by Warren Esby
Now how did they know that, I thought to myself. But they didn’t say it as if they were suspicious of me, and I didn’t ask them how they knew. They told me they would file the report from the little computer they had in the patrol car. They also told me I should demand the insurance company send me a check right away since there wouldn’t be any chance of it being recovered.
“Tell them not to waste their money on waiting thirty days and having you rent a car because there was no way that Tahoe is coming back from Mexico.”
How wrong they turned out to be as well. But I did call back the insurance agent, and he said he might be able to do that since it was a big black SUV that was stolen. They hadn’t recovered one like that after it had been stolen in a long time and he said, “I may be able to get this done quicker because for sure that SUV is in Mexico.”
How did everyone know that the Tahoe was in Mexico? I never could figure that one out. But everyone was so sure.
We drove out to Borrego Springs the next day, and it was really warm out there. We stopped for some lunch and then drove out to a remote spot about twenty miles east. We pulled up on a ridge and saw a depression down below with a Ford Expedition parked in it. We drove down alongside it, and I noticed it was the one I had driven up from Mexico the day before. The driver got out and walked over to the Escalade and got into the back seat across from me. He was introduced to me as Sam. We drove back up on the ridge and waited in the air conditioned Escalade with the motor running. It was 1:55 PM. Right on schedule we saw a drone coming in. It circled once and swung low over us and then continued the circle and went considerably higher. The missile came with a woosh followed by a big explosion and the Expedition just flew apart. It was pretty impressive.
Jerry said, “I never get tired of seeing that.”
Ben responded, “Neither do I.” Sam just nodded.
We returned back to the coast and dropped Sam off in the parking lot where he had left his Cadillac XTS. Ben and Jerry dropped me off at my apartment. After they left, I went up the street to get a bean burrito and came back and went to bed early. I had another busy day ahead of me the next day.
Chapter 23
Ben and Jerry showed up on Monday, and we went down the road a ways to get some huevos rancheros for breakfast at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants that was open for breakfast. They were reluctant at first, but I chided them by saying they couldn’t consider themselves breakfast experts if they hadn’t had huevos rancheros, so they relented. They must have liked them because they asked the waiter for another order of what “those waving ranchers” in Mexico eat.
When we got back to the parking lot behind the Baskin Robbins, they gave me the keys to one of their two Cadillac Escalade Hybrids. I didn’t know which of the two it belonged to since both of them looked the same. I mean both the Hybrids looked the same, although when you think about it, so did Ben and Jerry. I drove down to Mexico and up to the police station as scheduled without incident. It was the same scene with two SUVs parked in front with California license plates on them, one of which was the Tahoe. I went inside. Senor Straw Hat Policeman and Mr. Cowboy Policeman were there with the two others who had ridden with them on the last trip. They smiled when they saw me and Mr. Cowboy Policeman said, “Right on time. Let’s see what you brought.”
We all marched outside as before. Senor Straw Hat Policeman looked at the Escalade and whistled. He then walked around it. Then he turned to me and said, “This won’t do.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s much too nice for this job. This job requires something like a Ford Expedition or a Chevy Suburban or Tahoe.”
Mr. Cowboy Policeman nodded his head in agreement, and the others nodded theirs and said, “Si, Si.” And then Mr. Straw Hat Policeman said to me,
“I do you a big favor now.”
“What?” I asked.
“I trade you for the Tahoe. It’s already loaded and ready to go.”
Mr. Cowboy Policeman nodded and smiled, and the other two said, “Si, Si.”
Knowing not to argue, I simply asked that he switch the license plates once again, which he asked one of the Si Si Riders to do. When that was done, we exchanged keys and he said,
“Let’s go.” He got into the black Ford Expedition that was parked there in front of the police station and one of the Si Si Riders got in beside him. Mr. Cowboy Policeman walked around the building and returned in a few minutes driving a Chevy Suburban. He stopped to let the other Si Si Rider get in, and off we went in a parade with the Tahoe in the middle. Once again we arrived at the parking lot behind the beach surfboard and apparel store and once again I walked home. It was Labor Day and I realized I had just done my patriotic duty.
