Cuban Death-Lift

by Striker, Randy

  “Now, wait a minute there, man—”

  “I don’t feel like waiting a minute, buddy. Just answer me. Was there anybody aboard when you got here?”

  He gave me a strange smile, then. A strange lethal smile—the kind you sometimes see on cats hidden beside a bird feeder. It didn’t look like he was armed. But I was wrong. The back of his pants had been covered by the tail of the loose shirt. And that’s exactly where he began to move his hand. I knew what he had in mind. Kill me, toss me into the depths of the Stream, then plunder my boat, too.

  By the time he was bringing the little snubnosed revolver up out of his back-mounted holster, I knew exactly what I had to try to do. The bowrail of Sniper threw its shadow across the stern of the Mako—that’s how close I had gotten. His back was against the low gunwale of the stern quarter, and before him was the red tarp and the mound of stolen ship’s supplies. Chances were good that even at that close range he would have missed me with the snubnose.

  But I had taken enough chances.

  As his right hand lifted the revolver, his left hand came down like a clamp to steady his right wrist, taking aim. And as he did, I turned the wheel full to starboard, punched the port engine full-bore, and jumped to plane in an explosion of diesel exhaust and water. It was a long, tricky moment as I swung immediately back to port—making sure I didn’t nail the Mako with my stern. And when I looked back, ducking, to check the clearance, I saw the unexpected. I had hoped the black guy with the gun would go toppling overboard backward with the force of my wake. Instead, he lay on his side on the deck of the skiff, clawing in dreadful slow motion at a strange reddish ember which had suddenly appeared on his cheek, just below his left eye.

  And then the ember began to spurt blood.

  He crawled shakily to his knees, touching his cheek with a hand.

  He had a look of puzzlement on his face. He looked at the blood on his hand, cocked his head wryly and looked at me.

  And then he fell dead on the mound of plunder in front of him, his blood darker than the scarlet of the tarp.

  Sniper was back to dead idle now. I paused for a thoughtful moment trying to figure out just what in hell had happened.

  And then I knew.

  I looked back toward the fighting deck, and there was the woman, Androsa Santarun. She had used the angle of the VHF antenna and teak gunwale as a brace—the lithe shape of her hidden by the extension of the salon wall. The .38 she held in her left hand was still poised, ready.

  6

  The only emotion she showed as she punched the empty cartridge overboard into the depthless sea was anger.

  Anger at me.

  There was no remorse, no feminine hysterics at what she had just done. The Mako still rolled in the dissipating wake of Sniper, and the dead man’s head weaved back and forth in the wash and draw of it. I clunked my engines into reverse, backing off a way so we would not drift down into the trawler, then started to climb down to the fighting deck.

  “And just what do you think you’re doing, Mr. MacMorgan?”

  She was mad, all right. She bit the words off, the low alto of her voice a pitch higher.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know why I was climbing down to her. I had the vague idea she might faint or burst into tears . . . or something. When I hit the deck, I turned to her. Oddly, she seemed somehow smaller with a gun in her hand; a whole head shorter than me, more than a hundred pounds lighter. I stood looking down into her perfect face and realized exactly what had made her seem taller, fuller: the impact of her; the intensity of beauty, sexuality, and those mahogany eyes. Now, mad as she was—and even holding the gun—she looked almost frail.

  But not vulnerable.

  No way. Not the way she handled a weapon.

  “Maybe I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” I said.

  “Mr. MacMorgan, I truthfully don’t give a damn about your life. All I wanted to save was my . . . my trip. I told you not to come over here. But you insisted . . .”

  Her anger added flavor to her faint Spanish accent, softening the A’s, blurring her R’s.

  “Not a matter of insisting. It was my decision.”

  “Damn your decisions!”

  She was mad, all right. For a moment, I thought she was going to take a swing at me. And I had to choke back the grin I felt fighting its way to the surface.

