Rum Runner eBook_for Epub_Revised

by dannal

  Reggie jumped up from the sofa in the salon and bolted for the rear deck. He hung the binoculars around his neck and plunked himself down in one of the deck chairs. Despite the teen’s sulky attitude, Momo knew he had gotten through. But he didn’t know how much more he could take from the kid before he snapped, and did something he might regret.

  Then Momo heard Reggie mumble something in his direction.

  “What?” Momo said. “What you say?”

  “I said Mama Dorah’s gonna put a curse on you, Momo. A hex,” Reggie said. “She’s gonna make you wish you ain’t never been born.”

  Momo strode toward Reggie as a walking fireball of anger. His jaw clenched, his teeth crushed together, the huge would-be gang leader stomped toward Reggie and grabbed hold of his shirt front. Momo pulled the Desert Eagle from his waistband and stuck it in the teenager’s face.

  “Open yo’ mouth,” Momo said. “Open yo’ mouth. I ain’t playin’ now. Open yo’ mouth or you gonna get smoked right now.”

  Reggie opened his mouth, and Momo pressed the thick muzzle of his Israeli-made pistol into the younger man’s mouth. Momo could hear Reggie’s teeth scraping against the nickel plating of the Desert Eagle’s frame and slide. “Now listen up, Reginald,” Momo said coldly. “You gonna tell me all about Mama Dorah’s powers. The sight you called it. Tell me about the sight, Reggie. It ain’t real, is it?”

  Reggie’s eyes betrayed his terror. He seemed too afraid to answer.

  “It’s okay, Reggie,” Momo said softly. “I know you can’t talk now. So you just nod your head up and down, or shake it side to side. Mama Dorah’s a fraud, isn’t she?”

  Reggie nodded his head gingerly.

  “The sight ain’t a real thing, is it, Reg?” Momo said, sounding menacingly cold. “Don’t lie to me. Just tell me the truth. Right? The sight ain’t real, is it?”

  Reggie shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “Aww, what?” Tiny Deege said, sounding indignant.

  “Now I’m gonna take my piece out yo’ mouth an’ you gonna tell me all about it,” Momo said to Reggie. “Dig?”

  Momo removed his pistol from Reggie’s mouth and wiped the slobber off on Reggie’s shirt. “How she know all that stuff? How she know where to find Josue Remy?”

  “I found it for her,” Reggie said. “She knew I did a bit of hacking now and then; she made me do searches and find Josue. Took a couple of years. I hacked into police mug shot databases, traffic cameras, ATM cameras, grocery store cameras. I ran programs that searched the web for photos, videos, and automatically ran them through a facial recognition software I stole. Took a single frame from an ATM camera in Sainte-Anne, Martinique, to identify Josue. Hacked the bank, traced him to Le Robert, Martinique. Mama Dorah figured that was enough to send us on this trip.”

  “When all this is over,” Momo said, standing and tucking his pistol back into his waistband, “and I take over Ti Flow, you and Mama Dorah gonna be movin’ out the neighborhood. Dig? Don’t want to see you two in the ’hood again, lest I do something you might regret.”

  Reggie just nodded. He was likely too terrified to do anything else.

  “Good,” Momo said. “I’ll be up on the flybridge.” He climbed the steps from the rear deck to the open cockpit area overhead. Momo sat down at the cushioned captain’s chair at the helm. He leaned back with his eyes closed as the catamaran swayed gently in the tropical breeze that lightly roughed up the water of Le Robert bay.

  Momo didn’t realize he had drifted off until he felt the gentle tug on his snug-fitting shirt. At first he had thought that some kind of bug or creature was crawling on him. He slapped at it, then opened his eyes and saw Reggie’s eager, bespectacled eyes peering down at him.

  “What is it?” Momo mumbled. “What time’s it?”

  “Hey, Momo,” Reggie said. “Looks like someone be leavin’ from the boat dock. Thought you’d wanna know.”

  Momo grabbed the binoculars again and swiveled in the captain’s chair. He pressed the cushioned eye cups into his eye sockets.

  “It’s Josue,” Momo said, sounding aghast, despite his grogginess. “He’s leavin’ the island.”

  Momo checked the face of his TAG Heuer chronograph watch. Nearly two hours had passed since he had nodded off at the helm of the anchored catamaran. He shook his head to clear the fog he felt in his brain.

