Free Red Tide (Siren Publishing Classic) by Tymber Dalton Page B

nodded, his mind racing. He felt radical changes approaching. Problem was, they weren’t close enough for him to tell if they were good or bad. With her divorced, his last, logical argument as to why he couldn’t approach her vaporized.
    Oh, quit thinking like that. You’re nineteen years older than her. What would she want with you?
    The summer heat felt hypnotic, and they had to force themselves back to work. Even the shade of the boat slip’s roof proved no help. Mitch eventually went home to get an electric fan for some relief. It was late afternoon before they finally finished everything they had to do, and they wearily closed the engine hatch and put the tools away. They were just cleaning up when Rick’s grey-and-black FMP Bronco pulled into the parking lot and stopped next to Ed’s truck. He ambled up to the slip.
    He laughed. “Boy, looks like the two of you’ve been having fun today.”
    Ed swabbed at a smudge of diesel oil on Mitch’s cheek. “Fuck you, Rick. Some of us have to do our own maintenance, you know.” Ed and Rick exchanged snide remarks ever since the FMP officer sheared a lower unit off one of the Johnsons on the back of his Boston Whaler a couple of years earlier while chasing a suspect. Ed and Mitch towed him back in, and Ed didn’t let him forget it.
    Rick sat on the dock box. “My, my, touchy today, are we?” He smiled. “Just thought I’d let you know, they found out that guy’s real name. Julio Barres, from Miami. Had rap sheets long as your arm in all the aliases, but never anything as big-time as this. They’re still not sure that maybe someone else was on the boat with him before it sank, but they don’t know and aren’t going to worry about it unless a body turns up. They haven’t tracked down the owner yet.” Rick had spent a few years in the DEA before changing tracks, but he still had a few friends in low places, so to speak.
    “Did the Coast Guard figure out why the Emmerand sank?” Mitch asked as she scrubbed the grime off her hands in the wash sink.
    “It looks like somewhere along the line she hit something pretty hard and bashed the props which bent the shafts—”
    “Which made the packing come loose,” Mitch finished. “That’s what I figured.”
    “Bingo. That’s the only explanation they can come up with, so they’re going with it.”
    Ed perched on the gunwale. “He wasn’t the owner?”
    Rick shook his head. “No, the real owner is a Caymanian trust called Tropical Holdings. Being in the Caymans, it’s most likely a front to launder money. Problem is, it’s damn near impossible to get through the legal red tape to find out if there are any flesh-and-blood people actually traceable to the boat. Many times, it’s a web of trust after trust after offshore corporation, that’s owned by another trust. When you finally figure out where the chain begins, the people are usually fictitious or dead.”
    “Let me guess,” Ed interrupted, “with a trust handling the affairs of the estate.”
    “Exactly.”
    Mitch piped up. “So with the Caymanian driver’s license, it’s logical to assume that if he wasn’t a trustee, he at least had access to its different holdings.”
    He nodded. “That might be true. And for all we know, that could include condos, more boats, companies here and abroad, etc., etc.”
    Ed laughed. “Do you think this guy was really smart enough to pull all of that off?”
    “The official story is yes. Realistically, they don’t want to touch this. It’s not like there’s a clear-cut South American connection they can go after. There’s nothing to follow up on this guy. When DEA went to his apartment in Miami, it was cleaned out. Nothing left but the furniture. Someone doesn’t want this guy traced back to them in a big way, but there’s nothing to go on right now.” He chuckled. “Are the press still hounding you?”
    Mitch shrugged. “I don’t know. They haven’t come out here today, and I haven’t checked the