A Ryan Weller Box Set Books 1 - 3

by Evan Graver

  “Yes, we even had one turn up here, in St. Petersburg.”

  “What happened to that one?”

  “We’d already paid out on it, so we sold it to a local company that fixes them for resale.”

  Ryan took a swig of Pepsi and looked out the window at the sun-dappled waters of Old Tampa Bay. “You ever go down to the Keys to look at these boats?”

  “No. We don’t go look at sunken boats. We have them moved if they’re blocking shipping lanes or present a navigational hazard. Why, what do you think you’ll find?”

  He shrugged and got up from the chair. Emily remained seated, looking at her fingernails as if his questions bored her.

  “I’m just trying to cover all the angles. I guess you’re familiar with boats.”

  “This is my job,” she snapped. “And I live in Florida.”

  “Just making sure. I want to look at the wrecks.”

  “Why? They’re a bunch of sunken boats.”

  “You’re a former cop, Emily.” He caught the look of surprise in her eyes at knowing her background. “Let’s look at this as a crime scene. That’s what we have here. Each boat has a story to tell, and in order to interpret that story, we have to look at the crime scene, and put together the pieces of the puzzle.”

  Emily nodded and watched him sip soda and study the files.

  “Find anything unusual?” Kyle Ward, the company CEO, asked as he stepped into the room. Ryan had seen his picture on the company website. The man was in his thirties and well-groomed, from his tailored suit to his polished shoes and close-cropped black hair.

  “Mr. Weller wants to look at two wreck sites of our stolen sailboats,” Emily said.

  “What are you looking for?” Ward asked.

  “Anything to tell me why these particular boats were stolen and who stole them. Really, any piece of the puzzle that will bring us closer to capturing the thieves and saving you some money.” Ryan flipped a file closed and stared at Ward. “That’s the bottom line.”

  “I like this guy already. Get him what he needs, Emily.” He laid a hand on Emily’s shoulder and smiled at Ryan. “Nice to meet you and good luck with your search.” Ward left the office, closing the door behind him.

  “Do you dive?” Ryan queried his new associate.

  “Yes, recreationally. I’m not a big-shot commercial diver like you.”

  “Good.” He ignored the barb and stretched his whole body, feeling his chest muscles tighten as his arms extended back and above his head. When he relaxed, Ryan asked, “Do you have your own gear?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are two wrecks I’d like to look at, one in the Dry Tortugas, the other near Marathon. They’re close and they may give us some clues. Like I said earlier, it’s a crime scene. Do you know any dive operators down there?”

  “You can’t throw a stone without hitting a dive operator in the Keys, but we charter a boat when we need one.”

  “Get one out of Key West. We’ll fly down there in the morning.”

  Her sarcasm was clear when she asked, “Do you want me to book airline tickets, too?”

  “No need.” Ryan grinned. “I’ll have Chuck file a flight plan from here to Key West.”

  “You have an airplane?” Emily asked, dumbfounded.

  Ryan nodded while gathering the files he wanted and stacked the others neatly in a pile. He kept out two to have copied for his records. “Do you have the file for the boat in St. Pete?”

  “I’ll have it brought down.”

  “I want to talk to the guy, but I also want you to come with me.”

  “I suppose, you need me to drive?”

  “If you’re offering.” Consulting his watch, he said, “Maybe you know a good place to eat lunch as well?”

  Chapter Eight

  Fulton’s Marine was a small repair shop tucked amongst other industrial businesses on an ocean-connected canal. Uncut weeds grew around old boat hulls, and rusty engines lay half buried in the dirt. An assortment of boat trailers, some with and without boats on them, had tires so flat and dry-rotted Ryan doubted they would hold air. Dirty, white paint flaked off the building’s cinder-block walls, and the office door had rust showing through several layers of paint.

  “There’s your boat.” Emily pointed to a forty-foot Hunter sailboat near the back of the lot as they drove up to the garage. The hull was lodged in a cradle of timbers and missing its mast.

