Betrayed in the Keys

by Matthew Rief

  Felix was sitting behind his desk. He had one leg propped up and was swirling a half-full glass of bronze liquid and ice cubes. He looked tired, his skin sagging under his green eyes as he motioned for us to come in.

  “Felix, there’s been an incident,” Cesar said. “Oscar is dead.” Felix tilted his head back, anger taking over as Cesar continued, “He was trying to rape the maid, Penelope. Logan broke out from his cabin and confronted him.”

  Felix looked off into the distance, then shook his head.

  “Sit down, Logan,” he said, looking calmly at me. “That will be all, Cesar.”

  As Cesar left the room and shut the door behind him, Felix finished off his drink with one long pull. After setting the glass on the table, he let out a deep breath, then shook his head.

  “That idiot had it coming,” he said. “I told him repeatedly to leave our captives alone, but he just couldn’t control himself.” His words were slurred, and I was convinced that he’d probably already drunk at least five glasses of whatever his fancy was that evening. “I got another call from Jefe. He expects us in Tampico tomorrow evening.”

  I didn’t reply. Instead, I reached up and felt a patch of blood slowly streaking down the side of my face from where Oscar had elbowed me. Felix handed me a rag, then looked off into the distance as I wiped the blood away.

  “You must think I’m just a murdering bastard, huh?” he said. “Well, maybe I am.” Then his eyes stared fiercely into mine, and I felt as if we were seeing each other for the first time. “But know this, everything I’ve done started with self-preservation.” He paused a moment, then added, “Have you ever been to Tlapehuala before?”

  I shook my head. “No. But I’ve heard about it.”

  “Ah, and what have you heard?”

  “Nothing good.”

  He paused a moment, grabbed a bottle and filled his glass almost to the brim.

  “It was my home, years ago. Many years ago now. Much of Black Venom’s roots can be traced to a tiny village of no more than three hundred a few miles outside of the city. It was during one of the worst droughts in history and times were hard. No money. No food. No glimmer of hope.” He took a drink, then continued, “Men do desperate things without hope. Terrible things. Sometimes even to their own family.

  “It’s kill or be killed, Mr. Dodge,” he said. “Betray or be betrayed. That is how this organization operates, and it’s how it has always operated. I’ve done what I’ve needed to in order to survive. And I’m not proud of it. I kept clinging to a belief that someday it would end. That I would rise high enough in the ranks to dismantle this thing from the top. To free myself and those I care about. But that will never happen.”

  I sat in silence, listening to his words. I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it was just the alcohol talking, but it felt deeper. Like it was something that had been on the hardened leader’s mind for a while.

  “If we find this treasure, perhaps myself, Cesar, Antonio, and a few others can escape. Perhaps one day we can even go home,” he said. “Fake IDs, fake passports, fake names. We can disappear with enough cash.” He took in a deep breath, then sighed. “I can only give this until tomorrow evening, Logan. If Jefe discovers what we’re doing here, he will have each and every one of us killed.”

  His moved shifted suddenly, and anger took over. He grabbed the artifact from the desk in front of him, raised it high in the air, then slammed it onto his desk, denting the wood.

  “What the fuck does this thing mean?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I woke up early and headed up to the map room alongside two guards. Once there, one of the ship’s staff had a full pot of coffee brought in just for me, and I wondered if it would be enough for the hours I had ahead of me. After Felix had practically passed out drunk the night before, I’d headed down to my stateroom and tried to get some sleep, only to be woken up a few hours later by a dream.

  I leaned over the digital display of the table in front of me, shuffled through a few pictures of the artifact, and looked at the map of Florida Bay. My dream had been vivid and more detailed than any dream I could remember. I dreamt of Shadow, his ship, and Captain Gray, the famous pirate hunter who’d tracked him and taken him down. Upon waking up, I thought about Frank and a few of his ramblings about the Golden Age of piracy.

