White Cargo (2 page)

“I thought you were anxious to get through the Canal,” Katie replied.

“Well, what the hell? It's not much out of the way, and we need to get that alternator fixed, you know. No more
showers or microwave or hair dryer until we can charge the batteries again, and all that stuff in the freezer is going to go, too.” The alternator had been down for two days, and they didn't have a spare. “Take a look here, both of you,” Cat said, spreading the chart on a cockpit seat. “Here's Santa Marta, just down here. It's a commercial port, and they're bound to have some sort of electrical repair place there.”

“Listen, I don't like what I hear about Colombia,” Katie said. “All I hear is pickpockets and drugs and stuff. Sounds like a pretty rough place to me.”

“Don't believe everything you read in the papers,” Cat replied. “Hell, lots of people go there all the time. It's just like any other place; a few of them get ripped off, sure. We've been in neighborhoods in Atlanta that were probably as dangerous as anything in Santa Marta.”

“I don't know, Cat.”

“Listen, Mom,” Jinx broke in, “I don't mind getting ripped off if I can use the shower pump again. My hair is terminally dirty.”

“Come on, Katie,” Cat cajoled, “we'll be there in time for lunch, we'll get the alternator fixed, and we'll be back at sea again by dinnertime. What do you say?”

Katie shrugged. “Well, okay,” she said, reluctantly, “I guess I could use a shower, myself.”

“You're on,” Cat said, switching off the autopilot. “Showers for everybody. Stand by to come about.” He put the helm over, tacked the boat, sheeted in the headsail, and, using his palm across the compass rose on the chart, set a rough course for Santa Marta. The women started below.

“You want some breakfast?” Katie called back.

“Well, as long as you're up,” Cat grinned.

“Oh, I'm up, all right.”

“So am I,” Jinx echoed. “I'll give you a hand with the pancakes. You do want pancakes, don't you, Cat?”

“Need you ask?” Katie said. “He really needs to put on some weight.” They disappeared below.

Cat placed an exploratory hand on his belly. Well, maybe he was getting a little thick about the middle, but hell, he was
hungry.
He wasn't sure what he weighed at the moment, but he reckoned it must be at least twenty pounds over his usual two hundred and twenty. He was a tall man, though, six-three in his bare feet; he could carry a few more pounds.

He sat back, steered the boat by hand, and tried to think if he had ever been happier. He had not. He had thought he was too old to be this happy. He'd had the boat built in Finland by Nautor and shipped to Fort Lauderdale, where he had supervised the installation of the electronics himself. Katie and Jinx had joined him, and they'd shaken the boat down, cruising down the islands as far as Antigua before reprovisioning and starting for the Canal. Once through, they would take a few days to haul the boat out, scrub the bottom, and make any last-minute repairs before pointing toward the South Pacific. After that they would have another eighteen months of his two-year leave of absence from the business to circumnavigate the world.

Jinx came up the companionway ladder with orange juice and coffee on a tray and sat beside him, bracing her feet on the cockpit seat opposite. She seemed to be wearing only a T-shirt; the girl rarely bothered with underwear, and it made Cat nervous. Never mind that he had powdered her bottom and changed her a thousand times; at eighteen, she was tall, slender, and full-breasted, just
like her mother, and even more beautiful—heart-stoppingly beautiful. Cat was afraid that some movie agent was going to capture her out of a university theater production and whisk her off to be a starlet. Cat had a theory that beautiful women were at a disadvantage in the world, that once their looks opened a few doors, they would be exploited and used up while they were young and left with no better alternative than marriage to the richest and least unattractive man available. He had seen these women in bars and around hotel swimming pools, worrying about the sag of their breasts and the wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, contemplating the latest cosmetic surgery. Jinx was a smart kid, and he wanted her to have a career that would give her some independence and self-esteem. When she had graduated from high school, he'd taken her aside. She had laughed aloud at his concerns.

“Me
a cheerleader, entering beauty contests? Come on, Cat, you know me better than that!”

