Water from My Heart Read Online Free Page B

tenderize and fillet me so they could take my last penny. I knew they were working me into a lather, waiting for their moment to pounce, but I never gave them the satisfaction. To their abject surprise, on a high-stakes Thursday night, I ran the table, cleaned up, and made enough to live on for a year. Collecting my chips, I kept my mouth shut but when I glanced at their eyes, I knew two things: that I’d stung them and that it would never happen again. Babysitting hour was over. Next week would start the reckoning. Having read the writing on the wall, I did what they never suspected. To everyone’s disbelief, just when it was starting to get good and I was beginning to make a name for myself, I cashed in and walked away.
    This did not make them happy, and as they had some pull in the city, they blackballed me in every game in and around not only Boston, but the Northeast. It didn’t matter. I’d tired of poker and I’d tired of Boston. My eyes had hit the horizon, and I was looking for a new game. And I found one.
    In London.

Chapter Three
    T he water was waist-deep, gin-clear, and given no breeze, a sheet of glass. Deeper out, it faded from turquoise to midnight blue. Off to my right, the sun was falling en route to a beautiful setting. Twenty feet away, a lobster scurried to an underwater hide. A ray hovered just inches off the ocean floor. Two hundred meters out, a couple of boats were anchored. Kids in the water. Snorkels. Masks. Lobster bags. Laughter. Floating in circles around them, oil-soaked adults lay baking on rafts. The smell of salt, coconut oil, rum, and spent fuel suggested they’d been there the better part of the day.
    Most every weekend, folks out of Miami motored out of Biscayne Bay, through Stiltsville, and across the forty-four miles between us, appearing early and packing this place with dozens of boats. At just over three miles long and a quarter mile wide—​l ittle more than a white speck in the Atlantic—the Bahamian island of Bimini is a blue marlin and bonefish hot spot, an offshore oasis for the Miami jet set, a famed Hemingway hangout, and one of the last vestiges of Her Majesty’s empire. It’s also a convenient escape for the disillusioned and a pretty good place for a rather successful drug runner to live uninhibited. The beach behind me sat bleach white and relatively untouched. The sand lay dotted with hundreds of conch shells. The northern tip of the island, including this beach, had been privately owned for a couple generations, but it sold last year to a casino, which was rapidly carving the landscape. In its wake, quaint fishing village had given way to the worst a casino has to offer. Local legend held that the lost city of Atlantis sat out in front of me just beyond the anchored boats. The legend held merit given the inexplicable geometric rock formations just below the water’s surface. I guess you don’t need me to tell you the name of the casino. The entrepreneurial owners had already cashed in on the legend and were ferrying visitors out to the rocks in glass-bottom boats. Not surprisingly, the legend had grown considerably. Mermaids had been sighted.
    I landed on this island much like Columbus. By mistake. Been here a decade. Jimmy Buffett said it best: “Summers and winters scattered like splinters…”
    Still no sight of her on the beach. My left foot was tapping on its own. She’d be here any minute. Right? Right. The magistrate had first balked when I asked him to marry us on the beach at 7:00 p.m., but then I laid a wad of cash on the table and his entire countenance changed. Started talking about how he loved marrying folks on the beach at sunset. Still no sign of him, either, but he had a few moments to go yet.
    In the moments following my not-so-romantic proposal, I’d asked Shelly where she’d like to get married. She pointed at her feet. “Right here.” Which explained my present location. She wanted the setting sun on her face. Breeze in her hair.