Wayward Sons

by Wayne Stinnett

  All three of them slipped out of sight, somewhere deeper in the house. When Patrick’s phone buzzed—likely Mike’s ID on the Dominican—he ignored it, keeping watch for Snyder, waiting for him to re-emerge through the back door. When he finally did, he came out with his wife and the Dominican woman following.

  Patrick pulled out the burner. Going to dig around soon, he texted Condor. Will contact you with all findings.

  “You don’t know how to sail,” Alicia reminded me, as we carried the last of our things down to the boat.

  I reached Wayward and stepped aboard, dropping my bag on the cockpit settee. Then I turned to help Alicia and Gabriela aboard.

  “Gotta start sometime. Anyways, the boat’s got engines,” I said. “I’ve driven one before.”

  “Your dad’s bass boat on Castaic Lake doesn’t count,” Alicia commented as she stepped down. “This boat’s wider than his was long.”

  I fished the key from my pocket and unlocked the door to the salon, sliding it open. “A boat’s a boat. Goes on water, dips in the waves, feels good to sleep on. We’re also short on options.”

  Gabriela looked around the cockpit with its large, covered seating area on one side, curved stairwell up to the bridge on the opposite side, and the big, stainless steel grill at the stern.

  Then her eyes drifted upward to Wayward’s eight-story mast. “You own a sailboat but don’t know how to sail?” she asked, a look of amazement on her face.

  “It’s a catamaran,” I said, side-stepping the question. “Pick out a stateroom, then come up to the bridge.”

  Before going up, I stepped back over to the dock and disconnected the shore power and water, then went inside and turned on all the batteries and necessary breakers, including the house lights. The women were just coming up from the two opposite hulls where the cabins were located.

  “Get the dock lines,” I said to Alicia. “Gabriela, all I want you to do is help me watch and not run into anything leaving the harbor. Can you do that?”

  “The broker said the boat can sail faster than it can go on just the engines,” Alicia said, moving toward the dock.

  “I can sail,” Gabriela offered.

  I looked at her in a different light. “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t want you opening up any of those stitches, so let’s stick to the easiest passage. Wayward has twin 110 horsepower diesels that can get us to San Juan by dawn.”

  Gabriela and I climbed up to the helm and I started the engines. She’d finally called her sitter to explain that she’d be back by morning. The woman had already figured out that she was staying the night and Gabriela had awakened her.

  Alicia cast the dock lines up onto the side deck, and once she was aboard, I put the two throttles into forward idle. The wind had us against the dock and the fenders started rubbing, making the squeaking sound of rubber on fiberglass. I quickly shifted back to neutral, the sudden realization coming over me that I should have already learned all this.

  “Shift the left engine into reverse for a second,” Gabriela said. “That will move the bow away from the dock.”

  She sat on the bench on the left side of the expansive flybridge, watching me. I gave her a side-eye, then nodded and reversed the port engine for a tick. With the left engine pulling backward, the front of the boat moved away from the pier. I shifted the engines to forward and watched over the twin bows as Wayward moved away from the marina.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know how to use a GPS, would ya?” I asked Gabriela, as Alicia joined us.

  “I’m not good with electronics,” she admitted.

  “I have the manuals,” Alicia said, sitting at the dinette behind the helm seat, and turning on a small lamp built into the table.

  Gabriela joined her and the two began poring over the books. Fortunately, I had a straight shot southwest out of the marina for several miles before I’d have to turn west. There were boats anchored there, but they were to one side or the other, away from the deeper channel.

  “Here!” Alicia said, carrying one of the manuals to where I stood at the helm. “It’s a chart plotter, not a GPS. Well, it has GPS, but not like a car’s. It won’t tell you which road to take, only the direction to get there. We have to add waypoints around obstacles.”

  She turned on the larger of the many electronic screens. I knew from watching DJ that it showed a nautical chart with water depths.

  Alicia scanned the manual, then set it aside. “Oh, thank God. It’s a touch screen.”

