Originally known as Fey, having something to do with the ocean not the owner, Butch had decided to call it Beaujolais, partly because of
the color it was painted, burgundy and white, and partly because a bottle of Beaujolais had helped seal the deal with the owner's wife.
The interior of the boat was dry and warm for now and, as Butch had just outfitted it for a party, there was even a fairly good stock of
supplies. While most of the supplies were liquid, he had managed to put aboard some decent solid foods also. With electricity running the
dual power fridge, he had most of the comforts of home.
Butch wasn't sure just yet if he felt safe on Beaujolais. Lying on one of the bunks he tried to collect his thoughts. The pain in his head was
lessening by the minute, thankfully, and some of the cobwebs were clearing out with it. Who knew about the boat? The owner's widow, the
marina fellow, the state's registration department, that was about as far as he got. Sleep overcame him.
When he woke up the first time it was getting dark. He fell back in to a light sleep, dreaming that someone was sitting beside him trying to
tell him something very important. Without the sun, the interior of the boat gradually cooled to the point where Butch became
uncomfortable. He rolled over, expecting to grab the edge of his duvet to slip over himself but, instead found only the hull of the boat. A
loud groan escaped when he remembered where he was and why he was there.
Sitting up, he realized that he was extremely hungry and thirsty. He felt dazed but his head had stopped aching. His body felt stiff from
cramped position on the bunk and the low temperature of the interior of the sailboat. After listening intently for several minutes, he was
confident that the marina was for the most part deserted.
Butch hurried to light the galley stove and its warmth soon spread through the cabin. He found a wool sweater in one of the lockers and
felt a bit more alive than he had previously. The beer in the fridge was cool and he soon had a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him on
the folddown table between the bunks. Coffee followed with a luxurious shot of Cointreau added for medicinal purposes. With an effort,
he put the dishes into the small sink and flicked off the stove. He crawled under a sleeping bag he had unrolled on the bunk and, once
again, dropped off into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Early the next morning he woke suddenly, again feeling he was being watched. A light footstep on the deck and a slight rocking of the boat
told him he wasn't as alone now as he was last night. He slipped out of the bunk and slowly, silently edged towards the steps up to the
hatch. Crouching in the small space between the engine compartment and the steps, he watched the hatch slip slowly open. The feet and
legs that followed seemed to him unlike any cop's he had ever seen. When the figure got to the bottom, it paused which gave Butch time to
reach up and place a strong arm around the torso and a hand over the mouth. The figure, suddenly very active, elbowed Butch in the
stomach and went limp, quickly slipping out of his grasp.
"Goddamn it Butch, cut that out. You scared the living shit out of me!" Maggie wiped her mouth and stomped up and down. "I come here to
try and help you and scare the friggin hell out of me."
Butch by now had come to a full state of awareness. "You are just about the most wonderful sight I have ever seen, Maggie."
"What do you mean, just about?" She quickly surveyed the cabin and then carefully twisted Butch's head around to the light, with a finger on
his cheek. "That is one hell of a mess you have there Mr. McQuire. Let me clean it up a bit."
A few minutes later, with Butch on the bunk with his head on a towel, Maggie slowly cut away some hair and soaked the dried blood off
the side of his scalp. "I expected a soft mushy spot, throbbing like a babys but you must have a hard head. Any idea what type of
sledgehammer hit you?"
"Didn't see a thing, Maggie. My last vision was of a knockout brunette. Her last vision wasn't quite as pleasant as mine, though." He looked
up at her. "Have you heard any news about anything?"
Maggie rinsed out the cloth in the pan of water on the table. "They found a dead prostitute in your condo. About 20, strangled, couldn't tell
if she was sexually assaulted or not for obvious reasons. No real sign of a struggle, except your tie around her neck." She continued to wipe
his head although not as quickly as before. "Oh...and you need a new couch." She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. "You been here
since you left your place?"
"Yeah. Gary, the security guard, gave me a few minutes head start." He took her hand lightly and moved it away from his head and sat up.
