by Tom Lowe
“What do you mean?”
“He left his cigar butt on the railing. No bigger than your thumb, and that might be big enough. Let’s walk over there to see if it’s the same brand Izzy smoked.”
The man had left the wet cigar on the weathered and creosote-stained dock railing. I said, “It looks expensive, dark leaves, probably hand-rolled. It could be the same brand Izzy Gonzales smoked. We can store it in a Ziploc.” I stuck the tip of a ballpoint pen in the warm ash and carried it back to Jupiter.
Dave stopped walking near Jupiter’s transom. “Do you want me to call Cal Thorpe?” he asked.
“Does he have a family?”
“You know I can’t answer that?”
“You just did. I don’t want to risk his life.”
“He speaks Spanish like he was raised in Mexico. Maybe he can get in the inside, find the weak link to Gonzales.”
“All of that takes time, money and people in Langley who have a reason to toss me a rope. We don’t have any of that right now.”
“Maybe we do.”
“What do you mean?”
Dave folded his thick arms. “It depends on how bad they want Gonzales, and my guess is that in this political climate, they want him pretty bad. The president’s pledged to do whatever it takes to stop or dramatically curtail the flow of Mexican drugs smuggled across our border. But a billionaire, like Pablo would operate in an insular environment. It’d be like invading Fort Knox. However, you may be the catalyst to bring him out.”
“You mean the bait.”
“Look at it from this perspective, Sean. You’re already in his sights, and if that fake fisherman you spotted is connected to Pablo, it’s now only semantics. If you’re his prey, it stacks the odds in his court. If you’re bait, and if someone’s got your back, it can give you the edge in an international street fight.”
“There are a lot of fine and dedicated men and women carrying federal shields. And there are some not so competent, and that can put me in a dangerous place.”
A young couple steered a Morgan into the pass, popped the spinnaker and let the east wind push the sailboat into the channel. I said, “What I’d like more than anything is to drive over to Cedar Key and take a few weeks to sail a 41 Beneteau back here to Ponce Marina for the new owner. He’s in Boston, a novice sailor who wants to take delivery when he and his family winter in Florida.”
Dave picked at a hangnail. “Sometimes it’s hard to read your opponent, to play the cards dealt when never asked to sit in the game. But that comes with the territory.”
“I’ve stepped away from the table. Agents Flores, Jenkins and Keyes and their colleagues can take the reins. Izzy Gonzales, the man who killed Molly, Mark, and Luke Palmer, is dead. Frank Soto raped Nicole Davenport and left her shell to be zipped by ranger Ed Crews. The feds can chase them down. I gave them a head start by dropping the tracker in a dead man’s shorts. Let them take the lead and run with it.”
We watched as Joe the cat, a calico, thick with muscle and attitude, strutted by, ignoring us, holding his scarred head high. Dave said, “I’m going back online to see if the GPS signal might have returned. Maybe we’ll see it heading for the Yucatan.”
“Just leave it, Dave. It took too many deaths to get a serious federal posse out there. If the feds want to use me to get Gonzales, let them earn it. I’m done.”
“We both know you can’t walk away. Before, it was to help track down a killer for that lady on your boat. Now, it’s because Gonzales won’t let you walk away. Sean, we need to turn the game around so you do walk away.”
I looked at the cigar stuck to the end of a Bic pen, my hand gripping the pen hard, knuckles white as cotton. Max barked. I turned when she pawed at the glass on the sliding door leading into Jupiter’s salon. The door slid open, and Elizabeth stepped out on the transom with Max jumping up, trying to see the direction Joe the cat had gone.
Elizabeth smiled. She wore beige shorts and a white cotton top. “Max has been such a sweetie. She was napping on the couch until she looked up and saw you two out here. I thought her little tail was going to fall off she was wagging it so hard.”
I smiled. “And then she saw ol’ Joe, and her recessed lioness DNA took control.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll join you gentlemen up there.” Elizabeth walked to the steps leading from the transom to the short section of dock that held Jupiter’s mooring ropes.