  With Gabriela’s help in locating the marina near her apartment building, and after several minutes and a few do-overs, Alicia had a course laid in that would keep us from wrecking Wayward. All I had to do was follow the red line. I looked down at the screen for a moment, familiarizing myself with the location of the depth reading, speed indicator, and time to each waypoint.

  “It’s eighty miles, give or take,” I announced, pushing the twin throttles down. “About six hours at cruising speed. You two go get some rest.”

  “How do you know the cruising speed?” Alicia asked, flipping through the manual.

  “A man’s gotta know, baby,” I said as I settled back into the helmsman’s chair.

  My wife rolled her eyes at me.

  In truth, the saleslady and I had had long conversations about top speeds and cruising speeds. Other than the color of the hull, speed was the one thing I hung my negotiator’s hat on. I knew how much I wanted, and I soon knew what each boat had to offer.

  Wayward could run all day at fifteen knots. The top speed was eighteen.

  Gabriela started toward the steps and Alicia leaned in close, putting a hand on mine on the wheel. “I hope you’re not planning on driving all night, hotshot.”

  “I could use a break in a couple hours.”

  She put her other hand on my cheek in the darkness. “Yeah. I can do that.”

  Then she kissed me, and I was alone on the bridge in the darkest hours of night. We’d reached the opening to the channel and there was nothing ahead but water I couldn’t see, nothing around Wayward but the murmur of her wake and the whispers of winds slipping around her. I set the autopilot, then moved around the bridge, extinguishing all the lights. The chart plotter would have to be on, but it had a dimmer, which I turned way down.

  I stood at the helm, my hands on the wheel, absorbing the nearly imperceptible rhythms of Wayward as she worked to cradle us over the Caribbean Sea.

  The chart plotter shined upward like a spotlight. I blinked my eyes, looked at it and noticed we were fast approaching the first waypoint. I blinked again, then made a mental note to find some of those night vision goggles like McDermitt had worn the night he and DJ had rescued us from the cult on Norman Island. Or at least a pair of night vision binoculars like DJ had. Might be easier on my eyes.

  The first waypoint was only two miles out of the harbor, just past a flashing green buoy, which I tried to keep my eyes away from. Once past the outer channel marker, I turned off the autopilot and spun the wheel to follow the red line.

  The next waypoint would be off the northeast tip of Puerto Rico, which lay sixty some miles ahead. I zoomed the plotter out and saw that the red line passed well to the north of Culebra and all the little rocks and islands surrounding it. I checked Wayward’s speed, adjusted her heading, then set the autopilot again. It had a fine-tuning control, and I adjusted it to a heading of 285° magnetic. Watching the chart for a few minutes, I made sure that we stayed right on that red line. Then I sat down at the helm and started the long wait, watching the horizon for the lights of any other boats or ships.

  I found the switch and activated the navigation and steaming lights. The latter were mounted way up on the mast and provided a little light on the water, without ruining my night vision. The red and green navigation lights were invisible from the bridge, but I could detect a slight glow on the water to either side of the bows—green on the right and red on the left.

  Time passed quickly, sitting alone with my thoughts. I was almost cert
ain that Luc’s murder was tied to the murder of Markel and his wife. Was Markel selling his so-called cancer cure to anyone he could dupe into buying it? Maybe he’d ripped off the wrong guy.

  Luc Baptiste was an investigative reporter. Maybe he was going to expose Markel’s scheme, so Markel had him killed. That would explain why he’d talked to Marc Herrera. Luc could’ve already known that Markel had tried to rope in Herrera.

  Maybe Anthradone was Markel’s dummy cancer cure. Hildon Pharmaceuticals thought it was real, but they wouldn’t be the first big corporation to get roped in by a con man. Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes had proved that tricking investors into buying thin air wasn’t impossible.

  Could be an investor figured out Markel’s game and took him out to save the public embarrassment of a court case. I knew of plenty of guys in the finance world with egos big enough to try something like that.

  As I continued to mull the possibilities, I noticed an occasional splashing sound off the right side of Wayward, inconsistent with the steady swish of the bow wave.

