Revenge in the Keys

by Matthew Rief

  “Ange, what the—”

  “Use your head, Logan!” she said, killing the engine and stepping onto the dock. “There’s gotta be at least twenty of them, and they have the entire place surrounded.”

  As I climbed off the leather seat, she flipped down the kickstand and planted it on the dock. Then she turned and stared at me with her intense blue eyes.

  “You know me, Ange,” I said, glancing back at the smoke rising up from my dad’s condo. “I don’t back down from a fight. I don’t run away.”

  She shook her head, “Yeah, well, one of these days, it’s gonna get your ass killed.”

  I gripped my Sig, scanned the condo’s grounds and walked towards the beach. “Just cover me,” I said sternly.

  As I glanced back over my shoulder to look at Ange, she hit me with a strong roundhouse kick, her foot striking me right in the cheek and slamming me hard to the dock. Then she stepped towards me, forced her heel into my right hand and ripped my Sig away. Ange was a fourth-degree black belt in tae kwon do, and it always amazed me how fast she could throw a punch, land a kick or put someone in an unbreakable hold.

  “Crawling right into an ambush won’t solve anything,” she said, staring me in the eyes.

  I took a few calming breaths, slowing my heart rate and turning my brain back on. What was happening to me? I was usually the calm one. The collected one who always thought things through. Even back on Loggerhead Key, when a small army had surrounded me and killed three Coast Guardsmen in cold blood, I hadn’t let go and completely given into my anger. I’d still used my head and hadn’t been so reckless. I guess it was the thought of my dad being murdered that had switched my psyche into the highest gear imaginable.

  Seeing that I’d calmed down, Ange jumped onto the starboard float of her Cessna, unlocked the door and threw her backpack and the hard case containing her sniper rifle behind the two front seats.

  Stepping back onto the dock, she turned to me and pointed towards the resort. “Attacking them now is just plain stupid, and you know it too. No, if we fight these guys, we do it more prepared, and hopefully with greater numbers.”

  She was right, of course. She usually was. Taking all of them on right now would be stupid. But those guys had murdered my dad, and every part of me wanted to run over there, guns blazing, and avenge his death.

  “Besides,” she added, untying the mooring lines, “you have what they want. You’re the only one who can help them find whatever it is they’re looking for.” She opened the door, turned back to me and added, “Let’s make these assholes come to us.”

  I took one more look back at the resort. Even from the end of the dock, I could see the massive flames pouring out of my dad’s old condo. Scanning around the rest of the grounds, I spotted a handful of guys carrying guns, searching vigorously. Turning back to Ange, I gave the float a push off the dock, then jumped aboard. Ange had already started up the engine by the time I slammed the door shut.

  I looked back through the glass as she eased the throttles, accelerating us over the calm water of Santa Martha Bay. I noticed a few guys running down the dock towards us, but they were too far away to make an attack. Then, just as we were picking up enough speed to take off, a truck drove down the dock, stopping right at the end. It was far away, but I saw a massive guy step out and stare at us as we took off and gained elevation. Less than a minute later, he vanished from view, and the island of Curacao soon became just a beautiful speck on the horizon behind us.

  A few minutes after taking off and before we’d reached five thousand feet, the phone I’d grabbed from Enrique at the cemetery started to ring. Digging into my pocket, I pulled out the phone, pressed the answer button and held it up to my ear.

  I didn’t say anything, only listened, waiting for the person on the other end to speak first.

  “You’ve got my attention, Logan. I’ll give you that,” a low and powerful voice said. He spoke in a Bolivian Spanish accent, and I knew instantly that it was one of the Campos brothers.

  “What the hell do you want?” I said sternly, loud enough for him to hear me over the howling of the engine.

  After a moment’s pause, he said, “I would like to offer you one final chance to live. If you turn back now and tell me everything I want to know, I’ll let you walk. I offered the same deal to your dad. I suggest that you be smarter than he was and accept the offer.”