Dave lowered his voice. “This is all yours, now. Think about what we discussed. Think about your options, Sean. That guy with the fishing pole was on M dock, less than fifty yards from where we’re standing. No doubt he’s a pair of eyes for Pablo. You know the next time they come it’ll be on your doorstep, and they won’t be carrying a fishing rod.”
Dave waved to Elizabeth as he walked across the dock and stepped aboard Gibraltar, disappearing into the air conditioned salon.
Elizabeth looked at my arm in the sling and kissed me on the cheek. I could smell the fragrance of hibiscus from the shampoo she’d used. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you,” I said, glancing around the marina. “We have to talk.”
NINETY-THREE
We made coffee and sat at the bar inside Jupiter. I told Elizabeth what Pablo Gonzales had said. She listened then asked, “What are you saying, Sean? Are you suggesting that it’s safe for me to go back to the restaurant, to go back to a world I don’t even recognize since Molly was taken away from me?”
“They’ll come for me, Elizabeth. I don’t want you here to risk your life when they come. I’m going to put you in safekeeping, somewhere no one can find you until I stop Gonzales.”
She stood from the bar and watched a trawler chugging into the marina with a white-haired man behind the wheel on the fly-bridge and a woman less than half his age in a bikini lounging on the seat beside him, a tall Bloody Mary in her hand. Elizabeth turned back toward me, her eyes capturing the ruby reflection of the sunset off the bay. “You went back into that forest for me, for Molly, too. I’m not going to abandon you. Not now. No damn way. I won’t give Gonzales permission to intimidate me. I can shoot a gun—”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but you can’t stay here. Gonzales will—”
“Shhh,” she said, stepping up to me. I stood as she tenderly reached out to touch my shoulder. “Does it hurt?”
“Only when I breathe.”
She unbuttoned my shirt, her fingers gently touching the dressing. She lifted her eyes to mine, the pools of green filled with compassion, her lips wet. She said nothing as she guided my right hand to her cheek. She pressed her body against me, her eyes locked on mine. I cupped her face with both hands and leaned down as we kissed. Her lips were warm and soft, no trace of lipstick. She smiled and said, “Make love to me, Sean.
“I don’t know if this is the right time—”
“This is the best time, Sean. Time is all we have, and I don’t want to waste it with things that aren’t important in my life.”
She reached for my hand and led me down the three steps to the master berth. As I closed the door to the cabin, I glanced back up at Max. She sat on the couch in the salon, ears cocked, eyes following something outside, something farther away than the dock in front of Jupiter.
Inside the cabin, I looked out the porthole for a second, and watched the setting sun cast the marina in shades of cherry and black. I pulled the curtains shut. Maybe Max saw nothing menacing, her little radar catching something that wasn’t hostile.
I turned to Elizabeth as she unbuttoned her shirt, her face alluring, eyes filled with conviction. We kissed again, long and passionate, then undressed. She looked at my bandage for a second, her eyes blinking back tears. I kissed her again and could feel the heat radiating from her skin. Then I lay on my back and guided her over me. She looked into my eyes, slowly mounting me, her eyes closing, a deep breath, her hair cascading on both sides of her face, brushing against my chest and shoulder, the pain in my arm extinguished. Elizabeth’s soft moans were
drowned by a diesel engine cranking a few slips away. A single tear rolled down her cheek and fell in the center of my chest. She leaned down to kiss me and I felt her body quiver.
Thunder rolled over the sea and buried the sound of a single bark from Max, a subconscious alarm in my head, an obscure omen beyond the cusp of the horizon.
NINETY-FOUR
The next morning we awoke at sunrise and showered; then Elizabeth put on one of my old shirts. She moved around Jupiter’s small galley and made omelets, turkey sausage, fried potatoes and onions. Her body language was more relaxed preparing breakfast, moving between three pans, the toaster, and the brewed coffee in the pot. “Can I fix Max a little plate?” she asked, picking up a paper plate.
“Cut the links into pieces and maybe she’ll eat slower,” I said, opening the side windows and salon door, allowing a cross-breeze to take the place of the air conditioner.
