I chained my bike to a sign and went into the dockmaster’s shack. Art kept it about forty degrees colder than the outside temperature and stepping inside was like dropping into suspended animation. You could almost hear the bones in your forehead grating as they contracted, and your chest hurt if you breathed too deeply.
“Billy!” came the phlegmy roar as Art saw me. “The hell, brother.”
“Hey, Art.”
He sat behind an incredible clutter of merchandise. There was so much stuff hanging and stacked that it was almost possible to miss seeing Art. That was quite a trick, since he weighed over 300 pounds and looked like a cross between a pink Dalmatian and Jabba the Hutt.
Art had ridden his Harley into town one day maybe thirty years back and never left, but there was still a little bit of the biker to him. He was still big, but most of it had gone soft and hung off him in gently wobbling waves. His skin was mottled from a life in the outdoors, with dozens of bright pink patches marking the skin cancers he’d already had burned off.
He looked up at my face like he was looking for pimples. After a minute he nodded and grunted.
“Am I okay?”
He grunted again. “Heard about your dust-up at the Moonlight. Wanted to see if that shitweasel Tiny got a mark on you.”
“You’re kidding.”
He gave me a sour look and shook his head. His three extra chins swirled like a tide pool. “You’re losing it, brother. Been losing it for a couple months now. Maybe you pull out, maybe you crash and burn.”
He leaned a huge, soft knuckle on the counter and shoved his face at me, suddenly roaring. “But if you let a butt-sucker like Tiny put a fist on you, you’ve gone way too fucking far and I’m coming outta here and kicking your little pink ass!” He glared at me and slapped his arm on the counter for emphasis. It sounded like water balloons hitting the kitchen floor.
“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Any calls?”
Art glared at me for a minute, making sure his warning sank in. Then he leaned back and shook his head, sending three or four chins crashing into each other. “Nothin’. Not even the fuckbags who say they’re gonna call back. It’s D-E-D-D dead, brother.”
“All right,” I turned to go.
“Oh,” Art grunted. “That old dyke was in here. Wants to see you.”
‘That old dyke’ was Art’s name for Betty Fleming. She was only forty-five, and she wasn’t a dyke, but Art didn’t like women messing around with boats. And Betty was single, strong, self-reliant, and smart, making her life and her living with sailboats. I think Art secretly realized Betty was a lot tougher than he was, and it made him nervous.
“She say what she wanted?”
Art waved an arm. A wall of blubber the size of the Sunday Times swung back and forth from his triceps. “Aw, shit, Billy, you know what she’s like. Mean, cranky, stubborn old bitch. Like she got a permanent period.”
“I’ll go see her,” I said, and hit the door.
“Who the fuck cares. Butthead old dyke,” Art muttered behind me as I left.
I paused for a second on the dock outside, trying desperately to adjust from the Arctic air inside the shack to the steam bath outside. Spring-loaded sweat shot out of my pores. A drop splattered onto the dock and I thought I heard it hiss.
Betty’s sailboat was in a slip opposite mine, on the far side of the marina. I walked around, wondering what she wanted from me. She wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, and her disastrous marriage had turned her into someone who hated like hell to ask anybody for help, for anything. We had a comfortable, half-distant friendship; I’d given her some fish once or twice, she’d repaid on the spot with a few cold beers.
When I got to her boat, a 40-foot sloop-rigged sailboat, Betty was below in the engine compartment. A stream of profanity came up through the hatch. I wished Art had been there to hear it; he would have liked her a little better.
“Hey, Betty,” I called down the hatch. A moment later she stuck her head up.
She had that permanent leathery tan the live-aboards have. Her hair, an almost colorless blonde, was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She wore a dark blue bikini top, a pair of loose cotton shorts, a wide smear of grease, and enough sweat to float a small dinghy.
“God damn all diesels anyway,” she greeted me.
“Stick with outboards,” I said. “When they break down they’re easier to throw overboard.”
She pulled herself out of the hatch and onto the deck. “Come on aboard,” she said.
I stepped across onto the deck. It was scrubbed clean, as it always was. A red metal toolbox stood beside the engine hatch and a small circle of engine parts was spread around it.
I nodded towards the engine. “What’s the trouble?”