“It’ll do just fine.” She paused, holding the clothes and staring at him blankly.
“What?”
She nodded toward the front door. “I just need a minute.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” he said, quickly stepping outside.
She exited the rocking houseboat to see Troy in the driver’s seat of her Honda. She sat down in the passenger’s seat and began rolling up the sleeves of the button down, it too sporting the Tortuga Adventures logo.
“We going somewhere?” she asked, pulling her ponytail through the back of her baseball cap.
“I think I know where I can get us a better boat.”
Troy glanced at the magnetometer printout in Megan’s lap.
“And a computer to find out more about those readings.”
Vince Pinzioni woke up to the sloshing of waves against the side of his boat. He put his hand to his forehead and massaged his aching brow.
“Oh hell,” he muttered.
He looked around the cabin of his boat. Empty. Troy and Megan must’ve brought her in when he passed out. He dragged himself out of bed and climbed the steps up to the deck. The weather was turning harsh and he thought about calling the dock to get his boat lifted up out of the water. Lying sideways between the dashboard and the windshield was Megan’s bottle of rum, also empty.
He rolled his stiff neck and tossed the bottle idly into the water. He sat down heavily in the captain’s chair and closed his eyes.
“Hell, how much did I drink?” he said aloud.
A quiet ping opened his eyes. The G.P.S. unit was flashing on his dash. He thumbed through the coordinates they had traveled and was surprised to see that they had veered away from the course he’d remembered taking before the rum. Apparently, Troy and Megan had a destination of their own in mind when they had departed.
He clicked open his cellphone.
“Yes?” the voice asked.
“You ain’t gonna believe dis,” Vince said into the receiver.
11
Sunset Pier
Former NYPD Detective Joe Bond was on the phone with an angry Miami socialite trying to explain why her sugar daddy was sitting in the processing cell of Key West’s police department. Apparently, sniffing a line of blow right in front of God and everybody at Club Opium is okay on South Beach. Things were definitely relaxed here in Key West, but you don’t just do your coke on the bar at the Hog’s Breath Saloon.
Joe’s partner, Steve Haney, rapped lightly on the glass office door and popped his head in around it. He was a relatively new detective with just over two years of service in the Keys following his five years of uniformed service in Coconut Grove. He was a big man with a predilection for short-sleeved Tommy Bahama shirts. The only problem with being a big man was that he perspired quite readily in the island heat and his expensive silk shirts did nothing to contain the sweat… or the smell. As it was, he presently had a tiny beading of sweat under his eyes and was beginning to form a glistening sheen on his shaved bald scalp.
“You’re not gonna believe this!” he mouthed silently.
Joe held up a hang on a second finger.
“Yes ma’am,” he said into the receiver. “He will be able to post bond. Yes ma’am, you can come and get him this afternoon. I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am.”
He hung up the phone.
“Geezus, man,” he shook and his head at Steve, “these people think they can get away with anything.”
“Dude, you gotta come check this out. You’re not gonna believe what some guy fished up off of Sunset Pier.”
Joe and Steve rode down to the pier in the station’s newest patrol car, a fully electric Toyota Highlander. Joe hated it; he wanted to hear something when he turned the key, a rumble, a knock, a screech, anything. The electric just booted up.
When they reached the world famous Sunset Pier, a small crowd had gathered… just five or six people. With the tourist evacuation, Key West had become a virtual ghost town. A crusty old fisherman was talking with two uniformed police officers. His beard was silver and scruffy; his face was leathered and gaunt.
“It’s all I caught all damn day,” Joe heard the old man saying.
One of the officers saw the detectives approaching and held out the man’s catch of the day. Joe pulled on a surgical glove and took what simply appeared to be a small black box from the officer. A pang of excitement gripped him as he turned it over and inspected it. Though it was covered in many months’ worth of ocean sludge and grime, it was obviously a broken G.P.S. device.
Joe looked at the fisherman. “Sir, we thank you for calling us about this.”
“Nothin’ to me,” he said, “I almost threw it away; I don’t want the damn thing. Can’t eat it.”
Steve stepped around Joe and pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. He held it out to the fisherman.
“Here ya go, Gerald.”
“I don’t want your damn charity,” he growled.
“Gerald, take it,” Steve said, shoving the money in the old man’s shirt pocket. “Consider it a reward.”
He grimaced but made no move to give the money back. He nodded and walked back toward the pier.
Joe shot a puzzled look at Steve. “You know that guy?”
“He’s local, no place to go really,” Steve said quietly. “Came down to the Keys looking for escape and all he got was the cage-less prison of homelessness.”
“Poetic, Steve.” Joe turned his attention back to the G.P.S.
He pushed the power button, and it seemed to spark to life, but just for an instant before it fizzled back into silence.
“We have to get this back to the lab,” he said. “You have a bag?”
“Got one in the car.”
“Okay, let’s go.” Joe turned to the officers. “Guys, let me know if you have any more info here, and I’ll get a statement from each of you back at the office.”
They both nodded and walked away. As he stepped into the cruiser, Joe radioed the station. “Jill, get me the Johnson file. I need to know if we had any details about the G.P.S. the boys had on their boat.”