  “Famous pirate hunters like Gray were successful because they didn’t think like normal British officers,” he’d said after dinner one evening while we’d lounged about on the bridge of the Calypso. “They thought like pirates.”

  His words played over and over again in my head for what felt like an eternity. Then it hit me like a strong gust of ocean breeze against the side of my face. I shouldn’t be looking for the treasure, I should be looking for Shadow. Like the great pirate hunters of the Golden Age, I too should think like a pirate. I should get myself into Shadow’s mind and figure out where I would have hidden a treasure if I were him.

  For a few hours before the sun came up, I read page after page about Shadow and the members of his crew. I wished for Frank’s thumb drive and the records he’d found in the archives but made do by digging deep with internet searches, my every movement watched by the two big guys by the doors. At seven in the morning, Cesar came inside and told me that we were drawing anchor. Just as the words left his mouth, I heard the yacht’s engines start up and felt my heart sink a few inches.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “Felix said we had until this evening.”

  “Relax,” he said. “The damn reverse osmosis units aren’t working, so we need to pull into a nearby marina and fill our freshwater tanks.”

  He told me to just stay in there and not leave for a few hours, then disappeared and shut the door behind him. I sat frozen for a moment as an epiphany took over my mind. That’s it. Freshwater. A pirate ship like the Crescent would have had to take refuge near a freshwater source of some kind. And if I could figure out where they got their water, I was confident that the treasure would be hidden somewhere nearby.

  I went to work, punching the keys of the laptop and searching the internet for any natural freshwater sources in the Florida Keys. I knew that it was scarce but hadn’t realized just how scarce until I read a few articles. Natural freshwater sources had been almost completely nonexistent south of the Everglades. The islands were a paradise to the eyes, but a hellhole for human survival. I read stories about sailors marooned in the Keys during the dry months, about how many of them had gone crazy due to extreme dehydration and died after drinking seawater to their heart’s content.

  After an hour of searching, I’d found one potential freshwater source. There were only a few references to it in old maritime logs, and many people of the era had believed it didn’t exist at all. In an 1820 text about the Keys, entitled “Piloting Directions for the Gulf of Mexico,” it stated that there was a natural well on the north end of Old Matecumbe and that it was routinely sought out by wreckers and turtle hunters.

  There was a mention of the same well by Hester Perrine when she recounted the death of her father, who was killed during the Indian Key Raid that took place August 7, 1840. Hester wrote that three days before her father’s death, her father had shown her a place she referred to as the Fairy Grotto, which she described as a sparkling spring that was roughly fifteen feet across and four feet deep. Hester and her father had both been living on modern-day Lower Matecumbe Key at the time.

  After reading a few more vague references to a miracle spring that saved the lives of those shipwrecked sailors fortunate enough to find it, I slid the laptop away and shifted my attention to the digital map that covered the entire horizontal display of the table. I zoomed in on Lower Matecumbe Key, a stretch of land situated between Upper Matecumbe Key and Craig Key. Much of the island is covered in waterfront homes and restaurants, and I learned that all of its Indian burial grounds and its natural spring had been destroyed during the construction of the Overseas Railroad. But most of the northeast
section of the island is relatively untouched, and as I looked over its satellite imagery, I concluded it to be the best place to search for a treasure. I just had to figure out what the words on the artifact meant.

  I shook my head, knowing that I was betting everything on a hunch and not facts. I knew that the chances of walking onto Lower Matecumbe and stumbling onto a lost treasure were about as likely as winning the lottery two times in a row.

  Soon after, I heard the engines come back to life and felt the yacht move out of whatever marina they’d decided to cruise into. Felix came in, followed by Cesar right on his heels. The Black Venom leader moved into view, then leaned against the table containing the zoomed-in map, laptop, and all the research I’d done over the past day.

  “Well,” Felix said, staring at me. “Where to, Dodge?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment, wanting to choose my words carefully. Seeing my eyes drift down to the map, Felix tapped the touchscreen a few times, then slid his fingers in different patterns, his voice visibly frustrated.

