Just Add Salt (Hetta Coffey Mystery Series (Book 2))

by Jinx Schwartz

I glared at the radio. “What a male chauvinist pig,” I huffed. “How does he know I’m not the captain?”

  Jan smirked. “Gee, I guess his first clue was that you don’t friggin’ know where you were headed.”

  Fabio surfaced about that time. “Why are we slowed? What has happen?”

  “Nothing. Let’s take her back up to eight knots and I’ll make lunch.” I tromped to the kitchen, my ego smarting from my incredibly dumb gaffe. We were barely out the Gate and I’d already proven myself nautically challenged.

  I plopped a Tombstone pizza in the oven, hoped the brand name wasn’t an omen of things to come, and grabbed a chart. Marking our present position according to the GPS, I then, using our speed and course, estimated where we would be in an hour. I’d learned dead reckoning in Coast Guard class and from now on, bells and whistles or no, I’d by golly know where we were.

  Fabio, since he was up anyway, took over the helm while Jan I moved to the aft deck to enjoy some suddenly glorious weather. Gulls wheeled overhead, hoping for a handout or a direct hit on one of us. As we passed Half Moon Bay I regretted we were on a fast track to Mexico. Jenks and I had spent many happy hours anchored at Pillar Point. We’d also weathered a nasty storm there one night, the night he told me I’d handled a tough situation so well that I was now a certified sea wench. Recently, he’d probably amended that to just plain certifiable. Sigh.

  “I heard that sigh. You miss him, don’t ya?”

  Jan had my number, so I didn’t even try denying it. “Yes, I do.”

  “You know,” she began, using that tone she used when she was about to tell me something for my own good, one she stole from my mother, “you and Jenks are just going over a bump. It’s not like he’s never coming back or anything. You’ll see. Everything’ll be fine. Hey, let’s call the guys on that fancy Satfone of yours.”

  “We’ll wake them up.”

  “Good.”

  “The sat time sets Tanuki back about a jillion yen a minute.”

  “So, since they’re paying, what do we care? You’re just being a big chicken. What do you think? Jenks is gonna reach out and bite you?”

  “Oh, all right. We need to check for messages anyhow. You do it, you haven’t used the system yet.”

  “Cool.” She turned on the Satfone. “Says here we got one message, but no caller ID. Maybe it’s the guys.” She listened and the smile left her face, replaced by a puzzled look.

  “What is it?”

  “Some weird message. Says we should stay away from Mag Bay.”

  Oh, crap. “Or we’ll pay?”

  “Exactly. How did you know that?”

  I shrugged, trying to look totally calm while my stomach knotted up. “Not the first time I got that message. Remember, I called and accused you of putting someone up to it. Just some whacko. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You just got this Satfone. Where did you hear this message before?”

  “Uh, back at the dock. On my land line.”

  “And when, dear friend, were you planning on sharing this little threat with me?”

  “I sorta did. Now seems like a good time?”

  “A tad late. Let me get this straight. We are going to Mag Bay, where you landed a shady contract, and someone is warning us not to go or we’ll be sorry?”

  I shrugged. “That about sums it up. One do wonder how the caller got my new number, so let’s narrow our candidates. Who has this number? Me, you, Jenks, Lars, the Trob and Allison. After the first crank call, I asked Wontrobski who knew I was taking on the project. He said no one at Baxter Brothers, other than himself. Sooo, we got us a whale hugger at Tanuki, sí?”

  “Hetta, the Japanese eat whales. They do not hug them.”

  “There are environmentalist fruitcakes in every country and I think we got us one. Let me put the Trob on this.”

  “Good idea. Now, let’s call…do you smell smoke?”

  Chapter 10

  Taking a deep sniff, I shrieked, “Oh, crap, the pizza!”

  I reached the galley just as the smoke alarm went off and the oven timer started dinging. Confused, I jerked the oven open to find a perfectly cooked pizza and no smoke. Then the boat’s engines went dead and we suddenly settled, dropping into our own wake. As we swayed wildly in our backwash, the pizza escaped the open oven and hit the floor, very near where ominous smoke seeped out around the seams of the engine room hatch under the galley steps

  I was kneeling in tomato sauce, attempting to move the steps out of the way so I could check the engine room when Captain Fabulous charged into the saloon and practically tackled me. As I struggled to get loose, he yelled over the screech of the smoke alarm, “No! We cannot open the door.”