  She parked the car. They climbed out and crunched across the gravel toward the office door. The smell of saltwater and dead fish hung in the air even though the building was a half-mile from the Gulf of Mexico. Ryan felt sweat on his brow as the sun pounded down on them. Glancing up, he saw a seagull glide on wind currents and heard the distinct screech as it called to its mate.

  Ryan and Emily entered the office. No one was in the cluttered room. A window air conditioner ran at full bore, but the office was still stuffy. Piles of papers sat on every surface, and cups of half-drunk coffee sat haphazardly on several stacks.

  “A real winner here.” Emily’s tone let Ryan know she disapproved of the décor along with the stench of stale cigar smoke and mildew.

  He pushed past her through a door marked Employees Only. Boats, in various stages of repair, lined the interior walls. Outboard engines hung on wooden stands, and big, disassembled V8 motors and their assorted parts were laid out on the oil-stained concrete floor. Hank Williams Jr. blared from a stereo at the rear of the shop.

  They walked toward the music until they found a man standing on a ladder, leaning into the open engine bay of a Yamaha jet boat. Only his legs were visible.

  Ryan banged on the side of the boat with the palm of his hand and said, “Hello.”

  It startled the guy so badly, he almost fell off the ladder. He glared at the intruder as he made his way down to the floor. He stepped off the ladder and pushed his trucker’s cap back on his bald head, then crossed his arms over a grease-stained red shirt under bib overalls stretched tight by an ample gut.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Fulton. I’m Emily Hunt and this is Ryan Weller. I’m from Ward and Young. We’d like to look at the Hunter you got from us.”

  Fulton’s eyebrows rose, and his double chin wagged. “That boat’s mine. I paid for it.”

  “I know, Mr. Fulton, but we want to look at it one last time.” She nodded at her companion. “He thinks we might find something that will lead us to the thieves.”

  Fulton pulled the stub of a cigar from his mouth. “Fine. Look at it all you want, but don’t touch nothing.”

  Ryan asked, “Mr. Fulton, have you inspected the boat?”

  “Of course, I did,” he retorted. Then his look turned apprehensive. “Why?”

  “I just wanted to know if you noticed anything suspicious in or on the boat.”

  Fulton looked at them as if trying to decide if they were trustworthy. He wiped his hands on a rag while staring at Emily. She gave the man a lascivious smile and cocked her hip.

  His tone softened. “Yeah, I found something.” He started for the office door they’d come through earlier. “I found a piece of wood in the cabin. Looked like a crate top. Did you know they gutted the lady?”

  Ryan shot Emily a look.

  “Guess not.” Fulton interpreted the look for himself. “Someone gutted her. I mean, not just stripped of everything valuable, but they took everything out of her. All the bulkheads, bunks, galley, head, everything. I don’t know why I bought the big turd. Guess I figured it was cheap and I could fix it up the way I wanted. Retirement project, so to speak.” The whole time he talked, he stood behind his desk, rummaging through a pile of papers, assorted lengths of rope, and several rusty metal objects Ryan couldn’t identify.

  “Here we go.” He pulled out an olive drab chunk of wood with black Cyrillic writing on it. “There was some heavy brown paper stuck to this. It had wax or something on it to make it waterproof. Seemed strange to me.”

  Ryan took the wood and turned it over in his hands. He c
ouldn’t read Cyrillic, but he knew what the wood went to. He handed it back and thanked the man, then asked if they could see the boat.

  “Sure, help yourself. Just be careful climbing around on it. I don’t wanna be sued ’cause you were careless.”

  “No problem, Mr. Fulton, the boat’s yours. We just want to look at it,” Emily reiterated.

  The two investigators walked outside and slipped their sunglasses back on. Ryan found a weathered wooden ladder and carried it to the Hunter where he leaned it against the rub rail. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket. Emily gave him a look of disgust as he lit it. As he smoked, he walked around the hull, examining it in detail. There was a fist-sized hole gashed into the fiberglass where the boat had run aground on a coral reef. Then Sea Tow had damaged the keel when they pulled it off the reef. Ryan wondered what the fragile coral looked like after they’d mashed it with their ham-handed tactics.

