Crystal Blue (Buck Reilly Adventure Series Book 3)

by John H. Cunningham

  Back to the La Concha. I vaguely heard Zeke call out to me from the moped rental hut, but I was in the elevator before it registered.

  When my computer booted up, I searched for I Support Adoption and found a modest website with pictures of both Crystal and her husband, John. He had movie star looks, no surprise there, with determined eyes and perfect white teeth. I read through his brief biography. He and his two brothers had been adopted at birth by a loving couple unable to have children themselves. The rest was as Crystal had described him.

  Crystal’s biography was almost as skimpy vague, mentioning her past as an executive with City of Hope and her bachelor of arts and law degrees from NYU.

  I had the impression that she must come from an established family but there was nothing in her bio to base it on.

  There was a link to a brief article in USA Today describing the upcoming event, to be held at Foxy’s on Jost Van Dyke. There would be many celebrities in attendance, but the names hadn’t been released yet.

  Foxy’s? There was a small concert venue behind the famous waterfront bar, built for a millennium party intended to feature the Rolling Stones. I couldn’t recall if the concert ever happened, but I’d enjoyed a painkiller or two there in the past. Odd place for a charity concert.

  Elsewhere on the website I read some stats on abortion and adoption…nothing controversial…some photos of happy moms with kids…all straightforward. I clicked the “In the News” tab and found several links to stories about adoption from newspapers all over the world. More statistics, stories of new adoption laws… If there had been threats, I couldn’t imagine why. Adoption was a choice, yes, but not a controversial one.

  I sat up, stretched, ran my fingers through my shaggy hair and looked out the window over Duval Street.

  I was just the charter pilot. Just deliver the woman to St. Thomas, see what else she needs, and find some time to relax. John Thedford will probably turn up before morning and be waiting for us at the seaplane base in Charlotte Amalie.

  With that thought I closed my laptop, shut off the lights, and fell asleep to scattered recollections of the gin-clear waters, powdery white beaches, and colorful buildings of the Virgin Islands… and a glimpse of the cell where I’d spent a hellish few weeks in Hole Town, Tortola.

  OF COURSE WHEN YOU have a long day planned with an early start, you sleep like crap the night before. At least I did. After grabbing a café con leche at Cuban Coffee Queen on Caroline, I climbed back in my Rover and drove down Palm Avenue. I was early, but there was little traffic and the morning was bright, the sky a clear metallic blue, so I took my time and pondered last night’s sudden change in course. Hell, we hadn’t even ordered dinner before the dream charter went south.

  I took a sip of the hot café con leche—“Damn!” I’d burned my tongue.

  The parking lot at the Casa Marina was quiet. I checked my watch—fifteen minutes early. I parked in a handicap spot and sat with a clear view of the main entrance across the entry circle. The hotel had changed hands a few times over the years but I remembered my father saying it had been an abandoned husk in the early seventies. Hard to imagine it as dilapidated given its current grandeur, but then Key West’s history of boom to bust to boom had been as cyclical as Halley’s comet.

  A man in black slacks, white polo shirt, and dark glasses stood near the hotel entrance. He sucked hard on a cigarette and glanced back behind him toward the parking lot. Tall, muscular, hair slicked back. Having a smoke while his girlfriend slept?

  I didn’t think so.

  I followed his gaze toward a black van parked in the passenger off-loading area, but from my angle I couldn’t see if anyone was—

  Crystal walked out of the hotel, two bags in tow. She had on tropical-weight khakis and a purple polo shirt that accentuated her glossy auburn hair, which was up in a ponytail. Smart dress for travel. I reached for the door handle, but what happened next stopped me cold. The guy with slicked-back hair flicked his cigarette and approached Crystal at a trot.

  He said something to her and reached for her bags.

  Crystal pulled the bags back. Slicked-back grabbed her arm.

  I flew out of the Rover, jumped a hedge, and sprinted across the lot. The man now had hold of both Crystal’s arms and was trying to pull her toward the van.

