by Domino Finn
"Well, I'd like to keep that confidential until the time is right."
"Of course, sir. Are you representing national or international interests?"
I smiled. "South Florida, through and through."
"Happy to hear it, sir." It sounded like she was writing something down.
The groundskeeper who spotted me took another hard look my way. He headed to the house and knocked on the door. I tensed.
"Ma'am, I was hoping to speak to Commissioner Alvarez as soon as possible."
"I'm afraid that won't be possible before the fund-raiser. The commissioner is visiting with partners in the Cayman Islands, but I can schedule you for next week. I do need to know your name and affiliation, of course."
I made crackly noises with my mouth and ended the call. In retrospect, it was probably more obvious than just hanging up.
Son of a bitch. The Cayman Islands. Rudi's bank account that harbored the funds from his illicit real estate scheme was in the Caymans. But that wasn't all. I pulled out the slip of paper under Emily's picture. The boat that had been found with my blood all over it. It was registered in the Caymans. How had I missed that link before?
The front door opened and the groundskeeper pointed me out to a man in a suit. A skeleton security staff had been left behind. So much for the stake out.
As the man in the suit made his way across the yard, I tossed the burner out the truck window and sped away before he could get a clear look. But it wasn't him I was worried about.
I knew Evan about as well as you could know a person. We'd been through a lot growing up. He was still my friend, but he was also a family man and cop. No doubt he was working on tracking my phone the second I'd hung up.
Let them. The police would wind up at Rudi's house, and the warning would be clear: come to my house and I'll come to yours.
Chapter 11
My pickup is registered in the name of the old man who sold it to me. It was a cash transaction without transfer of ownership. That makes it untraceable to me. As long as no one links me to the vehicle, I can drive around without fear of a BOLO. I doubted the security guard at the commissioner's house knew who I was or caught the make of the truck, much less the plate. That was good enough for me as I made my way down South Dixie Highway, planning a Caribbean vacation.
US 1 is the longest north-south highway in the country, running all the way from the Canadian border in Maine to the southernmost tip of the United States in Key West. The Florida Keys are practically Caribbean islands themselves. Some large, some small; some built from trash; all connected by the land bridge that is US 1. The northernmost and largest of the islands is Key Largo. Less than an hour out of Miami, that's where I was, pulling into the driveway of a charter company.
The building had seen better days. Broken windows shoddily repaired with plywood, a warped wooden sign with an unreadable company logo, a mailbox rusted by the salty coastal air—I was beginning to think I should've called before making the trip down.
I hopped out of the truck and made my way to the porch. Old floorboards creaked beneath me, but I wasn't sure there was anyone home to note my presence. I was proven wrong by the sound of a shotgun pumping its action.
"Cisco Suarez," came a shrill voice from behind the screen door.
I put my hands up slowly and peered inside. I couldn't see anyone in the darkness. I let the black leak into my eyes again, and the interior began to illuminate.
"Don't you be trying that shadow squat with me, brujo."
I pulled my head back, surprised the woman had noticed. Even with my enhanced sight, I could barely make her out through the dusty screen door. "Just trying to get a good look at you, is all."
"Hmph. Why didn't you say that? Take a step back."
I did.
The door swung open and Carla emerged. I was right about the shotgun. Ten or twelve gauge, double barrel, pointed at my chest.
I sighed loudly. "You know that's next to useless against me, right?"
"I like the weight of it all the same," she replied.
Despite being in her mid fifties, Carla was a woman of action. Underneath her sun-leathered skin were tight, ropey muscles. She had tan hair that barely reached her eyes or covered her ears, and a hard face that meant business.
"What in Jesus' asshole do you want?" she snapped.
Oh, and she had a mouth only a deaf mother could love.
But what in Jesus' asshole did I want? Well, Carla was a smuggler, or had been when I'd known her years ago. She had a boat and she was an illusionist, which were a couple things I really needed right now.
