by Henry Carver
By the time he turned around again I was gone, already up the stairs and headed for the bow, stripping off my shirt and pants as I went until I was wearing only my boxers.
Rigger had turned onto his right side, leaving the pocket completely inaccessible. I could hear footsteps on the stairs—Carlos coming to find the very key hidden in my palm.
No time.
I placed it gently under the chair, in a spot I thought it might naturally land if it had fallen out of a pocket. Standing up, I stretched my arms out towards the sky, then saluted at Carlos as he came into view. I smiled, trying to look natural.
Rigger stirred in his sleep, his eyes starting to open.
I rolled off the bow and struck out towards shore, pulling my way through the azure water, never looking back.
Chapter 9
THE BEACH GLINTED at me as I waded in the last few feet and walked up onto the sand. Carmen looked stunning in a green one-piece, but I had eyes only for Ben Hawking. He grinned playfully as I trudged towards them, reached up an arm and waved me closer.
I’d failed to give credit where credit was due. The man had a way about him, a sense of naivety mixed with basic dignity, and all of it wrapped up in that goofy grin. He’d fooled me, played me for a mark, and I begrudged him a new found respect.
He deserved it. In truth, I was quaking in my boots. Alone on a sparsely inhabited island with a bank robber and his two cronies: I wasn’t quite sure how to play this one, and I couldn’t decide what he might do next.
Poor Carmen, I thought.
She couldn’t have known she was getting into bed with a shark. She rolled over lazily and kissed Ben on the lips. He kissed her back, even gave a little bit of the tongue, then looked at me and winked.
I had to get Carmen alone, I realized. She needed to be warned, and maybe—just maybe—the two of us together could figure a way out of this mess.
I approached them carefully. “Say, Ben, have you seen what’s beyond the palms?”
“Nope. I haven’t moved since I laid down.”
“Come on, let’s do a little exploring.”
“I suppose,” he said, and pushed up lazily from the sand.
I backed off from him, then turned on my heel and headed into the trees. The ground back here appeared to be loose island soil, sun-dappled and speckled with fallen coconuts. Ben shook one, checking to see if it was ripe.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“I can hear something sloshing around in there.”
“Getting it out can be tricky, you know. Look around,” I spread my arms out and turned around, “coconut milk for the taking. But it might as well be locked in little individual cages. Actually getting the stuff out takes a lot of practice.” I studied his face.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, and grinned that stupid grin at me again. It struck me again how effective his deception was, even under pressure. A very cool customer.
I pushed farther into the palms, working along until the soil turned rocky and we came upon small cliff. I started to the side and Ben followed. A hundred yards later we came to a pool fed by a modest waterfall.
“Fantastic!” Ben shouted, and waded in. He swam up to the falls, climbed up a large flat rock, and slid back down. He did it again and again.
I crouched down and watched him; I wondered about the money, about how he planned to move it. Part one of some plan seemed to have been fulfilled. The money had been taken. It had been transported by boat, then switched to an entirely new boat. That seemed good for Ben’s plan—it made the path of the loot harder to trace—and it was the only explanation for coming out here on the Purple instead of just riding along with Carlos and Rigger.
But it gave me a bad feeling about the future. His plan had a part two, and I didn’t think Carmen and I would be a part of it.
I shuddered.
He paddled towards the rock again, looking perfectly joyful in our discovery. He was the average tourist, and yet even as I sat here, trying to read him, he must be plotting against me.
“Say Ben, I think I’m going to head to the beach. Think you can find your way back?”
“Hold on, let me get in a few more slides and I’ll come back with you.”
“Don’t worry about it. If you get lost, just head down hill.” I faded quickly into the green of the jungle and half-walked, half-jogged back to the beach.
The Purple lay at anchor right where I’d left her. Starting the engine required an ignition key, just like in a car, and it was tied securely inside my trunks. There was a spare, but no one would be able to find it.
I could see Rigger sitting on the deck, awake now, scanning the beach through my pair of binoculars. Carlos must have brought them down from the bridge, but I couldn’t pick him out anywhere on deck. Carmen’s towel lay exactly where it had before, only now it was empty.
My head snapped around to check behind me.
No sign of Ben Hawking.
I scanned the water between me and the boat, on the lookout for a tell-tale ripple in the water.
“Conway!” a voice yelled. The call came from down the beach. Carmen walked along the shoreline toward me, perhaps a hundred yards away, a conch in her hand. She raised it in greeting and I jogged down to her.
“Since when do you call me Conway?”
“Does it bother you?” She dropped the shell and gathered her hair between her hands, tied it into a loose kind of knot.
“No, it’s just…”
“I’m just fucking with you, Conway,” she elbowed me under the ribs.
I broke into a smile beside myself. Just like old times. An image flashed vividly through my head: my hands twisted in her hair, pulling her to me, her lips red and hot and dry from the sun. I could almost taste her.
