D J was right about one thing; getting to work on Luc Baptiste’s murder did have me feeling better. Living on St. Thomas, the sunshine and the briny air were nice perks, but nothing cleared my head like work.

The VA office on St. Thomas sat about a quarter mile inland from Crown Bay, in West Charlotte Amalie, not far from the Yacht Haven Grande Marina in Long Bay.

Reel Fun cruised westward through Long Bay, keeping close to the shoreline, steadily dodging the other craft that seemed to cut every which way around us. DJ guided her through Haulover Cut—a narrow, man-made channel between St. Thomas’s southern shore and the north coast of Hassel Island. I held my breath while reefs closed to within ten yards of us on either side. Hassel was a pretty place—a roughly 140-acre island mostly owned by the Virgin Islands National Park and a handful of private estates, with a rocky shoreline and small stretches of sand beach.

To the west of Hassel, nearer the mouth of Crown Bay, lay Water Island—another high-dollar piece of real estate shared by a hundred or so people. The island’s name told you all you needed to know about its importance in the early days of exploration. Ships from all countries, tradesmen, pirates, privateers, and warships all stopped on Water Island to replenish their stores from the many freshwater ponds located there.

After navigating through Haulover Cut, we continued our westward course, following the contours of the beachhead, the sticky air hissing past our ears and the Bimini hardtop holding off sunlight so bright that looking at Reel Fun’s bow without my sunglasses felt as if I had almost seared my eyes.

Within a few minutes, we were close enough to Crown Bay Marina to see they had a few open spots for day docking. DJ pulled the throttle back to idle, then pushed his hand flat on a piece of the high-gloss, white dash to the right of the boat’s wheel. Like magic, a door rose up, revealing a compartment holding a GPS, start/stop controls for both engines, fuel pump, anchor controls and one of Reel Fun’s two marine radios.

DJ twisted a knob on the smaller VHF radio, then brought the mic to his mouth.

“Crown Bay Marina, this is Reel Fun. Tell me where I can tie up.” His finger let go of the button on the side of the mic. The radio cracked, and a few seconds later, a woman’s voice answered.

“Reel Fun , proceed to VHF 12 for more instructions.”

DJ quickly changed frequencies on the radio. “This is Reel Fun, waiting for somebody to boss me around.”

“This is Darla at Crown Bay Marina, ready to boss you around, skipper. What’re you looking for, Reel Fun?”

“How long you think we’ll be here?” DJ asked me.

I shrugged. “Back by dinner time, right?”

He nodded agreement.

“Just looking for a day slip and about six hundred gallons of diesel,” he said into the radio. “Got something like that?”

“Always do, Reel Fun, ” Darla answered. “Go to the first face dock and Glen’ll get you squared away with fuel.”

Reel Fun slowly pressed forward into the marina. Ahead, I saw the low, colorful buildings of Charlotte Amalie West. Off our portside, a familiar-looking sailboat motored out into Crown Bay. I caught the name—Lady Lesley —and remembered emailing back and forth with the owner, Ron, a few times before I found Wayward back in Yacht Haven.

Lady Lesley was a beautiful Tayana 37 that had sailed up and down the eastern seaboard since being commissioned in 1987. According to Ron, she’d spent the last decade shuttling between a rental off Elbow Cay in the Bahamas, and a place down here in St. Thomas.

I saw Ron on deck, working hand-over-hand to unfurl a staysail. I waved and he shielded his eyes from the sun at my back, then smiled and returned my greeting.

“Hey, Dep, quit waving at the neighbors. I need you to hop your ass down to the cockpit and get the lines ready.” DJ spun the wheel, turning the bow to starboard, aiming for a place on the fuel dock behind a converted tugboat.

Why couldn’t I have been partnered with somebody like Ron? A friendly, competent guy. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. I dutifully climbed down the flybridge ladder and brought the lines out of storage. As soon as I had them out, I looked up at the dock and saw a bow-legged, sun-scorched man who couldn’t have been a day under seventy holding his arms out.

“Toss me a line, son,” the old man called, his arms spread wide like an anhinga drying its wings in the sun. “I’ll get you tied off and filled up.”

“Glen?”

He nodded.

I tossed the line high, trying not to hit him in the face. He ducked a little to the side and caught it over his shoulder with practiced ease.

