Riptide (22 page)

Maggie turned and started back up the dock, then stopped after a few steps and turned around. He was still watching her.

“Did you try to hurt me, Mr. Boudreaux?” she asked quietly.

Boudreaux shook his head slowly. “No, Maggie. I didn’t.”

Maggie looked at hm for a moment. He didn’t look away. Then she nodded again and walked back the way she’d come.

She crossed the back of the Sea-Fair parking lot, and headed down to the docks belonging to Scipio, just a few hundred feet away. Axel’s trawler was warming up, and Maggie’s parents, Sky, and Kyle were already aboard.

Wyatt pulled up as Maggie reached the slip, and she waited for him to reach her.
 

“You doing okay?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Go ahead, I’ll get the stern line.”

Wyatt stepped aboard, and Maggie grabbed the line and jumped on. The kids were sitting on one of the shrimp boxes, the dark blue urn between them. Gray and Georgia stood at the port rail.
 

Maggie stowed the line, then she and Wyatt sat down on the box across from the kids, and Axel nodded at Maggie and pulled away from the dock.

It took them a good thirty minutes to get out to David’s favorite hole, not too far past St. George Island. By the time they got to it, it was nearly dark. The breeze had calmed a bit with the setting of the sun, and there was just a touch of purple and orange left to the sky at the horizon line.

Axel cut the engine and dropped the sea anchor, then walked over to where Maggie and Wyatt had gone to stand at the stern rail. “This is it, Maggie,” he said. It was the first time she’d seen him without a cigarette since they were about sixteen.

Maggie nodded and looked at the kids. They stood up, and were joined by their grandparents. Sky carried the urn in her arms, and handed it to Maggie, then took her cell phone back from Kyle.

Maggie looked at Sky, and Sky looked at the urn, then looked at her phone. She tapped it, and her playlist lit up. She tapped again, and “Waterbound” by Dirk Powell began to play. David’s favorite song, and the one Maggie had requested most from him.

“Sky?” Maggie spoke softly.

Sky looked at the urn again. “I love you, Daddy.”

Maggie looked at Kyle. “Bye, Daddy,” he said.

Maggie looked at Georgia, but Georgia had her eyes closed, her hand over her mouth.

“We love you, son,” Gray said quietly.

Maggie turned around and stepped up to the rail, then remembered she only had one hand. She turned to ask Wyatt if he could open it, but he was already there. While she held the urn, he removed the lid, and then pulled the small tab inside.
 

“Thank you,” Maggie said.
 

Then she tilted the urn over the side, almost parallel to the water, and watched a small stream of nearly-white powder begin to flow, most of it blowing east before hitting the surface of the water.

She held the urn over the water until the ashes stopped coming, then dropped the urn into the water, where it bobbed on a gentle wave. Wyatt started to back away, but Maggie reached out and took his hand in her one good one, then watched as the urn began to sink.

“I love you, David,” Maggie whispered. “Break the nets.”

THE END

Read on for a sneak peek at What Washes Up, the third book in the Forgotten Coast Suspense series
.

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I’d like to extend a special thank you to so many of you who pre-ordered your copy of Riptide.
 

You let me know after reading
Low Tide
that you wanted to keep reading this series almost as much as I want to keep writing it. I was overwhelmed by the number of pre-orders, and it meant a great deal to me that you wanted to spend more time with these characters. It’s because of you that I knew that Maggie, Wyatt and Boudreaux had an audience.
 

As always, your honest review would be deeply appreciated. If you could take a moment to
share your experience
with
Riptide,
I would be thrilled.
 

Also, feel free to drop me a line anytime, at
[email protected]
. I love hearing from readers.

I
t was a windy night out on the bay, very windy for a late-July night without any tropical storms in the area.
 

Maggie Redmond’s long, dark brown hair kept trying to fly out of its clip, and she struggled to get it all tucked and out of her way one-handed. Her right arm, the one she really had a close relationship with, was still in a sling, after she’d been shot by some low-life on her own property.

She gave up on the clip and grabbed onto the portside rail, then looked up at Wyatt Hamilton, who was towering over her, holding binoculars to his face as he looked out to the bay.

She, Wyatt, and Dwight, one of the deputies who worked with them at the Sheriff’s office, had taken her Dad’s fishing boat out past St. George Island to do a little sunset fishing. Wyatt had just been reeling in a nice-sized redfish when they got the call.

