Wayward Sons

by Wayne Stinnett

  “Sure,” I said. “Since I found that compartment in his bedroom, I’ve been thinking I should check around the rest of the interior too.”

  The next couple of hours, DJ and I combed through every bit of the Gazette we could think to check—from bow to stern and radio mast to bilge. Other than a pair of handguns tucked in odd places, the bundle of papers I’d found earlier, and a baggie of either cocaine or heroin, we didn’t stumble over any secret diaries or deeds to forgotten pieces of land.

  Eventually, we decided our search of Luc’s boat had reached the point of diminishing return. About the only thing we hadn’t done was search the hull below the waterline.

  DJ and I walked out to the cockpit. I turned around and put the key into the lock on the salon door.

  “Well, Luc Baptiste was on plenty of peoples’ lists,” I said, as I turned the key. “At least that packet of papers on Reel Fun tells us that. A guy like him kept a lot of dirt on a lot of powerful people.”

  As I turned around, I noticed DJ completely frozen. Something on the boat next to us had his full attention.

  Over my left shoulder, I saw what it was. A man on the strip of dock off Gazette’s starboard—between Luc’s boat and the fishing trawler I noticed on the way in.

  In the weak light, he looked like he’d just stumbled in from a trop rock festival. His hairy, tanned beer belly popped out from his open Hawaiian shirt, and his long, brown hair made him look like David Crosby coming off a 1969 world tour. Streaked with gray, his beard might be home to a hermit crab or two.

  And he clutched a mean-looking sawed-off shotgun.

  “That’s illegal, you know,” I said, motioning at the gun.

  DJ kicked my ankle. “Shut up,” he hissed.

  “Hands up. Both of ya.” The man’s voice was a tar-laden grumble, like he rose from a rum bottle with a cigarette in his mouth every night when the sun went down.

  Still, we put our hands up.

  “Y’all were smart enough to come in the middle of the night a couple days back,” he said, “when ole’ Nels was sleeping off the beers. But this time, you showed up too early, and now you done pushed your luck too far.”

  “We aren’t who you think we are,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re not.” He hocked a loogie and spat it on the dock. “Sure, you’re cops or something, right? If you’re cops, you show me y’all’s badges.”

  “Do we look like cops? We’re not cops, moron,” DJ said.

  “You gonna call me a moron, son?” Nels asked sarcastically. “I caught the two of y’all breaking and entering into a man’s private property. According to law, I can stand my ground and I’m at liberty to shoot both your asses full of buckshot right here, right now.”

  “That’s not actually how a stand-your-ground law works,” I said. “And even if there is one in the USVI, I don’t think you’ll be able to argue its use when you shoot us with an NFA-restricted weapon.” I nodded toward the shotgun. “Plus, we didn’t break and enter. We used a key.”

  Nels’s jaw twisted like he was chewing gristle, and his eyes burned hotter.

  “Don’t do the cop thing right now,” DJ hissed before turning to Nels. “Look, man I understand why you’re wary of the two of us,” he began. “We’ve seen the inside of Luc’s place—somebody’s been there for sure. But we ain’t robbing it. I mean, if we were, you’re right to say we’re about the two most piss-poor burglars that the Almighty ever made. I left my boat docked right there.” DJ motioned at Reel Fun, behind Nels, but the man didn’t take his eyes off us. “And neither of us is carrying a thing, which seems like bad business sense if we’re a coupla thieves looking to make a profit.”

  “You’re a pair of no-good criminals. Empty your pockets,” Nels said. “Both of y’all.”

  “I’m not emptying my pockets,” DJ grumbled.

  “Just do it,” I whispered back as I turned mine out. I held up my sat phone, showing it to Nels, then my wallet, and then dropped them both onto a seat cushion. I showed him my house keys. “These are mine.” I held the keys high, then brought them low and dropped them on the cushion, as well. “And this is for Luc’s boat,” I said as I held up the small key. “His brother-in-law is a detective for the Puerto Rican Police. A guy named Collat. He gave the key to us.”

  I couldn’t see Nels’s reaction. He didn’t shoot me, at least, so that was something.

