“Not often,” Bond said, “but the kind of work I’m in, you take precautions. You might have noticed; this house is designed to be defended—blank front wall, back patio enclosed by opposite ells. Only one approach—from the hill behind—and I’ve got sensors all over out there. Well, Jake, my boy, I fear your cover’s blown.”
“How?”
“Probably when you signed over your travelers cheques. A bank clerk bribed to look out for your name would pass it along when he saw it. If you’d let your pack out of your sight, it’d have disappeared before you turned back around, but nobody was going to mug you for it downtown in broad daylight. Maybe word got out that a Gringo went around the harbor asking about chartering a boat to San Juan. Obviously you were tracked back to here.”
“So now what?”
“First, I call a pal at the morgue. They’ll dispose of the guy. Then how about we grab a bite and head for Bayahibe? Umm, any chance of a look at those ledgers?”
I told him to help himself. He sat down at the table with the two books in question, flipped to the months of interest, and ran down the columns of entries with his finger. He carefully cut out a page from each book. “Okay, that’s it. I’d love to spend a few days with that material, but we’ve gotta get you out of here. Then they’ll be out of my hair, at least.” I got my kit together, and we went to the front door. He handed me a pork-pie hat. “Put this on. Just a sec,” he said, picking up a device from a side table. He poked a button. I heard the car below on the street start. “Another precaution,” he remarked as he replaced the device. “If they’re going to bomb my car, at least I won’t be in it. They mean us no harm, they just want the stuff in your pack, though they’d kill you to get it. But you never know; some of those guys are dumb enough to blow us up with the stuff. The guy out back, he’s a grunt, expendable. His partner’s out there somewhere, but I don’t think he’ll risk a shootout. Okay, guns at the ready, just in case. Move out.”
We clambered down the stairs and piled into the car. The engine sounded better than the exterior looked. “What, a stealth car?” I asked.
“It’s camo’ed-up a little, yeah. Top shape, working wise. Here we go.” We wound through the narrow roads. As we pulled away from the slum onto a main avenue, I noticed a car falling in behind us. It must have followed along out of the slum, lights off. Bond noticed it too. “No need to worry about that for now. When we get out of town on the highway, we’ll deal with him. Relax.”
Bond drove straightforwardly through the city to the coastal highway, Number 3. It was good road, and traffic was light. “I could outrun him any time I want, but he’d eventually catch up. We need to put him out of action before I drop you off.” We sped on for nearly an hour. A few miles beyond a small town, La Romana, Bond slowed to the point where the following driver could track his taillights, then continued around a wide sweep in the road to the north. In about a mile he turned into a side road, then sped up until we rounded a blind turn. He stopped the car, doused the lights, reached across me and opened the glove compartment. He pulled out an S&W .44 magnum revolver and climbed out of the car. Our shadow came around the corner. Bond took a two-hand stance and fired two shots at the hood, stopping the car abruptly. He fired another shot through the passenger side of the windshield, then jumped back in and hit the gas. “Blew out his engine. That’ll keep him there for a while,” he said, handing me the gun. “This piece would stop a Tiger Tank. Put it back in the glove compartment.”
“I saw a sign to Bayahibe back there.”
“You did, but I took the road to Bahia de Yuma.” Bond drove a fast 20 miles, winding through low hills. The way the car took the curves, he must know a good custom shop—Detroit suspensions don’t handle like that. We stopped. “Now get in the back and lay down out of sight. You asked around in Santo Domingo about Bayahibe, so they’re expecting you’ll go there. It’ll look like I dropped you down at Bahia de Yuma. It might, in fact, have been a better choice, but I have a compadre in Bayahibe.” We drove back and hurtled past where the disabled car sat. “Stay down for a while,” Bond said. After a time, he stopped again. “Bayahibe’s about five miles down this road. I don’t want anyone to see this car there. You’ll reach it at daybreak. Go to the charter marina and find Santiago. Ask him how the fishing is.” I climbed out and shouldered my pack. “Just a sec, give me that hat.” I passed it to him. “Hand me the attaché case on the floor back there.” I did. He sat it on the passenger seat, opened it and pushed a button. A man’s torso inflated from it and popped up beside him. He put the pork-pie hat on its head. “They’re going to see me heading back toward Santo Domingo with you. Halfway back, I’ll pull over in a town with major crossroads, deflate this thing and drive back home alone. Should confuse ‘em long enough for you to get away, and with you gone they won’t bother me anymore. Good luck, Jake. Take care.”