“Roger that.”
“You think this is linked to Skipper’s boys?” Steve asked as they booted up the electric car.
“I dunno,” —Joe pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to the office— “but it’s pretty coincidental if you ask me. When was the last time someone pulled a G.P.S. unit out of the water?”
“Good point, but that was months ago.”
“Almost a year, but it’s the only link we have right now. Maybe the lab will turn something up.”
In the original findings, the investigators had discovered that Skipper Johnson’s boys, Randy and Mark, had rented the boat from a local deep sea fishing outfit. Joe made a few calls and traced the unit back to Captain Mark’s Maritime Marlin Expeditions. Captain Mark claimed that there was only one type of G.P.S. unit in all of his boats, a Northstar 952DW Chartplotter. They were top of the line and recorded up to ten of the most recent trips plotted on them. That way, they could remember and return to the best fishing grounds of the season.
Joe picked up the phone and dialed the lab. Lisa Carlson, the FSU lab intern, answered the phone.
“Whadda ya got for me?” Joe asked her.
It had only been a couple of hours, but Lisa had turned out to be a whiz with such things and produced results in a flash.
“I was able to salvage the hard drive. It seems to be dry and in working order. I would guess that we can put it into a new unit and it should work just fine.”
“Nice,” Joe said. “I’ll get Steve to run down to the marina and pick one up from Captain Mark.”
“Who’s Captain Mark?” Lisa asked.
“Just a boat owner who might belong to this unit. Got anything else?”
“Well, I did find a partial print on one of the batteries inside, but it probably just belongs to Captain Mark,” she said. “I’m checking against the C.I.A. and local databases to see if we can get a match.�
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“Excellent,” Joe said. “Let me know when you have anything else.”
“Will do.”
He clicked the receiver button once to hang up with Lisa and dialed Steve’s extension.
“Yello?”
“Steve, I need you to go down and talk to Captain Mark. We need to borrow one of his Northstars.”
12
Black Depth
George Wyatt sat on the southeast corner of the waterline catwalk of his oil rig, Wyatt 1. The walk down the hundred-plus stairs had taken just long enough that his coffee had cooled to a drinkable level. He had taken off his shoes to let his feet dangle in the warm waters of the gulf.
The full moon reflected off the unusually calm surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The calm before the storm, he thought, both literally and figuratively. The only sound he could hear was the lap of waves against the massive pylons supporting the superstructure. Even the late-night radios of the skeleton crew had been silenced as they drifted off to sleep several stories above. Wyatt was utterly alone.
Unable to sleep, he could barely drink his coffee his stomach was that knotted. Despite having made this rendezvous several times before, it had never gotten any easier, or any more palatable. He thought of unknown kids in the projects of Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth and Baton Rouge and New Orleans strung out on the crap that was about to pass through his rig. He thought of promising young men dying in a hail of gunfire over a few ounces of the drugs that were about to be on the Wyatt 1. He thought of mothers abandoning their children so they could get their next dose of the poison that was about to pass through his hands. His hands.
Why did he always have to help move it? Why did he always have to touch it? It would be easier to stomach if he didn't have to actually touch it; if he was never personally responsible for moving anything even one inch. He suddenly had the urge to wash his hands.
Just a few inches below him was the surface of the water. It might as well have been the top of a mountain. Wyatt was sitting a mile above the next solid surface. Beyond that black barrier laid the last frontier: the unknown, the undiscovered. Sure, he had seen it on sonar readings from a hundred feet above the waterline, but sitting here on the edge made it seem much larger, much bigger, much more overwhelming.
He toyed with the idea of jumping in; of feeling the warm water engulf him and hold him and try to keep him forever, the way it kept so many other things forever. He would have no more stress, no more fear, no more worry. And no more guilt. It would be just him and the deep blue sea until the last breath left his lungs and he followed his drill shaft to the bottom, a drill shaft that to this day had remained as dry as the Sahara, as dry as his bank accounts were becoming. Maybe in his last moments of consciousness, he would get to see for himself what he had seen only on a computer screen.
The faint sound of a twin-turbo propeller speedboat in the distance caught his attention. He sat and listened as the sound grew louder and louder. When it sounded near enough, he produced the high-intensity LED light from his pocket and began to flash it in the appropriate pattern. He heard the sound of the engines change and he knew the boat's pilot had seen the signal. He wiped away the tears he hadn’t realized had crept into his eyes.
Within minutes, Hector Martinez was slowly moving his boat into position between the pylons. He was careful to keep all lights off, save for a dim few that wouldn't be visible from a distance.
“Señor Wyatt, cómo estás, mi amigo?” Hector said with a grin.
“Hello Hector.” Wyatt was beyond feigning any pleasure at seeing him.
“I did not think I would beat the hurricane this week, no?”
“You did, though. How much do you have this week?”
“Two hundred kilos, give or take a few.” Saying give or take a few was Hector’s way of offering to lose a kilo or two to Wyatt. For a price, of course.
For a split second, George Wyatt wavered at the possibility. Damn, the money would really help. If he wasn’t up to his ass in this deal with the government, he might be swayed. Suddenly, it registered how much Hector had said he was delivering.
