Chapter Two

Note from the Author:

I hope you enjoy this draft, pre-edited sneak peek at the upcoming novel Lost Fleet. Stay safe, wash your hands, and be kind to each other!

-Chris

Chapter Two

A late spring breeze raised goosebumps on Kate’s skin. She rubbed her arms, then opened them wide and wrapped them around the tiny, elderly woman standing beside a three-quarter-ton diesel pickup truck in the parking lot of Shark Key Campground and Marina.

“Miss Marilynn, it’s not going to be the same around here without you.”

“Or my homemade toffee.” The woman pulled Kate tighter into the hug. “We’ll miss you too, dear. But we’ll be back in time for Thanksgiving.”

Kate felt the woman’s arms relax. As she pulled away, Whiskey nudged his nose between them and pressed against Marilynn. The little woman stumbled, and Kate caught her elbow to steady her.

“Whiskey, quit it. Be nice.” As Kate admonished her seventy-pound German Shepherd, Marilynn bent down and hugged him, coming back up covered in black and tan fur. She giggled when she brushed his hairs from her jacket then patted Kate’s arm once more.

“Goodbye, dear. Have a good summer. Keep these men in line.” She waved across the deck to where Steve sat across the table from Shark Key’s owner, Chuck Miller, and her neighbor, captain of the catamaran Knot Dead Yet, William Jenkins. “And stay out of trouble yourself, dear.”

With that, the woman climbed up into passenger seat of the rumbling pickup truck. Her husband John waved from behind the wheel. As Marilynn buckled in, the truck eased forward, the fifth-wheel trailer they called home crunching behind them across the crushed coral parking lot.

Kate stood at the edge of the deck and watched the last of her snowbird friends leave Shark Key for the summer. Chuck eased up beside her and rested his arm on her shoulder. “Sweet couple, eh?”

Kate felt her head nodding, floating in the vast sky. Her hand drifted down and absently patted Whiskey’s head. “Yeah, they—” her voice caught in her throat, and she coughed to cover the emotion. Turning around in a haze, she took a step toward her friends’ table, then stopped.

“The man on the plane.” Chuck took her hand. “He was more than just a friend from work, wasn’t he?” With his leathery skin and wild, sunbleached hair shot through with gray, dirt under his fingernails, and the constant cologne of gas and oil, her friend looked older than his fifty-seven years, and he seemed every bit the rough, simple native Conch he was. But under the salty crust hid a heart much more perceptive than Kate liked. At least when it was directed at her.

She quietly nodded and they drifted back toward the table.  She found herself in a chair she didn’t remember sitting in. “I met him the first day of my internship at Verity.”

“You worked for Verity?” William asked as he pulled out a seat for his wife. His deep voice pulled Kate back into focus.

“Got the internship the summer before my Junior year at Columbia. My dad was furious. He’d pulled some strings to get me a spot running coffee for the talking heads in the studio at Fox News, but I wanted to earn my way and get out into the field. Real journalism, you know?”

Whiskey rested his head across her thighs.

“The correspondents were testing all of us, sending us on errands and pitting us against each other to research obscure facts, picking favorites and weeding out the ones who were only there because of some connection. Nicholas pulled me to the side…”

His voice echoed in her memory. Let’s not play these games, okay? I don’t need an audition, I just need someone I can count on.

“…we were a team from the start.”

A trim black woman waggled her eyebrows from the opposite end of the table. “I bet you were.”

“It wasn’t like that, Michelle. At least not at first. He didn’t have the ego of the other guys. Always willing to share the byline, as long as we got the story and got it right, ya know?”

“Oh, honey. He had the ego. They all do.”

All three men started to protest.

Michelle waved them off. “Don’t even try, boys. Take you two…” she waved at Steve and her husband, William, sitting side by side. “The UPS guy knows you both by name.”

“It’s not a competition.” Steve playfully nudged the friend at his side. “I’m just trying to get the Hopper Too outfitted to be the best private dive charter in the Lower Keys.”

Michelle grinned. “Well, stop it. He’s trying to keep up, and we’re running out of things to buy for the Knot.”

Kate’s felt her lips pull up into a smile as she joined in. “Yeah, Bradley down at WestMarine asked me if you two were okay the other day. Said neither of you had been in for three days, and he was afraid something was wrong.”

“You don’t see me getting in the middle of that…” Chuck popped a French fry into his mouth.

Kate smacked his shoulder. “Of course you’re not in the middle, Charles. They’re both trying to keep up with you. Ever since we brought up your grandfather’s loot, you’ve been in upgrade heaven. Redoing the docks, dredging the west cove, new washers and dryers in the laundry room. Even the new engine in my boat… Everything you’ve done around here is for someone else, sure, but you’re still at the head of the pack, my friend.”

As Chuck glanced around the table with flushed cheeks, Babette Wilcox arrived at the table with another bucket of cold drinks and a tray piled high with food.

“I found a bag of lionfish tucked in the back of the freezer. It’s the last of it until the Derby this summer, unless one of you can drag your butt out before dawn to bring a bunch more in for me.” She spread four red baskets of fried lionfish bites around the table, and dropped a squeeze bottle of her homemade island tartar sauce in the center. Then she plopped down beside Chuck. “It already feels too quiet around here, but it’s nice to be able to sit down and eat again.”

