Barracuda

by Sigmund Brouwer

  David patted the man’s hand.

  “Maybe leaving everything I have to that charity will make a difference,” Greene said. “It’s the best I can do. Those diamonds. Did you find them? They’re worth a lot of money. That can really help the kids in the charity.”

  “The diamonds,” David said. “We—”

  Greene let out a gasp. His chest stilled. It didn’t rise again.

  “He’s dead,” Webb whispered. “Dead.”

  David put his arm around Webb’s shoulders. “Sometimes dying is easier than living.”

  SIXTEEN

  Two hours later, Webb sat with his grandfather on the patio outside their cottage. It was a warm, cloudless night, and the moon was visible through the leaves of the palmetto trees. The buzz of insects made for a comforting blanket of background noise.

  “I’m tired but not sleepy,” David said. “You?”

  “Tired but not sleepy,” Webb said.

  Paramedics had arrived within minutes of the 9-1-1 call. They had confirmed time of death. Webb and his grandfather had been asked to wait until police arrived and had been told that was standard procedure. They had waited in the dining room until police confirmed that the death was not suspicious and then waited until someone from a local funeral home arrived to handle the body.

  “How do you feel?” David asked.

  “Tired but not sleepy.”

  “That’s a way to avoid my question, right?”

  “Right,” Webb said.

  “Not one to discuss your feelings.”

  “Answering that would require discussing feelings,” Webb said.

  “That’s why you haven’t talked about the video from your dad?” David asked.

  “I haven’t watched it,” Webb said. “There was the barracuda, then the cut on my arm, then the trip to the medical clinic, then the visit to Greene and then the rest of the evening.”

  “If you’re tired but not sleepy,” David said, “I’d suggest a walk to watch it. It’s important to hear what your dad has to say. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked. Because I’m not sure you’ve ever had a chance to deal with his death.”

  That’s when it hit Webb. Of the six grandsons, his grandfather had chosen Webb for a trip to Florida to sit at a dying man’s bedside. Because David wanted Webb to talk about his own dad.

  No way, Webb thought. He wouldn’t talk about that with anyone.

  Webb tried to swallow his anger at his grandfather and said, “Are you curious about the nanny cam?”

  The moonlight cutting through the palmetto leaves gave his grandfather’s face a ghostly appearance and softened the older man’s expression. Still, Webb could see that his grandfather was debating whether to push Webb about his father. As the silence continued, Webb was okay with not trying to fill it.

  Then David said, “While your stubbornness makes me want to bang my head against a wall, I admire and respect it. Last chance. Want to talk about your father?”

  Webb said, “Are you curious about the nanny cam?”

  His grandfather gave a theatrical sigh. “I am curious about the nanny cam.”

  “While we were waiting for the police,” Webb said, “I went to the bathroom down the hall. It took less than a minute to figure out how it works. And yes, it’s set up to record conversations.”

  “To confirm,” David said. “Someone leaves the nanny cam there. Lets it pick up conversations. Then picks up the camera later?”

  “I can’t see how it was set up to send out recordings wirelessly.”

  “So whoever did this needed to be able to come in and out on a regular basis?”

  “Yes,” Webb said. “Maybe had a couple of identical nanny cams and switched them out.”

  “Leading to another question. Why? And I think I can answer that. If Greene was babbling things because of his painkillers, that person was hoping to learn something from the babbling, right?”

  “Like where Greene might have some money hidden?” Webb asked. “Or the diamonds?”

  “Yes,” David answered. “Which tells us something else about the person who put the nanny cam there. He knew enough about Greene to suspect there was a secret. That would mean someone close to Greene.”

  “Or she,” Webb said.

  “Greene’s live-in nurse?”

  “That’s the obvious guess,” Webb said. “Plus, while I was in the bathroom I replayed one of the recordings. Just enough to know that we should give it a good listen.”

  “Well then,” David said, “why don’t we?”

  Webb found the almost hidden switch on the back of the frame that played back audio, and they both leaned forward to listen.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was the nurse’s voice. Yvonne Delta. And Greene’s voice. Webb easily pictured the words as if they had been transcribed.

  Delta: I want to make you more comfortable. Is there anything I can do?

  Greene: Stop coming to me with questions. I have given you enough already. I don’t owe you more. I have nothing left to say.

  Delta: You are lying to me. Last night, in your sleep, you talked about it again. The diamonds. Where are the diamonds?

  Greene: Woman, I put the money in the bank years ago. After the war. You know that. Everybody knows that.

  Delta: There is more.

  Greene: More?

  Delta: The diamonds. You talked about diamonds.

  Greene: No. No diamonds!

  Delta: You’re lying to me. You still have diamonds from that man. The man you drowned.

  Greene: I…did…not…drown him.

  Delta: You let him die. That is the same. You ran with his money and his diamonds and you let him die.

  Greene: Please. Let me die in peace. After all that you have bled from me, at least give me that in return.

  Delta: Where are the diamonds? When you babble, you talk about diamonds in different places.

  Greene: No diamonds.