  “We have to see what’s going on in there.”

  “Not until we have out the fire.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Come with me.”

  With a death grip on my tomato sauce slathered wrist, he dragged me along behind him. As we passed Jan, who stood in the center of the room in what looked like a trance, I grabbed her. We all went to the bridge looking like a bunch of kindergarten kids holding hands on a field trip. Or a Chucky Cheese birthday party.

  Fabio rattled on non-stop, mostly in Spanglish, letting us know he was in charge and we were not going to sink. On the bridge he pointed to a blinking red light marked HALON SYSTEM. “This light must go out, then we may look into the engine room. No before. Very dangerous. This remove all aire.”

  “Aire?”

  “Choke the aire from fire.”

  “Oxygen. That’s right, Jenks installed the system before he left. Now what? Shouldn’t we call a MAYDAY or something?”

  “No, we wait. We are no in danger, I think.”

  Just as he said it, the alarm quit screeching, but my ears rang anyhow. “Mira, the fire, she is dead. Now I go see. Please to wait here.”

  “My boat, Fabio. I go.”

  “If you insist, señora. Señorita Yan, will you please to keep watch?”

  “Hey, how come Jan’s señorita and I’m señora?”

  “You are not marry?”

  “No. I told you I have a boyfriend.”

  He shrugged. I would later learn that Mexicans are totally nonplussed by gringas, and most think we are all loose women who could easily have a husband and a boyfriend. In my case, they were right on two out of three.

  Fabio eased open the engine room door a crack. A little smoke curled out, but it was the lingering kind. He paused again, letting more oxygen in, waiting to see if there was a flare-up. Finally satisfied, he turned to me.

  “I will need oscillator.”

  “Uh, do I have one?”

  “Sí, I have seen in cocina.”

  My Tex-Mex Spanish was good enough to know whatever it was he wanted was in the galley. He spun his hands and made a buzzing sound. I got it. I grabbed the clip-on fan next to the stove and minutes later we’d dispersed enough smoke so Fabio could safely enter the engine room. While I watched, one trembling finger poised above my cell’s autodial button for 9-1-1, he searched for the source of our smoke. After ten minutes he shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I do not find it. Nada.”

  “It can’t be nada. All that smoke.”

  “Señorita Café, I see nothing.”

  “Hey, you two,” Jan called. “We’re wallowing in the waves and I’m getting seasick up here. Can’t you do something with this boat?”

  “Can we start an engine, Fabio? So we quit rolling in this swell? I’m experiencing a touch of mal de mer myself.”

  “¿Porqué no? I will stay here, you please to start the engines?”

  Both engines fired immediately, no smoke reappeared, and ten minutes later we were humming along nicely, on the way to Monterey. Hey, that sounds like a good song title.

  Fabio, however, didn’t look like singing. “We should return to you port,” he told me.

  “Why?”

  “The smoke.”

&n
bsp; “Fabio, we’re almost into Monterey. If you’re worried that we have a mechanical problem, we can call Ernesto and have him drive down here.”

  “No!”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I am capitán, I fix you yate.”

  Oh, brother. God forbid I should ruffle Fabio’s macho feathers.

  Nothing exciting happened the rest of the way into Monterey, unless you count sea critters. Jan and I were charmed by the furry little otters that wrapped themselves in kelp floats and lazed in the sun while chomping on shell fish. By the time we tied up at the Monterey Yacht Club for the night, our day’s adventures with the US Coast Guard and mysterious engine smoke were left in our wake. After chomping a few tons of seafood ourselves, and washing it down with a couple of liters of chilled thirty-dollar California Pinot Gris, compliments of Tanuki, we hit the sack early in anticipation of a dawn departure.

  As I was dropping off, I made a mental note for the next day to call Trob regarding crank calls, Martinez’s son for the retired cop’s phone number in Mexico, and Jenks and Lars to…make ‘em jealous? It’s a gift being a true sea wench.

