Sin (2019 Edition)

by J. M. LeDuc

  Sin listened in horror to the rest of the story, hugging her tight.

  “I promise no one will ever hurt you,” Sin whispered in her ear as she whimpered.

  Sin held her until she had no tears left, and then picked Maria up and carried the sleepy child back to the house.

  Thomas and Carmelita were waiting on the porch when they came into view. Sin placed her finger to her mouth. “She is sleeping,” she mouthed.

  Carmelita went to take Maria from her arms, but Sin shook her head and said that she would put Maria to bed.

  As she placed her in her bed, Maria’s eyes opened slightly. “Promise?” she sighed.

  “Sí, mi belleza (yes, my beauty).”

  Maria smiled and with a peacefulness that comes with trust, closed her eyes, and fell into a deep sleep.

  Sin could practically feel the tension as she walked down the stairs into the family room.

  Carmelita and her father were staring at her with anticipation.

  “Well?” Thomas asked.

  “Well, what,” Sin answered.

  “Don’t be coy,” Carmelita said. “What happened on your walk? How did Maria’s feet get wet?”

  Sin breathed a sigh of relief when she realized what had everyone worried.

  “I showed Maria how to skim a stone across the water. She kept getting closer and closer to the water as she continued to skip the rocks. Before she knew it, she was ankle deep in the water.”

  Carmelita’s hand went to her mouth and her deep brown eyes opened wide. “What did she do when she realized she was in the ocean?”

  “She was frightened, but I held her until she began to relax,” Sin answered.

  “Unbelievable,” Thomas said. “We’ve tried everything to get her over her fear, and you do it in one day.”

  Sin poured herself a cup of coffee. “Don’t get your hopes too high, she is still very afraid, and it will probably be harder to distract her next time.” She took a sip of the Cuban brew. “But little by little, she will get over her fears.”

  Sin thought about the things Maria told her. It will be a miracle if she loses her fear of the ocean.

  Sin’s father soon became tired and Carmelita walked him upstairs to lie down.

  Sin walked out on the back deck and lit a cigarette. She smoked the cigarette down to the filter before flicking it over the balcony. Using her binoculars, Sin looked out at the water. She was happy to see that there were no boats anywhere off the Key. She took this as her cue to leave and make her way to the north point of Tumbleboat to meet Charlie for a little ‘recreational’ night dive.

  18

  Sin and Charlie did a buddy check on each other’s gear before they trudged into the water.

  “It’s a moonless night,” Charlie said, “that’s good and bad.”

  Sin nodded her understanding.

  “We can’t risk being spotted so we can’t use a dive flag and I don’t want to use any underwater flashlights until we reach a depth of forty feet,” he continued. “I checked the current and it’s running due south. Once we swim past the break, we have five minutes to reach our depth and turn on our lights. If we take longer than that, we may run right into the first reef and get torn to bits.”

  “It sounds like you’ve made this dive before,” Sin said.

  “Only from the chair in my den. You’re the only one I know that’s been crazy enough to have done it in reality.”

  Charlie watched Sin look out at the water and bite her lip. “Anything you want to add?”

  She pointed to where the waves made their final break. “About thirty feet in, where the waves begin to swell, there is a ledge. It drops from a depth of about twenty feet to eighty. The deeper we go, the less of a current we will deal with. I suggest hugging the bottom until we hit the inner reef.”

  Sin watched the left side of Charlie’s mouth rise and she felt an inner pride. “You take the lead,” he said, “I’ll follow.”

  He tied the end of a yellow rope to his weight belt and handed the other end of the ten-foot rope to Sin. She did the same. Silently, they turned toward the ocean, placed their masks on, put their snorkels in their mouths, and made their way past the rocks and coral of North Point.

  For the first part of the dive, the only communication between the two was the pull of the rope when they strayed too far apart and a kick in the head when they were too close. Once Sin swam past the shelf where the ocean bottom dropped off, the descent was quick. Before she knew it, her lead hand was touching sand. She wasted no time turning on her dive light. Charlie’s soon followed.

  He gave her the ‘okay’ sign, Sin signed back. They then made their way toward the inner reef.

  When they arrived at the reef, Sin knew something was wrong. She hugged the sand, trying to belay the current as much as possible. Lying on the ocean bottom, she reached for her slate and wrote a short message. Finished, she handed the slate to Charlie.

  “Looks wrong.”

  Sin waved for him to follow her lead.

  Charlie nodded in affirmation.

  They held on to each other with one hand and the vegetation on the top of the reef with the other in order to swim against the strong pull of the current. They hadn’t gone more than thirty feet when Sin stopped. She looked back at Charlie and then suddenly dropped off the end of the reef.

  In a matter of seconds, they were fifty feet deeper and hovering over a perfectly manicured ocean bottom.

  Sin grabbed at her slate and scribbled like a woman possessed.

  “Trough dug out.

  Man-made.”

  Charlie read the words and then pointed south. He signaled to Sin that he was taking point. She nodded and followed his lead.

  Charlie removed the glove from his right hand and felt the sand in front of him. For every foot he moved forward, he made at least three passes through the sand with his hand. This went on for about twenty minutes and they had progressed less than fifty feet.