After a decent interval, I walked over to the gelato place, but Ben and Jerry weren’t there. I went in and ordered a half scoop of pistachio and a half scoop of dark chocolate which was my favorite combination. I never did understand why someone hadn’t decided to come out with that combination. Stracciatella was boring in comparison. I sat and ate a few bites of each flavor and relaxed wondering what to do about the newly reappeared Tahoe that was supposed to be stolen but was now sitting in broad daylight in the very location I had told the police it had been stolen from. If they cared to look, which they seemed disinclined to do, I would probably be arrested for insurance fraud. I didn’t think I could explain it as a practical joke. You never joke with policeman. They take themselves too seriously. And they don’t like all those stale doughnut jokes, or stale doughnuts either for that matter.
I walked back to the Baskin Robbins and Ben and Jerry were just pulling in with the remaining Escalade. As they got out, I told them what happened.
Ben said, “I’ll need to consider this one over a banana split. This is complicated and I always say that a big problem requires a big ice cream.”
Jerry said he thought he could get by with a double hot fudge sundae, so we went inside. I was polite enough to wait until they were each half through with their dishes before I asked the first question.
“Should I tell them, the police and insurance company that is, that I found the Tahoe myself?”
“Hell no. We can’t have them taking a second look at this. I’ll have to call Sam,” said Ben.
“But it’s practically brand new. It only has a few thousand miles on it,” I protested.
“It’s a big liability and we can’t take a chance. You’ll get the insurance money anyway,” Jerry replied.
“What about your Escalade?”
“Oh, I’ll requisition another. No biggie. It’s part of doing business,” Jerry explained. “Besides, I wouldn’t mind having a new one.”
“Yeah. Neither would I. Maybe you could take my Escalade the next time,” Ben said hopefully.
We left the restaurant and Ben called Sam and Herb and made the same arrangements for the Tahoe’s disposal as they had for the old Ford Expedition. They asked if I wanted to come out to the desert with them the next day, but I said no since I was due back at the Salk Institute. That turned out to be a mistake since Olga was watching that morning and saw me come into work with Astrid who had agreed, once again, to pick me up and drive me to work. And that didn’t speak too well for Ben and Jerry either since they weren’t there to protect me in case I needed protecting, which I didn’t then. But I knew I didn’t have a chance of surviving if the Russians came after me during the time there was a drone strike scheduled nearby.
Then Ben said, “We’d better get the stuff out of the Tahoe before Sam gets here. Do you have the extra key?”
“I do, but it’s back at the apartment.”
“Well, go get it. We’ll wait,” said Jerry.
So I went back to the apartment and got the spare set of keys and came back. We all walked over to where I had left the Tahoe and unlocked it. On the back seat were three brown paper grocery bags. Jerry looked inside each. Two had used bills like the time before, but there was what appeared to be twice as much as the fir
st time since there were two bags of the same size as before. The third bag contained two plastic pistol cases that said Glock on them. Each contained a Glock Model 26 subcompact 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. What joy there was in Laundromat Town that night. I think that Ben and Jerry were happier about having real handguns for a change, compliments of the ATF, the drug cartel and the Russians, than I was having a million dollars in used hundred dollar bills. I carried the two shopping bags back to their Escalade, and they gave me more preaddressed labels and additional deposit slips. I then left them to go back to my apartment. Their last words to me as I left them were,
“Remember. If it fits it ships.”
Chapter 24
The woman who’s supposed to be my wife is bugging me again. Hurricane season is over and the weather is nice and she wants to take the yacht out and go island hopping. She said, “What’s the use of being rich if we don’t act like it, if we don’t take our yacht out and go island hopping like a lot of the other rich people we know do?”
I pointed out to her that we had just hopped over to Jamaica the month before, but that wasn’t good enough for her.
