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“I needed it,” Letty said. “Thanks.”
Oxnard, the part they saw of it, was a low town of blacktopped streets, small houses with tiny lawns, fences everywhere, strip malls and auto stores, and, unusually for California, it didn’t get much better as they got closer to the Pacific.
The Motel California had vacancy and Letty used the NSA credit card to rent two rooms for the night. The clerk was an unsightly man, wearing a white dress shirt sweat-stained at the collar, and a thin brown nylon necktie. A room at the motel came with the right to walk out the back door and down to the boat slips, he told Letty, when she asked. As the clerk was giving her the keys, and warning her that the two rooms were both nonsmoking, she asked, “Does Craig still keep his boat here?Green Flash?”
“Yup. He’s in A1. You a friend of his?”
“More like an acquaintance,” Letty said. “We thought we’d drop by to see if he’s in.”
“He was here a couple hours ago, barefoot, hitting the candy machine,” the clerk said. “He didn’t look like he was going anywhere.”
Letty thanked him. Outside, they moved the luggage from the truck into one of the rooms and put the five remaining boxes of computer chips in the other. That done, they walked back to the office and the pass-through glass door that took them down a flight of steps to the boat slips. The night was quiet, almost silent, so any noise at all jumped out like a dog’s bark.
A couple were walking up the dock toward the motel, towing an aluminum wagon full of garbage bags. They nodded at Baxter, who was leading, and he asked, “Where’s Craig’s boat?”
The man pointed down the dock and said, “The Pacific Seacraft, the slip on the end, left side. He’s got some shirts hanging from the boom.”
Baxter thanked him and as they continued down the dock, Letty asked, “What’s a boom? I mean, I’ve heard of them...”
“You don’t know what a boom is?”
“I’m from Minnesota,” Letty said.
“It’s the thing the shirts are hanging from,” Cartwright said.
“Ah.” As they got to the end of the dock, they saw a long canoe-shaped sailboat with three shirts hanging from the boom, a surfboard neatly tied along the deck, and lights in the cabin; they could hear Everlast doing “Smokin & Drinkin,” the guitar trickling up from below.
The boat had been backed into the slip, so they could see into the small cockpit and down into the cabin. The extra lengths of the lines from the boat to the cleats on the finger docks were carefully curled in perfect spirals, lying flat on the docks. Up and down the dock, stainless steel hardware was clinking against metal masts, a constant tinkle in the light ocean breeze.
Letty called, “Craig? You in there?”
The music muted, and a moment later a long-haired man, wearing only cargo shorts, came to the cabin hatch and asked, “Who’s there?”
“Some friends of Ben Able. We need to talk to you,” Letty said.
“Let me get my flip-flops. I’ll be right up.”
They heard some shuffling around and then Sovern appeared, climbing out of the cabin and into the cockpit. He was a tall, tanned, broad-shouldered man, with an oval face and shoulder-length, slightly curly blond hair.
Cartwright said, “If you had a puka necklace, you’d be perfect.”
“If I had a puka necklace, I’d have to shoot myself,” Sovern said. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk... privately,” Letty said, looking up and down the dock. “The boat looks like it’d be a little tight for all of us.”
“We could probably walk out, if it’s important...”
“It’s important and we have two motel rooms here,” Baxter said. “We also have, like, a half million dollars’ worth of advanced computer chips we don’t know what to do with.”
“Maybe I can help with that,” Sovern said. “Let’s go... How’s Ben?”
“He’s on the run,” Letty said. “The train thing. We think there are three of you guys dead. Two for sure.”
Sovern stopped. “Three dead? Nobody called me. Or maybe they did, but I didn’t answer.”
“Loren Barron and Brianna Wolfe were both murdered at their house,” Letty said. “Dan Delph is missing and we think he’s probably dead as well. They were killed by Russians.”
“No...”