  Sin tugged on his wetsuit to draw his attention and shrugged her shoulders.

  Charlie grabbed the slate hanging from his waist and tapped a message.

  “Too smooth. IEDs?”

  Sin looked around and noticed the same phenomenon. She nodded and let Charlie resume his search.

  A few minutes later—he stopped.

  Sin watched as Charlie dug in the sand. He waved her forward and shined his light in the hole he had made.

  Sin looked down and saw an underwater IED. She stared and thought, You’ve got to be shitting me.

  Sin busied herself filling in the hole as Charlie discovered others. She glanced at her underwater GPS and realized they were just offshore of the fishing company. Her mind was going a mile a minute when she felt Charlie poke her. She looked to see him shining his light on his watch. Their bottom time was over.

  It was time to surface.

  They quickly covered the other mines and rose from the bottom, the current pulling them south onto South Point.

  Safe on land and their equipment off, Charlie grabbed their tanks and tossed them into a mangrove sanctuary.

  “What are you doing?” Sin asked.

  “We’re about to have company,” Charlie answered. “Come on.”

  Sin grabbed her fins and mask and ran behind Charlie until they were hidden in the tangle of the mangroves.

  “What makes you think we are going to have company?”

  “The IEDs had two wires attached to them. One is a pressure and vibration sensitive trip wire. The other one made no sense. As we surfaced, I started thinking that maybe it was connected to some sort of early warning system.”

  “Okay,” Sin said, “But that still doesn’t explain why you think we tripped it or that someone is coming.”

  “Call it a hunch, I just don’t like the way things feel right now.”

  Sin thought for a moment and then said, “Do you think this might have something to do with how the agents got caught?”

  Charlie was about to answer when headl
ights flooded the parking lot. “Hold that thought,” he whispered.

  Two men stepped out of a truck. They were dressed all in black and their faces were concealed behind black headgear. Each held an automatic machine pistol.

  Sin could tell they were aggressive and thought they were immortal by their nonchalance. She heard one yell with bravado, “You search up by the plant, I’ll take the shore line. You see anyone, shoot to kill. We can dump them just like we did those FBI peckerwoods.”

  Sin wanted to jump out and kill the bastards, but she didn’t have a weapon.

  Within ten minutes, the men were back in the truck and gone.

  Sin and Charlie waited in complete silence for another fifteen before either made a sound.

  “It was them,” Sin said, pointing to where the truck had been. “The bastards that killed Alex and the others.”

  “Don’t go jumping to conclusions.”

  “Conclusions?” Sin snapped her head around and glared at Charlie, “Didn’t you hear what he said?”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Charlie’s voice stayed calm as he spoke, “but I didn’t hear him say if they killed the first three agents or Alex or all the above, and more important . . .” Charlie put his hand on Sin’s shoulder to silence her, “I didn’t hear who gave the orders.”

  Sin looked down at the ground and kicked a few loose shells.

  “Did you notice the weapons they were carrying?” Charlie asked, dragging Sin back into the moment.

  “Among other things,” Sin said. “They looked like Glock 18 machine pistols. You don’t take those to a party unless you plan on doing some serious damage.”

  “What else did you notice?”

  “Can we get away from here and continue the debriefing then?”

  Charlie smiled. “Sorry, old habit.”

  Sin nodded her affirmation.

  “Before we leave, we need to sink our equipment.”

  “The Navy isn’t going to be too happy about that,” Sin said.

  Charlie chuckled. “Nothing the Pentagon won’t replace at hundreds its actual cost.”

  “You are just one big conspiracy theory.”

  “You can thank my conspiracy minded brain that you weren’t on the receiving end of one of those Glock 18s.”

  Sin stopped mid-motion as she was picking up her air tank and heeded Charlie’s words. “Good point.” She then grabbed the tank and handed it to him.

  He took it, strapped it to the other equipment and wrapped everything in their weight belts.

  Standing at the end of the Point, Charlie and Sin both grabbed the wrapped equipment.

  “On a count of three,” Charlie said.

  Sin rolled her eyes. “Let’s go, Jacques Cousteau, I’m wet and cold.”

  Charlie grinned as he counted.

  They heaved the bundle out as far as they could and watched it sink.

  “Come on,” Charlie said. “I parked an old truck at the Dairy Queen a half mile south of here. We can ride back to North Point and talk about what we found.”

  On their drive back, Sin mentioned that the two men they saw were definitely professional. “Whoever is fronting this operation isn’t just using local talent,” she said.

  “The locals are just the scapegoats,” Charlie said. “If anything goes wrong, they are going to leave the idiots to be hung and try and get away scot free.”

  He glanced over and again Sin was biting her lower lip. “You really have to stop doing that,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”

  Sin released her lip and pushed her wet hair away from her face. “I’m thinking there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and the church and fishing company are the next two pieces to explore.”

  Charlie nodded. “The church is important, but I don’t think the fishing company is the place we need to search.”

  Sin thought for a moment and pointed a manicured nail toward him. “The orphanage is in the same building. That’s where we need to search.”

  Charlie smiled.