  “What’s the significance of this area?” he said. “And how in the hell do I get the map to flip around?”

  Cesar moved in behind me, and I used my right hand to flip the map around so that it faced Felix. I was about to tell him about Lower Matecumbe and the freshwater source there, but I couldn’t. Instead, my mind was entranced by an image on the screen beneath me. A shape I hadn’t realized was there before.

  Reaching under the table, I grabbed the artifact and held it up in front of me.

  “That’s it,” I said, the words charging out of my mouth like a holy proclamation.

  My eyes jumped back and forth between the artifact in my hands and a satellite image of a land mass that looked just like it. It was the exact same rounded triangular shape as the artifact.

  Felix, seeing where I was looking, moved beside me and held out the old dagger. I realized then that the engraving beside the name and date wasn’t a heart—it was the same shape as the artifact.

  “What island is that?” Felix asked, staring down at the uniquely shaped piece of land.

  I smiled as I thought about the island that I’d cruised by hundreds of times before, an island clearly visible from a long stretch of US-1.

  “That’s Lignumvitae Key,” I said, and at that moment, there was a part of me that knew without a doubt that it was where Shadow had hidden his treasure.

  A quick search told me that Lignumvitae, once referred to as Cayo de la Lena on Spanish charts, had the highest elevation of anywhere in the Florida Keys at nineteen feet above sea level. The island is covered in rare tropical hardwoods, the most abundant being its namesake the Hollywood Lignum Vitae, a tree that is currently endangered. The combination of the island’s elevation, its close proximity to fresh water, its abundance of trees, and the shallow waters surrounding it on almost all sides, made it the perfect place for a Golden Age pirate to bury his treasure. The island would have also been concealed by Lower and Upper Matecumbe, making it ideal for keeping a ship hidden and out of sight from passing ships along the Atlantic side of the Keys.

  “This is incredible,” Felix said, staring down at the map. “This island is the exact same shape of the artifact. And it looks almost completely uninhabited.”

  “It is,” I said. “It’s a state park now. Its two hundred and eighty acres are mostly thick forest, with the only structures being a few houses and a dock on the east side.”

  Felix nodded, then grabbed the artifact and read, “Thirty paces north of the heart. Ten fathoms down.”

  As the words came out of his mouth, he grabbed his cell phone and called the captain, telling him to make wake for the northwestern end of Lignumvitae Key. Just as he hung up, the door flew open and Cesar ran inside.

  “Felix!” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I could hear the loud helicopter blades thundering through the air before I’d reached the main deck. Peering through a row of large side windows, I gazed upon the ocean dotted with specks of land surrounding us. To the north, I saw a dark blue Mil Mi-38 transport helicopter roaring towards us at its top speed of one hundred and eighty miles per hour.

  Felix moved beside me, talking quickly into his cell phone and telling everyone on board to get ready. Clearly, he hadn’t expected guests anytime soon.

  The pilot circled the massive bird around towards the stern of the yacht, then slowed to a stop and began to descend. I watched from the main deck with two guards standing beside me as the massive main rotor blade lowered the nine-ton aircraft softly onto the helipad. The yacht swayed slightly with the added weight and shook as the rotors whooshed and slowed.

  Felix ordered me to follow him as he headed out towards the helipad. Instantly my mind went to work, assuming that the worst had happened. It had to be the old man, I thought. The one they called Jefe. No one else would make Felix act the way that he was acting and cause fear to overtake his expressions. The jig was up, the treasure had slipped away, and now I had to find a way to escape.

  “Move it!” one of the big guys said as he pushed me out onto the deck.

  It was loud and windy and chaotic. A few guys ran towards the helicopter to tie it down, and within a few minutes, the large side door fell open, revealing a staircase. As soon as the first guys stepped out, I knew that whatever was about to happen, it wouldn’t be good. They wore dress pants and shirts and had stockless AK-47s strapped over their necks and clutched in their hands. Dark sunglasses hid their eyes as they stepped out into the tropical afternoon sun. I counted fourteen in all, and once they were away from the gusts of wind blowing down from the dying rotor above, they stood in formation in front of us.