Babette had lived and worked at Shark Key since she had arrived more than ten years ago. Her white and blue fifth wheel hadn’t moved from its site halfway down the narrow key in all that time, and Kate was pretty sure the wheels were irreparably frozen in place.

“So, Kate, spill it. Tell us about this hot-shot adventure-man of yours.” Babette had a way of finding the lighter side of everything.

Kate finally felt the smile as she remembered. “Nick is—” she caught herself. “…was always all-in on whatever story we were chasing. He never held back. Didn’t matter if we were in the tropical jungle of Brazil or the concrete jungle of Brownsville.”

“My internship was only supposed to be for the summer, but he demanded they keep me.  When classes started in the fall, I moved in with him, and we worked on everything together. My professors cut me a lot of slack. As long as I got my papers turned in and kept getting bylines at Verity, they were fine with me missing half their classes. I followed him everywhere.”

“Where was the most exotic place you two went?” Michelle brushed a mosquito from Kate’s shoulder.

Kate’s eyes brightened. “This one time, we were in the Amazon working on an expose about an American company he thought he could tie to illegal slash-and-burning in the rainforest. Anyway, we’d hired a guide. Nick was trying to sort through his notes as we traveled down the river, and the dude turned really fast to avoid a log in the water. Nick’s bag full of notes flew off his lap and into the water. A damn crocodile tried to eat it.  Didn’t take it long to realize that the leather wasn’t the skin of a live animal anymore, so it finally gave up and slithered back to shore and we were able to hook the bag and pull it back on board, but all our notes were soaked and torn up with teethmarks.”

Babette gasped and glanced across the parking lot toward the tip of the lagoon that lay in the center of the long, narrow island. “We’ve had to trap a couple of crocs in there.”

“Yeah, it’s not so good for business when you’re putting up ‘Don’t walk your dogs by the lagoon’ signs everywhere,” Chuck winked.

Kate patted Whiskey’s head. He pushed up to his feet, stretched, and wandered to the seagrape hedge lining the edge of the deck. Kate continued, “So for Christmas that year, I picked up a bunch of extra freelance work to buy him this waterproof messenger bag. Didn’t sleep for a month. It was a hideous lime green, but it was the most indestructible one I could find. When he opened it, he kissed me on the nose and told me it was the most thoughtful gift he’d ever received.”

“I never figured you for a gift-whisperer.”

Kate spun at the sound of a deep, lilting voice with a faint Latin accent. Kara Alvaro wrapped her in a warm hug then grabbed a chair from a nearby table.

“I have my moments.” Kate smiled. “Anyway, right after graduation, Verity hired me on full time. I already had more pieces published with them than a lot of the staff reporters. Nick wanted to do an anthropological piece on a tribe living on the side of a volcano in the Andes. He took me and a photographer—Jamie. Sweetest guy. Always had something kind to say. Anyway, we’d been down there for two months when the volcano erupted. The tribe refused to evacuate, so we stayed, too. Jamie was getting some great images of the lava flows, but he got too close.” Kate fell silent.

“I wanted to go home after that. It was too much. But Nick wanted to stay. We’d been drifting apart for a while, anyway, so… yeah.” She looked up into the perfectly clear, cool sky. “I’m actually kind of surprised he made it this long. He was like those missionaries who tried to live with cannibal tribes, even when they knew they’d get killed. He ran toward danger every chance he got.”

Heads turned toward a rustle at the edge of the deck. Kate spotted Whiskey’s rump sticking out of the hedge, his tail thwacking wildly against the thick, waxy leaves. A moment later, he wiggled backwards, extracting himself from the tangle of branches. A small orange and green iguana dangled from his long snout by its tail.

“Whiskey! Drop it. Now!” Kate shoved her chair back and scrambled toward him, swatting at him to release the poor reptile. The dog dropped his prize, then glared at Kate as he watched it scramble back into the bushes.

Kate returned to the table and opened a fresh beer. “It’s been twelve years. I haven’t talked to him since I climbed onto that plane in Peru. I don’t even know how he knew where to find me. Or why he’d want to.”

Michelle rested her hand on Kate’s elbow. “Are you going up for the service?”

Kate’s vision blurred. She heard Steve’s voice from across the table, but it sounded so much further away. “Of course she is. You never get over your first love.” The clatter of ice as he stuffed an empty water bottle into the bucket in front of him pulled Kate’s attention back to the table.

William wrapped his long fingers around Michelle’s hand and the group stared awkwardly until Kara broke the silence. “Ain’t that the truth? My first love was Reynaldo Cruz. He was a Dominican singer who was a sensation when I was about thirteen. All the girls were in love with him, and all the boys—except me—wanted to be him. I won the school talent show with a Reynaldo Cruz song. I think I still remember it.” She pushed her chair back, pulled an empty beer bottle out, and held it up like a microphone.

“God, no. Please, no!” the others begged as Kara began to gyrate her hips like a Latin pop star.

She erupted with a deep laugh and plopped her massive form back into the chair. Taking a long gulp of water, Kara softened her voice. “Kate, honey. It’s okay. I’ll go up with you. It’s the least I can do after what you did for me last fall.”

Kate pulled her focus back to the group of loyal friends. “Thanks, Kara, but I think I need to do this one on my own.”

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