  “Now, you.” He motioned the shotgun toward DJ, who turned to me as if I’d knocked on Nels’s window—porthole, I mean—and asked him to come over and stick us up.

  “Go on now, brother, turn ’em out,” Nels ordered. “I ain’t been in the mood to shoot nobody for a real long time, but I’ll always do what I hafta.”

  DJ grumbled, then turned out his pockets. All he had on him were the keys to Reel Fun.

  “All right, so you ain’t got nothing stolen in your pockets. You two boys are headed in the right direction,” Nels said, lowering the shotgun, but not to the point that he couldn’t swing it up on us in a heartbeat.

  I slowly lowered my hands.

  “Did you know Luc Baptiste?” I asked.

  “He was my next-door neighbor. What do you think?”

  “Fair point,” I said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Few days ago,” Nels replied, but it didn’t appear he wanted to talk about that. He had something else on this mind. “I got a question for the two of you.”

  I wasn’t in the place to refuse him, and a little dialog was good for earning trust.

  “You said Luc’s got a brother-in-law who’s a detective with La Uniformada.”

  “Sure did,” I answered.

  “Then why ain’t he out here, poking around? Why’d he send you two?”

  It was then that I realized I’d broken one of Collat’s rules. His only one. I spoke his name.

  But before I answered, Nels seemed to come up with the answer on his own.

  “Shit.” His shoulders slumped, and the shotgun’s choke swayed beside his knee as all the tension drained from his shoulders. For a second, I thought he might tumble backward and splash into the water or whip that thing up and shoot us. “Luc finally got himself into real big trouble, didn’t he? He crossed somebody connected and got himself killed.”

  Our new friend Nels had a lot more to say. And he’d only say it at the nearest bar; a single-story, corrugated steel building with a large patio that was half thatch and half blue tarp. A rusted sign planted in the dirt parking lot read Shell’s Bar and Grill.

  The place was walking distance from the marina—maybe half a block. The location, across Krum Bay from the desalination plant, ensured it would never be featured on any St. Thomas tourism brochures. Even so, it didn’t look nearly as busy as it should have been, given the time of night and the space the building occupied.

  When we walked through the front door, my initial assessment was confirmed. The bar was big enough to hold a couple hundred people, but as I scanned the room, I estimated no more than two dozen people inside.

  A bouncer sitting on a bar stool across from us nodded at Nels. He was easily as tall as me, and twice as wide.

  “You bringin’ some new friends tonight, Mister Nels?” He grinned like a schoolyard bully, laying a trap for the squirrely kid.

  “I got friends,” Nels said, as he turned right and kept walking. DJ and I followed him on a path across the barroom. “I got more friends than you, you grinning, silly, little bitch…” The rest was lost in a stream of Nels’s mutters.

  My partner made eye contact with the bartender and raised his hand. “Bucket of beers,” he said. “Don’t care what. Just bring them to our table.”

  “Bucket!” the bartender cried.

  On our left, a pair of sun-burnt tourists laughed over beachy mixed drinks, and a group of local guys who must’ve just got off work sipped beers and played at a tattered pool table with a beer-warped two-by-four standing in for one of the table’s legs.

  “You know I go
t friends,” Nels mumbled. “Got one.” He pushed open a door along the northern wall, leading us out to the patio. “Had one I cared about a lot. Ain’t many people in this world got a friend they cared about a lot.”

  He led us straight to a table along the patio’s leftmost wall, then pulled a chair out, and plopped down. His tanned belly hung out of his open shirt while he glared at the door, his lips twitching like a pair of hooked nightcrawlers while he talked to himself.

  I pulled out the chair opposite him and rested my elbow on the two-by-four rail that the sections of thatch and tarp had been stapled to. DJ stood beside us, leaning on a support post.

  From where we sat, we had a clear sight line to the marina—Nels’s boat, in particular. His eyes shifted that direction.

  Two seconds after we took our table, the door popped open behind me. I turned to see a little waitress trucking our way with a glistening metal bucket in her hand. The necks of green beer bottles poked over the top like fresh-cut celery.

  “There’s my girl!” DJ said with a flirty smile.