  A very scary voice, one from which I thought I had escaped, shocked me into consciousness. I peered out my porthole into predawn gloom and tried to recall where I was. I remembered: Monterey Yacht Club.

  Jan’s side of the bed was empty. We’d decided to bunk together in my quarters, give Captain Fabio the forward cabin rather than have him camped out on the main saloon couch. Once we started the run south of San Diego, anyone who wasn’t on watch could grab whatever empty bunk they found. Nautical term: hot bedding it. This brought some rather fanciful thoughts to my head regarding Fabio. I stretched and imagined…there was that annoying voice again. No, it couldn’t be.

  I stumbled up the steps, drawn, like a moth to flame, by the chirp of dreaded Pamela: “And two, three, four. And breathe.”

  A bright pink, five-foot plastic band hit me in the face.

  “Come on, Hetta, move it,” Jan ordered, and turned up the volume on the television.

  “Beam me up, Scotty.”

  “You’re dating yourself, dearie.”

  “I watched the reruns. What in the hell are you doing?”

  Jan shut off the DVD player. “Pammy recorded a workout for us to take along as a bon voyage gift, and to thank you for lending her your Volkswagen while we’re gone.”

  “I should have let her walk, since she’s so good at it.”

  “You’re just being testy. Her car is broken and you didn’t want to leave your car in the parking lot at the yacht club anyhow.”

  True. I had long since sold my shiny red Beemer to the Trob, but even though my old VW station wagon was more suitable to salty-aired parking lots, I didn’t think leaving it abandoned for months was a good idea. Especially in Oakland.

  Jan reached over to crank up the sound again. “I think it was really sweet of Pam to devise a workout routine just for us. Grab that resistance band. It’ll give you well defined muscles.”

  “How’s this for resistance?” I raised my hand and shot her a well-defined digit.

  Thirty minutes later my face was as pink as that damnable band. Gotta give it to ole Pamerooni, not a single muscle was spared her DVD of Doom. Stumbling to the galley, I put a kettle on for French press. I was chugging an ice-cold Perrier, waiting for my café pressé to brew, when Fabio, who had wisely stayed in his quarters during our muscle fest, emerged. Obviously fresh from a shower, his black hair glistened and his bronzed face shown from a close shave. He smelled of Old Spice. I’m a sucker for Old Spice.

  “Buenos dias, señoritas. A beautiful day, no? Are we listo to go?”

  I frowned at the fog outside “I’m listo to go back to bed.”

  He smiled a charming smile and turned on the VHF radio for the latest marine forecast. Fog or no, sea conditions were perfect for our run to Port San Luis.

  A cuppa Joe and a shower lifted some of my dismay at learning that Jan intended to keep us in shape during our trip. I have ever so much more fun getting out of shape than staying in it. What are vacations for, anyhow?

  Chapter 11

  Fabio, while Jan and I chewed our nails, wound our way through the soupy fog under radar. Once clear of the narrow exit and past the last buoy into open water, we gave a little cheer, kudos to our captain whose navigational prowess boosted my growing confidence in him. Quite naturally, once we were clear of danger, we cleared the fog.

  Mesmerized by the magnificent Monterey Peninsula scenery, it wasn’t until we passed Stillwater Cove and Pebble Beach that I experienced a blue moment; Jenks and I’d spent wonderful weekends at anchor there, watching golfers lob balls into the Pacific, while seals and otters frolicked in giant kelp. He should be here, I thought, on Raymond Johnson instead off in some damned desert.

  I shook off my depressing thoughts, opting to put my dead reckoning skills to work instead. After double checking figures and charts against the GPS a few times, I gave myself a congratulatory pat on the head. I then decided to do some actual work for Tanuki, but not before sticking my head into the engine room several times, sniffing for smoke, which thankfully did not materialize.

  By the time we reached the anchorage at San Simeon, I was confident that taking Raymond Johnson south was not such a bad idea. The day was topped off with our arrival at the San Simeon anchorage. Although fog was quickly forming around us, the sunlit Hearst Castle towered above it all, seemingly floating on clouds.