  Sin looked at her watch. It was almost one a.m. “I’m going to go over there later today and see if I can get a tour of the place. That will give us an idea of what to look for.”

  “I still have a little bit of searching to do in order to get all the architectural drawings of the church,” Charlie said as he pulled the truck next to Sin’s vehicle.

  “Let’s meet at four p.m. at the hangar, compare thoughts, and figure out the next step,” he said.

  Sin leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for always being there for me.”

  Charlie blushed. “Get out of here and be careful.”

  Sin opened the door and slid out of the truck. “You, too.”

  19

  Sin knew that Carmelita had friends who worked at the orphanage, so she asked Carmelita to call and arrange a tour for her. At ten a.m., she was dressed and headed out the door.

  “Do you mind if we go with you?”

  Sin turned and saw Carmelita and Maria standing behind her.

  “Maria has some friends at the orphanage and I have not seen my friend Rosa in a while. I thought we could all go together,” Carmelita said.

  Sin smiled at them both. “Sounds like a plan.”

  They were greeted—if you can call it that—at the front door of the orphanage by a security officer. He let Carmelita and Maria pass, but stepped in front of Sin as she stepped forward.

  Sin read his name tag—York.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  Sin stared at him through her mirrored lenses, eyeing the guard from top to bottom, wondering if he could have been one of the ‘pros’ she saw last night. “O’Malley,” was all she said.

  “ID?”

  Sin pulled her military ID from her pocket.

  “Pff, so you’re the war hero everyone’s been talking about,” the guard groaned. “Can’t seem to find your name on the list,” he smirked, trying to give her a hard time as he flipped pages on his manifest.

  “It comes after ‘N’ and before ‘P’,” Sin said sarcastically.

  The guard checked off the name and opened the door. “Bitch,” he mumbled as Sin passed by.

  She slapped her hip and glared at the guard through her glasses as if to say, kiss my ass.

  Carmelita introduced Sin to Rosa, who led them to the great room which overlooked the water with large plate-glass windows.

  Maria released Sin’s hand and ran over to a group of girls in the far corner of the room. The jumped up and down, giggled, and hugged when they saw each other.

  “Maria will be fine with her friends while we see the rest of the orphanage,” Carmelita said.

  Sin nodded and followed the two older women into the back hall.

  As they began the tour, everything seemed legit. Sin couldn’t find anything or anyone who appeared to be out of place, but the guard at the front door never strayed far from her mind.

  “Why are there guards at the entrance?” Sin asked. “Isn’t that a bit extreme for an orphanage?”

  “I can see how it would seem so,” Rosa smiled, “but many of these girls come from tragic pasts. Prophet Heap wanted to be sure not just anyone could walk in.”

  Or out, Sin thought.

  As the tour continued, Sin noticed that the security didn’t extend much past the entrance.

  “Can we see the dormitory?”

  Rosa smiled at Sin and led them up to the third floor. “The girls are responsible for making their own beds,” she said, “so I’m sorry if it’s a bit messy.”

  Sin eyed the room looking for any discrepancies—anything that was incongruent to the environment. Again, she saw nothing.

  “You have a wonderful facility,” Sin said to Rosa. “How many girls do you house?”

  “It depends,” Rosa answered. “Right now we have twenty-eight girls, but we have had as many as thirty-five and as few as nine.”

  “How do the girls get adopted out to families?”

  “We are registered
with all the adoption agencies and because we are on U.S. soil, the girls get placed fairly quick.”

  Sin nodded and smiled. “I noticed that most of the girls looked Central American in ethnicity, how do the children come to the orphanage?”

  “Come,” Rosa said, “we will have some lunch and I will answer your questions.”

  They ate with the girls in the dining hall. Sin watched more than ate. When the guards walked in for lunch, the girls’ demeanor didn’t change. There was no fear in how they acted. This made her happy and angry at the same time. She could sense evil in the men, yet the girls sensed nothing.

  If they had been abused by any of these men, they would shy away from them, she thought.

  Rosa went on to explain how the girls came to the orphanage. Her words echoed Heap’s. The girls were either orphans in their native countries or their families could not afford to feed them. Either way, they were brought to the United States for a chance at a better life.

  Sin wiped her mouth with her napkin and asked where she might find the ladies room.

  “Through the door and to the left,” Rosa answered.

  Sin excused herself and walked through the door. The short hallway split. On the left were bathrooms and on the right another door. Sin looked around, saw no one, and tried the doorknob.

  Locked.

  She slipped into the bathroom and into a stall. There, she pulled a pick kit out of her boot. Back in the hall, she had the door opened in seconds. She slowly opened the door being careful of trip wires or any signs of an alarm. On the other side of the door, she found a staircase—a steep staircase leading down. Carefully, she stepped down the wooden stairs trying not to make any sound. At the bottom, it was pitch black. She used her cell phone screen as a light. The room was musty, wet, and dank. The floor was sand. She could smell the shoreline.

  She shined her light on the walls—bare cinder block. Between some of the blocks, there were slim openings. The closer to the bottom, the more frequent the openings. Sin thought for a moment. The bottom floor is enclosed just for esthetics. It’s strictly used for storm surge run-off.