I glanced down, and caught one of my hands moving up and out, like it had a mind of its own. I snatched it back, my arms suddenly unwieldy pontoons hanging there, heavy and awkward. I didn’t know what to do with them.
“Frank—”
“Conway’s fine.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I was just joking.” Her face had turned serious. She was even more beautiful.
“Look, can you find me tonight?” I asked.
She frowned. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not like that. Just wait—wait until I’m alone somewhere, and then come find me. Can you do that?”
Her cat-green eyes refocused themselves somewhere back over my shoulder. I didn’t turn, but I knew Hawking must be back there, out of the trees finally. I’d already had more time than I’d expected.
“Now or never, Carmen. Will you find me?”
She nodded, and that was enough for me.
AN INFINITY OF stars twisted in the night sky, bullet holes shot through a heavy black tarp. I perched on the bow, scrunched in the stained canvas chair, and watched the sky turn overhead.
At last light the Purple had been allowed to drift within just a few yards of the beach. All the necessary materials for camping had been ferried, bucket-brigade style, up above the high-tide line. Even Rigger had been floated across on a small inflatable raft, the kind used in pools. The equipment included two tents, sleeping bags, charcoal, coolers, and fishing rods, everything needed for a night out on the beach.
The duffel bag had gone across as well, clutched to Rigger’s chest, as part of his “gear.”
Years on the ocean had taught me that there’s always a chance for the unexpected, and waking to find the boat had drifted off while we slept on a near-deserted island would be very bad news. There was no choice, I had explained. I told everyone I planned to spend the night alone aboard the Purple, just in case. I’d let her drift forty yards back out into the cove on the outgoing tide, then dropped the anchor lines.
The campfire was easily visible on shore. After a few hours it had gone out. The glow of a lantern lit Carmen and Ben’s tent for another hour or so, and then that went dark too.
I deliberately avoiding lookin
g at my watch, but the stars told me it must be past two in the morning. My cramped joints agreed, and I gave up the fight for a pocket of warm air. I stood, threw off the blanket, and stretched my fingertips up towards the bullet-riddled heavens.
Time to give up, I told myself. She isn’t coming.
I’d been convinced of that for the last hour at least, but for the hundredth time I resolved to give her five more minutes.
I perched myself on the edge of the chair.
“Frank,” a voice whispered, directly behind me.
Every ounce of me tried to scream out. The sound climbed up out of my stomach and halfway through my throat before I strangled it. It shot out of me as air streaming between pressed lips, the hissing sound lost in the slapping of the waves.
I leapt off the chair and whirled around.
Carmen’s hair transluced in the starlight, her eyes refracted forest greens. She looked scared, and I had an overwhelming desire to hold her, to pull her to me and tell her that it would be all right. My hand reached out—I didn’t stop it this time, couldn’t stop it this time—and traced a wet tendril of hair down her left cheek.
She grabbed my wrist, stopped me from touching her face, but didn’t let go. She held on to my hand tightly.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“Just get me a towel,” she hissed, and let her hand drop back to her side.
I gestured, and she followed me below. I slid all the curtains into place, then lit a lantern I keep for emergencies. The boat had electric lights, but I thought better of draining the batteries, or of firing up the generator for that matter.
Carmen started to shiver, and I dug into the storage compartment underneath the seat and came out with the terrycloth robe I’d stolen from the Hilton in Puerto Vallarta last year. She pulled it on, and we settled into the single couch on the wall across from the galley.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“You first.”
“Something’s wrong with Ben.”
I said nothing.
“He’s acting strangely. He’s drinking for one, which he doesn’t usually do so much of. It’s a vacation, of course, so I’ve been attributing it to that. But tonight…” Her voice drifted off, tiny even in the tiny cabin.
“What?”
“He hit me,” she said, quiet as a mouse.
I went cold all over. Goose pimples prickled at my collar.
She must have seen my face. “It’s not like you think,” she said quickly. “We were arguing, things got out of hand, and he did it.”
I trembled in my seat, muscles knotting and unknotting up and down my arms.
”Just the once though.” She brushed back her hair on the left side, so I could see her ear. It was swollen, and there was a bit of dried blood clinging to the top.
“Does he hit you often?”
“No. Not often.”
“And he’s asleep on the beach?”
“Passed out, more like.”
“Okay.” I stood up.
“Frank, don’t.” She grabbed me around the wrist again. Her grip surprised me, strong as iron. “Please don’t.”
“No promises,” I said, but I sat again, straight-backed, on the edge of my seat.
“How did you know, anyway?”
“I didn’t.”
She frowned. “Then why ask me to find you tonight?” Her hair fit snugly over her ear, covering the damage wrought by Ben Hawking’s fist, and she started at the floor, ashamed of the beating he had given her.
My gut roiled.
“More bad news about the golden boy,” I said, and told her everything. I told her about the duffel and the money and the currency straps banding all the cash together, the ones marked Banco United.
