Page 2 of The Honeymoon Heist

If something went wrong, he was a dead man walking.

Chapter 2

I tried to wrestle the wheel away from Knuckles, saying, “I’m the one who needs the practice here! Let me do it.”

He shoved me aside. “This requires touch. You’ll wreck the boat, and it’s my ass on the line here. My name is on the rental.”

I said, “That was because I thought being in the Navy actually mattered. You don’t know anything more than I do about driving a boat. And you won’t be there in Positano. Get out of the way.”

Knuckles was a Navy SEAL, which meant I’d thought he knew something about boats simply because he was in the Navy, so I’d had him put his name on the rental, but it turned out, he was as bad as I was when it came to watercraft. He didn’t know a damn thing about boats, other than how to dive off one into the water. I’d flown him down to show me the ins and outs of boating before our trip, only to have him look at the widget in question, figure out how it worked, then lecture me onhow it worked.

In Charleston, South Carolina, one didn’t need a boat license to rent a watercraft, but I did for Italy—well, I did if I wanted to rent anything larger than a johnboat—so I was supposedly getting some instruction from Knuckles before I took the test, which had so far proven futile.

I’m not sure why I thought he’d be a help, because his Navy time certainly did him no good. Hell, at one point, I’d even owned a sailboat here in Charleston. An extreme fixer-upper that I’d lived on for a time. I’d never taken it out on the water because it wasn’t seaworthy—but apparently I knew more about boats than Knuckles did, and I was from the Army.

We’d spun around Charleston’s harbor, each taking turns going up and down the Wando River, gradually getting faster and faster as we tried to one-up each other, until we’d eventually tired of the back-and-forth. We’d driven to the mouth of Shem Creek for a little bit of an afternoon siesta, and Knuckles was refusing to leave the cockpit.

Jennifer had had enough.

Behind me, she said, “You guys are absolutely pathetic. Pike, I’m getting the boat with the skipper.”

We both quit fighting, me turning around and saying, “You can’t do that. I can drive the boat.”

“No, you can’t. Amena has more maturity than you two. There is no way I’m getting on a boat alone with you in Italy.”

“You won’t be alone. Amena will be with us.”

Amena was my adopted daughter, currently sitting on a bench at the back of the boat and looking at me disapprovingly. I could tell she was thinking about siding with Jennifer, which I needed to short-circuit.

I said, “Right, Amena? All for one and one for all?”

She slid her eyes to the right, glancing at Jennifer, and I knew she was about to agree with Jennifer not because of my boating skills, but because of what had happened earlier.

Before we’d left for the harbor, Amena had come out of her bedroom in a bikini, with a bottom half that looked like it had less fabric than a dishcloth and the top trying mightily to accent her assets that weren’t there yet. It was a nonstarter for me. She was only fourteen, but she was exotic, like something only seen in magazines. It was hard to tell where she came from, with hazel eyes, dark skin and a lithe body, and I didn’t think the bikini was appropriate.

In my eyes, bikinis had a gap. If you were five or six, wear them all day long, but after that, until you were sixteen or so, you wore a one-piece. I just didn’t think it was right for a fourteen-year-old to wear a bikini—especially her, because of how attractive she was. She didn’t get it, but I did. When she looked in a mirror, like every other teenager, she saw nothing but flaws, but I saw what others would, and a bikini at that age was unseemly. Younger girls, fine. Older women, fine. In between, where predators lived, give it a rest.

She’d become incensed, because she was all about becoming an “American” and believed I was being a prude. Which, of course, I was. She’d seen the Kardashians on YouTube and television and thought that was something to emulate. I thought it was something to burn. ThenIhad become incensed when I learned Jennifer had bought it for her.

We’d had a little bit of a standoff when I’d found out that they’d gone shopping precisely to get the swimsuit. Jennifer had ripped me up and down about my views, which honestly surprised me. Amena was, after all, our daughter now. Jennifer said she wouldn’t wear a bikini either, asking me if we had any potato sacks for the boat, and that was the end, because Jennifer not wearing a bikini on a boat would have been a travesty.

Which is to say, I lost. The final nail in the coffin was Amena telling me I’d only be happy if she wore a burka. That was a deep cut, because she’d fled Syria from the Islamic State, who wantedeveryfemale to wear a burka.

Knuckles kept the boat at idle, heading into Shem Creek, and Amena looked at me with hooded eyes. I waited, but knew she was going to support my side, no matter what I’d said earlier. Because at the end of the day, she was a pirate just like I was, and she had a connection to me that no stupid argument could break. She was wearing the damn bikini, after all.

She said, “Let’s see him park it and then make a decision.”

Knuckles grinned, stepped back and said, “All yours. Don’t wreck the boat.”

I said, “Okay then, all hands on deck. Amena, get the bumpers ready. Jennifer, get the throw line.”

We puttered into the mouth of Shem Creek, passing the shrimp boats tied to the docks, and headed to Red’s Icehouse, a low-country staple of boats and boozing. I passed a bunch of idiots on paddle boards lazily heading out to the mouth of the creek, not realizing that when the tide reversed, they’d be paddling their asses off just to maintain their position, ending the day with a sunburn and sore muscles.

Yeah, that’s from experience.

We pulled up to the dock of Red’s, with Amena looking at me intently and Knuckles shouting all sorts of crap like he knew what he was talking about. But he didn’t.

I slid the boat in next to another one, which is how Red’s did its docking—with each boat tied to the one next to it—and Amena’s gaze never left my eyes. She really didn’t want to screw up, which is something I loved about her. If we’d have been hit with an iceberg and the boat was about to sink, she’d still have held those bumpers waiting on me to give her the word.

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