  The waitress laughed and shook her head as she placed the bucket on the table between Nels and me.

  “I’m not nobody’s girl,” she said in a light island accent. Maybe Jamaican, maybe Haitian or something else—my ear hadn’t been tuned to all the different accents down this way. “You just keep that in your head, Mr. Light Blue eyes with your big, hungry smile.”

  “I never forget good news,” DJ answered, not breaking his grin.

  She rolled her eyes and laughed. “You got a way about you, don’t you? Is there anything else I can get you gentlemen?”

  “More.” Nels plucked a bottle from the ice and took a long drink. “And keep ’em coming.”

  “Mister Nels, we’re not going to have another incident tonight, are we? Don’t want you scaring off your new friends.”

  “I can handle myself, Beth,” he said, halfway into his bottle. “And these two ain’t my friends. They’re business associates. We’re here to talk about business, okay? I can keep count of my bottles when I got business to talk about.”

  Beth raised her eyebrows at me.

  “We’re in negotiations,” I confirmed, as I dug into my pocket and pulled out a credit card to start a tab. I didn’t see which one. I didn’t care. I handed it to Beth. “My partner and I are looking for some good marina slips to sell to retirees from the mainland.”

  Her eyes cut toward the marina in Krum Bay, then back to me, chopping my cover story to pieces.

  “You could do better than that, Mr. Big Business Man.” She took my card, then nodded in the direction of Nels’s boat. “I can’t expect that too many folks want a good look at the water plant when they’re retiring down to St. Thomas.”

  I shrugged at her. I couldn’t push the lie any further.

  “We’ll offer market rates,” DJ said. “A square price for a square deal. We ain’t here to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes.”

  “I’m sure you never sweet-talked a soul in your life.” Beth smiled at DJ as if she knew the kind of man he was—and she was probably right. With that, she walked back into the bar, throwing one last look over her shoulder in DJ’s direction, catching his eyes following her.

  When the door closed, DJ clicked his teeth and looked at me.

  “I’m feeling better about our night, Dep.” He grinned like a mountain lion coming upon a suburbanite’s terrier.

  I buried my face in my hands.

  How he did it, I’d never know. I was tall and blond and looked good in a wetsuit, according to my wife, but I never had as easy a time with women as DJ apparently had. Then again, I’d never been much of a skirt-chaser—at a bar or anywhere else. Not even before I met Alicia.

  A beer glistened at me from the bucket. I took it, the glass cold and wet against the muggy air that seemed to collect on the deck. From the color of the bottles, I was expecting Heineken or Tuborg, but it was called Stag and was from Trinidad and Tobago. I took a drink, and set my eyes on Nels, who looked longingly at his boat. Or Luc’s boat, perhaps.

  “You and Luc were close,” I said.

  “He was my friend.” Nels continued looking out over the water. “He might’ve been part of the news, but Luc wasn’t like them other ones. Wasn’t in it to sell stories. He wanted truth. Said he liked the way it felt to write something a lot of people didn’t want him to write.” Nels took a drink from his beer, and his mouth curled into a bitter line. “Sometimes I felt like he was the only guy on this whole Earth who knew what was worth doing.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  He took a long pull and looked me directly in the eyes. “Either of you two in the military?”

  “101st Airborne,” DJ answered.

  “I was Pararescue,” I said.

  “All right,” Nels nodded slightly. “You two see combat?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Afghanistan.”

  DJ knocked on his titanium leg with his opposite foot.

  “I was First Infantry,” Nels said. “Vietnam.”

  “Big Red One.” DJ nodded somberly.

  Nels pointed his bottle at DJ in affirmation, then took another long pull from it. “Mortarman. Saw my first combat during Operation Cedar Falls in January of ’67 and went through it all until we were called back to Fort Riley in ’70.”

  The look on his face suddenly changed, like an old memory had captured and dumped him into a bottled reality like a lightning bug. Then the lid spun off, and he came back to Shell’s Bar and Grill.

  “Three years on the campaign does something to a man,” he said. “Makes you crave death. Not dying, mind you. You just want to lay your eyes on death from time to time, the same way your heart aches for an old girlfriend when you’re home alone at night, even though you know she ain’t no good.”