When I had finished, she shot up and started pacing back and forth in the small space between the couch and the chart table, stopping occasionally to drum her fingers on something or twist a strand of hair around a finger.
“So you think Ben has something to do with the money?” she asked finally.
“Carmen, he actually brought it up, talked about money missing. As far as I”m concerned he’s already bragging about it.”
“The money thing, though, that wasn’t a robbery,” she said.
I looked at her, confused.
“I work in the bank now, remember?”
“It is a little hard to believe.” I smiled, thinking of some of the times we had together. “You never struck me as the office type.”
She sat down again, leaned up against me, and I put my arm around her body. She was still shivering.
“It was just a job,” she said, “but I turned out to be pretty good at it. I was there when they told Ben about the problem, and I understood it all. It’s just a paperwork issue. Banco United is owned by the group Ben works for, and they own a lot of banks, among other things. I hate to tell you this—you being a private citizen with a bank account and all—but this stuff happens all the time. I’ve been working at the office for less than a year and I’ve already seen it more than once. I’m not saying money just falls off of trucks, just that when it comes to reams of boring paperwork, attention wanders, mistakes get made.”
“If there was a robbery, would you have heard about it?”
“In the amount you’re talking about? I don’t see how I could have not heard about it. They would have called Ben. Even if he wasn’t at a phone, they would have tracked him down.”
“Then how do you explain the large bag of money sitting on the beach not two hundred feet from here?”
“A large but legitimate withdrawal,” she said weakly.
I laughed, a short, hard bark. “Wouldn’t the bank take off the marked currency straps? To count it as a withdrawal?”
She thought about that. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Here’s why no one came to get Ben Hawking,” I said. “They don’t know it’s missing. Just now, you filled in a piece of the puzzle for me. I couldn’t figure why they weren’t all over him already. I mean, the Mexican police are corrupt but they’re not incompetent. If anything that means they are more tied into criminal organizations than cops in the States. For the right price, Federales can find out anything. And a big American company like this banking group could pull the right strings in an emergency. Say, if a bank robbery occurred.”
“So why haven’t they?”
“Because they don’t know they’ve been robbed, and until then no one goes looking for the missing money. That paperwork you mentioned—could Ben have fudged it intentionally?”
“You mean hide the fact that the money was there, so that when it got taken no would realize?”
She was as quick as I remembered her being. “Exactly.”
“Yes, of course. He’s a vice president of the parent company. Technically he ranks higher than the president of Banco United. He would have access to the paperwork, even the vault if he could give a convincing reason.”
I nodded.
“But he wouldn’t do it. You don’t know him. He’s a good man.”
I reached out, touched her torn ear, and she looked at the floor again. “There’s no way, Carmen. There’s no way that money and that man ended up together in the middle of the ocean by anything other than design. What’s the alternative?”
“Coincidence,” she said, and her mouth hardened into a thin white line. Carmen had never been a big believer in coincidence.
“I think he covered the paper trail, set up some cover to get accomplices access to the vault, and then sent the three of them in to get the money the same morning we left.”
“You said the three of them.” She tapped a front tooth with her fingernail. “What three?”
“There were three of them. When I was on their boat, just before it went under, I saw a body.”
“Someone drowned?” Her eyes sprang open.
“No,” I said. “He’d been shot in the chest.”
“Oh God.” She covered her mouth. “He’s involved in
a murder.”
“Involved? Carmen, he could very well be the man who killed him. Let’s just hope it was an accomplice and not some poor dock worker. But probably he was an accomplice—that’s the best angle on it I can figure. Why else would he be out here on the boat with them? If I had to guess I’d say there was some argument over the money, and the argument turned violent.”
She started to pace again, rapping her knuckles incessantly on the walls, the table, the backs of her own hands. I just stayed still, said nothing, gave her a minute to let it all filter through.
“But why would any of them be on the boat,” she said under her breath, a statement, not a question.
“What do you mean?”
“You put your finger on it, Frank. You asked why else the dead man would be out here if he was just a dock worker. That’s a good question, but it applies to all of them. Why should any of them be out here on the ocean after a robbery?”
I said nothing, just watched her think. Eventually, it stumped her.
It had stumped me, at least for a while.
“Why, Frank?” she asked again.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Don’t even try to feed me that little shrug, you pretending to be casual,” she said. “I know you, remember? Your face has that hard look it gets whenever we get into a tight place.”
I said nothing.
“You know exactly why—don’t you?” Her pacing increased in speed, back and forth, faster and faster. Energy radiated off of her. She was practically jumping up and down.
I stood, grabbed her by the shoulders, made her be still. “Do you love him?” I asked.
“What does that have to do with anything? I know this has been tough on you—”
“Forget about me,” I cut her off. “This might be hard for you to hear, and I can’t be sure, but—the paperwork, the vault access, he had the ability to set all that up. What about you?”
“Me?” Her nose crinkled up like it always had when she didn’t understand something.
“Yes, Carmen. You. Why did he bring you along during all this?”