  Delta: That is not what you say in your dreams. I’ve looked where you first said they were. But that’s not the place. Where are they hidden?

  Greene: I am so tired.

  Delta: Where are they hidden?

  [silence]

  Delta: Jonathan?

  [silence]

  Delta: Jonathan?

  [silence]

  Webb clicked off the switch and set the picture frame down. He became aware again of the buzzing of the night insects.

  “Huh,” David said.

  “Hysterical reactions like that don’t help anybody,” Webb said.

  David snorted at Webb’s sarcasm. “You and me, we don’t like showing a lot of what we’re thinking.”

  “Don’t even like talking about how we don’t like showing what we’re feeling,” Webb said. “How about talking about Yvonne instead? There was a lot in that conversation.”

  “She’s been blackmailing him, it sounds like,” David said. “For years. So she knew he’d let a man die and took advantage of it.”

  “It also sounds like she believes the diamonds exist,” Webb said.

  David shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me if they had been there once. Do you know what Prohibition was?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t hold me to getting the dates exactly right,” David said, “but a little less than a hundred years ago, the government made it illegal to make or sell any kind of alcohol. Fortunes were made by people willing to smuggle it into the United States. They were called rumrunners. When Prohibition ended in the 1930s, rumrunners could build those fortunes in other illegal ways. They dealt in cash. Diamonds too, I guess. Much easier to carry diamonds than gold.”

  “But maybe not so easy to bring diamonds into a bank and make a deposit.”

  “That would be my guess. We know that Jonathan waited until after the war to put that money in the bank, telling everybody he earned it during the war. I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept the diamonds hidden.”

  “And then talked about it because of the painkillers.”


  “I don’t think it was an accident that Yvonne was his housekeeper,” David said. “And I think we’ll need to talk to her.”

  “Tonight?” Webb asked.

  “Tomorrow,” his grandfather answered. “Tonight I’m asking you as your grandfather to do that one thing for me. Go listen to what your dad wanted you to hear.”

  Webb gave his grandfather a questioning look.

  “Many times in his last months, he told me that he wanted you to have a great father,” David said. “He was hoping your mom would eventually remarry and that your stepdad would be everything that he had wanted to be for you. He made the video to be able to talk to you if that didn’t happen. He asked me not to show it to you if you had a great stepfather, because he didn’t want to get between you and that person. But he asked that if someday I felt you needed to see the videos…”

  David took a deep breath. “You won’t talk about it, but I know what you have at home isn’t the father he wanted for you. So why don’t you give your dad a chance to be that father? He made more than a few videos, talking to you as if the two of you were sitting on a porch. Advice and questions. Just listen, okay? If you like this first video, I’ll get you the others.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Webb thought he was alone, but he was wrong.

  He sat on the trunk of a long, fallen mangrove, with his sandaled feet on the sand. The breeze felt good across his face. He had the iPod in his hand, and he was working up the courage to view the video.

  “Hey,” came Kristie’s voice, soft in the night air.

  Webb slid the iPod into his pocket as he stood and turned.

  She was almost at the mangrove trunk.

  “Hope I didn’t make you jump,” Kristie said.

  “Hey,” Webb said. “Nice to see you.”

  “I was on my usual walk,” she said. “I saw you leaving the cottage and I followed. Is that okay?”

  She didn’t wait for Webb’s answer. She moved to the mangrove trunk and sat on it. She grabbed Webb’s arm and pulled him down so that he was sitting beside her. She leaned her shoulder against Webb’s shoulder, and he caught the trace of perfume in the air.

  Wow, he thought. This feels so good.

  “I heard about Jonathan Greene,” she said. “I heard you were there. That must have been horrible.”

  That’s what Webb would have thought if someone had told him ahead of time that he would be with a person when that person died. Except it hadn’t turned out like that. He’d learned that dying was part of living.

  “I think,” Webb said, “he was glad not to be alone.”

  That, Webb realized, would be the hardest part. Not to have someone nearby, especially if you were afraid or if you weren’t ready. It made him think of his dad. Webb didn’t even know if someone had been right there when his dad died. Had his mom been there at that moment, or had he been alone? He would ask his grandfather.

  “Was Greene talking or anything?” Kristie asked.

  “Anything?”

  “People say he had treasure hidden somewhere in the Keys. It would be so cool if you found out something about it. You know, deathbed confession.”

  “Oh,” Webb said. “That kind of anything. I guess if you hadn’t been there, something like that does sound cool. But you know, it seems kind of sacred, when someone moves from life into death. It’s not something you want to make into a campfire story, if you’ve been there.”

  “So he didn’t give out any big secrets?”

  Webb felt a tiny barb of irritation. Hadn’t he just said it wasn’t the kind of thing to turn into a story? Wasn’t she listening? Maybe she didn’t understand, because she hadn’t been there.

  What a huge realization, in your final moments, to know that the journey of life was going to end. It was the kind of realization where you would want to know that you had lived your life as well as you could, and the kind of realization where you would hope you didn’t have any big regrets.