  My blood began to boil and I gritted my teeth. “There won’t be any deals. I’m gonna make you pay for what you did.”

  “Fine by me. I prefer doing things the hard way. There’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you. I’ll be seeing you again very soon, Logan.”

  “Yes,” I said sternly. “You will, Campos.”

  I hung up the phone abruptly and dropped it on the dashboard. After a brief moment of silence, I turned to Ange. “Thanks for getting us out of there.” Then, taking in a deep breath, I sighed and added, “That place was crawling with bad guys, and they were expecting us to go there.”

  She smiled. “Don’t mention it. I know how it feels to lose parents. I’m sure I would have done the same thing if I were in your position, but we have to be smart about this. You’ll have your chance to get revenge, I’m certain of that. Let’s just try to do it on our terms.” I thought over her words and nodded. A second later, she glanced at my cargo shorts pocket and said, “Now, about that watch.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Just as we were reaching our cruising altitude of ten thousand feet, I reached into the front pocket of my shorts and pulled out the wristwatch that the drug runners had found on my dad’s dead body. The digital display still worked and was even giving a reading of our altitude and the barometric pressure inside the aircraft.

  Holding it out in front of Ange, I said, “Does this watch look familiar to you?”

  “Yeah. It looks just like yours.”

  “Right,” I said, holding it right beside the one strapped to my wrist. They were practically the same make and model, just a few years apart, and while mine was black with silver lining, my dad’s was black with blue lining. “I bought this watch for my dad for his birthday the year that he died.”

  Ange shrugged. “I don’t get what any of that has to do with the location of whatever it is these guys are after.”

  I nodded, understanding her completely. To anyone other than myself, the watch and the words engraved on the back would have absolutely no meaning at all. I was the only person alive who could figure out the clue, and that was exactly what my dad had wanted.

  “You see,” I said, “my dad was old-school. He’d been using an analog dive watch his entire life and never had a desire to switch over to digital. So when I bought him this watch, it was more of a joke between us than anything else. I honestly never thought he would actually wear it.”

  Ange glanced at me with raised eyebrows, letting me know that I still wasn’t making any sense.

  I continued, “About four years ago, my dad and I were diving near Thunderbolt when we discovered a narrow opening in the rock at about 150 feet down. Since we both still had a good supply of air left in our tanks, we decided to check it out. We shined our flashlights ahead of us and slowly finned into what we soon realized was an underwater cave. It appeared to go on into the darkness forever. After about ten minutes of swimming, the cave began to angle upwards. A few moments after that, we were staring up at a cavity of air, our exhalation bubbles disappearing as they broke through the surface overhead. We finned up through the vertical slug of water.”

  I paused for a moment, and when Ange looked at me with intrigued eyes, I continued, “After breaking the surface, we climbed out of the water, took off our BCDs and explored the area with all the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning, hoping to stumble upon something rare or valuable. The cave wasn’t very big, maybe the size of the inside of a school bus, so it didn’t take us long to search every inch of the place and realize that there was nothing but rocks. As we moved back towards our scuba gear
, I noticed a smaller cave jutting through the rock and mostly hidden in the corner. As I struggled over slippery rocks, trying to squeeze my way inside, my dive watch slipped off my wrist and fell into a narrow crevice. We spotted it far below but knew that there was no way to reach it. So we left it and headed back up for the surface.”

  We sat in silence for a few seconds, listening to the engines and the propeller as we flew through the air. I looked over at Ange and could tell she was trying to work all of it out in her mind. Then she reached for my dad’s watch, turned it over, and read the inscription one more time.

  “NEVER LOSE TIME,” she said, reading the words aloud. “Your watch. The word time is underlined, referring to your lost timepiece.”

  I nodded. “Exactly.”

  Then she handed it back to me and said, “So, whatever it is these guys are after, your dad must have hidden inside that cave.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Do you remember where it is?”