  Ryan climbed the ladder and entered the cabin. Fulton was right, they’d stripped it bare. Back outside, he saw Fulton leaning against the corner of the building, his hands in his pockets, the brim of his trucker cap pulled low against the glare of the sun.

  Ryan leaned over the rail and looked down at Emily. “Why didn’t you state that they’d gutted the inside in your report?”

  “I didn’t know.” She gazed up at him and placed her hand above her eyes to shield them from the sun. “After the owner reported it stolen, we got the police report, the owner filed a claim, and we paid. Sea Tow brought the boat in four months later. They claimed salvor’s rights and sold it off to Fulton. We never saw the boat. The only reason I knew it was here was because Fulton took title, and the HIN, that’s hull identification number, came back as one of ours, and we had to release it.”

  “You said ‘police report.’”

  “This boat was stolen from its dock in Pensacola, Florida.”

  “Why didn’t you look at the boat?”

  “I asked if they wanted me to investigate it, but they told me not to worry about it. They’d cleared the matter up. I noted it in the report and moved on. Ryan, we must get a hundred reports a month that come across our desks.”

  “All right.” He climbed down and put the ladder back where he’d found it. He glanced over at Fulton who took his cigar from his lips and nodded to him.

  Back in the car, Emily asked, “You know where that wood lid came from, don’t you?”

  “Crates of Kalashnikov’s finest AK-47s. They line the insides of the crates with the heavy wax paper before they put the guns in.”

  “Why would there be a crate of guns on the boat?”

  “Most likely gunrunners.”

  “Someone’s running guns into the US?”

  “It happens every day. In this case, they used the Hunter to fly under the radar. No one bothers to check into customs if the boat’s registered in the US. Just swing by some little out-of-the-way dock, throw a few crates of rifles on a truck and poof, disappear into the great American Heartland.”

  “Or down the Iron River.”

  “Emily Hunt, ATF slang, really?”

  She shrugged and started the car. “I used to be a cop.”

  Ryan chuckled and thought about the Iron River, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’s slang for the illegal gun trade flowing from the United States into Mexico to support the cartels and gangs.

  “What now?” she asked as they pulled into the parking lot of his hotel.

  “We fly down to Key West. Come in, and we can find out what time Chuck has us leaving.”

  They found Chuck Newland lying by the pool, sunning his body, and watching the bikini-clad babes flit about the pool deck.

  “Chuck, this is Emily Hunt, the insurance investigator I’m working with. Emily, this is Chuck Newland, the resident DWR pilot.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He grinned up at Emily. He had on orange swim trunks, a white Stetson cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses. “Take off is seven thirty a.m., boss. Preflight’s at seven.”

  “Okay, Emily,” Ryan said. “Pack your dive gear and whatever else you need for a few days in paradise and we’ll see you at the St. Pete’s airport in the morning.”

  She nodded. “See you then.”

  Chapter Nine

  It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning when Ryan pulled back the throttles on the Fountain 38 LX, one of Fountain’s top-of-the-line sportfishing craft. With triple three-hundred-horsepower Mercury Verado engines, the boat was capable of sixty-five miles per hour, fast enough to cover the seventy miles from Key West to the Dry Tortugas in just over an hour. He kept the boat at its recommended cruising speed of forty-eight, which made for a longer journey and conserved fuel. Even though they had a full tank of gas, he felt no reason to push it.

  Yesterday, Chuck had set the Beechcraft King Air B200C down at the Key West airport seventy minutes after taking off from St. Petersburg. The three of them had spent the rest of the day checking into the Hyatt Centric Key West on Mallory Square, inspecting the Fountain boat, which happened to belong to Kyle Ward, and picking up the tanks and weights they would need from the dive shop. They followed the arduous work with an obligatory bar-hopping session which had lasted well into the night.

  It wasn’t every day Ryan had the use of a high-performance Fountain to do a little underwater detective work, and he appreciated every minute. They were northeast of Garden Key, the main attraction in the Dry Tortugas, where the U.S. government had built Fort Jefferson to help suppress piracy and protect vital shipping in the Gulf of Mexico. Obsolete before it was even complete, it fell into disrepair before being handed over to the National Park Service.