  “Fine,” I said. “My decisions be damned. But now we’re going over and have a look at that trawler. There might be someone else aboard.” There was something else I had to say—say to protect my own cover, if nothing else. So I did. “By the way, where did you learn how to use a handgun like that?”

  I watched her closely for a reaction, but there was none.

  “All you have to do, Mr. MacMorgan, is run the boat. What I know and what I do is none of your concern. And if you ever do anything this stupid again, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  I couldn’t help it then. I felt the silly grin take my face.

  “You’ll what—shoot me too?”

  She had quite a left. Her nostrils flared, her eyes became slits, and she threw a big roundhouse at my chin. It was to be no open-handed slap, either. The pretty brown fingers were clenched into a fist. I leaned away from it, caught her small hand in the palm of my left, and squeezed gently. I saw her teeth clench into a grimace. I lightened my grip and said evenly, “Woman, you’d be well advised never to try that again.”

  I dropped her hand, turned, and climbed back up to the flybridge, hearing her stalk off below.

  I nudged Sniper up to the trawler. The stern was almost completely submerged, waves rolling over the transom. But the cleat on the port side of the transom was still above water, so I got a line around it, careful to pass it through by bow chock before securing it with a temporary slippery hitch. I left Sniper’s engines gurgling—in case I wanted to back off quickly.

  And just as I was about to step over onto the trawler, the woman came up behind me.

  She said, “Don’t you think the person with the gun should go first?”

  I looked at her. She was calmer now, some of the anger gone. She held the revolver in her left hand.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll carry it with me.”

  She shook her head. “No. That’s not what I meant. I’ll go first.”

  “I thought you wanted to get to Mariel Harbor safely.”

  It was as close as she had come all day to smiling. “That’s exactly why I don’t want you stumbling around with a loaded gun in your hand.”

  I stepped back and made a grandiose sweeping gesture with my arm. “After you, Miss Santarun.”

  Using the line for balance, she jumped lithely to the transom of the trawler, then walked knee deep in water toward the wheelhouse. It’s eerie boarding any abandoned boat at open sea, but an abandoned boat that is hopelessly sinking adds a touch of the macabre which makes you strain to listen and obligates you to whisper. The ropes creaked in the wash of ocean, and a halyard tap . . . tap-tap-tapped in the light wind.

  I expected the dead man’s partner to be hidden somewhere in the cabin of the trawler. And I didn’t want the woman to face him alone. So by the time she was entering the wheelhouse, I was right behind her, Gerber skinning knife in hand.

  Even in the bright May sunlight, it seemed dark inside. Water covered the floor, and cushions and charts and clothing floated in shallow chaos. The electronic equipment had been ripped out by the dead pirate, and a box of more plunder—Danforth compass, ship’s bell, and a life ring, face down—sat on the booth table, waiting to be loaded onto the Mako.

  “Why don’t you let me have the handgun and go first?”

  Androsa Santarun held up her hand, telling me to be quiet. She stepped into the water of the wheelhouse, the revolver following along with the sweep of her eyes. She pulled open a storage closet, then tried a cabin light—which didn’t work.

  “It doesn’t seem likely he’d be by himself.”

  She shook her head, agreeing. “No,” she sa
id. “It doesn’t.”

  On both sides of the wheelhouse were couches, the tops of which opened for storage. She lifted the first, then dropped it back.

  Nothing.

  I was about to check the other one—but that’s when I noticed. A line of bullet holes riveted inward along the port wall.

  She saw them, too.

  “Automatic weapon,” I said. And then I added quickly in reply to her quizzical look, “I was in Nam for a year. You learn all about automatic weapons in the Army.”

  The holes swept across the bulkhead in a long arc, the smashed windows of the wheelhouse evidence of where they had finally halted.

  “The guy in the Mako didn’t have a weapon like that. If he had, he’d have used it on me long before you got your shot off.”

  “Possibly,” she said. “But who else would want to shoot at some innocent private boat?”