  “Yeah. Believe it or not, it’s actually close to the Thunderbolt wreck. You and I have cruised past it many times. It’s just south of it, actually, and like I said, it’s pretty deep at one hundred and fifty feet down. Not a lot of people are comfortable diving that deep.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Leave it to your dad to outsmart people even from the grave.”

  “The best thing is, they could’ve been trying to understand that clue for years and they never would’ve gotten it. No one would have.”

  A few hours later, we landed in Jamaica to refuel, this time pulling into a different, smaller marina about fifty miles west of Port Royal. After paying the attendant with a small stack of Jamaican bills, we climbed aboard and took off for Key West. It was a long trip, and we took turns piloting, giving each other time to rest and enjoy some of the delicious Jamaican barbeque we bought back at the marina.

  It was a beautiful day in the Caribbean. Blue, cloudless skies as far as the eye could see and a calm ocean below. I’d always enjoyed flying over the Caribbean, especially in a Cessna, where the cruising altitude of usually just over ten thousand feet offered a much better view than that of a commercial aircraft. Looking down through the window, I watched as we flew over Jamaica and Cuba, as well as the shining white sand and turquoise waters of all the hundreds of smaller islands and shoals that littered the deep blue ocean below.

  It was just after five in the afternoon when we touched down back in Tarpon Cove in Key West. Easing alongside the dock, Ange turned us around, then killed the engine just as the starboard float made contact with the fenders. Opening the door, I jumped out and tied her off, and then we grabbed our stuff and headed down the dock towards the parking lot. She’d already paid to moor the plane there for the entire month, so she only smiled and waved at the dock attendant as we headed for my Tacoma, which was still parked right along the water.

  Tossing our gear on the backseat, we hopped inside, and I drove us over to my house just a few minutes away. I kept my eyes alert as I turned off Palmetto Street and onto the gravel driveway of my house. I knew that it was incredibly unlikely that any of the Campos brothers’ drug runners had already reached Key West, but I always preferred to err on the side of caution. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that I lived here, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before they showed up.

  I parked underneath my light-gray, white-trimmed house that was propped up on stilts and, after disengaging the security system, we walked up the stairs and in through the side door. After grabbing a quick shower, we dressed in fresh clothes and headed over to Conch Harbor Marina. I’d called Jack Rubio, one of my oldest and best friends, while in the air using my satellite phone, and we’d agreed to meet on his boat, the Calypso. Jack had been running Rubio Charters, a fishing and diving charter, ever since his father had passed away.

  Pulling into the marina, I parked right along the railroad ties, then we both got out and headed down the dock. Jack had the Calypso moored at slip forty-seven, just down the dock from my boat, and when we approached his white forty-five-foot Sea Ray, we saw that the deck hatch leading down to the engine room was propped open.

  I stepped onto the swim platform, straddled the transom and peeked my head down into the engine room. Jack’s messy blond hair, tanned skin and lean frame were unmistakable. He was wearing nothing but a pair of board shorts, and his body was awkwardly positioned behind the generator.

  “Need a hand?” I said, sliding over the transom and stepping down the small metal ladder that extended down to the engine room.

  He froze and peeked his blue eyes over the back of the massive machine. “Just about got it.”

  A second later, he crawled out from behind the machine, pressed a few buttons on its front panel, and started it right up. When it purred like a cat, he turned to me, grinning from ear to ear. “Just needed a little love.”

  Jack had always been good with engines, generators, radios, and pretty much anything else that had electrical and mechanical components. He’d learned to be after years of running charters all around the Lower Keys.

  I climbed out of the engine room, followed closely by Jack. He was covered from head to toe in sweat and oil, so he grabbed a nearby towel before giving Ange a hug. After closing and locking the hatch, we headed up to the bridge and sat on cushioned white seats surrounding a small table. The view was great up there, and Jack opened a nearby cooler and handed out coconut waters and bottles of Keys Disease beer. Keys Disease was a local brewery that both Jack and I loved and had both invested in, mainly to encourage them to bring back our favorite brew they called Paradise Sunset.