  The fenders, I thought, then rose and took another look forward into the darkness before going down the stairs to the cockpit, then up to the side deck. I quickly pulled the fenders up and stowed them, then returned to the bridge.

  Soon, I heard the door to the salon slide open, then close again. I checked my watch; two hours had passed since we’d left St. Thomas. I checked the chart plotter, zooming out so I could see Puerto Rico. We were a third of the way there.

  Alicia approached me from behind and slipped her hands around my waist, then kissed my neck. “Your watch is up, Captain. What do I need to do?”

  “I have the autopilot on,” I replied, putting my hands over hers. “It hasn’t strayed from the red line for two hours and it’s at least two more hours to the next waypoint. Just watch out for any boats. If you need to adjust course, you have to switch the autopilot to standby. I saw a cruise ship way out on the horizon a while ago—that’s it.”

  “With the engines running, I was able to turn on the air conditioner,” Alicia said, looking at the gauges and plotter. “I gave Gabriela two Ibuprofen and she’s resting comfortably in the bigger cabin in front on the right side. Go down to our cabin and get some rest.”

  “I can sleep up here. The night’s cool, and I just need to rest my eyes a bit.”

  I piled a couple of throw pillows into the corner of the dinette and stretched out, closing my eyes.

  “Are we doing the right thing?” Alicia asked quietly. “I mean, we know nothing about Gabriela. She might have killed the doctor herself.”

  “I believe her story.”

  “Hmm,” Alicia replied.

  And that was all. Before long, my mind drifted and it seemed like only a few minutes had passed when Alicia shook my foot and called my name.

  I sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, putting a finger to her lips. “We’re just a few miles from the next waypoint.”

  An hour later, with the first faint light of dawn blushing in the sky behind us, I turned off the autopilot and turned into San Juan Harbor. Remembering the sunken boat that DJ and I had seen, I was glad to realize it was getting light. We’d made it.

  Shortly after sunrise, Alicia and I got Wayward tied to a dock at a marina near where Gabriela lived, then we woke Gabriela up and the three of us double-timed it to the marina office.

  After paying the dockmaster for a full day, we crossed from wooden planks onto concrete, then up a set of concrete stairs that took us past the sea wall and onto a wide sidewalk next to a six-lane street. At this time in the morning, the city was just waking up, and only a single car passed by us. An unbroken line of vehicles was parked on the shoulders of the road in either direction.

  Gabriela stepped off the curb to cross the street. Alicia and I followed, not bothering to check for traffic or waiting for the crosswalk signal to change.

  A woman’s clothing store was located on the opposite corner. When she stepped up onto the curb in front of it, Gabriela went left, then turned into the first alleyway she came across.

  I was a few steps behind, peering into the smudged front window of the store. A single emergency light flickered in the back corner and a mannequin lay on its side below, dusted with cobwebs. Nobody had been in the place for months, at least. The same as Gabriela and my wife, I turned left into the next alleyway. They were both moving along the opposite side. I jogged to catch up, then came out on a side street, where clean laundry hung overhead, suspended from lines, and draped over balcony railings—a hallmark of poor neighborhoods the world over. A pack of kid-size bicycles was chained to a long, steel stand, and soccer balls and baseball bats mingled at the foots of stoops and in gutters lined with cigarette butts and sludgy sand.

  I caught up to the women as Gabriela punched a code into the keypad next to the big glass doors at the base of one of the buildings. A buzzer sounded, the lock clicked, and she pulled open the door. We moved through a lobby haunted by the funk of mildew, dust, and cigarette smoke that usually characterized cheap second-hand stores. Past the only bank of elevators, Gabriela opened a steel door.

  When we climbed the stairs and reached the third floor, she pushed the bar latch on the door, and we came out into a hallway. Then she led us all the way down to the last door on the left. She had trouble getting her keys out of her pocket.

  “May I?” Alicia asked.

  The lines in Gabriela’s face deepened as her mouth stretched into a line.

  “Is it this one?” Alicia pointed at the pocket on Gabriela’s left hip.

