Free Circle of Bones by Christine Kling

after I’d exhausted a couple of tanks just chasing fish around, I took the dinghy into this little cove where there’s a spring.” He finished the story, telling Theo about the men who arrived, his escape up and off the cliff, and how he’d been picked up by the Bonefish .
    “So what did she look like?”
    “What?”
    “Don’t bloody try to act like you didn’t notice. It’s not like we’ve had women crawling all over this vessel the last few months. Christ, man, you were butt-naked and all alone on a little sailboat with a woman. Did you do her?”
    “Shut up.”
    “Aw, come on, Cap’n.” Theo stood up, put his hands under his shirt and poked his fingers out to make imaginary breasts. He waggled his eyebrows up and down. “Was she hot?”
    “I don’t know.” Cole rubbed his hands across the chart, smoothing out non-existent wrinkles in the paper. “I was more worried about the guys who’d been trying to kill me an hour earlier.”
    “Yeah, right,” Theo said, sitting back down looking dejected. He took a long drink of his coffee. “So somebody’s after you. Again .”
    Cole held up an index finger and pointed at Theo. “One of these days, my friend, you are going to have to eat those doubting words.” 
    Theo leaned forward, his close-cropped head hovering over the chart. “So, who do you think they were this time?”
    “The Brewster brothers.”
    “No, mon.” Theo leaned back, screwed his eyes closed for a second and made a face like a man who had just sucked on a lemon. “Not again. Not those two trogs?”  
    Cole wasn’t thrilled about it either. The Brewsters were half brothers, a couple of Outer Banks lowlifes who had once told Cole they were “from the same crackhead mama, different white daddies.” 
    “How’d they find us?” Theo asked. “I thought we left them back in the Carolinas.”
    Cole shrugged. “Word gets around. Especially that word — gold. And Shadow Chaser ’s not exactly inconspicuous. Even a moron could track down a boat that looks like her in the Caribbean.”
    “I wouldn’t give Spyder that much credit.” Theo sipped from his coffee mug. 
    “Spyder, no. His brother, yes. Besides, I’m pretty sure I spotted them as the woman was bringing us into Pointe-à-Pitre.”
    “What? Tell me they didn’t see you.”
    “No, I went below to use the head.  They’ve got a Bertram sportfish now, named Fish n’ Chicks .”
    Theo chuckled. “Probably stole it and renamed it. That sounds like Spyder.”
    Cole nodded. “I’m almost certain they were the ones after me this morning. With those wet suit hoods, I didn’t really see their faces, but later I was looking out the port when this boat passed us. It sure looked like Pinky out on deck.”
    “Him, I’d recognize anywhere.”
    “You’ve got that right,” Cole said. There was a time he’d felt sorry for Pinky who suffered from a condition called vitiligo. Most of his skin was the light brown color of walnut shells, but vitiligo had caused odd patches to lose all pigmentation. The result was he sported a white Afro and his skin looked like somebody had splashed him with a bucket of bleach.
    Theo walked to the galley sink and rinsed out his mug. “So, what about the Whaler?”
    “Let’s head down there and look for it tonight. I can’t afford a new one. And there was all my dive gear in it, too. If we’re lucky, they left it there. Decided they’d rather leave it for us so we can find the wreck – which they intend to steal from us, later.”
    “What I don’t get is, if they followed us here, why show themselves now? Why chase you? What were they after?”
    “They must know, somehow, that we’re getting close.”
    “But how? Do you think they know about the journals?”
    “God, I hope not.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    Pointe-à-Pitre
    March 25, 2008
    5:25 p.m.
     
    Diggory Priest leaned back in his café chair, took a sip of the decent Bordeaux they’d served him, and surveyed the large concrete