  I rocketed toward them, lowered my shoulder, and speared him from his blind side. All three of us fell to the ground, Crystal screaming.

  Slicked-back grunted but was on his feet, faster than me, hand in his pocket. I shoved Crystal behind me and rolled to my feet, crouched, as he popped open a switchblade.

  “Help!” Crystal yelled.

  The man lunged toward me, the knife slashed toward my neck—

  I ducked, spun to my left, continued in a full circle and caught him with a clean uppercut to the kidney, which bent him over. He grunted something unintelligible, straightened, jumped back, and raised the knife again.

  Damn!

  Crystal screamed again, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed the side door slide open on the black van.

  “What’s going on!” a voice yelled from the hotel entry. “You men there—hey!”

  Slicked-back waved the knife, glanced toward the hotel, back at me, his crooked teeth gritted—

  “Buck! No!” Crystal said.

  “Call 9-1-1!” came the voice from the entry. Slicked-back suddenly turned and jumped into the van, which sped off with him glaring back at us from the open door.

  Crystal ran up behind me, along with an older, round-bellied bellman.

  “Are you okay, Buck?” she said. “Oh my gosh, what was that?”

  “The police are on their way, sir.” The bellman was panting. “Are you all right?”

  With my hands on my knees, I sucked air. My shirt was damp—had he cut me?

  I rubbed my hand across my stomach—café con leche.

  “Was he trying to steal my bags?” Crystal said. “If you hadn’t come when you did—Buck, are you all right?”

  I finally looked up and saw the concern on her face. I stood but spotted something on the ground. A handkerchief?

  “I’m fine.”

  She was shaking, so I put my arm around her and she squeezed my shoulder. “That was crazy! I’ve never—what did he want?”

  I bent down and picked up the cloth. It was moist. I smelled it and my eyes blurred—chloroform.

  To her credit, Crystal wasn’t crying or a puddle of nerves, just concerned and confused. Could this be connected to her husband’s disappearance on St. Thomas? I heard sirens coming from White Street and in a moment of clarity stuffed the handkerchief in my pocket. We needed to get out of Key West and to the Virgin Islands to find out what was going on, not get held up here indefinitely.

  Crystal stood close to me, quiet now, and I guessed she too had connected the dots. I took a deep breath, almost back to normal, and leaned close to her.

  “We need to get going, so let’s keep this simple.” I nodded toward the police car that flew into the parking area, lights flashing and siren blaring.

  She gave me a quick nod.

  “I’m so sorry, folks!” A man in a suit had come from the hotel, the bellman who’d helped defuse the attack next to him. A moment later two policeman appeared in front of us.

  “Someone tried to steal my suitcase.” Crystal spoke up before a question was even asked. “Thank God Buck arrived at the same time.”

  The cops looked at me.

  “Buck Reilly?” the shorter, pudgier one said. It came off like an accusation.

  One cop took a statement from Crystal while the other took one from me. I followed her lead and made the attack seem like a robbery gone awry. I told him about the knife and the bellman coming in the nick of time, which caused Slicked-back to run. No, I didn’t notice the make of the van or license plate. In twenty minutes they were finished and said they’d let us know if they learned anything. Crystal gave her cell number. I told them I could be reached at the La Concha
.

  The manager was still apologizing when we climbed aboard the Rover, now an hour behind schedule.

  “Sure you still want to do this charter, Buck?” She looked straight through the windshield.

  I shifted gears and we made our way down Atlantic Boulevard to A1A. One of my former partner Jack Dodson’s sayings came to mind: A job that starts bad ends bad.

  I swallowed.

  “A paid trip to the Virgin Islands, are you kidding?”

  I caught the hint of a smile out of the corner of my eye.

  And wished I didn’t know from experience that Jack’s sayings almost always came true.

  WE TOOK OFF FIFTEEN minutes after arriving at Key West International Airport, leaving Ray with his mouth agape after I told him Crystal’s husband was missing and she’d just been attacked at the Casa.