“Thanks for the lessons in tradecraft, Bond. Anything I can do for you, repay the hospitality?”
“Those ledger pages cover it. Hey, it was fun, added some excitement to some dull days. Give my greetings to Ev the next time you see him. Tell him that if he ever needs anything done down here, I’m his man. Good hunting.” I wished him likewise. He turned the car around and drove off.
The sun painted high wispy clouds in the eastern sky with pastel oranges and pinks but had not yet topped the horizon. A balmy breeze and the pungent smell of chaparral made for a pleasant early morning hike. I fast-marched maybe four miles before I met a man coming toward me on the road. I asked him where I’d find the fishing boats, and he gave me directions. Another mile and I reached Bayahibe, a resort and fishing village fronting on a bay with a stretch of fine sandy beach. A fleet of outrigger-equipped boats sat placidly in their slips in the pre-dawn gloom at a small marina, crews fussing them into readiness for the day’s charters. Fishermen, Americans mostly, were starting to trail over from the hotels, eager for a go at the deep’s denizens. I asked a deckhand for Santiago, and he pointed out a big Hatteras cruiser in a slip on the other side.
A paunchy, middle-aged local man lay stretched out on a cushioned bench along the cockpit, on the other side of the fighting chair, his weathered captain’s cap tilted over his eyes. “Senor Santiago?” I asked.
He rolled over and looked at me. “Do you know somebody?”
What kind of question was this? Know who, from where? Take a best guess. “Bond. In Santo Domingo I know Bond,” I said.
The man levered himself upright. “I like people that know people,” he said wryly. “You know Bond, you say. So therefore…?”
I looked the boat over. “Bond said to ask you, how’s the fishing?” I said.
“You a fisherman?”
“I’ve done some fishing.”
“Then you know the answer to that question.”
“It was great yesterday. Tomorrow will be even better. But today, not so good.”
He straightened his cap on his head. “So you want to go fishing today?”
“Maybe. Is your boat available for a day’s charter?”
“Si. But this is not my boat. My boat’s over there.” He pointed down the dock. “What kind of fishing you want? Inshore? Offshore? Blue water? Billfish? Santiago does it all. The wahoo are biting, they say. Ever hook a wahoo? They give you a good fight.”
“Show me your boat.”
He eased himself up off the cushion, came across the cockpit, lithely mounted the gunwale and dropped down on the pier beside me, rocking the boat against its lines. He motioned me to follow him. His boat, a 36-foot Sea Ray cruiser, had seen better days, needed a good scrub and some varnish on the brightwork. I leaned down to see the waterline. The hull was clean enough, anyhow.
I looked around, ensured that no one was within earshot. “I need a boat ride to San Juan.”
“I know a boat you could get on.”
“How soon could we leave? I’m in a hurry to get out
of here.”
“It’s gassed up. I just need to run over to the store and provision us, take a few minutes. Three hundred U.S. for the trip?”
“How long does it take?”
“Have you there tomorrow morning. Mayaguez is closer. Two hundred to Magayuez, then you take the bus to San Juan. Cheaper. Maybe quicker.”
People would be expecting me to show up in San Juan. On the other hand, the ferryboats ran to Mayaguez. They’d be watching there too. Be safer on the boat than traveling overland. “All the way to San Juan.”
“Hokay,” he said. “Be back in a minute. You want to come along?”
“Better if I stay down below out of sight. Get what you want. I’ll eat anything. I could use a little breakfast right now.”
“Sure thing. Can I give my cousins a free ride?”
I looked the boat up and down. It seemed close quarters. “How you going to get them all inside?”
“It’s just two guys. It’s good weather. They’ll sleep in the cockpit. Good deckhands, handy in the event of trouble. They got girlfriends in San Juan, no work for them here today.”
I went below. The saloon, larger than it looked from the dock, was shipshape. I hung out in the forepeak, well out of sight. He and his cousins showed up twenty minutes later. They stowed the stuff, did a little prepping and cast off. We rumbled out of the marina just after daybreak, convoyed with two spiffy fly-bridge cruisers full of fishermen eager to drink beer, drown bait and burn themselves lobster red. We cleared the harbor and Santiago, set course toward the rising sun.
