Dallas sighed. If there was anything he knew really well by now, it was that Yerby Catalano had died on a beautiful day. “Right. But do you remember anything about any of them?”
Jones was thoughtful. “There were other dive boats, of course. And a few other boats that came and went. A couple of fishing boats. A speedboat. Now that I think about it, that was kind of odd. Speedboats don’t usually just sit out there.”
“What kind of a speedboat?” Dallas asked.
“Donzi, I think.”
“What about the fishing boats? Did you notice a name? Did you see a boat with the word sun in the name?”
“Yeah, come to think of it. Something like...no, wait. It wasn’t sun. It was sin. Something sin. Like Evening Sin or something like that.”
“You’re sure? Sin, not sun?”
“I’m absolutely sure.”
Dallas thanked him and called Liam, giving him all the information he had so far. They needed everyone out there—cops and Coast Guard—looking for those boats.
Dallas started walking back along the docks, studying every boat as he went. Every captain and crew member on the dive boats now knew who he was, of course.
He’d nearly reached his starting point when he saw a man walking down the dock toward him carrying a toolkit. At first, he barely noticed him; he had been looking for a big, strong guy with blue eyes.
But then he remembered the pictures he had in his phone, pictures of Blade, Hammer and Pistol.
Men who couldn’t be found at home or prowling the city’s hot spots—or even the down-and-out establishments that tourists seldom saw.
The man looked up just as Dallas neared him.
It was Blade, Billie Garcia, Martin Garcia’s cousin, the man who had enlisted Jose in Los Lobos.
Billie looked up just as Dallas recognized him. He took one look at Dallas and knew.
He was a thin, wiry man of about twenty-eight. He produced a knife seemingly from nowhere, and with it grasped tightly in his hand he lunged for Dallas, who moved in the nick of time. Garcia plunged past him and into the water.
Dallas didn’t hesitate. He dived in after the man, blinking to clear his eyes against the water.
Garcia was right in front of him, still wielding the knife. Dallas surged back, crashing into one of the pilings supporting the dock, and slipped to the side.
Garcia drove his knife into the piling. As he tried to wrench it free, Dallas clutched him around the throat.
The knife came free.
Garcia knew he was caught, but he still had the knife.
He raised it again, and Dallas realized Garcia wasn’t trying to kill him anymore, he was trying to kill himself.
*
Hannah headed up to the captain’s room again. She tried not to notice that Dallas Samson had somehow already made it his own. There was a light scent of some woodsy cologne in the air, something she’d missed when she’d been rescuing Valeriya, shoving the bed around and finding the key.
The scent naturally made her think of him. She hadn’t realized it until that moment, but she was even familiar with his scent.
And she liked it.
Worse...she was drawn by it.
The man was an enigma to her, she had to admit.
Yeah, an enigma she wanted to sleep with again.
She gave herself a mental shake and walked to the side of the room where a number of old books were carefully kept in glass-fronted bookshelves. Dark wood, of course, in keeping with the room’s resemblance to a captain’s cabin.
She looked through the titles and found the two books she wanted. One was titled Spanish Treasure Ships and the other was Key West: Dirty Days of the Territory.
Taking them both, she curled up on the bed. Petrie jumped up beside her, and she smoothed his beautiful fur.
She thought she knew almost every legend about Key West and treasure that it was possible to know, but maybe some of her facts were rusty.
She started with treasure ships. A fleet of twelve ships had left Havana, Cuba, in 1715, bound for Spain. A devastating storm had cropped up, and all twelve ships had gone down on July 31, 1715, off the east coast of Florida. Most of their silver and gold coins and other treasures had been discovered. But the Santa Elinora had headed out of port late, accompanied by one gunboat. They’d been behind the fleet by a day or two, so they’d been caught by the storm not long after leaving port. The Santa Elinora had gone down in the Florida Straits, not ten miles from Key West.
She’d been discovered, as well, though not until almost a hundred years later, by one of Commodore David Porter’s ships.