Free Violet Lagoon by John Everson Page B

finest beneath the false floor right about there?”
    “I said reformed, not no fun,” Billy said. “And how do you know so much about drug smuggling, hmmm?”
    “Well for starters, I’ve been your friend since Freshman year.”
    Casey laughed and ran her hand up Mark’s shoulder. “Hey that’s right…You know, I bet you could give me a lot of good dirt on our friend here. For instance, that girl he was seeing last semester, Beth? Did he ever…”
    Just then, the slim blur of a brunette came running down the dock yelling, “OK, OK, I’m late! You can make me walk the plank later. But look what I got!”
    From a bulging canvass bag, Jess pulled out a few scraps of tan fabric, cut with irregular triangles. One piece was clearly meant as a loincloth, the other could have been a bikini top. Both looked like stage costumes meant for extremely scantily clad prehistoric island dwellers.  
    “I am not wearing that ,” Billy proclaimed, as Mark reached out an arm and helped her climb into the boat.
    “Of course not, silly! That’s for Casey.” She reached into her sack and pulled an almost equally small loincloth and tossed it in his lap. “This one’s for you.”
    Mark cocked an eyebrow and looked skeptically at her. “I know we said ‘Blue Lagoon’ and all, but do you really think we’re all going to parade around in these?”
    “Well not here ,” she grinned, waving at the dock, crowded with sailboats and speedboats and people milling about. It was a gorgeous summer Friday morning, and plenty of people were playing hooky and heading out to sea. On many of the decks, small groups of people were kicked back in easy chairs, taking in the sun, drinking beer for brunch and talking with friends. “But Billy promised that nobody goes to this island, it’s off the map. Totally empty. So if we’re going to ‘get away from it all’ and play Blue Lagoon for the weekend, let’s do  it. We can change once we’re out near the island.”
    “I don’t think you girls will stay in those outfits for long, anyway,” Billy said with an evil grin. Then he turned the key in the ignition and the motor sputtered to life. “All hands on deck,” he called, and after releasing the dock ties, they slowly began to move out into the crystal blue ocean.
     

II. The Island
     
     illy McAllister drove the boat borrowed from one of his former “customers” due south, navigating between various small keys, some of which were barely larger than a dune of sand with a frosting of scrub grass. 
    He was really looking forward to this weekend, and not just for the obvious, expected benefits. After being busted for drug peddling and spending a couple years out of circulation, he’d decided to clean up his act and go back to the U of Miami to earn his botany degree. He wanted to erase all of the black marks of his last couple years of high school, and aborted first couple years of college from his mind. This Blue Lagoon trip celebrated the end of his first term back, and things were really starting to look up. He still had some connections with the people of his past, hence the boat, but he didn’t deal. And people had finally stopped asking him to. 
    Now he had Casey, who he liked to say, put the "blo" in blonde (though he never said it to her face). And more importantly, semester finals had ended for all of them yesterday afternoon, and Billy felt good about his scores. This weekend, he really had a good reason to party. While it had played him poorly in the end, his checkered past had given him the ability to play tour guide for his friends. If he got nothing else out of three years of serving as the pickup man for shipments of pot, he now had a cartographer’s knowledge of all the lesser known keys south of Florida. And the one they were heading to had once been a favorite spot, since it was large enough to boast trees and an expansive beach, but remote enough to be unfrequented. In all the times he’d stopped there, he’d