  “Drug runners,” I said. “It’s not all that unusual. Maybe the people running this boat were carrying a load and the competition caught up with them. Or maybe they were just out here fishing and saw something they weren’t supposed to see. Like I said—it happens.”

  She sighed. “I guess you’d better notify the Coast Guard—”

  She stopped then, listening intently.

  “Did you hear that—shush.”

  She tilted her head, straining to listen. And then I heard it, too. A soft, rhythmic thunk . . . thunk, coming from the forward berth beyond the door.

  “Give me the revolver.”

  She looked at me, said nothing, then headed for the door, the .38 poised.

  She put her right hand on the doorknob, hesitated for a moment, then jerked it open.

  The water was deeper in the forward cabin. It came out in a black wash, calf-deep, rivering more floating junk—and something else, too.

  A man, face up.

  He was naked to the waist, his arms thrown out as if caught in some strange slow-motion fall.

  His hair was short, blacker than the water, and his hands and face were a ghastly white.

  He looked as if he was in his mid-twenties. A gray blotch marked where his wristwatch had been. The mustache on his face looked ridiculously neat in comparison to the rest of his drained flesh.

  His throat had been cut; cut so deeply that his head bobbed slowly in the water as if it were about to come off. And that’s why the water was black—black with his blood.

  The woman was stock-still at first. Then she covered her mouth suddenly and stumbled toward me. I locked my arm around her, feeling ribs heave beneath breasts, holding her close.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. . . .”

  It was what the reporters would probably call an appalling sight.

  And they would have been right. His face was contorted, locked in the horror of his final conflict: teeth bared, eyes wide, wolflike. Quickly, I moved the woman away from the body, over by the built-in couch.

  “It’s awful,” she said. Her hands still covered her mouth.

  “Feel like you’re going to be sick?”

  She shook her head and braced one elbow on the box of ship’s hardware that had never quite made it to the Mako. “No,” she said. “I’ll be okay. Just give me a second.”

  With my foot, I rolled the corpse over. It was already bloated, spongy.

  I was looking for a bullet wound, but found none.

  It didn’t make sense. Why had the black man slit the throat of his own partner?

  Or maybe it wasn’t his partner. Maybe it was the guy who had owned the boat. And maybe some drug runners had gotten to him first. . . .

  I opened the narrow compartment below the wheel where the ship’s papers should have been kept.

  Empty.

  Somebody had beat me to them.

  I decided to check the skiff.

  I took the woman gently by the arm. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “This boat isn’t going to last much longer. One good wave and she’ll turn turtle.”

  She seemed to be still in a daze. Shooting the pirate hadn’t seemed to bother her. But the way this guy died, it even made me a little queasy myself.

  “Let’s go,” I said again. “We’ll cut the Mako loose and call the Coast Guard—”

  The moment I said it, the couch seat I had not gotten around to checking came flying off. It knocked me back against the wall and, in slow-motion realization, I knew what was happening. The pirate’s partner was hiding in there, hoping to hell we’d just leave. But I had forced his hand—said I wanted to free the Mako, his only means of escape from this sinking boat.

  I didn’t see him or his pistol, but I heard the first shot—and saw the woman drop to a heap on the water-slick floor.

  “Hold it right there, or I’ll kill you, too!”

  High voice, on the edge of hysterics. It was a kid. Not much older than twenty. Blond hair, tan face with a sneer that showed a row of bad teeth. When your life is on the line, you don’t take time to reason. The instincts take over and the brain digests visual information at near superhuman speed all in a glance: Androsa Santarun was not dead—slightest movement of chest, no blood; the kid wasn’t comfortable with a weapon—held it awkwardly, like a snake; whether I halted or not, the kid would kill us both. He had to.

  I tossed the couch seat at him and dove for his feet, hearing, as I dove, the pistol explode and the crash of window glass. I jerked his feet out from under him and tried to smother his arms.