“There are a lot more islands in the Caribbean that we haven’t seen, and we do nothing but sit here. What’s the use of having a rich person’s yacht and a rich person’s name if we don’t act like rich people?”
Now it is true that the name we go under here is a rich person’s name. We go by the name Astor, which Ben and Jerry suggested we use. It’s not too far removed from my Russian name of Astrov and may, in fact, be the English version of it. I’ve never checked that out. But I did think it was another intelligent suggestion from Ben and Jerry. All of a sudden we showed up in the Cayman Islands with a lot of money. People would normally have asked who we were and how we came by our wealth and did we come by it legally. With the name Astor, no one asked. I also had the opportunity to change my first name as well and toyed with the idea of taking the name Dis Astor since that was how I felt about my life sometimes, but I decided I didn’t wanted to spend my life being Dissed by everyone and ended up keeping my given name of Alex.
“What islands do you want to hop to?” I asked.
“How about Aruba to start and then we can go to Trinidad and around the eastern Caribbean and end up in the Bahamas or someplace like that? We can take a long time since we have time.”
“Yeah. But not Aruba. I really worry about taking you to Aruba.”
“Why. I heard it’s very nice with lots of night life.”
“But I heard it’s dangerous for attractive women like you. They get kidnapped and killed or disappear. And you’re very attractive.”
“Thank you, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Why is it dangerous for me?”
“Well, don’t you remember there was that case a few years back about a young American girl who went down there and disappeared and everyone knew she was probably killed by the guy she was last seen with, and they never could convict him. It was all over the news. I seem to remember his name was Van Sloop or else his name was Van and he had a sloop.”
“I seem to remember. So what happened to him?”
“Well they think Van Sloop gave her a ride in his sloop and dumped her body in the sea. She either died accidently or he killed her, although now they think he killed her because he left in his sloop and went to Peru where he killed another girl and they did find her body. And he tried to get away but got caught because his sloop wasn’t there. He couldn’t take his sloop to Peru because Colombia was in the way.”
“So what? He’s in jail now, so we don’t have to worry.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m in the middle of writing my memoirs. Why don’t you wait a while until I’ve finished?”
She said, “No, I don’t want to wait. If I know you, there’s a likely chance you’ll continue to live and continue to have things to write your memoirs about, and I’ll be an old lady before we get to go. I’m getting closer to thirty every year. And besides this trip will give you other things to write about, other exciting things rather than all the mundane things you’ve already done.”
Well, she had a point. I would have more to write about. And then she continued,
“You’re really being pig headed about this.”
She had won the argument. She knew I didn’t want her to ever think of me as pig headed, so I said, “Okay. When do you want to go?”
“I already talked to Tom. He said he could have the yacht fueled up and provisioned and ready to go in two days.”
Tom was in charge of the yacht. He had a captain’s license and was very good at fixing things and had sailed every part of the Caribbean. He was expensive and worth it. Of course when you have as much money as I do, everything is worth it no matter how much it costs because it doesn’t really cost me anything. It costs someone else. It costs the Federal Government but not really since the Federal Government isn’t someone, it’s something else and it doesn’t have to worry about money because it isn’t the Federal Government’s money either. At least some people think that way and say it’s the taxpayer’s money. But that can’t be true because nobody pays me taxes. I get my money from the Federal Government and I have to pay them taxes. I’ll have to check with my accountant on this point. Anyway, I have plenty of money to pay Tom and his wife as well. She’s an excellent cook and keeps the yacht clean. Tom’s nephew is the only other crew member and is learning his trade from Tom. He’s only a teenager, but he’s been on the water all his life and eventually wants to get his captain’s license too.
