Whistler's Angel (18 page)

Even so, he and Claudia used assumed names. He would introduce himself as Kip, sometimes Greg. He thought these names suited the sort of
young man who had a lot of time on his hands. Claudia would make up her names on the spot. She thought Fluff or Bootsy were the kind of names that went with a Greg or a Kip. The use of false names had begun a precaution, but Claudia thought there would be no harm in having some fun while they were at it.

“Gotta keep it light, Adam. But don’t worry. I’m watching. I’ll never let anyone harm you.”

Names aside, he’d asked Claudia to cover her scars whenever they would be with other people. The entrance and exit wounds were still vivid. Someone would be bound to ask what had caused them, and the subject was better avoided. Although Claudia was not at all self-conscious about them, she took to wearing little green or white scarves, knotted to one side with long trailing ends, whenever they were in company. He had bought her several. They looked good on her. Almost anything did. He had also requested that she try to avoid telling anyone that she was an angel.

“Why would I do that?”

“Just in case it comes up.”

“Adam, that’s hardly a thing people ask.”

“Well, yeah…but if some guy says you look like an angel, you shouldn’t
say, ‘Well, it so happens that I am.’”

She looked at him. “Adam, do you think I’m that dumb?”

“Claudia…far from it. All I’m trying to say…”

“I don’t really mind that you think I have a screw loose. I don’t even mind if some people think that I’m just some rich yuppie’s bimbo. But please don’t imagine that I’m stupid.”

“Dean’s list, remember? Of course I don’t think that. And where did this
bimbo thing come from?”

“I…overheard it.”

“From someone who’s actually spoken to you? Because anyone who’s known you for more than three minutes…”

“No, just some kids who were walking past the boat.”

That was one more thing about her. Her senses stayed heightened. She could hear and she could smell many things that he couldn’t, and his own, he’d always thought, were fairly acute. Early on, he’d thought that these were more in her mind, but she’d usually turn out to have been right. So, okay, thought Whistler. Some kids called her a bimbo.

“Using names like Fluff and Bootsy, what else did you expect? Even without them, I’m still not surprised. I can’t blame them for wondering what a woman like you is doing with someone like me.”

At that, she softened. “Don’t short-change yourself. I’ve seen the way women look at you. They get goosebumps.”

“The heck they do. No woman ever has.”

“There are times…when you’re quiet…you look dangerous, Adam. You look…I don’t know…sort of coiled. It’s a turn-on.”

He grunted. “Can we get back to you?”

“Except when you smile. You have a little boy’s smile. Go from one to the other; women melt at your feet.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s been my curse. So many woman.”

“Of course, with me, that cute smile came first. I had to wait to find out

what a tiger you are.”

He was starting to blush. She always did this to him. Whenever he tried to sit her down, be firm, she’d have him stumbling all over himself.

“Claudia…listen. All I’m trying to say…it’s like when I asked you to cover the scars. You’re hard enough to forget as it is.”

“That’s all you meant?”

“I should not have brought it up.”

They both let it go. They quickly made up. That had been the closest they’d come to a quarrel since…well, those other quarrels weren’t really quarrels either. They were minor disagreements; they’d discuss them and he’d yield. He had yet to win an argument with Claudia.

The bimbo thing never came up again, mostly because she abandoned those names and took to calling herself by rich girl’s names such as Courtney or Valencia or Brittany. She might have overheard “spoiled bitch” a time or two, but no one calls a Brittany a bimbo.

That discussion, however, was
not
all he meant. There were two related subjects that he’d wanted to discuss, but that was not the time to pursue them with her. She’d reduce him to stammering again.

The first had to do with the
guardian
part of her being his guardian angel. There had been several incidents – her trying to protect him - that could have led to serious trouble. The first time, off Belize, a passing yacht radioed to say its compressor had shorted out and that it had run out of ice. It was during her watch; he was sleeping below. Claudia, recalling what he’d said about pirates, told the yacht to stand off and send over its dinghy with only one person aboard. They did as she asked and she gave them the ice. But she’d waited at the rail
in her kevlar vest with the decksweeping shotgun at the ready.

That skipper must have wondered what they had on board that commanded that sort of vigilance. He might easily have reported Last Dollar as being a suspected drug runner. Suspicious-looking boats were reported all the time. The motive for reporting them was financial, not ethical. The tipster would get up to twenty five percent of the value of everything seized. But nothing had come of it. That yacht had not reported them. If it had, they would have been boarded soon after. Perhaps that other skipper was a runner himself.

“Claudia,” he’d said, “please don’t do that again.”

“They were watching us, Adam. They were watching through binoculars.”

“More likely, they were ogling a nice-looking woman. Next time, come and wake me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And I wish you’d leave the guns where they are unless there’s a clear and present threat. You know what’s just as good? Hold a cell phone to your ear. That almost always makes people back off if they don’t have the best of intentions.”