6 | The Harder They Come
The boat ride to San Juan, Puerto Rico, started off well. Santiago said it was about 200 miles, so we’d be arriving in pre-dawn darkness, which suited me just fine. His cousins, able crewmen when called upon, mostly kept to themselves. Santiago claimed to make his living as a charter boat operator, taking wealthy Gringos out on billfish quests. Marlin and sailfish abounded in those waters, and he’d do runs out to the Gulf Stream if a client were willing to pay for it. However, he claimed, he’d had a run of bad luck, 84 days without a client catching anything worthwhile. Once, he told me, a client caught the biggest marlin anyone had ever seen, only to have the sharks eat it before they could get it back to port, nothing but the head left. Another piece of bad luck he lamented was the Gringo, who’d lost Santiago’s best rod and reel through carelessness, and then stiffed him for three weeks of charter fees. He’d had to supplement his income by hiring himself out to Bond and others for occasional “projects,” as he called them.
Well, I don’t know. Fishermen are known for being great storytellers. At any rate, the weather was calm; Santiago skippered the boat skillfully, and he’d provisioned the trip well. I sat in the fighting chair sipping my way through Heinekens from the cooler, gazing aft and letting tension evaporate under the clear blue tropical sky as we burbled along at fifteen knots. Until we passed below Isla de Mona, a barren little mound in the middle of otherwise empty blue water. Deserted except for a lighthouse, it lay about 50 miles off Puerto Rico’s eastern edge. A speck crept up over the horizon off our port side, coming from the direction of Puerto Rico. Its heading seemed on a vector to cut us off.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Santiago remarked from behind his binoculars.
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s a Bertram cruiser, not a kind of boat to be out here at this hour. If it was going around PR, no need for it to be this far out, it’d stay inshore. The good fishing is in the other direction from where it’s coming. There’s no destinations to the south of us, so on that heading there’s no place it could be going, except to meet us.”
“Are we in danger?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could tell me? I didn’t ask your business, maybe I should know? Some men came around to the docks two days ago, asked everybody to tell them if they saw a Gringo named Jake, said they’d pay good moneys. You know about this Jake? Are any bodies after you?”
“Not me personally, but some rough customers would like to get their hands on what’s in my pack.”
Santiago pushed the throttles ahead, and his boat picked up speed with a jolt. “Bond is my friend, and Bond’s friends are my friends. We should change our plans a little, I think. Maybe you’d like to go to Ponce or Salinas instead of San Juan? On the south side of the island. To get to San Juan, we have to get past that guy. We go to the south side; he won’t catch us.”
“Any old port,” I said. Santiago altered course to ESE. He shouted something to his cousins that aroused them from their below-deck reverie.
“Their boat, they think they have the speed to catch us, but they don’t,” Santiago said. “When I took up doing projects for people, they had my boat fixed up for me a little. Bigger engines. Some adjustments to the planing hull. But let’s see what that other boat does. No need to give away the game. Maybe they’re just wealthy Gringos taking their whores out for a boat ride on a sunny day.”
The other boat altered course to intercept. Santiago upped the throttles a little more. We ran along for a couple more hours, the other boat settling in on our wake, gaining a little but never getting nearer than a mile or so. Puerto Rico peeped over the northeastern horizon and grew steadily larger and darker. To the west of us, the light began shifting orange as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Then the boat behind began visibly gaining on us.
“Sonofabitch means to catch us just off the island, right around sundown. But he won’t.” Santiago let the other boat draw nearer, maybe a quarter mile off, still gaining, then matched his speed to theirs. I heard a gunshot in the distance. His cousins came up on deck with rifles and took seats in the cockpit.
We came abreast of the tip of Puerto Rico, and Santiago took us in toward shore. “Tricky waters around here,” he remarked. “Many reefs. Great diving. Good inshore fishing. Sometimes I’ll take dive trips over here when the fish aren’t biting.” He slowed the boat a knot or two, allowing the boat behind to close a little, and headed toward an island reaching out from shore. “Over here, especially good reefs,” he said, slowing the boat again as we drew toward the island. “But you gotta know the waters.”