  “Yes. And thank you.”

  “Trust me, when I was a nurse back in Newport Beach, I had to do a lot worse than this.” She reached in and fished out the keys. “Stuff they don’t talk about in nursing school until you’re a couple of semesters in. They must figure you’re committed by then, and you won’t walk away.”

  Gabriela pinched one of the keys between her thumb and forefinger. She fiddled it into the lock, then turned it until it clicked.

  The door came open, and I heard a TV droning. A matronly Hispanic woman sat up in a chair and started to say something, but Gabriela put a finger to her lips.

  “Shhh,” she hushed. “Gracias por quedarte, Clara ¿Qué te debo?”

  Clara eyed me suspiciously as she stood and waved a hand over Gabriela’s hand inside her purse. “No, no,” she whispered. “El viernes estará bien.”

  Then the sitter hurried out of the apartment. A lamp clicked on, revealing the rest of the small apartment; a kitchen on the left with a dinette table, and on the right, a couch against the wall—the living room wall, probably.

  When Alicia and I went inside, something else in the living room caught my eye. A bed. Right in the middle of the room, covered in blankets with a steel pole beside it. I thought it was a lamp at first, but then I realized that, no, it was an IV stand. A plastic tube stretched down to the pile of blankets.

  Gabriela walked up to the bed and turned the sheets down, folding them over a few inches at a time.

  A girl’s face peeked out. She was asleep, and she had the same dark, wavy hair as her mother, but it lay flatter on the pillow, like a body stripped down to the bones. The girl also had her mother’s round face and button nose.

  “Florita,” Gabriela said softly, just above her daughter. She kissed her forehead. “Wake up, little girlie.” She stroked her daughter’s cheek, then Flor began to stir.

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Mama?” An arm as thin as a chicken bone reached up. Long, spindly fingers wove into a lock of Gabriela’s hair.

  “Hey, baby,” Gabriela said.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s very early in the morning.” She kissed Flor again, who hadn’t noticed Alicia and me standing beyond the head of her bed.

  “Where were you yesterday?” Flor asked. Then she gasped. She sat up in bed shakily, but managed to hold herself there without toppling over. Her
hand brushed across the bandages on Gabriela’s arms. “Mama, what happened to you? Are you okay? Were you in the hospital? Why didn’t you call me? Did someone hurt—”

  Gabriela pressed a finger to her daughter’s lips, quieting her.

  “Mama’s all right. I got a little hurt, but some people helped fix me up.” She nodded toward me and Alicia.

  Flor’s head whipped around. She had the same muted expression I’d seen on Gabriela’s face when I pulled her out of her wrecked car and sat her beside it; both like mountain cats perched on a boulder, watching land developers pat out a new lane, bisecting the range they and their ancestors had hunted for millennia.

  That expression quickly changed. Flor curled her lip and scrunched up her nose.

  “Who’re you two people? What’d you do to my mama?”

  “Flor!” Gabriela said.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “It’s okay.” Alicia held her hand out, slowly walking up to Flor, who looked at my wife like she’d offered a diseased rat.

  “My name is Alicia Snyder.”

  Flor reluctantly took her hand and shook.

  Alicia motioned to me. “This is my husband, Jerry.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “Well, Jerry found your mother. She was hurt. She was near—” Alicia stopped when she noticed Gabriela shaking her head, warning her not to finish that thought. “—near our house. Her car broke down.”

  “I hit a tree,” Gabriela said. “I worked late last night, and I guess I was more tired than I realized. That’s like me.”

  Flor looked in her mother’s direction. I only saw the back of her head, but my imagination filled in the blank. She wasn’t happy. Then, she rotated her face toward Alicia, her brow knitted.

  “Near your house? So which neighborhood was that?”

  Alicia looked to Gabriela for help.

  “You’re being very unkind to our guests,” Gabriela said.

  “Which was it?” she asked. “Breakdown or car accident?”

  “I guess I didn’t see the car.” Alicia shrugged, trying her best to cover for Gabriela. “I just assumed.”