The Narrows

charters were by no means regular. A good week for the business was three or four half-day charters. There was one week in which there were no charters at all and another in which there was only one. I was beginning to see Buddy's point about the need to move the business to the mainland in order to increase the frequency and length of charter bookings. McCaleb was running the charter business as a hobby and that wasn't the way to make it thrive.
    Of course, I knew why he was running it that way. He had another hobby-if you want to call it that-and he needed time to devote to that as well. I was putting the records back into the chart station drawer, with the intention of heading down to the bow to explore Terry's other hobby, when I heard the salon door roll open behind me.
    It was Buddy Lockridge. He had come up on the boat without my hearing the Zodiac's little engine or feeling its nudge against the fantail. I also hadn't felt Buddy's considerable weight as he climbed onto the boat.
    "Morning," he said. "Sorry I'm late."
    "That's okay. I've got a lot to look through here."
    "Find anything interesting yet?"
    "Not really. I'm about to go below, check out his files."
    "Cool. I'll help."
    "Actually, Buddy, where you can help is if maybe you called the man who was the last charter."
    I looked at the last name written on the page in my notebook.
    "Otto Woodall. Could you call him and vouch for me and see if I could come by this afternoon to see him?" "That's it? You wanted me to come all the way over to make a phone call?"
    "No, I have questions for you. I need you here. I just don't think you should be going through the files down there. Not yet, at least."
    I had a feeling that Buddy Lockridge had probably already perused every file in the bow. But I was playing him this way on purpose. I had to keep him close but distant at the same time. Until I had cleared him to my satisfaction. Yes, he was McCaleb's partner and had received credit for his efforts to save his fallen friend, but I had seen stranger things in my time. At the moment I had no suspects and that meant I had to suspect everybody.
    "Make the call and then come downstairs to see me."
    I left him there and headed down the short set of steps to the lower part of the boat. I had been here before and knew the layout. The two doors on the left side of the hallway led to the head and a storage closet Straight ahead was a door to the small stateroom in the bow. The door on the right led to the master stateroom, the place where I would have been killed four years before if Terry McCaleb had not leveled a gun and fired on a man about to ambush me. This had occurred moments after I had saved McCaleb from a similar end.
    I checked the paneling in the hallway where I remembered two of McCaleb's shots had splintered the wood. The surface was heavily varnished but I could tell it was newer wood.
    The shelves in the storage closet were empty and the bathroom was clean, the overhead vent popped open on the forward deck above. I opened the master stateroom door and looked in but decided to leave it for later. I went to the forward room and had to use a key from the ring Graciela had given me to open the door.
    The room was as I had remembered it. Two sets of V-bunks on each side, following the line of the bow. The bunks on the left still functioned as sleeping compartments, their thin mattresses rolled up and held by bungee cords. But on the right the lower bunk had no mattress and had been converted into a desk. The bunk above was where four long cardboard file boxes sat side by side.
    McCaleb's cases. I looked at them for a long and solemn moment. If someone had murdered him, I believed I would find the suspect in there.
    "Anytime today."
    I almost jumped. It was Lockridge standing behind me. Once again I had not heard or felt his approach. He was smiling because he liked sneaking up on me.
    "Good," I said. "Maybe after lunch we can head over there. I'll need a break from this by then anyway."
    I looked down at the desk and saw the white laptop with the recognizable symbol of an apple with a bite out of it in silhouette. I reached down and opened it, unsure of how to proceed.
    "Last time I was here, he had a different one."
    "Yeah," Lockridge said. "He got that one on account of the graphics. He was getting into digital photography and stuff."
    Without my bidding or approval Lockridge reached over and depressed a white button on the computer. It started to hum and then