Sure, I could turtle up in my hideout and hope the silvan magic would keep me out of sight, but I wouldn't make forward progress sitting on my ass. Two weeks of failed stake outs attested to that. Better to look for a needle in a Caribbean island.
"You still taking on clients?" I asked.
Her eyes hardened. "I went to jail 'cause of you."
"You went to jail because you tried to smuggle out a poser Jamaican witch doctor who robbed charms from my partner."
Her head shot back, as if she'd never thought of the situation with as much clarity before. "You blew up my boat and crashed it into a Navy vessel!"
"Whoa, whoa. You crashed your boat after my powder blew it up. I wasn't the one who took it onboard. Besides, the fire burned away the drug stash I know your client was carrying. You could say I saved you from trafficking charges."
"Hmph. That's a fist up my ass if I ever had one."
Breathtaking imagery. "Carla, what are we talking about here anyway? You paid a fine and were put on probation. It could've been much worse. From the looks of it, you're still in business."
"The business of taking a dump," she answered, and I hoped that was colorful language. "I look like I'm making a respectable income here?"
I smiled and pulled a fold of cash from my jeans.
Carla dropped the shotgun to her side. "Shit. Why the hell you wait so long to take those bills out?"
As the old smuggler counted the money, I told her what I needed. She shrugged like it was nothing and counted the cash again. I kept quiet until she finished this time. Better not to make someone holding a shotgun lose count.
Within the hour, Carla walked me to the dock to help load the boat. It was a forty-two-foot yacht. Not a whole lot of upper cabin space but it looked fast. Maybe not luxury, per se, but it was worth a king's ransom compared to the building she lived in.
I was a little uneasy stepping aboard. The last time I walked on a boat, I didn't walk off in one piece. Good thing I had no memory of that incident or I might be afraid of sailing.
"Seas are calm today," Carla said. "Four-foot waves at most. That keeps up, I'll get us there in a day and a half."
I raised my eyebrows. "A day and a half? This thing has an engine, right?"
"Don't be an oaf," she snapped. "This is the fastest I've got. Had to sell my go-fast. Damn shame, too, but radar technology's caught up with 'em anyway."
I chuckled. If there was a living pirate in Key Largo, it was her.
Not only that, but her yacht, the Now You See Me, was a veritable ghost ship. It was trim and clean and didn't have spirits of creepy British children, but Carla's magic ensured it had a few tricks. Namely, her illusory spellcraft could make it practically disappear, given the right conditions.
We loaded up and hit the high seas. I wasn't much of a sailor, but after years of death and weeks of being a fugitive, being on the open ocean was a relief. Birds hovered on the breeze overhead. Dolphins swam in the aqua below. I watched the sun set over the open water and deepen the landscape to a brilliant cerulean, beautiful yet mysterious.
But even though the water was relatively calm, it was choppier than the ride in my pickup. My insides tightened and I began focusing less on the beauty of the earth and more on keeping my lunch down. And that's a slow way to pass the time.
We stopped to refuel in Havana, then again in Cape Antonio, before making a beeli
ne to Grand Cayman. The stops were a welcome break from the monotony of the sea, but I never disembarked. I hid in the shadows and got what sleep I could.
By the next morning, my excitement had built again. I made a point to watch the sunrise, and the water was a deeper green than anything I'd seen in my life. We were almost at our destination and I was already getting nostalgic about the journey. A little sea sickness is a welcome price to pay for shoving the stresses of reality aside.
Carla sat on her captain's chair picking at the calluses on her bare feet. Despite that, I tried to capture the serenity by staring into the sea. But it was gone already. My elusive white whale, sunken in the depths of my burgeoning investigation.
The Covey. The remaining living members were in a holding pattern. Hiding from me. Except for Emily. She was in plain sight but, in many ways, the most difficult to deal with.
Em. The love of my other life. After going off and dying, I couldn't really blame her for marrying my best friend, but to find out she was part of the Covey? To discover the only reason she ever introduced herself was to manipulate a naive shadow witch into finding the Horn of Subjugation and then steal it for herself? That hit me hard.