“Two hundred kilos? Where the hell am I supposed to hide more than four hundred pounds of cocaine until the pickup? You never said it would be that much.”
“And I never said it wouldn’t, Señor Wyatt,” Hector said in a quiet, serious tone. “Are you rejecting the delivery?” Hector placed his right hand flat on the front of his shirt, just above the beltline. Wyatt knew there was probably a gun underneath.
Wyatt also knew Hector was all business now. Rejecting the delivery was as close to legalese as this illegal business got. If Wyatt said yes, there would be immediate repercussions from all fronts, assuming Hector didn't just shoot him out of principle. All anyone would find would be a few drops of blood on the catwalk, if that.
“No Hector, I'm just saying—”
“Good. Now, we get this unloaded.”
On the storage deck of the Wyatt 1, George Wyatt and Hector Martinez carried the last of the cocaine from the freight elevator to a never-used closet in the corner of a never-used room. He replaced the dusty boxes that had been stacked there in such a way that no one would see anything unless they really went prowling around. It was bad enough to move it, but this time Wyatt had to store the stuff, perhaps for days or more. This deal just keeps getting worse, he thought.
“Where is Stingray?” Hector asked.
Stingray was the name of the contact that usually showed up the same time as Hector to make the exchange. Fitting, Wyatt thought, since Stingrays are poisonous.
“Beats me. All I know is that your other pickup is delayed. Stingray is delayed, and I'm supposed to store this shit until God-knows-when. They don’t tell me anything else. I don’t know when my rig became everyone's freakin’ illegal trading post!” Wyatt realized his voice had grown almost to a scream by the end of the sentence.
Hector remained silent. He waited for the oil rig financier to calm down. “Sounds like they tell you even less than they tell me,” Hector said with a lopsided grin.
Back down at the waterline, it was time to finish business and send Hector on his way. He had already been here a good ten times longer than he usually was, and that was about nine times longer than Wyatt could tolerate him.
“This is for you,” Hector said, turning to Wyatt with a large, locked, nondescript briefcase. “Two thousand per kilo, yes?”
“That's the deal.” Wyatt said, taking the briefcase. He knew the briefcase contained nothing but one hundred dollar bills, bound in ten thousand dollar stacks.
“And this is for Stingray,” Hector said, handing Wyatt a stack of sealed DVDs, each one with a sequential date from the last week written on the face.
Wyatt slid the DVDs into the briefcase. It was as if a great weight was lifted from his shoulders. He knew the payment for this trade would be coming and he could keep the rig running for at least one more month.
“And when she arrives,” Hector added as he stepped into the boat and started the ignition sequence, “tell her that Hector says hello and that my sister had her baby.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said, waving Hector goodbye not a moment too soon. Funny, he thought, that issues like family and children still pervade this business, where it seems like all morality has long since vanished. He again wondered about his own morality. We each of us have our price, he thought.
Two days later, Wyatt found himself sitting on the same catwalk with the same flashlight drinking coffee from the same mug. Only yesterday, he had finally met Hector's drug-running guy and had to help him load the cocaine into his shrimping boat for the ride to dry American soil. Dammit, he’d had to help carry it to the boat again. What the hell was that all about? He idly thought to himself that it was just a way of getting blood on his hands too.
The rough, utilitarian growl of Stingray's boat was unmistakable in the distance. Coast Guard boats always sounded that way. The shady government contact called Stingray deftly maneuvere
d the boat between the pylons and tied it to the catwalk. The engines kept running, and no one came off the boat.
“Sorry I'm late. Something came up. A surprise development sort of thing,” echoed the voice from the boat.
She always wore a black hoodie with a red bandana tied around her face. Only her eyes showed in the narrow slit. Secrecy. Always. He didn’t know who she was and he liked it that way; one more level of self-preservation in the plausible deniability.
“That’s fine,” Wyatt said. He handed over the stack of DVDs, along with a portable hard drive bearing the unmistakable logo of Wyatt Oil Company. “These are for you.”
The DVDs he supposed were some classified info from a deep cover contact in Cuba, and the portable hard drive a detailed analysis of a particular set of coordinates Stingray had given him. He’d taken the time, as he usually did, to copy the DVDs to his rig’s computer… as a precaution. If anything ever went down, he’d at least have some bargaining chips.
“Wonderful,” came the response. “I’ll be sure and send another memo to my friend at the IRS. Keep this up and they will owe you money.”
Wyatt forced a chuckle though he didn’t feel like laughing. He wouldn’t be in this damn below-board business if it weren’t for the IRS, the same IRS that would never see a dime of the money he was getting from Hector Martinez. He was a sliver away from shutting down the rig until Stingray had come along with this undercover deal. It still made him sick to his stomach that he was involved in this, but if it bought him more time to strike oil, he might be able to do away with all this crap. All this cloak and dagger certainly didn’t make him feel at all like James Bond.
“Are you getting ready for Daniel?”
“Eh, I think it’s going to pass east of us, and bang up around Destin.”
“Perhaps. Be careful, though, we have a lot riding on this rig.”
“Obviously,” Wyatt said, glancing at the portable hard drive.
The Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Series Boxset Page 27