Perfect Bait. Michael Douglas Fowlkes

going to have to get all this old paint off, but that’s no big deal. Just a lot of hard work. Strip the varnish and polish out the stainless. These decks, here,” he said, kicking at the blackened teak under his work boots, “they’re two inches thick and will sand out and come right back to life, good as new. There’s no wood in the world like teak. All in all, she’s going to be just fine.” He paused again and looked into the salon. “Some new carpet inside, fresh wallpaper, linens and things, and you guys will be ready to roll. Besides, how else you plan on making her pay? A boat’s got to earn her keep, you know. Otherwise, she feels neglected.”

      “We haven’t thought about any of that stuff,” I said. “By the time we wrap it up every night, I’m so beat I can hardly eat, never mind think about the future.”

      “Pussy.” He turned to Jennifer. “No offense.”

      “You were right,” Jennifer said, finishing another bite in a little restaurant tucked away on a side street between Scott and Rosecrans. “This is the best calamari I’ve ever had.”

      Lloyd reached over to give her a loving pat on the arm. “Glad you like it.”

      We’d all worked our tails off the last couple of months. Other than the nights in the salon, when we were almost too tired to talk, this was the first time we’d all been together away from the boat.

      I could tell Jennifer was up to something. She finished off her plate and caught Lloyd’s attention with a look. “So Lloyd, what gives? You show up out of nowhere, spend every waking minute working with us, won’t take a dime, and we don’t have a clue why.”

      “I love boats,” he said, pausing to let that simple statement sink in. “Loved them all my life. I knew your Vintage here when she was first launched. One of the prettiest boats I’d ever laid eyes on. Beautiful lines. She was a proud lady and served her original owners well. I knew them both. Elderly couple from up north someplace. Hollywood or Pasadena, I think. Anyway, when I ran the fuel dock, they’d come in, and we got to be friends. They ran that darn thing alone. Just the two of them. Damnedest thing I ever saw. For years, they’d take her down to the Cape for the season. Then out to the islands. Took good care of her, too. Oil changes like clockwork. He was ex-Navy and did it by the book.”

      A look of sadness came over his face. “Don’t know what happened to them, though. One day the boat was here; next thing I know, she’s gone. Someone told me they’d sold it to a family from Florida, and they’d run her through the Canal and left her in Fort Lauderdale. But that’s all I knew until one day I saw her being towed by the Harbor Patrol. Wouldn’t have recognized her if I hadn’t known the boat before. She was a disaster, a total mess. Rust running down her hull, busted out windows, bird shit all over her—pretty much the way you found her. I asked around and found out she’d been impounded, but you know the damn cops—they wouldn’t tell me a thing. Said she was in the middle of some legal mess. No one was making the mortgage payments, slip fees, nothing, so they came and got her.”

      He took another sip of wine. I was astounded. He’d known the history of the Vintage all along. He continued. “I’d been keeping my eye on her, wondering what was going to happen. About that time, I decided running the fuel dock was getting to be too much. Especially during the season when we were pumping twenty thousand gallons a day for the sport boats. I had a couple of real good guys working for me, so I just turned the business over to them. But I’d been keeping my eye on her, wondering what was going to happen to her.”

      “You owned the fuel dock?” I asked, more astonished.