  “Reggie, go tell Zann he comin’ with me,” Momo commanded. “And grab me a can of Rockstar. Make it two. We gonna catch us a traitor.”

  The sun had barely breached the horizon when Max finished inventorying the rum in his underground distillery. He had eighteen fifty-four-gallon barrels of rum aging in the cavern. That did not include the hundred and twenty plus cases of bottled rum stored in the dark recesses of the humid cave.

  Transferring all the rum above ground promised to be an arduous chore. Max intended to make lighter work of the job using a sturdy garden cart to move the boxes across the cavern floor, and then lift them above ground using a makeshift crane built from tubular steel scaffolding. His Polaris quad would provide most of the muscle.

  As soon as Josue returned from his errand in Le Francois—attempting to get his hands on the cell phone of Marquise de Losa’s mistress—they would begin the grueling task of delivering all of the rum to Everest Walsh’s yacht. And then Max would get on with his plans to deliver his poison into Marquse de Losa’s bloodstream.

  Max stopped to take a moment to look around at everything he had built. A strange feeling irritated him deep down. He had to admit: he was sorry to see it all go. He even wondered if he would ever make rum again. Would he even need to, now that his efforts as a rum producer had fulfilled their intended purpose?

  Max heard shuffling footsteps near the top of the wooden steps ascending from the cavern floor to the surface. Max drew his FNS pistol. It wasn’t like Josue to make so much noise.

  “It’s okay, Boss,” Josue said, showing his bare palms. “Don’t shoot,” he added in a jesting manner.

  “You better be ready to move some rum,” Max said. “A lot of rum.”

  “Ready, Boss,” Josue said, kneeling beside the opening of the cavern’s mouth. “And look at this.” He tossed a smartphone with a hot pink protective case down to Max, who caught the phone with two hands, careful not to drop it.

  “You’ve got light fingers, my friend,” Max said. “Good work.”

  “It was easy,” Josue said. He pulled a small credit card out of his pocket and held it up. “I use this to jimmy the door. Didn’t take much, small hotel had old-fashioned locks.”

  “Is that…a McDonald’s gift card?” Max asked, squinting at the writing on the bright red plastic card.

  “Don’t leave island without it,” Josue said, flashing his bright white grin that was impossible not to appreciate.

  Max chuckled. “Josue,” he said, shaking his head, unable to wipe the smile from his lips. “You are a force to be reckoned with.”

  Max and Josue leaned into the job of transferring the rum as if they were well-seasoned stevedores. It only took a short while for the two men to find a rhythm: lower a barrel from the stack, letting it fall onto a sparring mat placed on the cavern floor to keep the cask from breaking; roll the barrel over by the staircase and strap it to the quad; have Josue run up the steps and drive the Polaris to lift the heavy cask; roll the barrel down to the dock, and load it onto Max’s Cobia fishing boat. They performed this same exercise over and over again until the fishing boat sat questionably low in the water, and the rest of the barrels stood upright at the end of the pier.

  Max eased the twenty-seven-foot boat across the bay until the relatively small vessel drew up into the wide shadow of the Snowy Lady, being dwarfed by the fortress-like yacht. Max noted the presence of Marquise de Losa, who stood peering down from the sundeck, looking like a sentry in his militant-looking olive green coat and mirrored sunglasses.

  Max navigated the Cobia gingerly to the exterior swim platform at the massive yach
t’s stern. A man in a white, short-sleeved uniform with white shorts and black epaulettes greeted Max and Josue as they arrived.

  “Mornin’, gentlemen,” the dapper crewman said, speaking with a thick Texas accent. He looked about thirty, with perfectly combed, neatly-trimmed brown hair. “Eric Pepperdine, first mate of this vessel. Captain Bartholemew sent me to assist you in getting your cargo stowed aboard the Snowy Lady. Hope you don’t mind if I pat you down?”

  Max stood with his hands out to his sides so the crewman could check him for weapons. Just like the day before, Max had opted to leave his weapons at home when traveling to Walsh’s yacht, lest he draw too much suspicion. Eric Pepperdine made short work of his pat-down, and then he shook Max’s hand. Then he quickly patted down Josue.