We ate and Elizabeth said, “Living on a boat makes you want to downsize and toss all the clutter in your life into a big dumpster somewhere. I wonder what it’d be like to actually travel around on a boat.”
“Sailboat is the way to go. Quiet, it’s just the wind and the water.”
She sipped a glass of orange juice and looked across the marina. “This world is so different from your old home on the river. It’s a different kind of quiet there. Which do you prefer, the marina life or the solitude of the river?”
I remembered what Gonzales said about solitude, my stomach tightening as I swallowed the eggs. “Both places have their pluses and minuses. Right now, because you are here, I’d rather be at the marina. If we were on the river, my shack of solitude, I’d rather be there with you.”
She smiled. “That’s sweet. Maybe when this is over, we can take a boat trip. That would be a world I’ve never experienced, one that you might have to pry me away from, assuming I don’t get seasick and become a green-faced pain-in-the-butt for you.”
My phone vibrated on the bar. It was Dave. “Good morning,” I said.
“That term is indeed relative,” his voice deep as his pipes opened.
“What’s the matter?” I almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
“I was watching the daybreak newscast… they’re reporting that the body of a park ranger, Ed Crews, the man you thought went MIA from the forest, was found last night.”
“Where?”
“In the forest. Found by two teenagers on ATVs. Kids will probably have nightmares for life.”
I pushed the plate back and stood. “What’d they find?”
“The corpse was sitting upright, under a tree. The body had been decapitated. The head was stuck on the end of a broken limb.”
I said nothing. Elizabeth’s eyes were wide, her lips growing tighter.
Dave said, “Police say there was a note, a piece of paper stuck in Crews’ mouth. Someone wrote: ‘Heads up, the spineless one will be next.’ Sounds like Pablo Gonzales sent you a personal and very graphic message.”
I held my breath for a long moment. “Want some coffee?”
“Do you have a fresh pot brewed?”
“Yeah, and if your stomach wasn’t turned by the newscast, you might like some of the hearty breakfast Elizabeth made.”
“Twist my arm. I’ll be right over. It’s a beautiful blue-sky morning. Let’s dine on Jupiter’s cockpit.”
“No sign of a fake fishermen or other intruders in our little boat world?”
“Seems to be clear as the sky.”
* * *
The three of us sat in deck chairs at the small table in the cockpit. Elizabeth didn’t want to hear any of the details surrounding the discovery of Crews’ body. Dave sipped from a mug of black coffee, a slight breeze tossing his white hair. He said, “I’ve been thinking about what Gonzales told you.”
“And, have you reached a conclusion that us non-sociopaths can relate to?” I asked.
“Perhaps. The overriding theme in Marquez’s novel, A Hundred Years of Solitude, is how man is doomed to repeat his mistakes, even when five years of rain washes away every semblance of indiscretions made in the village of Maconda. Marquez, incorporating a linear style of storytelling with surreal prose, leads us to believe that man is doomed to repeat his atrocities because we’re all wired with some defective, inherited genetic material since the Garden of Eden. He contends that man is destined to recycle the mistakes and imprudence of his forefathers… Paradise Lost.”
“I don’t follow you,” Elizabeth said.
Dave nodded. “I’m just thinking, verbalizing aloud. Blame it on the strong Blue Mountain coffee. I guess my point is this: Gonzales sees no hope, no salvation for the sins of our fathers because most of us are doomed to repeat them. He’s put himself in a self-ordained position to eliminate the repeat offenders from the docket. In other words, he’s got a God complex, maybe similar to Hitler, whereby he feels he’s been chosen to cut the diseased or the weak ones out of humanity’s herd. That would make him the worst kind of psychopath because he would believe all that he does, all he accomplishes, is for the greater good. A killer who can rationalize his deeds because he believes a higher power has chosen him as an elite foot soldier is extremely dangerous.”
I said, “So you think Gonzales believes rendering me in a state of paralysis will stop a repeat of the evils that cycled through a village like Maconda.”
“That’s so sick,” Elizabeth said.
