* * *
Finally one last sardine remained in the tin. Hatch pinched it out of the oil, laid it diagonally across a saltine, added the last bite of pickle and sliver of cheese, doused it real good with Tabasco, stacked another cracker on top, and put the whole thing in his mouth, then dusted the crumbs off his beard.
Chewing with contentment, he happened to glance toward the entrance of the harbor. What he saw caused the sandwich to stick in his throat. The corner of a cracker scratched his esophagus as he forced it down, muttering, “Hell does he think he’s doin’?”
No sooner had Hatch spoken his thought aloud than a long blast from the approaching boat’s horn nearly knocked him off his stool.
He would have come off it anyway. Because by the time the intact sardine sandwich hit his stomach, Hatch was out the door of the weather-beaten shack that housed his charter service and angrily lumbering down the quay, waving his arms and shouting at the boat’s pilot—probably a tourist from one of those square, landlocked states who’d never seen a body of water bigger than a watering trough—that he was coming into the marina way too fast, that he was violating the “no wake” rule, and that his recklessness would cost him a whopping fine if not a couple nights in jail.
Then Hatch recognized the boat as his. His! The damn fool was abusing his boat, the finest and biggest in his fleet!
Hatch fired a volley of expletives, wicked holdovers from his years as a merchant marine. When he got his hands on those kids, they’d regret the day their daddies spawned them. He might be old and ugly and bent, he might have gray whiskers and a slight limp from an unfortunate run-in with a knife-wielding Cuban, but he could hold his own with a couple of pretty beach boys—“And make no mistake about that, you arrogant little fuckers!”
Even after the boat cleared the buoys it didn’t slow down. It kept coming. It missed a forty-two-foot sailboat by inches and set it to rocking. A dinghy slammed into the side of a multimillion-dollar yacht, and the folks sipping nightcaps on the yacht’s polished deck rushed to the rail and shouted down at the careless mariner.
Hatch shook his fist at the young man at the wheel. The drunken fool was steering straight for the pier, kamikazelike, when he suddenly cut the engine and spun the wheel sharply to port. The outboard sent up a rooster tail of spume.
Hatch had barely a second to leap out of the way before the boat crashed into the quay. The young man clambered down the steps of the cockpit and across the slippery deck, leaped onto the aggregate pier, tripped over a cleat, then crawled a few feet forward on all fours.
Hatch bore down on him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and flipped him over as he would a fish he was about to gut. In fact, if he’d had his filleting knife in hand, he might have slit the guy from gonads to gullet before he could stop himself. Luckily he was armed only with a litany of curses, threats, and accusations.
But they sputtered and died before they were spoken.
Up till then Hatch’s focus had been on his boat, on the recklessness and speed with which it had been steered into the marina. He hadn’t paid much attention to the young man piloting her.
Now he saw that the boy’s face was bloody. His left eye was swollen practically shut. His T-shirt was in shreds, clinging to his lean torso like a wet rag.
“Help me. God, oh, God.” He threw Hatch’s hand off his shoulder and scrambled to his feet. “They’re out there,” he said, frantically motioning toward the open sea. “They’re in the ocean. I couldn’t find them. They… they…”
Hatch had witnessed a man get shark-bit once. He had managed to pull him from the water before the shark could get more than his left leg. He was alive but in bad shape, in shock, scared shitless, blubbering and making no sense as he bled buckets into the sand.
Hatch recognized the same level of wild panic in this young man’s eyes. This was no prank, no showing off, no drunken escapade, as he’d originally thought. The kid—the one who’d smartly saluted him earlier—was in distress to the point of hysteria.
“Calm down, sonny.” Hatch took him by the shoulders and shook him slightly. “What happened out yonder? Where are your friends at?”
The young man covered his face with hands that, Hatch noticed, were also bloody and bruised. He sobbed uncontrollably. “In the water.”
“Overboard?”
“Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.”
“That asshole nearly wrecked my yacht! What the fuck was he doing?”
A man wearing flip-flops came slapping up, hands on hips, reeking of a cologne that any self-respecting whore would think was too strong. He was wearing only a Speedo swimsuit beneath an overhanging belly covered with black curly hair. He had a thick gold bracelet on his right wrist and spoke with a nasally northeastern accent—just the kind that never failed to get on Hatch’s fighting side.
“The boy’s hurt. There’s been an accident.”
“Accident my ass. He put a big dent in the Dinky Doo.” They’d been joined by the man’s female companion, who was dressed in a bikini and a pair of high heels. Her tan and tits were store-bought. Under each arm she was holding a toy poodle. The pets had pink ribbons tied to their ears and were yapping in angry synchronization.
“Call 911,” Hatch said.
“I want to know what this son of a bitch intends to do—”
“Call 911!”