  Max was relieved when the first mate operated the controls of the Snowy Lady’s davit and winch—tools that might normally be used to hoist a yacht tender onto the wide swim platform for transport—to hoist the heavy rum barrels out of Max’s boat and onto the yacht’s stern deck where they could be rolled into submission.

  It wasn’t long before Max and Josue had finished unloading the barrels, and the Cobia’s throttles were wide open. The boat cut through the fresh morning air toward the long white pier at Ilet d’Ombres, so that they could pick up another load.

  The two men worked hard loading the boat a second time. It took three trips to get all of the barrels out to the Snowy Lady, and another three boat trips to transport all of the cardboard cases of bottled rum. With just a dozen boxes still sitting on Max’s dock, he sent Josue back with the boat to retrieve them.

  “I’ll square up with Walsh,” Max said, standing on the teakwood-covered rear swim platform. “When you get back I’ll help you unload the boxes. Then it’ll be Miller time.”

  Josue nodded in an almost solemn way, visually recognizing the gravity of what was about to take place. Max would finally have settled his score with Marquise de Losa.

  Max didn’t care how he would have to do it, but he convinced himself he would be placing the powdered ricin into a drink and Marquise de Losa would be draining it, even if Max had to pour it down the crazy-haired murderer’s gullet.

  As Max watched Josue drive the boat back to the ilet, his mind drifted toward thoughts of his wife, thoughts that now haunted him every day: how Lovelle had always longed to see the islands someday; how she had loved sweet, gooey rum drinks like daiquiris and pina coladas; how beautiful she was. And he couldn’t stop thinking about the cute little fleur de lis tattoo she’d had done on her wrist, just because she loved the way the little French lily looked so much. It now made him sick to realize how much she had meant to him, when he had scarcely ever said a word to let her know that while she was still alive.

  Max also recalled how his wife had once joked, “We should sell all our stuff and move to St. Croix—we’ll make rum for a living, and spend our days on the beach.” He laughed a little as he looked out over the pristine water that faced the scattered buildings of Le Robert in the distance. “Lovelle would have loved this,” he said softly to himself, fighting against the tears that threatened to fill his eyes.

  Then Max remembered the pink-cased cell phone he had in his pocket. He had the forethought to mute the phone, lest he draw any dangerous attention to himself in the event that de Losa placed a call to his mistress while in Max’s presence. But when Max spotted Tito driving Walsh’s Chris-Craft runabout into the yacht’s harbor-like garage, he got a sudden urge for a drink.

  “How do I get to the bar from here?” Max asked Eric Pepperdine, who happily escorted him through a short passageway that led to a door into the dimly-lit bar Walsh called Rum Lord’s Reef. “Actually, I could sure use the head first,” Max said, letting go of the doorknob.

  “Two doors down on the left,” Eric said, and Max stepped past him to the yacht’s bathroom. He opened the door and the lights flickered on automatically. The tiny bathroom was elegant: all of the wood was curly maple; a countertop of Italian marble; even the toilet was chiseled out of some kind of stone. Max removed the cell phone of de Losa’s mistress from his pocket. He turned it on and boosted the volume to the maximum. Then he flushed the toilet and strode down the passageway to the bar, entering just in time to bump into Tito, who had just finished docking the boat, and was stepping into the bar.

  “Tito, my man,” Max said, clasping hands with the powerful, bleached-blond henchman. Max leaned in for a half-hug and with his left hand, discreetly slipped the cell phone into the right pocket of the lightweight Tommy Hilfiger jacket Tito wore.

  “Hey,” Max said, plopping down on one of the barstools. “I was just going to get a drink and then head up to the main deck to see if Mr. Walsh is available. I gotta get paid for all this rum,” Max said with a sly smile.

  “I’m gonna grab a beer,” Tito said, waving at Coyo behind the bar. “Then I’ll tell Walsh you’re coming.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Tito stepped through the door, and disappeared down the lower deck’s passageway.

  “Morning, Coyo,” Max said to the bartender. This guy must live here, Max thought. “Too early to get a Ti’ Punch to go?”

  The slick bartender made Max’s drink, and then Max was on his way up the spiral staircase at the very heart of the vessel, connecting all of the yacht’s four decks. Max stepped out into the opulent décor of the upper deck’s cigar lounge and found Everest Walsh, standing in his bathrobe with tousled hair. He and Marquise de Losa appeared to be engaged in a deep, serious conversation.