  Didn’t do a very good job. He got another shot off, right by my face. It made my ears ring and my head roar. But it missed.

  “Watch out!”

  It was the woman, on her feet again. There was a thin trickle of blood down her left cheek. She had recovered her .38 and had it leveled at the kid’s head.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I saw her pull back the hammer, a strange, starry look in her eyes. But before she had a chance to fire, I hit the kid’s blanched face with a heavy overhand right, knocking him cold.

  I stood up, pointing at him. “There you go—an easy shot. Go ahead and shoot if you want to kill someone else so bad!”

  She lowered the handgun slowly, trembling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just . . . just . . .”

  I took her by the arm and steered her back out onto the deck.

  “Do you know how to use a radio?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. I’m going to tie up the kid and stick him and the other guy in the Mako. You call the Coast Guard. Don’t give my call letters. Just tell them there’s a vessel in trouble. The Loran is beside the radio. Just tell them the numbers you see flashing. They’ll understand. Got it?”

  She shook her head stoically. “And then what?”

  “And then I’m taking you back to Key West—”

  “No!”

  “We have to have someone look at your cheek.”

  She touched her face, then studied the blood on her hand, as if she had forgotten the wound. “He didn’t shoot me—I hit my head when I dove to the floor, dammit! No, don’t say another word. We’re going on to the Mariel Harbor—that’s the agreement!”

  There was something almost pathetic about her fierceness. She looked like a Spanish version of one of television’s Angels, determined as hell to solve the obligatory “mystery,” fake blood and all.

  But there was nothing fake about this woman—blood or mission or anything else.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. But when we get back, you do the explaining to the authorities.”

  Her firmness was edged with contempt. “Don’t worry, Mr. MacMorgan. I’ll see that you don’t lose your precious boat.”

  She turned then, back toward Sniper. But before she did, she cast one more look into the wheelhouse of the trawler, at the dead man, at the kid—and at something else, too. The life ring. It had been knocked out of the box during the fight, and now floated right-side up in the shallow blood and water on the cabin floor. It explained the new determination in
her. I knew the name from my conversation with Norm Fizer.

  In black block letters, the life ring boasted the name of the trawler which now sank beneath us:

  Storm Nest.

  7

  The first thing you raise approaching Cuba from open sea is a low bank of cumulus clouds appearing, on the curve of horizon, like a sudden Dakota windscape. The sea is a mile deep, purple-black in shafts of clear light, and flying fish lift in coveys before you, skimming cresting waves and luminous sargassum weed like locusts.

  It was dawn.

  Clouds were fire-laced to the southeast, and, later, the bleak facades of factories and pre-Castro highrise hotels below Havana caught the light in a blaze of geometrics. Mariel Harbor, already demarcation point for more than sixty thousand refugees, was just twenty miles to the west, a surge of dark cliffs.

  The Coast Guard had held us up.

  The Coasties and Norm Fizer.

  Androsa had insisted on notifying her “lawyer” on VHF. I thought it a stupid move on her part—even though she played her role perfectly on the radio, telling Norm she might need “legal counsel” upon her return to Key West. She made no mention of the trawler’s name. But still, there was no way of knowing if the Cubans were monitoring the Key West marine operator. And if there was a security leak in some high federal office, it wouldn’t take long to realize who Fizer really was.

  But I couldn’t stop her without tipping my hand, so I said nothing.

  We stood by aboard Sniper, waiting.

  Fizer was on the first Coast Guard chopper out. A small cutter came later, and they sent a watch with pumps to try to save Storm Nest. While the Coasties worked, Norm came aboard Sniper. He was as businesslike as ever, but the good humor which I’d always known to dominate his personality was nowhere in sight.

  He was damn concerned.

  And I didn’t blame him.

  When he got into the salon, sat down with coffee and his briefcase, the woman looked at me irritably.

  “Would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes, Mr. MacMorgan.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Norm nod ever so slightly.