“Indeed,” agreed Dave, “but a psychopath only needs a fantasy cause to create a platform of illusions.”
The sun went behind a cloud.
The crimson light was no bigger than a dime.
The shade of tomato soup as it swept across Jupiter’s transom. It was almost subliminal. It could have been a reflection from any of the dozens of boats bobbing in the moorings. But there is no reflection when the sun goes behind a cloud.
NINETY-FIVE
“Get inside!” I said.
“What?” Dave asked.
“A shooter!” We scrambled as Nick leaned out of the salon door on St. Michael.
I saw the red dot flash for a second across Elizabeth’s breasts. “Get down!” I yelled, flattening Elizabeth to the transom. A silencer suppressed the crack of the rifle, the noise resembling a wooden mallet striking the dock somewhere. A second round sliced through the water between Jupiter and St. Michael just as Nick was closing his salon door, a steaming mug of coffee sloshing over his hand.
“Oh God!” Elizabeth screamed. I grabbed her arm, pulling her to the bulkhead of Jupiter, Max right behind us. Dave crouched low and ran across the cockpit to the salon doors. Elizabeth, Max and I followed. I glanced back at Nick. He was perplexed, hair sticking out, face bloated from a hangover and heavy sleep. He held his now half mug of coffee and looked like he’d just stepped into a bad dream.
“Get down, Nick!” I screamed, reaching for the Glock under my shirt. The next round blew a quarter-sized hole through the glass door next to Nick’s head. He dropped his coffee mug and dove headfirst into the bay.
I pushed Elizabeth into Jupiter’s salon. “Stay down! Go below!” I turned to Dave who was crouching behind the salon wall. “You hit?”
“No.”
“Can you see Nick?”
“No, but I hear him. I think he swam under the dock.”
“The shooter’s using a rifle with a silencer and a laser scope.”
“Where do you think he’s positioned?”
“He has to be elevated enough to shoot over Gibraltar.”
Dave nodded. “The only building that high is Jackson Marine. Their boat storage facility is three floors.”
“The Glock won’t do much good. Your 30.06 is still aboard Jupiter after I cleaned it for you last time I was here.”
“Where?”
“Port closet in the master. Get it for me. I want to keep an eye out there.”
“Your arm’s in a sling!”
“Please, Dave, get it.”
He returned in less than thirty seconds, the
rifle in his hands. “Is the scope accurate?” I asked.
“In no wind, you’ll get a one inch drop at the first two hundred yards.”
“Jackson Marine is about two-fifty.” I looked at the surface of the bay, and then at the wind gauge spinning on a sailboat moored about fifty yards in the center of the water. There was a slight ripple on the surface, the breeze about seven miles per hour out of the northwest.
Dave said, “Don’t stand. He might take your head off.”
“What the fuck is goin’ on?” shouted Nick from under the dock.
“Stay down, Nick!” I said. “Stay out of sight. The shooter might still be out there.”
“I’m wrapped around the dock post like a crab. Barnacles and shells are cuttin’ the crap outta my hands. Why’s some asshole blowing a hole through my door?”
I said, “He’s trying to kill my friends.”
“Good fuckin’ morning, Sean O’Brien.”
Dave asked, “Nick, can you see around the piling? Toward Jackson Marine, maybe the rooftop.”
“Hell yeah I can see. Looks like some dude’s lying down on his belly, on the roof, right above the A in the word marine.”
I saw the red laser dot move slowly across Jupiter’s cockpit. I gestured to Dave, and he nodded, his eyes following the tiny red circle. “Dave, watch the dot. I’ll have to get off a shot from Jupiter, and it’s bobbing in the tide, with the current and wind.” I chambered a round, took off the safety.
Dave said, “The dot is starboard, moving very slowly.”
I dropped the sling and felt the stitches tug in my shoulder. I stepped to port side, braced the rifle against Jupiter’s bulkhead and brought the scope up to my eye. I found him in seconds. Recognized the baseball cap. It was turned backward so the shooter could see through his scope.
Dave shouted, “Can’t see the laser dot! He could be sighted down on you.”