The Last One Left Read Free

and then when they were opposite it, return to course by giving it ten degrees more north for the same elapsed time, then put it back on his plotted compass direction. Or were you supposed to correct just five degrees and then …
    He was reluctant to touch or change anything. He had tried some careful alterations in the rpm’s to see if she would ride easier, but succeeded only in alarming himself. At slower speed she had a tendency to fall off course. Faster, she merely made a more sickening crashing sound when she came off the crest. And he could not guess how she would react to even a minor course alteration. He decided to wait and see how close they might come to the smaller boat.
    Soon he could see it at every crest, an open boat, a power boat twenty feet long, or a little longer, with a sleek hull, windshield, white topsides, and a green-blue hull lighter in shade than the strange blue of the Stream. The high sun made bright gleams on the metal fittings, the controls, the chromed windshield frame. She appeared to be floating light and high, bow to the wind, moving with a carefree grace to the long steep passage of the swells.
    But it was dead in the water. With the glasses he saw it was equipped with two stern-drive units, both uptilted. He could not make out the name on the transom. The boat appeared to be empty. To his immediate relief, he saw that with no course alteration, it would go by on his port at least a hundred feet away. The wind and the Stream combined to drift it northwest.
    “Hadn’t we ought to do something?” Junie asked.
    “Do what? So it’s some drunk. He rigged a sea anchor and he’s sleeping it off. Or young lovers.”
    She reached quickly and pressed the air horn button on the control panel. That sound, so huge when he would make the turn from the yacht club basin into the channel, sounded frail out here. In intense annoyance, he slapped her hand away.
    “It’s a vessel in distress, isn’t it?” she demanded, her face pinched into an expression of indignant anger. “Or a derelict? Aren’t we supposed to do something? What if somebody is sick, like a heart attack?”
    “Honey, you
started
the Power Squadron course. You didn’t
finish
the Power Squadron course. I
finished
the Power Squadron course. I am in
command
of this vessel.”
    “Oh dear Jesus, Captain Bligh. I just mean …”
    “I can see that she’s dragging some kind of bow line. I’d say it was an anchor line that maybe frayed, maybe right down at the anchor ring so she’s dragging enough so the line itself keeps her bow into the wind. So some careless damn fool loses his pretty little boat. So what if we try to come about? Ever think of that? Crossways on these swells, we’ll roll everything loose, and maybe coming about we get one of the breakers just right off the corner of the stern and we broach. Then what, baby? And do you want to be the one to try to get that line with a boat hook? And what if I judge it wrong and she punches a big son of a bitch of a hole in our hull? What I’ll do is report her position, and they’ll send a helicopter out of Lauderdale, or a cutter or something.”
    “That name on it, Howard! Muñequita. Out of Brownsville, Texas?” Money-quit-ah, she pronounced it.
    “What about it?”
    “Howard, I swear I read something about that boat or heard something about that boat. Something in the news. Last week, maybe.”
    “For God’s sake, June, you always want to make some kind of a big thing out of every little thing that happens.”
    “An empty boat out here in the middle of the ocean? That’s such a little thing it’s practically nothing?”
    It was abeam of them and they both stared at it. She took the binoculars from the rack, braced herself with one arm hooked around the back of the pilot seat. “Gee, Howard, it’s a pretty little boat, it really is. Like new.”
    “I’ll go down and report it,” he said. He went down the ladderway carefully, anticipating the now-familiar