  Then it stabbed Webb, the thought of what his dad might have been thinking in those final moments in the hospital. All these years Webb had been focused only on himself, getting angrier and angrier about the fact that his father had died and left him alone, so that someday a stepfather would step into the situation and home would become a place that wasn’t even close to a home.

  An image flashed into Webb’s head. Of his dad in that hospital bed, opening his eyes at night in a room that had that horrible hospital smell, of his dad feeling his life slipping away, of his dad thinking about a little boy he’d leave behind and of his dad regretting that he couldn’t spend any more time with his little boy.

  Webb felt a choking sensation in his throat. It took him a second to realize what it was.

  “Got to go,” Webb said. His voice felt hoarse.

  “Stay,” she said. She reached for his hand.

  He waved it away. “Got to go.”

  He stumbled away from the fallen mangrove. The choking in his throat became a sob. He hoped she couldn’t hear.

  He was a hundred yards down the waterline when that sob became a heaving motion in his throat, and the tears in his eyes nearly blinded him as he began to bawl in anguish, thinking about all that his dad had faced in those final days and final minutes.

  All Webb could say were three words, over and over again.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry, Dad.”

  When he’d cried himself out alone in the moonlight, Webb reached into his pocket for the iPod and started the video.

  His father’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Hey, little cowboy,” his dad said with a smile, “I sure love you.”

  Webb began to sob again.

  NINETEEN

  Yvonne Delta lived in a small square house across the water on Big Pine Key, a few blocks away from the main commercial strip where Webb had visited the medical clinic the day before. The skin on Webb’s forearm felt tight, but it didn’t throb. That, David told him, was an excellent sign that the cut was not infected.

  Webb had left his grandfather at the outdoor patio of a coffee shop just down from the medical clinic. They had agreed that Yvonne would feel less threatened by a kid Webb’s age than by David and maybe tell Webb more things than she might tell David.

  The address had been easy to find—she was listed in the phone book. Webb had enjoyed teasing his grandfather about how ancient that kind of technology was; after all, who actually picked up paper when you could jump on your device and find the information on the Internet?

  On the sidewalk in front of Yvonne’s house, Webb pulled out his phone and called David, who answered immediately.

  “All good?” David asked.

  “All good,” Webb said. “I’m ready to knock on her door.”

  “I’ll be here,” David said.

  Nothing else needed to be said. They’d already talked about how Webb might begin his questions. Webb didn’t hang up on the conversation. Instead, he slipped the phone into the front pocket of his shirt and left the connection open. David would be listening to every word.

  Webb followed a sidewalk into the front yard of Yvonne’s house, which had a neatly trimmed lawn and huge shade trees. The house had been recently painted and had flower planters on the front steps. But even with the shade of trees in the front yard, Webb felt the heat from the midmorning sun. It had been worse on the sidewalk, with the glare of the sun bouncing off concrete as he walked the few blocks from the café to her house.

  Webb felt sweat on his skin, and he was glad he’d worn a loose shirt. At least the sweat wasn’t showing up in huge wet spots on the fabric.

  He rang the doorbell. He heard approaching footsteps, and then the peephole in the door darkened, so he knew she was looking at him.

  “I’m Jim Webb,” he said to the door. “My grandfather was a friend of Jonathan Greene’s. Remember? We just visited, and you let us into the house a few nights ago. Could I talk to you about something Mr. Greene told us before he died?”


  The door opened. A waft of cool air hit Webb from the interior as he got his first really good look at Yvonne Delta. She was probably twenty years younger than his own grandfather. She was fighting off the years with dark dyed hair. Webb thought that exercise and a sense of fashion might be a better approach, because she was lumpy and in a drab dress. His grandfather, on the other hand, seemed much more vigorous and healthy and took pains to dress with style, so it didn’t matter that his hair was nearly white.

  “I suppose you should come in,” Yvonne said. “Air-conditioning is expensive, and I need to shut the door.”

  “Thank you,” Webb said.

  She pointed him to a chair in the small living room. The furniture was worn and plain. Paintings of animals in natural settings hung on the walls. Webb didn’t see any family photographs.

  Webb pulled the digital photo frame out from inside his shirt and set it on the coffee table in front of him. He watched carefully to see how Yvonne would react.

  “Don’t need to see any of his photos,” she said. “He’s gone and I’m not interested in his life.”

  Cold, he thought.

  “It seemed like you wanted to avoid me and my grandfather during our visits,” Webb said. “Is there a reason why?”

  “What a rude question,” she answered. “My life is none of your business. You said you wanted to talk about Jonathan Greene.”

  Webb picked up the frame again. “He had some secrets, didn’t he?”

  “Everyone does,” she snapped. “And I already told you I’m not interested in photos.”

  Webb was puzzled. He and David had thought the sight of the nanny cam would be a powerful threat to get her to talk. He put it down again.

  “My grandfather asked some questions about you,” Webb told her. “We found out that your father was great friends with Jonathan Greene. They fought in World War Two together. Your father returned to the Keys to become a banker. Greene started his business here.”

  “Common knowledge,” Yvonne said. “For this, you’re wasting my time?”