Glen was as good as his word. He got us tied up, and once DJ opened the fuel door and removed the caps for him, we headed up to the dock office, paid for our day slip and six hundred gallons of diesel, then headed inland. Darla said Glen could pull DJ’s boat forward using the dock lines, so it would be out of the way of the fuel dock.

I couldn’t see how one old man could handle that on his own. Surely, the marina had another dockhand somewhere to help the old guy out.

We walked up a set of concrete steps from the marina office. I heard DJ grunting behind me as he pulled on the rail with each step. The hangover must’ve been roasting him from the inside out, and I doubted he’d gotten much sleep the night before.

Part of me wanted to let him twist in the consequences of his own poor choices, but I couldn’t leave a guy who only had one leg hanging. So, I turned and reached out a hand.

“I’m fine,” he said.

He wasn’t. Sweat glistened across his forehead and his skin would’ve been green if he wasn’t so red. Anyway, I didn’t push it. I left him alone.

I walked up the rest of the steps, then stopped at the top. Ahead of me, I saw roads and traffic and strip malls dressed in colorful, chipped paint. With the drugstore on one corner, the grocery store on another, and a check-cashing place sharing the same building, Charlotte Amalie West looked like any other small town in America, except for the paint.

That, and the hills of St. Thomas, smothered under dark-green rainforests.

Halfway up the hills, I saw a scattering of homes spaced far enough apart to be considered “private,” but not so far, they were remote. Big decks and windows and white roofs seemed to push through the thick canopy, as if the houses were gasping their last breaths before being smothered by foliage. Here and there, blue FEMA tarps replaced the white rooves on several homes.

I took out my phone and looked up the VA’s address, then copied and pasted it into my GPS app.

Crown Bay Marina was close to the VA office. Less than a mile. I could make it without breaking a sweat, even as the sun rose overhead.

“My phone says we’ve got a little over half a mile from here to the VA.” My eyes darted from DJ’s titanium leg to his face. “Want me to call a cab?”

“What do you need something like that for? Bone spurs?”

“I’m trying to have a little compassion for my fellow man, DJ. That’s all. I just thought you might prefer riding in a car to walking in the heat with your leg thumping around.”

“Save your compassion for somebody who needs it. Just point at the VA.”

I jabbed my arm northwest like a spear.

“Then let’s get going,” he said, walking past me. “We don’t want our lead getting cold, right?”

We crossed the side street leading to the marina, made our way through a parking lot and hit Moravian Highway just beyond it.

Ahead of DJ, and having already crossed the highway, I stepped into a narrow parking lot attached to a blocky structure. The lot was big enough for one row of parked cars and space to drive around them but not much else.

The building looked like some of the cheaper apartment complexes I’d go past whenever I had to drive up to LAX to fly somewhere. No detail to it, no frills, nothing but four white walls, a roof, and however many windows it took to keep the place from looking like a prison.

A half dozen sets of doors punctuated the walls every twenty feet or so. I spotted one set that displayed a pair of window stickers of bald eagles holding American flags in their talons, soaring over the Rockies, and knew it was the VA without even seeing the small print on the door.

Going straight for the entrance, I walked between a Jeep and a Kia, then stopped to see where DJ was. He’d crossed the highway and was hobbling up the narrow strip of grass between the road and the parking lot.

An intense guilt swelled in me. I shouldn’t have been pissed at him. Not for anything he’d done. Life was hard enough for him without me holding a stupid grudge or being thin-skinned about every prickly word he had for me. For God’s sake, I used to jump out of airplanes in full scuba gear, then swim to shore and ruck a half dozen miles through the Florida swamp. I should have been able to handle a ribbing.

When he moved between the Jeep and Kia, I pulled open the VA’s front door. A blast of chilly air rolled out, feeling like heaven on my bare skin. I soaked in the AC while DJ shuffled to the front door. When I followed him in, I found myself in a small waiting room. Ahead, beyond DJ, was an empty receptionist’s desk. A hallway branched off to the left of the desk, then led to the back of the building. “We should wait for somebody to come up front,” I said.

“Why?” DJ set himself in the direction of the hallway. “We’re both vets.”

Before I could argue the point, my phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket, my eyes on the back of DJ’s head, swiped my thumb across the screen without looking and brought the phone to my ear.

“This is Jerry.”

“Jerry,” a man’s low, silky voice said, “it’s good to hear your voice again.”

A chill sank through my gut.

“Arlen.”