Like a sap, I reached for the picture in my back pocket. I was happy to find I'd left it in the pickup. But that didn't stop my thoughts.
In some ways, Emily was a complete stranger now. For all I knew, she was an animist herself. But there were still some acts I couldn't reconcile, some facts that made me believe Emily wasn't all bad. She'd apologized about my parents, claiming not to have a hand in that. She'd named our daughter after me and given her the doll I gifted. These were strange actions for a heartless conspirator.
Maybe I was just another sucker who wanted to believe, allowing remnants of my love for her to cloud my judgment. But it was what it was. Emily still had a hold on me, still tugged my heartstrings. She sat at home everyday, out in the open, but how could I harm the mother of my child?
Women, am I right?
Her half sister was a different matter. Kita Mariko, the offspring of an Australian real estate tycoon and a Japanese mistress. Em never told me about her half sister, but I connected the dots. Really, the dots were connected for me. Shoved into my face by the poltergeist of their dead father. The cover story presented his death as an accident, but Kita and Emily had conspired in his death to take over his land holdings in the Caribbean. How Kita had forced her sister into that situation was beyond me.
The man was another victim of my undead hand. Another drop of guilt in my bucket. Thinking over the connection of their well-traveled father convinced me that coming out here was all the more necessary. But I had to be careful.
Kita Mariko is Commissioner Alvarez's chief of staff, but she's much more than a bureaucrat. She's an animist. A paper mage. Interesting magic and the reason I now always carry flammable shells on hand. After our confrontation at the commissioner's house, I suspected Kita was the brains of the operation. Maybe she'd brainwashed Emily somehow.
There I went again. Looking for excuses.
But the Horn, killing me, killing their father—they were all just plays at something larger. Something that entailed buying a politician and the soon-to-be mayor of Miami. As the man's chief of staff, Kita was invaluable. Without her around, the Covey's influence was neutralized.
That only left Tyson Roderick, the ousted head of security for the commissioner. The real mystery behind the man was why a volcanic elemental was engaged in Earthly politics.
Elementals are strange creatures. I'd butted heads with Tyson. Killed him even. But that just banished him to his plane temporarily. Nothing stopped him from coming back again. Only so far, he hadn't come back. And if he didn't come to me I could hardly go to him. Not where he lives.
Opposed to the Nether, elementals are from the Aether. It's a steppe above ours. A place of primal beings. Jinns, dragons, and elementals. The Aether is made of fire and air, and it's a place humans cannot tread.
I sulked as I watched the water and the deep. The Nether is the polar opposite of the Aether. The Nether is made of earth and water, a land of silvans, giants, and fiends. Much more familiar to our kind. Much more tangible and material.
I considered my empty palm, scarred with blackened lines making up arcane shapes. The wound had scabbed over with a black crust. I hoped that meant my enhanced healing was going to work on it, but I wasn't optimistic. This was no ordinary burn.
Not ten feet from me, a serpent-like creature wriggled under the turquoise waves. Its timing, as I pondered the Nether, was impeccably creepy. Just as mythical creatures can venture through rabbit holes on land, Nether beings live beneath the sea as well. They're all around us. Under us. But they know how to stay out of sight. After my silvan curse, I knew to stay out of the Nether as well.
Carla stomped over to me. "If you're gonna puke, just do it already. I don't want you embarrassing me in sight of land."
I snapped out of my thoughts and noticed the island in view, flat and difficult to see, but taking up more and more of the horizon as we closed in. I quickly ducked below the rail. Time to get down to business.
"I'm fine," I told her. "What's the plan?"
Carla's weathered eyes considered me. "What plan?"
"I mean, how are you gonna get me in? I figure you can make me invisible while I follow you through customs."
"Angel farts," she snapped. "If I could work illusions on people, you think I'd keep this mug?"
I arched an eyebrow. "So, what then? Some kind of Trojan horse play? Or maybe a distraction. I could blow something up."
