” he said. “He gets a new boat; we get what we need. Who gets hurt?”
“The insurance company,” Dar said.
“They can afford it,” Charlie said, his voice going harder. “All
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these folks out here—not the big shots who stay in them hotels, but the rest of us, just trying to scrape out a living—can’t.” He finally lifted his head. “They never went after little people, just the big rollers with more money than sense. The fat cats.”
Dar looked up at him. “People like me.” She glanced at Kerry.
“Like us.”
Charlie took a breath. “No, that ain’t true.”
Dar cocked her head. “Of course it’s true.” She lifted a hand and gestured around. “I’ve got a five million dollar condo to go with this, and four times that in the bank, Charlie,” she told him. “I run one of the biggest computer companies in the damn world.
Hell, they came after me the other day.”
Charlie sighed. “Jackasses,” he muttered. “Bud told ’em to steer clear of you.”
“Gee, thanks,” Kerry murmured.
“You don’t understand,” Charlie told her.
“You’re right. I don’t,” Kerry readily agreed. “So let me ask you this—if these guys are so wonderful, how come you had to get a loan from the greasy bastard we paid off this morning?”
Dar’s eyebrow inched up at Kerry’s tone. She set the laptop down on the table, all its programs busily running, and leaned back. “Good question.”
Charlie sucked his lower lip for a moment, then shrugged again. “Same old story,” he said quietly. “After they started this all up, they’d put up with us taking a few bananas. But when it came to hard cash, it was ‘just say no to the dirty fags.’” His eyes held theirs steadily. “They tolerate us now. Took a while. Bud just refused to ask ’em to pay down the loan, though.”
Dar just shook her head.
“Like I said, you don’t understand,” Charlie said. “You got it all.” He got up and walked to the door, going out onto the back deck and closing the portal after him.
“Whoo,” Kerry murmured. “This is getting really icky.”
Dar found herself relaxing, despite the truth of that statement.
She took Kerry’s hand in hers and clasped it, then brought it up to her lips. “He’s right, though.”
Kerry’s blonde eyebrows hiked up almost to her hairline.
“Huh?”
“I do have it all.” Dar looked steadily into Kerry’s eyes, watching the expression on her face soften as warmth crept into the green orbs. “I don’t agree with what they did, but I understand what drove it,” she added. “It’s been tough for them out here, and I think they were looking for a way to survive more than anything else.”
Kerry nodded briefly. “I know. It’s not like they got rich off it,”
she admitted. “But I can’t go along with the fact they think no one 262
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gets hurt. Someone does, Dar. People could get hurt; they could even get hurt themselves.”
“Like they almost did the other day.” Dar sighed. “Let’s save that problem for after we solve this one, huh? I’m about out of crusader coupons at the moment.”
Dar had a point. “Okay,” she concurred. “Let me go talk to him.
I know he’s under a lot of stress. I can imagine how I’d be acting if I were in his place.” She got up, leaned over and brushed Dar’s lips with her own, then eased past her partner’s outstretched legs and headed for the door.
Dar exhaled heavily, the air puffing her dark locks up off her forehead as she slumped back into the couch and regarded her laptop. She still felt like an idiot for getting into the situation, but her more practical side had taken over and put itself in charge—at least for the moment. Logic made a lot better platform for problem solving than hysteria.
Dar let her head drop back against the couch, easing a hand behind her neck and rubbing the tense muscles just at the base of her skull. “What next?” she asked the ceiling. Her instincts were urging her to action, but aside from the digital searching her programs were doing on her behalf, she wasn’t sure if there was anything else she could do until DeSalliers called again.
Calling the police captain crossed her mind, but Dar rejected that idea out of hand. Even if she thought he might be on the up and up, and would keep the contact under wraps, she had no such confidence in anyone he worked with. Besides, she wasn’t sure he was honest, and she wasn’t about to risk Bud’s life on it. After all, the people there had no reason to trust or help her any more than they did DeSalliers.
We’re both just rich Americans, aren’t we?
Dar’s face scrunched into a frown as she applied that label to herself and didn’t like the sound of it.
Charlie was right, she realized, but not for the reason he thought. She really didn’t understand condoning piracy, but it had nothing to do with not knowing what scraping by was. She’d spent her whole childhood knowing that intimately. Maybe she’d just never bought into the whole Robin Hood thing.
That brought up the question of whether DeSalliers would make good on his threat. He’d avoided using brutal force in their first encounters, but as things had progressed, she’d gotten a sense that he was getting closer to crossing the line.
Okay, Dar
, she lectured herself,
let’s think of this in more familiar
terms
. She got up and picked up her milk glass, carrying it back to the galley. “DeSalliers has a contract he’s got to execute. He makes good on it, and he wins—he stays in business, he’s got the money to keep going, life is good.” She poured another glass and stood there sipping from it. “He probably figured this to be a no-brainer. He’s
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got power, he’s got people, just head down here and rope off the wreck, dive it, destroy it, bring back proof, and he’s home free.”
She poked in the basket and retrieved one of the cookies Kerry had made earlier, dunking it in her milk and taking a bite of it.
“Think of it from his perspective, Dar. You think you’re frustrated? Picture how he has to feel—he’s got Bob to deal with, then he runs into you and you wreck his boat, then you keep him from Bob again, then your friends enlist with Bob to mess him up, then you call his contract holder and tell them he’s a loser.” Dar finished the cookie and fished around for another one. “Bet he’s got a stuffed Rottweiler with my name pinned to it that he’s using for target practice.”
The thought put her in a slightly better mood. “Okay—so now I’ve got to convince him I’ve really got something he’s looking for, long enough to trade it for Bud or at least find out where he’s got him.” She licked her lips. “Just like bluffing out a competitor, Dar.
You can do that.”
What was DeSalliers expecting? He was expecting her to run scared, back off, wait for him to make all the moves.
All right
. Dar took the basket back to the couch, then sat down cross-legged and retrieved the laptop. She opened her mail and started typing.
KERRY EASED OUT of the cabin and spotted Charlie sitting on the stern bench they used for gearing up. She walked over and took a seat next to him, resting her arm on the back of the boat and gazing out across the marina.
“Y’know,” Charlie spoke first, “that’s why Bud never could stand Andy, I’m guessing.”
“What do you mean?” Kerry asked.
“He had everything. Everybody liked him; he was real good at what he done; he had a good marriage, had a kid he was proud of…
He made it seem like everybody should be just like him.” He glanced at the door. “She’s just like him.”
Kerry thought about that. “I wish more people were like him,”
she remarked. “I wish my father had been.”
Charlie shifted and looked at her.
“When I first met Dar and we were getting to know each other, every time she talked about her father, deep down in my heart, I found it hard to believe what she was saying.” Kerry spoke softly.
“Because my own experience had been so different.”
“Dar got off lucky,” Charlie said. “Most of us don’t.”
“True,” Kerry agreed. “But then I met Andy.” She turned her head and met Charlie’s eyes. “He gave me something my family never had, and I cherish that, and him, more than I can tell you.”
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railing. “I’m not gonna apologize for us doing what we had to do to keep our heads up,” he said. “I got a kid to take care of.”
Kerry regarded him. “I’m not into judging people. I’ve been on the receiving end of that too many times myself,” she said. “I think the important thing right now is just to get Bud out of that nutball’s clutches and resolve this.”
One of Charlie’s eyebrows twitched. “Thought you weren’t inta judging,” he drawled. “Calling that sonofabitch a nutball like that.”