Virgin Cay / A Night Out

VIRGIN CAY Gus Robinson has lost his boat sunk beneath the waves thirty fathoms down and nearly lost his life as well. But he manages to swim to land at Spanish Cay, and that s how he meets Clare. She offers him her bed, her body, and later offers him the one thing he needs most of all $20,000 which he can use to buy a new boat. Robinson is lost without his ketch, stripped of his freedom to set sail whenever the mood strikes him, to live life on his own terms. All he has to do to earn enough for a new boat is to commit murder, to kill the one person who stands between Clare and the inheritance she needs to continue to live her extravagant lifestyle. But it s not until he meets Gwen that Robinson is forced to make the roughest choice of all. A NIGHT OUT Johnny Flake is trying to outrun his past, which is how he finds himself captaining the Vixen on a run down to Cuba with Cutter and Cruze. Cutter would just as soon kill you as look at you, and Cruze is so far into the bottle he s beginning to smell like death itself. Flake has a bad feeling about this trip, and isn t surprised to find that instead of smuggling booze off the island, he finds they re carrying heroin instead. But he soon discovers new problems when mutiny sends him into the waters and onto the yacht being manned by playboy Allan Chambers and his oversexed wife, Jessica. All Chambers wants to do is feel the salt air in his hair. All Jessica wants to do is feel the next man. With the storm raging, and the two ships both heading for a little island off Key West, it s going to be a long and turbulent night.

Basil Heatter, the son of radio commentator Gabriel Heatter, was born on Long Island on March 26, 1918. He attended schools in Connecticut, then went abroad when was 16 for a two year travel stint through Europe. Returning to America, he went to work for a New York advertising agency. He enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and during WWII served as a skipper on a P.T. boat in the Southwest Pacific. Besides being a news commentator himself, Heatter wrote twenty novels of intrigue and adventure beginning with The Dim View in 1946, the story of a young PT boat skipper as well as several non-fiction works revolving around his love of the sea. In fact, he lived for years off Key West on his own self-built sailboat, The Blue Duck. He passed away June 12, 2009, in Miami, Florida.