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again, the ship hadn’t been attacked by pirates, so maybe their waxed chests deterred high crimes at sea.
    Joe couldn’t get straight what to think of guys whose job was to get stay-at-home moms to do push-ups and sit-ups and who then did the same thing themselves in their free time. Joe had loved baseball as a kid, and his arms showed that he’d swung a hammer for the next twenty-five years. But his gut showed that he didn’t buy into the exercise-for-appearances phenomenon.
    The trip started with flat seas up to Jacksonville. For dinner Joe, Tony, and the captain went to Hooters and watched the Yankees while they ate. The trainers saw a Jaguars preseason game. The next day, they left early and arrived late in Charleston. They ate Low Country food heavy with butter. The trainers explored town while Tony and Joe retired to the flybridge and pinochle.

    THE THREE GIRLS met two months ago, when they’d moved to Charleston as traveling nurses. They shared an apartment their agency paid for, and they worked the ER, moving between triage stations and assisting general practitioners with minor cut-and-sew operations or setting bones. Occasionally, they took shifts in the surgical center, where surgeons with IQs of 140, coke-bottle glasses, and fish-bellyskin dropped f-bombs like drill sergeants. Anesthesiologists, who enjoyed themselves more than other specialties in med school, calmed the patients’ nerves as they put them to sleep. The nurses stayed observant, made sure everything went smoothly. They made sure no instruments were left in a belly and no shortage of catgut.
    After work, they hit the gym, watched a DVD, and got takeout. On their days off, they lived the traveling part of their titles. In four trips, they’d been to every beach in South Carolina and Georgia they’d heard of. They had closed down The Salty Dog in Hilton Head and stumbled through the pine trees to the Marriott. They had eaten twenty types of seafood at Bernie’s in Myrtle Beach. They had drunk Natural Lights with lime at Ocean Annie’s, near Kingston’s Plantation. They had paddled around alligators at St. Simon. They had been stung by jellyfish at Tybee Beach.
    This weekend, they’d planned to drive into North Carolina. The bags were already in the trunk when the big guy had a personal collision with Ashley’s car. Now, instead, she awoke to the sound of big diesel boat engines. She felt them more than heard them. The boat left its slip slowly in reverse, then went forward, then reverse again, and finally steadily forward. Without getting out of bed, she pulled back the porthole’s curtain and watched the sky behind the sailboat masts that they passed.
    “How does the weather look, Ash?” asked one of her roommates.
    “Sunny,” Ashley said. “Do we have any sunscreen?”
    “Sure, here you go.”
    The cabin was as private as a boat got. It was the only one you didn’t go through the main salon to get to. You entered a slow-opening, shock-pressure-assisted door. It opened vertically, and the cabin was down several steep stairs. The only window was an inoperable porthole. The cabin had a small built-in dresser, a really small bathroom, and a queen-size bed. It abutted the engine room—normally crew quarters.
    The girls dressed for a day on a boat: bikinis under a layer of light clothing for the morning breeze. Ashley was the first to come out of the hatch.

    LEAVING CHARLESTON, JOE looked back at the city, a special place in the early dawn light. When the first stowaway climbed out of the aft stateroom, Joe spilled Folgers on his Docksiders. She wore a thin hooded sweatshirt and board shorts, and a bikini strap was visible inside her baggy collar.
    Seeing Joe, she sang out, “What a beautiful morning. Hi, my name’s Ashley Walker. Are you Mr. Pascarella?”
    Blonde hair, West Texas smile, Southern California wardrobe. Joe rubbed the pendant on his necklace and smiled.
    “Ashley, I never knew how much St. Christopher liked me