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From harbors of Key West to the wilds of Biscayne Bay to the night lights of Miami, Kling's tough-minded heroine has carved out a life that is uniquely her own. Now, in WRECKERS' KEY, the fourth book in the series, this fiercely independent woman is at a turning point . . . and in a dangerous duel with an unseen enemy.
Before Key West was the party capital of the Florida Keys, it was built by wrecking skippers who in feats of derring-do raced to shipping disasters to save valuable cargos from the ocean depths. But when a friend is killed, Seychelle begins to suspect a chilling scenario: that modern-day wreckers are causing yachts to crash onto the reefs-and killing off whoever gets in the way.
Seychelle's dear friend Nestor Frias was piloting a billionaire's luxury power yacht on its maiden voyage when it ran up on a reef. A few days later, Frias was dead. His eight-months-pregnant widow Catalina is distraught, and a host of questions surround both Frias's death and the ship's accident. When Cat turns to Seychelle for help in proving Nestor was murdered, Seychelle embarks on a dangerous course through the shoals and channels of the case and her life, unaware that a greater danger is looming: a murderous human storm designed perfectly for her.
With its vivid, colorful characters and rich sense of sea and land, Wreckers' Key is a brilliant addition to Christine Kling's fascinating, entertaining, and thrilling Florida mystery series.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
“We hit
the reef so hard, I’m surprised no one was killed,” Nestor said.
“I keep dreaming about it, you know? Hearing the sound of the hull
crunching across the coral and then Kent’s screams when his arm
broke.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes like he was trying to
wipe away the vision. “This situation scares me, Seychelle. My
whole career’s on the line here.”
I couldn’t
disagree. When you put a multimillion- dollar yacht on the reef on
her maiden voyage, your reputation as a captain is toast. I was there
to help with the salvage of the boat, but I wasn’t sure what I
could do to salvage Nestor’s career.
Catalina
Frias reached across the table, took her husband’s hand, and
focused her large brown eyes on his face. She didn’t say anything
for several seconds, but there was a sense of intimacy in that moment
that was stronger than if she’d grabbed him and planted a wet one
on him. “Hey, we are going to get through this, mi amor,
okay?” Her soft voice was accented, but her English was perfect.
She squeezed his hand, her other arm resting across the top of the
belly that bulged beneath her pretty print maternity top.
I was
sitting with the two of them at an outdoor table at the Two Friends
Patio Restaurant on Front Street. I’d arrived
in Key West late the afternoon before on my forty-six-foot aluminum
tug Gorda, and when I called Nestor on the VHF, I told him I
was too tired to come ashore after a four-day trip down from
Lauderdale with only my dog as crew. I just wanted to drop the hook
and collapse in my bunk, so we’d agreed to meet in the morning for
Sunday brunch. Now here I was, sitting under a lush trellis of
bougainvillea pushing scrambled eggs and sausage around my plate, my
appetite gone.
“Nestor,
this is the first time I’ve taken Gorda this far from home.
I wouldn’t do this for just anybody, you know.”
When he
smiled that boyish smile so full of gratitude, my heart ached for
him. He was in a hell of a spot.
“Gracias,
amiga. I can’t lose this job,” he said, the backs of his
fingers caressing his wife’s belly. “Not now, with the baby
coming in just a few weeks.”
I’d known
Nestor much longer than his wife had, and I loved him like a brother.
There was a time when maybe that love could have gone another way,
but the attraction that might have been had turned into an abiding
friendship. He really was one of the good guys. He’d showed up on
the docks just before Red died, and afterward, when I started running
Gorda on my own and several of the captains were bad-mouthing
the only female captain in the towing business, he always stood up
for me. I’d watched him work his way up the waterfront, going from
being a captain on the Water Taxi to running the charter fishing boat
My Way, until now, fi nally, he’d gotten his big break about
four months ago, as the captain of a luxury power yacht. The Power
Play was a newly commissioned Sunseeker 94 owned by a local
resident millionaire, Ted Berger. Berger had made his money in
dot-com-related businesses, and when he’d
sold out, he’d bought several South Florida TV stations and
sports teams.
“Do you
think Berger’s going to can you?”
“I don’t
know. Maybe. He hasn’t said anything yet. Seychelle, this was the
first passage I’d made as captain. Other than a couple of sea
trials to work on the engines, we hadn’t really taken her out yet.
He told me when he hired me to commission the yacht that he wanted
her down here in Key West for Race Week, but then he decided to
install new flat-screen TVs in all the staterooms, then a new sound
system, and we were late getting out of the yard. The festivities
down here had already started, and the boss was itching to come down
and party. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been going so fast in a
squall.”
“You hit
that reef going almost twenty knots in a rain squall?”
“I know
it sounds bad, Seychelle. Especially to someone like you. But let’s
face it—you haven’t exactly embraced the electronics age. Do you
even have a GPS on that tugboat of yours?”