  They dropped the anchor over the GPS coordinates for a sixty-foot steel-hulled ketch named Misty. The wreck was off Pulaski Shoals, just outside the national park boundary. Misty had been pirated off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and now rested under seventy feet of water. Looking over the Fountain’s rail, they could see Misty lying on her side at the bottom. Her severed masts now lay in a tangle of rigging off her port side. It was a sad sight.

  “Let’s gear up.” Ryan said, pulling off his T-shirt.

  Emily stripped off her shorts and shirt to reveal a bright blue bikini which prominently displayed her figure. She pulled her thick blonde mane into a ponytail and shoved her clothes into a gym bag.

  Chuck, leaning on the center console, pulled his sunglasses down his nose and looked at Emily and then at Ryan. Ryan’s eyes met Chuck’s and Chuck waggled his eyebrows. Ryan shook his head and grinned. His diving partner’s bare skin wasn’t hard to notice. Ryan averted his eyes and concentrated on gearing up for the dive.

  Emily and Ryan strapped their buoyancy control devices to air tanks and hooked up regulators and gauges. Their BCDs would help them achieve neutral buoyance underwater. He tested the wireless transmitter attached to the first stage regulator which sent air pressures to his wrist-mounted computer. They breathed through their primary and spare regulators. Both sets of equipment checked out, and he went over his gear with Emily. Ryan then inspected her gear, so they were familiar with each other’s equipment in case of emergency. His final preparation was to have Chuck hoist a dive flag on the flagpole mounted to the half-tower.

  “Captain Chuck, you have the boat.” Ryan gave him a salute.

  Chuck raised a bottle of water in return.

  They stepped off the back of the boat into gin-clear water. The water temperature was in the eighties, warm enough for Emily to just wear her bikini, but both divers wore three-millimeter-thick wetsuits and thin gloves. Between the coral and the wreck, they didn’t want to get scraped up. Their basic dive training taught that the body loses heat twenty-five times faster in the water than in the air. The thin layer of water trapped between the skin and the neoprene retained the body’s heat and kept them warm.

  The two divers geared up, jumped into the water, and descended along the anchor line. There was no current, so he let go and drifted slowly down to the wreck. Ryan probed and p
oked, moving debris and looking for clues to the boat’s sinking. He kept an eye on his dive buddy, watching her swim effortlessly through the water. She was neutrally buoyant with her hands clasped together in front of her. He’d seen divers with a lot more dives under their belt still swimming upright, using their hands to help propel themselves and kicking like they were riding a bicycle. Emily’s training and technique were a credit to her instructor.

  Eventually, he made his way over the transom, into the cockpit, and down the companionway ladder. The thieves had stripped the inside of the boat, just like the Hunter in St. Petersburg. Ryan checked his dive computer. They’d been down for ten minutes.

  Ryan pulled himself into the engine hatch and flicked on his dive light before methodically sweeping it across the floor. His suspicions were confirmed when he saw the seacocks were open, allowing the water to flood the boat. He probed the bilges with the powerful beam of light. He saw no hidden boxes or unusual pieces of plastic piping connected to the plumbing system, which served no other function than as a hiding place.

  Backing out of the engine hatch, he saw Emily at the top of the companionway. She motioned to her pressure gauge and then held her thumb up, jerking it toward the surface. He glanced at his gauge. He was down to a thousand pounds in his tank, more than enough to make the ascent and required three-minute safety stop at fifteen feet. Ryan gave Emily the OK sign with his fingers and she turned away from the door.

  Approaching the ladder out the cabin door, something caught his eye. They hadn’t stripped the head. In a book he’d read, the main character stored valuables behind the vanity mirror. He maneuvered himself into the head and surveyed the cabinet. There were no signs of tampering or that it had ever been out of the wall. He swung the mirror open and placed his hands on the top edge. He pulled down. The hinges held, even as he braced his feet on the bulkhead and strained with all his might. Blood rushed to his head from the effort.

  He took a deep breath and shook off the pangs of overexertion. It was worth a second look and he would bring a tool kit next time. After floating out of the hull, he lazily kicked across the deck to the anchor line. Emily was already making her ascent and he joined her on the line.