  It took nearly an hour of coaxing before Crystal opened up.

  “This had always been John’s dream—the charity, the celebrities, the promotional events—believe me, I had my fill of Hollywood while living there. I went along with it, thinking he’d never pull it off, but I admired his passion.” She sighed. “I’ve learned that when John puts his mind to something, it’s going to happen.”

  “Why adoption?”

  She looked out the window, watching the water shimmer from 15,000 feet up as she talked.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I knew people who’d adopted babies, mostly from abroad, but I just never had any thoughts about it one way or the other. Then, when… one of my… college girlfriends got pregnant, it was an absolute given that she HAD to have an abortion. Sure, she fantasized about having her baby, but there were just no support systems, not to mention the culture of shame that surrounds an unwanted pregnancy—even pro-lifers sometime give a girl a hard time. So adoption was never discussed; it might as well not have been an option. I’m not saying she would have made a different choice, but it really hammered the point home. An unpleasant, binary choice isn’t much of a choice at all.”

  My existence clearly put my birthmother’s choice in the minority.

  “That’s not always—”

  “Her parents would have killed her, Buck. She was going to law school, not nursery school.”

  I let a beat pass.

  “Why hold the event in the Virgin Islands?” I could think of a hundred locations easier to accommodate travelers.

  “My fundraising job taught me a lot about how to get celebrities to do things. It has to be something fun for them, or something that provides a lot of positive exposure. If you can do both, you increase the odds for success.” She shrugged. “Plus I dated one of the top leading men for a while—I learned way more than I ever cared to.”

  Figures. Beautiful woman, living in L.A., high profile job with a well known charity organization. I wondered why it ended but didn’t ask.

  “So why Jost Van Dyke? I love it, but it’s one of the harder islands to reach.”

  She sat up straight in her seat.

  “Last year, John and I took a bareboat sailing trip out of Tortola, no captain, just the two of us. We’d already started ISA and were getting nowhere with our efforts to arouse celebrity interest, so we were burned out. John had just gotten out of a nasty divorce when I met him, and he didn’t exactly leave the federal prosecutor’s office on good terms, so he was pretty down.”

  “Good place to re-evaluate life, those islands,” I said.

  I asked Crystal if his nasty divorce could have led to the threats. She crossed her arms.

  “John’s first marriage was a disaster. His wife was nuts and he found solace in the arms of other women, but nothing happened that would make her want him to disappear—and if he dies, her gravy train ends, so that makes no sense.”

  “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “We first sailed to Norman Island, then Cooper and Virgin Gorda. We took our time and didn’t even talk about anything aside from what we wanted to eat, where we wanted to dive, and what we wanted to drink.”

  She giggled, mostly to herself. I imagined her on the boat, seeing her through her own eyes rather than her husband’s—a smart, beautiful woman who had given up a successful and rewarding career for the man she loved. A pang of envy passed through me. My ex-wife had given up her modeling career for me, temporarily, but that’s because I was making gobs of money. When that ended, she was gone faster than I could count the number of designer outfits she’d left behind.

  Crystal was different. The real deal. Her husband was a lucky man.

  “And then we sailed the northern coast of Tortola where we got into a huge fight. John was ready to quit ISA but I knew he was frustrated, scared even—”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Failure. He’d never failed at anything, and suddenly things weren’t going as he envisioned. He just… lost it.”

  She again went quiet. I waited.

  “It was a turning point,” she said. “We’d hung out at Myetts on the Beach at Cane Garden Bay all afternoon and John had nearly drank an entire bottle of rum. He was very upset, drunk, and we both said things that cut to the bone.” I caught her shudder out of the corner of my eye. “That night he said it was over—the charity, that is, but we both knew the failure could drag our relationship down with it. He slept out in the cockpit, and I was awake all night in the cabin. The next morning was our last day, and all we had to do was sail around to Soper’s Hole to drop the boat.”