She nodded. “Okay, no more guns.”

That, however, was only the first time. On shore as well, she’d be watching for signs that any stranger was paying them undue attention. Another time, on Grand Cayman, they were sitting in a restaurant and Claudia noticed that a man outside was peering in through the window. People do that every day. They’re just looking the place over. But this one was wearing a dark business suit and Claudia was especially sensitive to suits, given her experience with Lockwood and Briggs. But he felt sure that anyone who might mean him harm would probably dress less conspicuously. They were, after all, in the tropics. This man, in any case, then entered the restaurant and seemed to be heading toward their table. Claudia tensed; her hand gripped her fork, and she was ready to spring. The man, to make a long story short, had only come in looking for a rest room. He was lucky he hadn’t reached into his pocket or he might have had a fork in his ear.

More recently, in Martinique, Whistler had hired a diver to go down and clean the growth off his bottom. He’d neglected to tell Claudia that he’d done so. She heard the scraping noises and she saw the trail of bubbles from the scuba gear the diver was using. True to her promise, she did not grab a gun, but she was waiting to whack him with a spinnaker pole the moment he came to the surface. She didn’t because…and this was the other subject…a pelican swooped down and landed on the deck. It squawked at her and it flapped its wings at her. Whatever that meant in pelican language, to Claudia it meant that the pelican knew the diver and was telling her that he was harmless.

When she told him about it, she still wasn’t sure. She said that even when the diver came up, he seemed unable to look her in the eye.

“Were you…still talking to the bird at this point?”

“I’m serious, Adam.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was doing that cell phone trick that you taught me.”

“Either way, I’m sure he didn’t want to intrude. Those guys do their job and they go to their next one. So it’s good that the pelican dropped by.”

First she’s bothered that the skipper off Belize was looking at her; now
she’s bothered that a dockworker wouldn’t. With anyone else, he’d have called it paranoia. With Claudia, though, it was more like disappointment. She was his guardian; she was right in there guarding, but there never seemed to be any genuine threat for Claudia to guard him against.

Eventually, he might have to sit her down and risk her annoyance one more time. The subject wouldn’t be excessive vigilance, however. It would be her thing about animals. He’d seen people watching her, wondering about her. She would speak to any bird that might land on the deck and she spoke to dogs and cats while ashore. Many people talk to animals. Nothing odd about that. But most people don’t have discussions with them. Most people don’t share with dogs and cats, met at random, the good news of the afterlife that awaits them. Most people don’t nod and say thank you to pelicans. Most people don’t take their advice.

As far as Whistler himself was concerned, if she thought he was an
angel, so be it. She was entirely human in all other ways. She had the normal range of moods; mostly happy, sometimes pensive, but he never saw her sullen or brooding. He never saw a single sign of regret that she’d chosen...been assigned...to be with him.

She missed her mother, but they’d swapped frequent emails using the Magellan device. And later, as there seemed to be less need for that precaution, they would speak on the phone once a week. Whistler knew that anyone determined to find him certainly could have done so by now, especially if Kate Geller’s phone was still tapped. Days would go by, sometimes a whole week, without Felix Aubrey ever crossing his mind. That chapter seemed to be closed.

Nor had her mother been pining away back in Cherry Creek, Colorado. Kate had made two more trips to Geneva and she’d spent the Christmas holiday with his father in Paris followed by a stay at Chamonix. That relationship seemed to have a future as well. Like Claudia, her mother was learning French and German. In fact, she and Claudia would test each other’s progress in the course of their phone conversations.

She’d told Claudia that she was thinking of selling her business. His father had encouraged her to do so, stop commuting, and think about moving to Europe full time. She didn’t say whether they’d spoken of marriage, but they’d surely grown comfortable with each other. And Kate had received several offers for the business. Those offers were increasingly attractive because the garden center’s business had boomed.

The boom in sales and traffic had come in the wake of all the media publicity that she had received as an aftermath of the drug raid. The wire services had written it up as a classic example of “jack-booted thugs” pounding down the wrong doors on bad information and hurting innocent people. A Denver paper ran a four-part series on the evils of the Federal Seizure Laws. Kate had faxed the whole series to Claudia.

The Denver paper’s editors were especially incensed by one of the provisions of those laws. That provision was called the “relation-back doctrine.” They called it an affront to any fair-minded citizen, one that turned the constitution on its head. That doctrine went far beyond seizing private property. Briefly stated, it said that all property was forfeit
from the moment
that it was
involved in a crime
.
This was even if the government didn’t learn of that crime until several years after the fact. For example, it said, say your son once used your phone to buy or sell a couple of joints. You never knew anything about it. But that buy then came to light in a subsequent prosecution. Your house, by law, was no longer yours. It had been used in the commission of a federal crime. It became the property of the federal government from the moment the call was completed. If you had been living in that house ever since, not only could the government put it up for sale, they could also charge you back rent.