“Nestor,
what I do is not the point here.”
“Sey, you
don’t even own a cell phone.”
“Okay,
already.”
“See, the
Power Play is loaded with every bit of elec tronic equipment
imaginable. Berger spared no expense. The man is really into toys,
and there are backups for the backups. So what we were doing is
running on instru ments, the same way commercial pilots do with
planes full of hundreds of passengers. The autopilot is tied in to
one of three separate GPS systems. We were in Hawk’s Channel, and
everything had been working great up to that point. I was on the
bridge myself because I knew we were nearing the entrance to Key West
Harbor. All the in struments showed us more than half a mile from any
ob structions when bam! We ran right up onto these rocks
off West Washerwoman Shoal. The impact knocked Kent off his
feet, and when he tried to break his fall, the bone just snapped—came
right out through his skin.” Nestor shuddered at the memory. He’d
already told me it had been a nasty compound fracture.
Nobody said
anything for several long seconds while we all saw it happen in our
minds, saw the big ninety-four-footer come to a grinding halt on the
rocks, the men on the bridge thrown off their feet, the screams and
the blood. Nestor grasped the Saint Christopher’s medal he wore
around his neck and kissed the face of the saint.
“So,
Nestor,” I said, “what do you think happened?”
My friend
looked at his wife for a moment, as though unsure if he should say
what he was thinking. It was amazing to watch how the two of them
communicated, saying so much in a glance or a touch.
“Seychelle,”
Nestor started, after a quick look around the dining patio to see if
anyone was listening to our con versation. Satisfied, he leaned
closer and lowered his voice. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Ted
Berger these past weeks, and I wouldn’t put anything past
him. He calls himself the Other Ted, as though he’s in the same
league as Turner. But he’d do anything to get there. Ruthless
is the word that comes to mind.” Nestor lifted his shoul ders and
bobbed his head once, like a bow. “Okay, maybe you have to be that
way to get the kind of money he has, but lately, with the start-up of
this girls’ hockey league and buying this boat, I think he’s
overextended himself. He wants out of this boat deal and now he seems
more pissed over the fact that he’s getting hit with a big salvage
claim than over the business of wrecking her in the first place.”
“Wait a
minute. Are you saying you think Berger tried to wreck his own boat?”
I tried hard to keep the disbe lief out of my voice.
“Jesus,”
he said, swiveling his head to look around the empty patio. “Not so
loud, Sey. I don’t have any proof— yet. But it just doesn’t
make sense otherwise. The only way this could have happened is if the
equipment mal functioned somehow. And I’m just saying that Ted
Berger would have been better off with the insurance company cashing
him out of an investment that had got out of hand.”
“Nestor,
I’m finding this kind of hard to believe.”
“You’d
understand if you could have heard him while we were in the boatyard.
He was constantly complain ing about how much things cost. He had no
idea what he was getting into when he bought a yacht that size.”
“I
suppose it makes sense in a way. If he’d just put the boat up for
sale, it would have signaled to people that he was in financial
trouble.”
“Exactly.
And he has the background—he made his money in electronics. I’m
going to have a buddy of mine check out the equipment on the boat and
see if he can find evidence it’s been tampered with. Get him to
come down before we take off to head back up north. I don’t intend
to take the fall for Ted Berger’s financial prob lems.”
At that
moment Nestor’s eyes flicked to the right and focused on something
outside the restaurant. The skin across his cheeks grew taut and his
eyes narrowed for only a second before his face broke into a huge,
forced grin. He lifted his hand and waved.
I twisted
in my seat, glanced over my shoulder. A white- haired man wearing a
loud red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt was standing on the sidewalk in
front of the restaurant. He waved, and then went in the front door,
clearly headed for us out on the patio. An instant later he appeared
in the side door and his voice boomed, “Good morning,” caus ing
the other diners’ heads to turn. When he reached our
table, he placed both his hands on Catalina’s shoulders then
bent and kissed her on the cheek. He said, “Our mommy-to-be looks
more glowingly beautiful every time I see her.”
Catalina’s
body had gone still at his touch, her only movement turning her face
away as he kissed her, so his mouth wound up kissing her hair.
Nestor
stood and shook hands with the man. Either he hadn’t noticed or he
was choosing to ignore his wife’s discomfort. “Good morning,”
he said as he pumped the man’s hand. Then he turned to me.
“Seychelle, I’d like to introduce you to Ted Berger.”
I started
to stand, but Berger waved me back down. “So you’re the tugboat
captain,” he said as he seated himself in the fourth chair at the
table and waggled a coffee mug at the waitress. “I kind of expected
a hag with a corncob pipe.” He cocked his head to one side and
looked at me from head to as much as he could see above the table.
“You’re definitely not a hag.”
The Tugboat
Annie jokes had grown old about the sec ond month after I inherited
Sullivan Towing and Salvage from my father. That was more than three
years ago.
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