  “I’ll bet Mr. Hearst had just this scenario in mind when he built her,” I mused.

  Jan, captivated by the setting, whistled softly. “It looks like something from a fairy tale.”

  “Xanadu,” I agreed.

  Fabio threw his arms wide and bellowed. “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree.’”

  Jan and I, nonplussed, stared at him and then clapped. He blushed, but took a bow. “I am an admirer of the Señor Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” He pronounced it Samwel Tiler Colereege, but we were impressed anyway.

  Later, after we were securely anchored for the night, we ate “rest over” chowder, as Fabio called it. After dinner he excused himself and went to bed, leaving Jan and me to finish our wine and marvel at the seemingly unending talents of our captain.

  “Who is this guy?” Jan whispered after we heard his cabin door shut.

  “Damned if I know, but I’ll tell you one thing, we got our money’s worth as far as I can tell.”

  “It has occurred to me that we didn’t really check him out.”

  “Snob. Just because he’s educated, that makes him suspicious?”

  “No. It’s just that I’ve never really trusted men who spout poetry.”

  “So, that’s your attraction to Lars? He’s suitably barbaric?”

  She giggled. “Okay, okay, I give. Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Go on, I’ll be down in a minute.”

  I remained on deck for awhile, surrounded by fog, darkness and just a soupçon of doubt. Who was this guy, indeed?

  We were back underway early the next morning. I was putting away the breakfast fixin’s when the Satfone chirped. No caller ID. I debated not answering, in case it was that crank with another threat, but Jan wouldn’t stand for it. I picked up the phone and growled, “FBI, Monterey Division.”

  “Hetta?”

  “Jenks?”

  We had a double satellite delay, plus an echo, making cohesive conversation challenging, to say the least. “Where…where…where…are…are…you…you?”

  “San…San…Simeon-on-on-on.”

  You get the idea, kinda like talking to your Dell tech rep in Calcutta.

  I did manage to tell him we’d call when we anchored into Port San Luis, hoping once we were relatively stable, the system would work better. That call was so frustrating I decided to send the Trob an e-mail instead of raising my blood pressure further.

  I fired up the computer and saw I had four messages, three from Tanuki and one from Unkn
own, which I figured was Satfone, since the subject was PAYMENT. No wonder Satfone sent e-mail, they damned well couldn’t call me on one of their crappy systems. You pay a million jillion bucks for a phone and another trillion per minute and you get nada.

  I was spoiling for a fight when I opened the e-mail with the subject: PAYMENT. A second later I needed a beer and my fight turned to fright. The body of the e-mail message, which I quickly figured was not from Satfone, said: Stay away from Mag Bay or you will pay.

  “Eeeek,” I squealed, startling Jan. She rushed over and read over my shoulder.

  “Who’s it from? How did they get this e-mail address?”

  I hit PROPERTIES, but the sender was clever enough to leave no clues. “Damned if I know. But I do know what I’m gonna do with it.”

  “What?”

  “Forward it to the Trob. If anyone can track this jerk down, it’s him.”

  So I did. Ten minutes later, I got a reply. The Trob was on the job.

  Port San Luis is a really neat little spot. You can get a mooring or swing on your own hook, call for a water taxi if you want to go ashore and eat seafood or just mess around. Jan and I did both. Because we were anchored, Capitán Fabio insisted on remaining aboard. Or as he put it, “I do not leave the sheeps.” We brought him a doggy bag of fish and chips.

  Jenks and Lars called while we were ashore and Jenks evidently had quite a little chat with Fabio. I wondered what all Jenks had wormed out of him, but all el captain of all trades would tell us was that Jenks “tretened” him.

  That did not sound like my Jenks. “Threatened? What kind of threat?”

  “Oh, he just say if I kill the womens, he will kill me,” Fabio reported cheerfully. “But, of course, I, Capitán Fabio, will not put the danger to the sheep or the womens.”

  “Say, Fabio, are you by any chance an "I Love Lucy" aficionado?” It had occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that he overplayed the Latino accent thing a tad.

  “¿Que?”

  “Never mind. What else did Jenks say?”

  “He will call.”