  Is that all they do? Max thought to himself. They’re like an old married couple.

  Tito sat comfortably at one of the elegant off-white sofas that wrapped three sides of the big stone-topped coffee table on the port side of the stylish lounge. He sipped his bottle of Presidente Beer and gazed out at Le Robert Bay.

  “Hey, Max,” Walsh said, waving at de Losa in a manner that suggested their conversation was over. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Marquise, get Max the cash for his rum. Came out to…” Walsh pulled an iPhone out of his robe pocket and flipped through a couple of pages of apps, before opening one, “$792,200. Oh, hell, just give him eight hundred even.” The wealthy cigar plantation owner and cocaine trafficker didn’t even bat an eyelash at the amount. It seemed inconsequential to him.

  “I’ve got some business to take care of up in the hot tub,” Everest Walsh said, glancing toward the spiral staircase behind Max. Max turned around and saw two bikini-clad women, likely Martinique natives, heading up toward the sundeck.

  “Max, you and me are gonna have some brunch later,” Walsh added, patting Max on the arm. “I’ll tell Claude to get it ready. About an hour?”

  Max nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  With that, Everest Walsh disappeared up the stairs like Hugh Hefner. Max was left standing in the center of the cigar room with the foul murderer, Marquise de Losa. The steel vial of deadly poison seemed to be searing a hole in Max’s pocket as his eyes locked onto those of his nemesis.

  Max felt his hands begin to shake involuntarily. He wondered if he should remove himself from the room before de Losa suspected something was wrong. Max looked away and turned around, stepping toward the stairs.

  “Wait,” Marquise de Losa said. The only word Max could think of to describe the man’s voice was small. It reminded Max of the soft, childlike intonation of Michael Jackson’s voice; no wonder the enigmatic murderer hardly spoke. The man’s accent sounded strangely American. Max had always imagined a deep, gravelly growl, laced with a thick Cuban accent. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for awhile, apart from Walsh.”

  “Yes?” Max asked, legitimately intrigued. Part of him wondered if Marquise de Losa might have finally recognized him from that horrible day in Islamorada six years past.

  “I have been looking at some land in Pinar del Rio, back in Cuba. I want to start my own distillery,” Marquise de Losa said, looking at Max with a strangely hopeful expression that surprised Max; he hadn’t thought a c
old-blooded enforcer, like Marquise, was capable of such an expression. “I wonder if you would indulge me, and listen to me talk about my plans for a short while. I ask because I know I will be needing a master distiller to join me.”

  Is Marquise de Losa, the man who killed my wife, my son, and my daughter—who took away my world—offering me a job? Max asked himself, feeling puzzled.

  “Well, I’m intrigued, Mr. de Losa,” Max said, rubbing his chin.

  “Marquise,” de Losa said expectantly.

  “Yes, Marquise,” Max said. “Why don’t we go and grab a drink? I’d love to hear all about your plans. The idea of distilling Cuban rum sounds very interesting.” Max’s hand was in his pocket, and he twisted the vial of ricin between his fingers. He felt impatient, as if his body was urging him to pour the poison down de Losa’s throat.

  “I’ll do you one better,” Marquise de Losa said. He pulled his cell phone out of his coat pocket and tapped on the screen a couple of times.

  Max’s heart raced. He looked down at Tito, wondering if the purloined smartphone in his pocket was about to ring to life.

  “Coyo, bring us up a bottle of HSE V.S.O.P. and a couple of glasses,” Marquise said. “Yeah, bring it to the cigar lounge.” Marquise put away his phone.

  The murderer offered Max a seat at the cushioned sofa that faced the tall port side windows. Max took his own sofa, the one beside where Tito was sitting, sipping his bottle of Presidente. Marquise took the sofa opposite Tito. The three men were situated on three sides of the large coffee table, affording each man an unencumbered view out over the bay. Max noticed the suspicious catamaran halfway between the Snowy Lady and Ilet d’Ombres.

  De Losa leaned back on his couch and threw his arm over the back cushion. His coat slipped open, showing the 9mm submachine gun the criminal wore on a sling. Max’s eyes homed in on the firearm; his mind raced. He couldn’t escape the feeling he was seeing the same weapon that had taken his family away from him.