"Hell, no. What is it with you and explosions? What we're doing is much easier than that." The Key Largo pirate reached into her boat shorts and handed me a passport. "Here you go."
I checked the ID. It was a near-perfect recreation of what I assumed to be a modern passport, complete with a picture of me that I had never posed for. I could sense the ambient Intrinsics emanating from the paper, and wondered what was really printed on it.
"I've never had a passport before," I whispered.
And just like that, Cisco Suarez was official.
Chapter 12
Grand Cayman's not a huge island, but upon leaving the clutches of the expansive sea and sky, it felt like it was all the land in the world. The white sand clashed against the rainbow of blues above and below, but it was far from an idyllic scene of pure, natural beauty. Tourists with sunburns scurried around madly like panicked ants. Locals hawked wares with impolite sales tactics. These were the vacation highlights edited out of movie reels.
Still, the spirit of the original island remained. A scoundrel's sense of adventure, maybe. Or a potential bounty. I couldn't put my finger on it.
Carla's enchanted passport held up. We made it through customs without a second look, and I wondered if the enchantment had a slight charm to it as well. I didn't have a chance to ask the boat captain because she told me to be back at the dock the next afternoon (but not too early 'cause she likes her beauty sleep) and disappeared without another word.
Guess she wanted no part of my trouble. Guess I didn't blame her.
I was now alone in George Town, the capital of the territory. Despite being nowhere near as sprawling as Miami, I was suddenly daunted and wished I had Carla as a tour guide. I could literally start anywhere.
The Cayman Islands, a sunny place for shady people. When a group of three tiny islands in the middle of the Caribbean makes it into the top five banking centers in the world, you know something's fishy. That's not the same thing as illegal, mind you, but it gets pretty close. Huge corporations to private asset holders all enjoy the light and indirect taxation the Caymans provide, but it really comes down to hiding money.
Why is any of this important to me? Well, the paper trail, Sherlock.
Fact the first: As part of my zombie service, I had helped incite a gang war in the voodoo communities of Little Haiti. The public crime wave spiked media attention. Predictably, property valu
es plummeted. My recent break-in to City Hall had caused all sorts of grief (including an up-close-and-personal police raid), but the visit uncovered proof that Rudi Alvarez and his staff, including Evan, had holdings in a Cayman Islands financial services company named Blue Sky.
Fact the second: Along with my gang warfare, I'd assassinated Australian real-estate tycoon Henry Hoover. His wealth went to his daughter Emily Cross. Most of his estate by then had been long squandered, but various properties in the Caribbean, notably the Cayman Islands, were part of the inheritance.
Finally, and perhaps most important, fact the third: Ten years ago I'd boarded a boat for a date with destiny that led to my capture and death. The boat was registered to a defunct charter company on Grand Cayman (think Carla's small-time operation except on this side of Cuba). The business was long gone, but any possible links were worth checking out while I was in the neighborhood.
I scratched my head and considered my options. Bank accounts, real estate, or the boat I'd been murdered on. Try boring, boring, and about damn time I got answers.
Destination in mind, I hit a local rental shop. The Caymans are a British territory so everybody speaks English. Even better, they accept US cash. That made it easy for me to flash my passport and rent a scooter. One pair of plastic sunglasses later and Cisco Suarez was out for a coastal ride, albeit on the left side of the road.
Within twenty minutes, I got my bearings and made it to the address of Stingray Tours, where the boat had been registered. Except the waterside building wasn't a charter company anymore. It was a scuba shop.
I parked my scooter and entered the storefront. Diving gear lined the shelves and a single old man sat behind the counter.
"Hi there," I said, just another unassuming tourist. "You guys rent boats?"
The geezer arched an eyebrow. "We don't do tours."
It was that obvious I didn't belong. I took the news like a champ. Frowning for a second and then pulling back before I overplayed the act, I said, "My father told me Stingray Tours was the place to get a charter."