  He looked up at us, holding his next thought. Nels was gauging our reactions. Probably expected us to be shocked, maybe offended that he’d admitted something that would have curdled the sensibilities of polite, decent people.

  “You need the gamble,” Nels continued. “The excitement. Theme park rides don’t do it. Fast cars and motorcycles work for some fellas. Not me. Gotta be bullets flying, blood, and fire—kill or be killed. Some of my buddies turned to crime after the war. Doing stuff like running drugs and knocking over gas stations. I didn’t.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know anyone who’d turned to crime. But I’d drifted from most of the guys I’d served with.

  Yet, the desire Nels described was familiar to me. I’d never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, and I wasn’t going to jump into the drug trade, but I understood. Once my body was washed by the wave of pure adrenaline I got when I jumped out of my first airplane, it craved that feeling again.

  “Luc understood,” Nels continued. “The kid wasn’t a vet, but he had that same wild streak in him.” He held his beer up in a toast, looked to the sky, then took another drink. “He always kept charging, head-first, at whatever he was onto. That kid loved the rush.”

  “Do you know what he was working on?” I asked. “Any idea who might’ve wanted him dead?”

  “Yeah,” Nels said. “I know exactly who wanted him dead.”

  My head swung right—to DJ, who looked every bit as surprised as I must have. Did Nels say what I thought he’d said? I turned back toward him.

  “You do?” I sat my beer down and leaned closer. “Who?”

  Nels looked at the marina again. He studied it for a moment, the murk clearing from his eyes, and his lips pressing into a sharp line. Then, he directed his eyes back to me.

  “The elites,” he said.

  My shoulders slumped.

  DJ snickered beside me. I managed to hold a straight face, not betraying how stupid I suddenly felt.

  “Ain’t a joke,” Nels said. “They’re across the whole damned world, killing good folks like Luc—folks who’re trying to stand up for what’s right and bring attention to the evil things the elites are doing to everybody.”


  All this time wasted by chasing a dead lead. We couldn’t leave until I got my credit card back from Beth and closed my tab. So, I thought I’d entertain Nels’s theory for a minute by challenging it.

  “And who are these people?” I asked. “And I don’t want to hear about the World Bank or the New World Order or shadow governments pulling strings from Cold War bunkers. Give me names. Specifically, who are the elites?”

  “I can’t name names—they all been scrubbed from the record. They got money and they got ways to hide. They ain’t people like us,” Nels fired back. “Politicians. Big businessmen. Billionaires. People with the kind of money they won’t get ground under the boots of the New World Order.”

  “Hey, pal,” DJ said, “you’re talking to two of those right now.”

  I shot him a look that told him to shut up. I didn’t like talking about money.

  “And what do these people do?” I asked Nels.

  “They put fluoride in the water.” Nels grabbed a fresh beer from the bucket. “They drop chemtrails on us from the sky to keep us in line, they put asbestos on dollar bills to keep us buying cancer drugs, and they keep us fat and happy, not thinking too hard about why things are the way they are. They don’t want nobody questioning their position at the top, or why the one percent got so much power over everybody else. I mean, hell, look at the drug companies in P.R. After Maria, who was the first ones to get power back?”

  “They were,” I said.

  “The hospitals never lost power,” DJ added.

  I’d read that most of the big drug manufacturers in Puerto Rico had stores of diesel, backup generators, clean water, and food in the eventuality that a storm like Maria knocked out Puerto Rico’s already weak infrastructure. Didn’t take a genius to see disaster preparation as a worthy investment here.

  “And they ain’t curing diseases.” Nels brought his beer bottle up, then stopped halfway, struck by a thought. “Hell, you seen them commercials on TV, right? When they go calling out the side-effects of their drugs like auctioneers. I bet you those companies’ drugs are the cause of half the diseases people got these days. Drug companies are still companies—they got greed and shareholders whose only interest is the bottom line—and are they gonna stop selling something just ’cuz Grandma Dottie’s turning a little green after taking her heart pills? Hell no!”