He was glad to postpone her college for a couple of years and show her some of the world. More than that, he was glad to have her close to him for a little while longer before she flew the coop entirely. Cat didn't know whether she was still a virgin, and he wasn't about to ask her, but he thought the chances were good that she was. They'd always kept a tight rein on her, and she had usually accepted their judgment with good grace. Not that she had been unduly sheltered; she'd had a full social life in high school, but none of the weekend house parties with fraternity boys three and four years older, none of the drinking and drug use. She expressed contempt for all that. There was a quiet wisdom about Jinx that contrasted sharply with her line of bright patter and her extraordinary, dark beauty. There was also a naïveté—Cat thought
she was still not fully aware of the effect her bun-revealing shorts and tiny bikinis had on the opposite sex, not excluding himself. For all her native intelligence, she was still very much the child-woman. These two years of sailing were going to be precious to him—the rare gift of an extension of what had always been a remarkably close father-daughter relationship.

They sailed along quietly for a couple of minutes, then, without any warning, she said, “Daddy, what about Dell?”

Cat's stomach knotted at the sound of his son's name. “What about him?”

“Why don't you call him from Santa Marta and ask him to meet us in Panama? You know what a great crew he is.”

“I don't think Dell is interested in sailing these days. Besides, he'd probably get arrested going through customs.”

“Cat, you need to patch it up with him,” she said, gravely.

“Wrong, Jinx,” Cat replied, quickly, “Dell needs to patch it up with the world. How can I possibly patch it up with him while he's doing what he's doing? Are we going to have big, family Sunday dinners and worry about the cops busting in on us? Am I going to take him sailing through a dozen foreign ports and have to sweat getting busted in customs every time?”

“He needs your help.”

“I'll give him my help when he's ready to ask me for it. It's been rejected too many times.” God knew that was true; he had given up thinking about the number of scrapes he'd gotten the boy out of, the number of new schools and fresh starts he'd financed. In marked contrast to Jinx, Dell had always been rebellious, lazy, and surly.

Katie appeared in the companionway with two plates of pancakes and they both shut up.

Cat grinned at her. “Now I remember why I married you.”

“You want these in your lap, buster?” Katie grinned back.

Jinx patted his belly. “Yeah, you might just as well apply them directly to the paunch. Why go to the trouble of eating them?”

Three hours later, the entrance to the harbor at Santa Marta loomed ahead. The three of them stood in the cockpit and gazed at the land. To their right, a group of high-rise buildings stood behind a fringe of palms. “That's the beach area,” Cat said. “The port is over there to the left, behind that little island. The main town is at the port.” An older, more Spanish group of buildings could be seen beyond the beach.

Suddenly Katie said, “Cat, let's don't go in here. I've got a bad feeling about this place.”

Cat didn't speak for a moment. Katie had had bad feelings about things before, and she was usually right. “Oh, hell, Katie,” he said, finally. “We're half an hour away from getting the alternator fixed. Showers for everybody!”

Katie said nothing.

Glancing frequently at the chart, Cat held his course for the harbor entrance.

C
AT HAD EXPECTED A MARINA OF SOME SORT, HOWEVER PRIMITIVE,
but he was disappointed. There was an area to his left that berthed half a dozen modern ships, loading and unloading; there was a mixture of smaller craft around the harbor—a small coaster or two, some fishing boats, and the odd sportfisherman—and tied next to a concrete wharf were four or five sailboats, ranging from roughly twenty-five to fifty feet in length.

With Jinx and Katie standing by with lines at bow and stem, their regular drill, Cat eased the yacht into a vacant spot at the wharf. Jinx had changed into a bikini, and he could almost hear the eyeballs click on the boats around them and on the quay as she hopped ashore and secured her line.

Cat slipped the binoculars from around his neck, deposited them on a cockpit seat, and stepped onto the deck. “Get some clothes on, kid,” he said as he brushed past Jinx. “We're in a strange place; there might be some strange people.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and jumped back aboard. Cat climbed a rusty steel ladder and came onto an area containing some buildings that appeared to be warehouses. Nothing like any small-boat repair facility.
A couple of hundred yards away, traffic bustled through downtown Santa Marta, an orderly collection of white stucco buildings dotted with palms and other tropical vegetation. He could see the spires of a small cathedral over the red-tiled roofs. He turned to see a soldier approaching, bearing an old American .30-caliber carbine, the sort he himself had carried as a Marine officer.