"Two things, Maggie. How did you know I was here, first of all. Second, the description you gave of the girl, that didn't sound like a radio
report. How did you get all that detail?"
Maggie smiled sweetly and said, U"sed to date a dick. Big, slow guy, one of the ones who came up to see you the first time. We didn't hit it
off and I set him up with his current wife. Still good friends." She stood up and stretched. "And I followed you here. That's how I knew about
the boat. Not today, but a week or two ago. I thought you were seeing somebody so I wanted to find out who. As far as I know there isn't
anyone like me around so I was curious. You were being pretty secretive lately and I had to find out why. Fairynuff?"
"Fairynuff, Maggie. Thanks for the second aid." She laughed. "Is it just me or do I smell a bit like a dead dog?"
Maggie laughed again. "I have smelled worse, Butch baby. Ever been in a meat processing plant?"
"I get the picture." Butch stood up and opened the door to the head. "Supposed to be a shower in here somewhere. And, I am supposed to
have shore water, hope it's hot." After a few minutes he had figured the shower out. He closed the seat on the toilet and turned on the hot
water. A small spritzer shot out of the showerhead. Alternating between full blast and small trickle, the water soon proved to be warm, at
least. After modestly instructing Maggie to turn her back, which she didn't, Butch stripped off his clothes and stepped into the water. There
wasn't a whole lot of room. He ended up sitting on the toilet lid while he soaped himself and rinsed.
"Ah, I feel a bit more human now my dear", he said as he stepped out. Maggie was nowhere to be seen. There was a flash of movement in the
forward berth, the only room with any privacy on the boat. Butch headed forward. Maggie had spread one sleeping bag on the top of the
extra sails that had been stored in the compartment and put another on top of it. She was now lying between them, fairly obviously naked.
"I thought you might need a bit of one on one with someone warm, Butch. Besides, she moved one leg against the other, squeaky clean men
turn me on."
"Any man or just some?" Butch asked as he crawled under the covers with her.
"Just you but I couldn't say that unless you were right here beside me
Later, although how much later Butch wasn't exactly sure, they both woke up, hungry and cool. A heavy rain had woken them. Butch at
first felt that he was back on the farm for a visit. Other memories had come a short time later but he had chased them away by pressing
himself tightly against Maggie's back.
Maggie heard the rain and felt Butch against her. She was back with her husband long before the Gulf War, in a tent in Algonquin Park,
then on a cruise in the Caribbean. She had memories too, of a long wait for someone who never showed up. Butch might never take his
place but so far she felt he was as close as she would ever get. But she never would chase him, only let him know bit by bit how she felt. By
now he had her trust although this had been somewhat shaken by the dead girl in his room. After the initial anger and hurt, however, she
put the doubt from her mind and realized that Butch, no matter how he seemed on the surface, couldn't have had anything to do with it.
More than that she realized he might need help.
"I think this is where we are supposed to have a plan." Butch's voice, flat and quiet made Maggie jump. "At least it seems that we should at
least know where we head next. We can't stay here. Cops will find out about the boat somehow, we might have a day or two."
"We might have a bit longer but I know what you're getting at."Maggie rolled out of Butch's arms and braced herself on her elbow to look at
him. "The cop I used to date said there was another case they were working on, one that seemed more important. Some big spender's wife
turned up floating in the waterway off Port Royal. Somehow a dead prostitute doesn't warrant the attention of a millionaire's wife."
"Depends on where the husband is, I guess." There was silence for at time. "The only thing that could connect me to something like this
would be baseball. It's not the only thing I have done in my life but it's the only thing important that I've done. I bet when you first met me
you would have thought it was a lover scorned situation or something, right?"
"You could say that." Maggie smiled lightly. "Maybe the remains of some hot nights in Boston?"
"Nothing that would piss someone off like this except.." He stopped but Maggie finished for him.
"The catch", she said, "or lack thereof?"