It probably wasn’t especially appropriate for them to respond, given that Dwight had had a few beers, Maggie was on leave and one-armed, and Wyatt didn’t look especially Sheriff-y in his cargo shorts and red Hawaiian shirt. However, they were already halfway to the location, and would beat the Coast Guard by at least five minutes.

“Can you make anything out yet?” she yelled over the Chris Craft’s engine.

“Not really,” Wyatt barked. “It’s too dark. But they’re right, it is on fire.”

Michael Vinton and Richard Farrell, two shrimpers that Maggie knew only passingly, had come upon it as they were headed out for the night’s work. They’d called the Coast Guard and the Sheriff’s Office, and someone at the office had called Wyatt.

Dwight was with them, so it wasn’t technically their third date, but Wyatt was a little put out, nonetheless.

“Let me look,” Maggie yelled up at him. She was short to begin with, but being one-armed besides made her feel even smaller next to Wyatt, who, at six-four, was more than a foot taller than she was.

“No,” Wyatt said. “You have one hand and Dwight’s hitting every damn wave like he was getting points for it. You’ll drop my binoculars.”

“No, I won’t. Let me look.”

“I said ‘no,’” Wyatt told her.
 

He took the binoculars down, looked at her, and gave her an eyebrow waggle. “My mom got me these.”

Maggie shook her head and sat down on one of the bench seats. She and Wyatt had worked together at the Sheriff’s Office for six years, had become friends who flirted over the last two, and had only started seeing each other over the last several weeks. It was, of course, forbidden by the department, so they’d been keeping it quiet. This was fairly easy thus far, as most people thought they acted like an old married couple anyway.

The banter was part of their friendship and they both counted on it to keep things sane. But their feelings ran deeper, and belied their sarcastic and often teasing mode of communication. Wyatt had lost his wife to cancer shortly before moving to Apalachicola, and Maggie’s friendship had helped him heal. Maggie had lost her ex-husband, who was also her best friend, just a few short weeks ago. Wyatt was helping her heal, too. Nonetheless, she thought he was a jerk.

She watched the orange glow in the middle of the bay as it grew larger, and could make out Michael and Richard in the lights of their trawler, anchored just yards away. They were standing at the stern rail, watching the small fire.

A few minutes later, Dwight cut the engine, and they coasted up to about ten yards from the flames. The shrimp boat’s engine was silent as well, and suddenly the only sounds Maggie heard were the hiss and pop of the flames and the lapping of the wake as it slapped at the sides of the boat.

“What the hell?” Wyatt asked, as he and Maggie walked to the starboard rail and looked at what they’d come for.

It was a small oyster skiff, a wooden one, but she didn’t recognize it. The paint had been scratched or blasted off of the stern, leaving no name to identify her, at least, not straightaway. But the lack of a name, and even the fact that it was on fire, weren’t the details that stood out the most. The man hanging from the front of the cabin, and currently offering his lower body to the flames, was a little more interesting.

“Good grief,” Maggie said. “What the hell is this?”

“Well, we don’t get too many Viking funerals around here,” Wyatt said. “So I don’t think it’s that.”

He grabbed one of the long metal fish hooks from its holder and poked at the burning skiff to keep them from bumping. Then he bent over sideways, to look up at the face.

Meanwhile, Dwight began making motions like a cat with a hair ball, and Wyatt heard him coughing into his hand.

“Ya all right, Dwight?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, but, uh, the smell. I’m a vegetarian.

“Well, don’t worry. I wasn’t going to invite you to try a bite.”

Dwight took two steps to the port side and threw his beer up over the rail.

“Sorry,” Wyatt said.

Maggie stood at the starboard rail beside Wyatt and sniffed. Aside from the rather horrid odor of burning flesh, she could pick up no kerosene, diesel or other fuel that might have been used as an accelerant. That would help explain why it was burning so slowly.

“Well, this night’s just getting better and better,” Wyatt said, standing up.

“What?”

“That’s Rupert Fain.”

“What?”

Rupert Fain was the drug dealer that was suspected of being behind the blowing up of her ex-husband on his shrimp boat at the town’s 3
^rd
of July celebration. They’d been looking for him since.

“It’s Fain. I memorized his damn mug shot.”

“He’s from Gainesville. What’s he doing out here?”

“Pondering the existence of karma, I imagine.”

What Washes Up
will be released on or before July 16
^th
.