“Hasta la vista,”
Cat said to the soldier, exhausting his Spanish.

The soldier asked something in Spanish.

“Speak English?” Cat asked, hopefully. It was going to be tough if nobody spoke English.

“No, señor,” the soldier said, shrugging.

Over the man's shoulder, Cat saw somebody less Latin-looking coming toward them.

“American?” the fellow asked.

Cat looked at him hopefully. Small, deeply tanned, tousled sun-bleached hair, a little on the long side—faded cutoff jeans, worn Topsiders, and a tennis shirt that had seen better days. Somewhere in his twenties. Cat knew in a moment he had found his man. The kid had Boat Bum written all over him. “Sure am,” Cat smiled.

“Where from?”

“Atlanta.”

The kid stuck out his hand. “My name's Denny. San Diego.”

Cat took the hand; it was rough and hard. The boy had hauled a few ropes in his time. “Cat Catledge, Denny. Glad to meet you. You don't know how glad, in fact. My Spanish is nonexistent. Could you say to the soldier, here, that I just want to get my alternator fixed, then shove off?”

Denny spoke in rapid Spanish to the soldier, who
replied more briefly. “He says you'll have to come to the port captain's office and check in, then you'll have to clear customs, but the port captain and the customs officer are both at lunch, so it might be awhile before you're legal.”

Jinx joined them. She had slipped a T-shirt over the bikini, but it wasn't long enough. Her creamy buns protruded from the bottom. “What's happening, Cat?”

Cat raised a hand to quiet her. “Just getting some information from our friend, the soldier, here. This is Denny, he's an American.”

“Hi, Denny, I'm Jinx.” She fixed him with a dazzling smile.

Denny looked vaguely stunned. It wasn't the first time Cat had seen this sort of reaction to Jinx. The young man looked around him. “Listen, you're just here to fix your alternator, right?”

“Right,” Cat replied.

“Well, if you don't want to hang around any longer than that takes, I can probably fix it with this guy for a few bucks, and you can avoid the formalities.”

“How much?”

“Ten bucks American, maybe twenty.”

“You're on, Denny,” he said to the kid.

Denny spoke to the soldier again and got a sly look and a nod. “Give him ten,” he said to Cat.

Jinx spoke up. “Cat, are you bribing somebody? You want to get us all arrested?”

“Jinx, clam up,” Cat said. “We're going to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

Cat handed the money to the soldier, who turned away without another word.

“Thanks,” Cat said to the kid. “I really do just want to
get our repairs done. I'm off a Swan 43 back there, name of
Catbird.
You know anybody around here can lay hands on a sick alternator?”

“Sure,” the boy replied. “There's a guy up in the town. Let's pull it off and I'll run it up there for you. You'll have to stay inside the fenced compound here, unless you want to start messing with customs.”

“You work here?” Cat asked as they climbed down the ladder to the yacht.

Denny grinned, exposing a set of good teeth. “Nobody works much around here,” he replied. “I work the sport boats, hire out when somebody hauls a boat, clean a bottom now and then.” They were walking toward the boat, Jinx ahead of them. Denny couldn't take his eyes off her. Cat felt almost sorry for him.

They reached the boat, and Katie stuck her head through the hatch. “Katie, this is Denny; he's going to give us a hand with the alternator. Denny, this is my wife, Katie.”

“Hello, Denny,” Katie said.

“Hi, Mrs. Catledge,” Denny said, shooting her an infectious grin. Katie waved and went back below.

They climbed aboard, and Cat led the way down the companionway. He lifted the ladder and unlatched the engine cover.

“Beautiful boat,” Denny said, admiringly, looking around the saloon. “I haven't seen a Swan around here for a long time. She looks new.”

“Brand-new, nearly,” Cat replied. “We shook her down from Lauderdale to Antigua, now we're headed for the Canal and the South Pacific. Gonna take a couple of years. Right after we get this alternator up and running.”