  There was nothing I could do now, no way I could escape them. I looked up towards the dark doorway leading into the helicopter and saw a figure appear. It was the old man from the video call. He was wearing a pair of silver slacks and a white dress shirt with sleeves rolled up just below his elbows. He made quick work of the stairs, which surprised me considering his age and the fact that he was carrying what looked like a cane in his right hand.

  Without hesitating, he walked straight towards Felix, who stood a few paces in front of me.

  “Jefe!” Felix said, holding out his arms. “I’m surprised to see you.”

  “I have no doubt that you are,” the old man fired back in his smooth accent.

  He continued with strong strides towards Felix, who reached out to greet his leader. To my surprise, the old man greeted Felix back by rearing back his cane and slamming it across the side of his head. The sound was loud and barbaric and almost caused Felix to fall over.

  As if waiting patiently for their cue, the fourteen armed men who’d arrived with Jefe aimed their weapons chest height and surrounded everyone else outside on the deck. They yelled, cursing at their fellow cartel members and ordering them to drop their weapons. Cesar and a few other guys reached for their weapons but were quickly tackled and held to the ground at gunpoint.

  Felix regained his balance. He looked around briefly, then drew his gaze back at Jefe. Without hesitating, the old man grumbled, stepped towards Felix and hit him two more times, once in the side and once in the face. As Felix fell to the ground, Jefe moved in close and snatched the revolver from his chest holster.

  “You fucking backstabber,” Jefe said, shaking his head as he held Felix’s revolver in his right hand.

  He struck Felix again, this time using the handhold of his own weapon. Felix’s head jerked sideways, and I could tell that he almost passed out from the blow.

  “Did you really think you could pull something like this off?” Jefe continued. “Did you really think that I could be deceived so easily?” He walked around the deck, his eyes scanning over me, Cesar, and the others who’d been trying to find the treasure. “I’m insulted by your stupidity, and even more so by your lack of loyalty.” He cleared his throat, then looked back at Felix, staring him straight in the eyes. “Our organization has stric
t laws regarding betrayal.” He knelt down beside Felix. “And now I get to fucking tear you limb from limb and feed you to the sharks.”

  He rose back to his feet and stepped towards Cesar.

  “But no,” he added. “That would be letting you off too easy given the circumstances. Instead, I want you all to see your futile little plan crumble before your eyes. I want you to see me and the cartel gain from it before you meet your painful demise.”

  He turned towards me, then stepped closer, looking me in the eyes and trying to get a read from me. We weren’t people anymore, we were mammals, and he wanted to see firsthand what kind of mammal I was. I didn’t blink, didn’t back down in the slightest. I was a fighter, and whether I died by his hands that day or not, he would bloody well know that much.

  “So this is Logan Dodge,” he said. “You’re the asshole who’s caused me so much trouble and, for some reason, no one can kill.”

  He suddenly raised the revolver, aiming it straight at my head. I didn’t even flinch or shift my gaze. The samurai, some of the greatest warriors ever to walk the planet, had always believed that it was the men who were willing to die who fought the best and usually made it out of even the worst conflicts alive. It was a belief I shared, and though I loved being alive, I always tried to be prepared to die and had trained myself to no longer fear death.

  With that being said, my heart still raced as I faced the barrel of his loaded weapon.

  Jefe stepped towards me. “I could end you right now. And as much as I want to, I have other, more… profitable plans for all of you.”

  He stepped back, lowered his revolver, and again addressed the entire group.

  “Before I punish you traitors, you’re going to lead me to this treasure,” he said. “That’s right, I know all about it. The same man within your ranks who told me that your engines were fine also told me what you were really doing here. I think Oscar deserves a promotion for that.” He stepped towards Felix, who was still on the ground in pain, and added, “I think he’ll have your job, Felix.”