  “So,” Jack said, leaning back into the cushioned seat. “What have you two been up to? You know you gave Wilkes quite the scare when you ran off on him last night.”

  It was hard for me to believe that it was only last night that Ange and I had been eating at Latitudes. It felt like a week had passed by, we’d done so much. I started at the beginning, telling Jack first about the phone call and about how Ange and I had flown down to Curacao to figure out what was going on. Then I told him about the drug runners who’d impersonated detectives and how we had gone to Willemstad, met with a real detective, and then been chased off the island by a swarm of bad guys while eating brunch.

  “Damn, sorry to hear about your dad, bro,” he said, shaking his head. “He was a great guy and should never have gone out that way. Truth is, I’ve always been a little bit suspicious about his death.”

  I nodded. If I was being honest with myself, I had been too. I mean, sure, my dad wasn’t the healthiest eater around. He enjoyed his bacon and greasy cheeseburgers as much as most men do. But a heart attack while scuba diving? It had always struck me as odd, considering he was one of the calmest people I’d ever seen underwater. I’d even argued with the coroners and detectives about it two years ago when they’d told me, but they’d assured me over and over that it was the truth. I wasn’t sure how it had all gone down behind the scenes, but I thought more than one guy had gotten an unexpected payday for that one.

  Running his hand through his long blond hair, Jack looked out over the horizon at the soon-to-be-dying sun and said, “So, what happens now? Sounds like these assholes are gunning for you.”

  I took a drink of beer and said, “Now we find whatever it is they’re looking for, and we use it as bait.”

  Ange and I had talked for a few hours on the plane ride north and had gone over different possible plans of action. It was similar to the way operations went both in the Navy and in the civilian sector. We tried to think like our enemies, putting ourselves in their shoes and trying to figure out how they would act in order to develop a counterattack. It had worked for me hundreds of times before, and I knew that it would work here.

  It was just like in the old pirate tales I used to read. If an English pirate hunter wanted to catch a notorious buccaneer, he first had to think like a pirate. That’s how the best pirate hunters succeeded, and that’s how famous pirates li
ke Bannister, Teach, and Kidd had met their ends.

  We discussed our plan of action with Jack and told him about the watch. Grabbing it from my pocket, I set it on the table in front of him and told him the same backstory I’d told Ange. “It’s the Lost Grotto, Jack. I’m sure of it. And we’re gonna dive down there tomorrow and find out what it is my dad went to such lengths to keep hidden.”

  Jack examined the watch and smiled. “I’m with you, Logan. But as you know, that cave’s right by Thunderbolt, and it’s popular this time of year.”

  “Which is why we need to go early and just try and blend in as best as we can.”

  “You think any of those guys you two ran into in Curacao will be following us?”

  “I have no doubt about that. Which is why all three of us will be packing.”

  We agreed to set out early the following morning and spent the rest of the evening enjoying a few more cold ones and watching the sunset over the water, painting the sky with reds, oranges, and purples in a sight that never got old. Jack fired up his grill and cooked up a feast of hogfish, lobster, and stone crab claws. He used a combination of various seasonings, including Swamp Sauce, a local favorite of ours, then cut open a few lemons, plated the food and set it all in front of us. I hadn’t realized just how hungry I was until I started to dig in, savoring every bite of the fresh and flavorful seafood and washing it all down with a few Paradise Sunsets, my favorite Keys Disease brew.

  When our plates were empty and our bellies full, Ange and I thanked Jack for everything and told him we’d see him bright and early in the morning. I stumbled my way down from the pilothouse and over the transom. As I stepped from the swim platform onto the dock, Ange gripped my left arm.

  “I think you might have had one too many, Dodge,” she said, laughing as we walked with our arms intertwined down the dock.

  She was right. Usually I was pretty good at controlling myself. I mean, sure, I had my nights just like most men do, but for the most part, I practiced the art of self-control. I guess it was the culmination of everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours that had made me reach the bottom of the bottle faster than usual.