"Even now, I still dream about it, you know that. I still think about it every morning before I get up. If it still bugs me like that, it could very
easily tick someone else off enough to set me up." Butch stood up, stepped into the shower stall and turned on the water. "Ever been to
Boston?" he called to Maggie as he closed the door.
Butch seemed to have thought things out a bit when he came back. He settled down in the settee by the galley and cracked open a beer. "I like this boat a lot. But you know I haven't even sailed it yet. Don't know if I ever would get around to it, being a land-based kind of guy."
Maggie looked up from the paper but didn't say anything. She figured he would continue on his own without her input. She was right.
"Let's say that the cops are looking for me." He smiled slightly. "As is they were doing anything else. Do you think they would let up a bit if they thought I was dead?"
"Well," Maggie worked her finger around in the puddle of water left by Butch's beer can on the table top. "I guess you have some sort of plan but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is."
"Sooner or later the cops are going to find out about Beaujolais. Whether it is here or on the open ocean. If I set out for somewhere else besides Florida, the Coast Guard will almost certainly make some note about us and track us down later on. Drugs being drugs and cops being cops, they will make us stop sooner or later." He took a long sip on the beer.
"I thought the water was the right way to get out of here but now I think maybe the highway is a better course. If I could sacrifice Beaujolais and make them think I went down with her, we might free up some time to make a run for it. Head north, back to my old stomping grounds. Do some scouting around and maybe track something down on my own."
"I don't really want to ask this but how would you make them think that you went down with the boat?"
"I don't really want to tell you, either. When you are a lush like me, you run into all kinds of people. With booze being what it is, people talk. I met a guy once, worked in the disposal department at the hospital..."
Maggie flung her head back and produced an incredibly loud and long "Ugggghhhh." She put her hand up in the air and waved at Butch. "Stop, stop, stop." Butch paused.
"How do you know he can be trusted?"
"Lets's see. The night I met him, he was with this leggy brunette. The next time I saw him he was with his wife." Maggie smiled. "His wife's father owns a couple of dozen orange groves on the other side of the state. The guy would lose everything, wife and home and future retirement fund. He has no way of knowing I wouldn't ever rat on him and I would never tell him I wouldn't."
The next day Butch woke early. Maggie heard him rummaging around in one of the lockers. "Can you make any more noise than that?" she yelled before pulling the duvet over her head and slipping back to sleep.
When she awoke, she could feel she was alone. She felt scared at first, then remembered the conversation from the day before. "Maybe he went to the butcher shop," she said to no one. "Time to check out this shower." She discovered that the best part of the shower was the custom pulsating power head that Butch had installed.
Just as she was stepping out of the head, totally squeaky clean and totally naked, she realized that someone was standing at the foot of the steps, someone dressed in a green camo poncho and a Tilley hat. The hat was tied hard down on either side as if the nor'wester of all nor'westers was about to attack. Maggie's scream of "Get the @#$% out of here you creep!" was accompanied by a saucepan that made a soft, mushy sound when it hit.
"No fair, Maggs" said a voice, "I can't throw anything at you." Butch flipped off the hat and poncho. " Some couples play these games all the time, you know." He walked towards her with his arms open. "Wanna play Peeping Tom today, honnee ?"
With an amused "hmmmph", Maggie flounced back into the head, slamming the door behind her. "Just got my period, bucko!" she lied. "Maybe you can use the shower head to entertain yourself."
"Ah, a secret discovered." Butch flicked on the galley stove for some coffee. "Can I make you breakfast, Maggie. Sorry for the scare. I did knock a couple of times." He picked up the saucepan she had tossed and filled it with water. "Quietly...but I did knock" he said under his breath.
"Alright." Maggie headed towards their berth. "Lots of bacon and some eggs and toast and..."
"And?" Butch asked.
"And I don't have my period". She waited, face down on the duvet, legs slightly apart. She didn't have long to wait. Breakfast slowly became brunch. It was late afternoon before Butch rose and headed out to stick his head out of the hatch.
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