So Tom made all the arrangements and off we went. And she was right. Here it is two weeks later and we had a good time in Aruba and now we’re heading for Trinidad, and I realize that I can actually continue to write while I’m on the yacht as long as the seas are fairly calm. We have a little bit of a sway which sometimes affects my typing, but not too much unless the swells are really big. And you know what they say about sex on a boat. It can really enhance it. It adds the age old rhythm of the sea to the age old rhythm of the – you know what. But of course if the rhythm of the sea is a little rough it can actually have a negative effect on the age old rhythm of the – you know what.
So now I have some memoirs to write about Aruba and the people we met there. I’ll write them down while they’re fresh in my mind and get back to the other memoirs afterwards.
Aruba is a nice place to visit and we made friends with other people like us who were traveling on their yachts around the Caribbean as well as some who lived on their boats at the marina we stayed at. One couple was Will Ketch and his wife Katarina. Another was Howard Yawl and his wife Darlene. They were both island hopping on their yachts like we were. The locals were John Boat and his girlfriend Ina Brigantine. The various couples really had a good time going around to various sights and bar hopping at night. We went to the club where Van Sloop was supposed to have hung out and lured young girls onto his sloop, and we each ordered a schooner of beer that the bartender said was a local beer that Van used to drink. After tasting it I understood why someone would want to kill somebody after drinking it. We all agreed it was that bad.
Well, I know you are thinking that it was really a great coincidence that all the people we met had nautical last names. It wasn’t a coincidence because those really weren’t their last names as you may have suspected. I’m not very good with names, especially last names, and seem to forget them fairly quickly although I do remember first names. You probably noticed that I mainly use first names in my narrative except in a few cases where something stands out in my memory or I have someone’s card, like “Wyatt” Earp’s card to refer to.
Anyway, Will and Katarina had a ketch so I referred to them that way, although their real name was something like Sutcliff. Howard and Darlene didn’t have a yawl at all. They had an ordinary cabin cruiser like ours, but they were from the South and kept saying to us whenever we met, “How’re y’all doing?” or “Y’all come over tonight.” Actually it was usually Howard
who said “How’re y’all doing?” and I think I just changed his first name to Howard as well as his last name to Yawl. I think his real name was Rob. John Boat, as you may have guessed by now, had a john boat, but I didn’t want to call him John John Boat because that brought back painful memories about John F. Kennedy’s little son John John who took his daddy’s airplane and crashed into the ocean and died. I don’t remember if he was eaten by sharks, but the thought of sharks eating people who crashed into the water is something I don’t want to think about while I’m sailing in shark infested waters. Anyway, John Boat usually kept his john boat tied up to Ina’s brigantine. At least that’s what I thought the correct name for it was and why I called her Ina Brigantine. She lives in a small houseboat with iron bars on the window that makes it look like a floating jail and the nautical name for a jail is a brig, and I seem to remember that brigantine is also a nautical name which I assume means small brig or small jail or small floating jail. So there you have it. It’s one of my secrets as to how I go about assigning names to people whose real names I’ve long forgotten or sometimes immediately forgotten. Well back to the more mundane parts of my memoirs now that I have the time.
Chapter 25
Astrid was her old sweet self as she drove me into work on Tuesday. We drove down the coast as usual and went by Torrey Pines Beach on our way to the Salk Institute. I suddenly realized for the first time that there wasn’t a single tree of any sort on that beach, let alone a pine tree. So how did the beach really get its name? Could I have been wrong about it being named for a Torrey? Then I decided I would think about it like Ben and Jerry would by taking its location into consideration. It was a beach on the ocean. All oceans look pretty much the same from the beach. Hell, it could have been the Atlantic as well as the Pacific for all of that. And then it hit me. Of course. This is where that Torrey would come to gaze out at the ocean and pine away over his loss and not being on the east coast gazing at the Atlantic Ocean rather than on the west coast gazing at the Pacific Ocean. So this would have been the place people of that time would identify as the place where that Torrey pines away. They just shortened it for convenience at a later date to Torrey Pines Beach. It all fit in my mind and I made a mental note to discuss it with Ben and Jerry the next time I saw them to see if my reasoning was correct.