Our pursuers drew a little closer. Another gunshot. “They can’t hit a moving target from a moving platform at this range,” Santiago observed. The cousins took fighting positions in the stern, nevertheless. Seemed like billfish chartering might not be their only day job. Daylight was beginning to fade away as we veered over toward the mainland. A gap between it and the island opened up, and Santiago goosed the throttles up a little. The boat behind increased speed and again closed on us. Santiago said something to the cousins, and they let go a fusillade in its direction. It returned desultory fire. Santiago seemed unconcerned. He sped up a little more and so did the following boat, now only a couple hundred yards behind. “Should of got ‘em on the last reef,” he remarked. “They’ve done some things to that boat too.” We came into a passage bookended by house-sized boulders at 20 knots and suddenly he hit the throttles hard. The boat did a nautical version of a wheelie, accelerating and rising up on its tail. We scooted through the passage and a quarter mile beyond at 35 knots. The boat behind stopped abruptly.
“It’s a little shallower through there,” Santiago said as he eased off on the throttle and altered course away from shore. “That was our last chance. The tide was just right. If that didn’t work, we’d have to run for it and hope to lose them in the dark. And if they had radar on board, we couldn’t. We’re in the clear now. I’m heading out where I don’t have to worry about depth. We don’t have no worries about them no more,” he said, motioning back with his head. “They ripped out their hull.”
Darkness fell. We continued on for a couple hours, running at 15 knots without lights. “This worries me,” I told Santiago. “People are expecting me to come to Puerto Rico because it’s the only place from where I can go to the U.S. with no passpo
rt. But somebody told somebody something, so somebody knew I was arriving today. That boat has a radio, so they’ll have reported this. It’s only a matter of time before others come looking. You mentioned Ponce and Salinas on the southern shore. Maybe there’ll be people looking for me there too, now that we’ve headed for the south side. Any way you can land me without detection?”
“There’s a little town between Ponce and Salinas, Potata Pastillo. I can slip in there with no lights, drop you off and then continue on to Salinas. You get a taxi to Mercedita Airport by the highway; that’s about five miles, you still maybe got time to catch a late bus to San Juan. Anybody in Salinas asks me, I put you ashore at Ponce, no idea where you went after that.”
“Your cousins won’t get to see their girlfriends in San Juan.”
“No problem. They got girlfriends in Salinas. “
Presently, Santiago steered us quietly toward the town dock at Potata Pastillo. I went below and put on my black outfit—no point standing out. He brought his boat up alongside and slowed it to a crawl. He wished me luck; I hopped down off the gunwale with my pack, and he turned his boat immediately back out toward open water. Within a few seconds, they’d got beyond the reach of the waterfront lights and disappeared into the night. I scampered away from the waterfront nightlights and took refuge in the shadows to get my bearings. Even as sought-after as I seemed to be, I figured there couldn’t be lookouts posted everywhere. The various outfits that wanted the BCCI records couldn’t possibly be working in concert, so each would have limited manpower, only enough to deploy in the most likely spots.
The town center wasn’t far from the docks. A few bars and cantinas did lively business, but most shops had shuttered up. I found a cab waiting at a taxi stand, the driver catnapping. He spoke good English and the U.S. dollar was the official PR currency—no complications there. He was game for a ride to the bus stop by the airport. I asked him about catching a flight from there to the U.S., but he advised me it was small, local flights only. Most planes to America went out of Luis Munoz Marin airport in San Juan. He estimated a good chance that a publico bus might come by and pick me up. They ran on the highway from Ponce to San Juan, but scheduling depended on the drivers. Sometimes they waited until the bus filled with riders, but also sometimes the driver at the end of the day found himself on the far side of the island and was in a hurry to get back home. I decided to take my chances, figuring that if worse came to worst I could sleep rough and catch one in the morning. Luck favored me. Within a half hour, a bus lumbered up. I donned a tourist shirt over my black top, stepped out of the shadows and flagged it down, clambered aboard and took a seat. Unlike the buses in Jamaica and Haiti, it wasn’t teeming with rural life, rather rode half-empty. Neither was it in a breakneck hurry. The driver stopped at villages and crossroads to pick up or discharge passengers. Nobody seemed inclined to interfere with me.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 11