  She smiled, and even through her distant gaze her eyes sparkled.

  “I‘d been talking all along about stopping off at a tiny little island called Sandy Spit, northwest of Tortola. John must have been feeling guilty, because even though we were supposed to be back with the boat by noon, he steered us there. Turned out to be the loveliest little thatch of sand and palm trees, surrounded by the most cerulean blue water you’ve ever seen.”

  I’d been to Sandy Spit. An acre square, with a deep-water anchorage out front and the softest pink sand in the Virgin Islands. I recalled the feel of my feet sinking into that sand as if the island were swallowing me.

  “We laughed and lounged on that beach, watched our catamaran lift in the gentle surf, and when John glanced at the boat, he remembered he’d promised to bring his former law partner a t-shirt from Foxy’s on the next island over. So we swam back to the boat, took an aggressive course to Foxy’s, and when we got there, the harbor was packed. Foxy’s was bursting with people partying and having the times of their lives.”

  “The old Silver Fox can do that to you,” I said.

  She explained that there had been a reggae festival going on in Foxy’s open-air pavilion. That was the spark for their idea. Voila! The vision they had changed their lives to pursue was resurrected.

  “After that, everything snowballed. We added a diverse all-star board of directors that includes a famous movie director, politicians, and even Viktor Galey, a billionaire industrialist, so the connections we needed gelled, and here we are.”

  A shiver passed up my spine. I glanced over and Crystal still stared straight ahead, smiling at the memory. On the brink of failure, they’d powered through it and were now set to achieve what they had considered impossible. I’d felt equal joy at the start of e-Antiquity. Boy, had I been wrong.

  A tear dripped from Crystal’s cheek onto her purple blouse.

  Why had the ISA event been derailed? Why had these people been targeted? There was either something going on that I didn’t know about yet, or Crystal was holding out on me, or both.

  I concentrated on flying, pushing aside my admiration for Crystal along with my attraction to her. Not a sexual attraction but more of an intellectual connection, something that’s been rare in my life. Flying in a small airplane is an intimate experience, whether you intend it to be or not. And when there’s an emotionally charged discussion with a woman like Crystal…

  I checked our position on my chart, adjusted our airspeed to preserve fuel, which was getting low, and vectored toward Grand Turk.

>   “We’ll be landing to refuel in about fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “That was fast.” She checked her watch.

  It had been three hours since we left Key West. I’d learned a lot about Crystal but had yet to learn a thing about why their event had produced threats, why she’d been attacked, or why her husband was missing.

  I’d dig deeper on our next leg.

  THE TURKS AND CAICOS possess some of the most beautiful waters I’ve ever seen anywhere. The fifty-plus island chain became very popular after the mid-1970’s, and as a result, Providenciales enjoyed a high-rise condo boom that quadrupled lodging opportunities on the island, marred the beautiful white beaches, and lasted until the market crash that killed e-Antiquity. At least Provo had a great airport and FBO.

  We had just enough time to refuel, use the restroom, grab a coffee, and get back in the air. Crystal didn’t seem to notice the clear water, the coconut-laden palm trees, the singsong voice of the fuel jockey. But the brilliance of the light brought out the colors in her hair and made her amber eyes sparkle.

  “So tell me more about the event,” I said once we were in the air.

  She turned toward me but her gaze seemed far away.

  “I’m the guy who doesn’t watch TV, remember?” I smiled. She tried to conjure one herself but didn’t quite succeed.

  “We’re expecting about twenty celebrities to participate in the concert—if they haven’t started dropping out because John’s missing. We’re calling it Adoption AID.”

  “Are they people you met while living in L.A.?”

  “Some. But every one of them has a direct connection to adoption, either as adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, or relatives.” She shifted in her seat and glanced out the side window. “We haven’t announced the complete line-up yet, but the network that’s televising the concert is supposed to start a heavy promotional campaign today.”