Trufante muttered the name so as not to mispronounce it, and tossed the fiery liquid back. It had the burn of a high alcohol content, but a soft, sweet aftertaste. “You’re right. Hipsters’ll eat this shit up.” He set the glass down.
“We are friends now, yes?” JC motioned for the man to pour another round.
Trufante was starting to feel the first shot, and thought if there was going to be business conducted, he ought to make his play now.
“I seen your fish operation. If you’re looking to branch into other commodities, I can maybe help you out.”
JC laughed. “That’s funny, because I know you and your old boss, Mac Travis. Seen you’re working for Commander now, too.”
The mention of Mac’s name sounded a klaxon in Trufante’s head and his memory returned. He’d been fishing the Dry Tortugas, working as deckhand for Mac. The catch was hot enough that Mac decided to offload what they had in Key West and head back out. Not knowing the local suppliers here, they had found JC’s place, mostly because of the gas dock next door. The old fishmonger had lowballed Mac. The negotiation had become heated. Mac and Trufante had followed him back into his facility. Right away, they had both recognized the bins full of illegal and undersized fish. Mac hadn’t been able to restrain himself, and they had left under bad circumstances. He needed to make that incident go away. “Maybe had a few too many when we met.”
JC laughed again. “That seems to be your MO. Anyway, here’s something for the cause. Don’t want no bad feelings in the fishing community. We thank you for your support.” JC handed him a wad of bills.
Less than a quarter-inch thick, it wasn’t what Trufante had expected, but he saw a hundred on top and made a quick calculation. With the choice of walking away with a couple of grand, or dismembered for a sacrifice, he chose the former. At this point, walking away with his life was enough, the cash was a bonus. He took the money and stuffed it in the cargo pocket of his shorts.
“You run across any more of them, I’ll do the same,” JC said, nodding to the gunman to open the door.
Trufante took a step onto the sidewalk and exhaled. Not wanting to risk the man inside changing his mind, he headed across the courtyard between the Half Shell and Turtle Kraals intending to grab a cab, get his boat, and get out of here. Crossing the street, he walked toward the turnaround where several cabs waited. Flagging one, he got in and was about to give the driver the name of the marina on Stock Island and his boat when the other door opened.
Billy Bones slid into the seat next to him and glanced across at him.
“Looks like a party to me.”
Sloan was mesmerized. Sitting across from Pamela, he listened as she described the other patrons at the Sunset Grill. She was perceptive and funny; but her eyes, the color of his aqua cologne bottle, had him hooked. Trying to remember that Eleanor was back at the Turtle Hospital, and that he was here for information on the location of the drugs, he sipped his rum drink and nodded, trying to blend in.
He was rather good at it, first learning in high school, when he had been bullied regularly because of his father’s reputation. Princeton had been a culture shock for him. After growing up on the streets of Key West, he had never been around “those kind of people”. Fortunately, his father had outfitted him correctly; his preppy clothes—and credit card—had gained him entry into their world. Superficially, he had fit in, and the first lesson that he had learned was the value of keeping your mouth shut.
Tonight, it was late, and the company was good. He was unable to stop his blossoming interest in the beauty sitting across from him. So, he waited, knowing that sooner or later, she would say something that would help find the drugs.
He couldn’t pull his eyes away when she squirmed in her chair as she pulled out her phone and checked her messages. “I’m getting worried about Tru.”
It was the break he was looking for. “Does this happen a lot?”
“Not since we’ve been back together. I was down in Key West for a while, but when the hurricane came through, he came to save me.”
Sloan gladly would have exchanged roles with him. “Where does he hang out?”
“There’s a couple of places around here, but I’ve already texted a bunch of his buddies and they haven’t seen him. If he’s not here, he’s probably down in Key West.”
She fell silent for the first time since they had sat down. Sloan knew it was time to make a move. “I’m up for a road trip.”
Before she could reply, her phone rang.
Mac couldn’t sleep. He felt like he had been tossing and turning for hours, but checking his watch on the nightstand, he saw it was only eleven. Thinking it was the wine and scotch, he got out of bed, careful not to wake Mel, and went to the bathroom where, not one for half measures, he downed a handful of ibuprofen.
An hour later, he was still wide awake. Knowing he’d have a better chance of sleeping if he got up and read for a while, he grabbed his phone, and headed for the living room. A pile of bills lay on the desk that was set into a corner of the kitchen. On top was the manual for the new solar inverter. If reading that didn’t put him to sleep, nothing would.
The one-story stilt house, originally built by Wood in the early ‘90s, had been leveled by a firebomb shot by a rogue CIA agent who was running a poaching ring on an adjacent island. Mac had rebuilt the house, keeping the original floor plan to make the foundation and plumbing easier. It was a comfortable layout with a great room and single bedroom.
Built on concrete piles, the main floor sat ten feet above ground level. Even then, the storm surge from the hurricane had come within a single step of ruining the house. He and Mel had boarded the windows, and the metal roof had weathered the hundred-forty mile-an-hour winds, but the solar panels and water tanks mounted on the roof had been lost.
Picking up the manual, he glanced at the table of contents, not wanting to delve into it, but knowing he should. There were no repair services this far out. If something went wrong, those few willing to make the forty-mile round-trip boat ride would charge more than Mac could stomach. Wood had taught him the importance of self-reliance and redundancy. Though the Keys were part of the continental United States, getting something done here was often as challenging as in a third-world country, and even worse since the hurricane. Mac was not without skills, as evidenced by the rebuilt house, and repairing engines and mechanical systems had come easy to him—until carburetors were changed to circuit boards. That was one of the factors that kept Trufante around. Even with the computer-controlled technologies, the Cajun could take an engine apart and put it back together blindfolded.
Grabbing Mel’s reading glasses from the table, he took the manual to the couch and lay down, figuring he’d be asleep in minutes. Skipping the grease-stained and worn installation chapters, his eyelids were already heavy halfway through the first maintenance section. He laid the manual open-faced on his chest and was almost asleep when several sheets of folded paper dropped out. He leaned over and picked them up from the floor.
Nick Van Doren’s archaic handwriting stared back at him. He had been so busy after the storm, repairing the house and getting their lives back to normal, that he had forgotten what he’d done with the young captain’s journal. He’d already been through the first section, and through its direction had located a nineteenth-century gold-filled diving bell ditched by Van Doren’s crew. The treasure had helped save the lives of his friend Kurt Hunter’s family. But the tale didn’t end there.
Wide awake now, he sat up, but before he could read the first sentence, Mel emerged from the bedroom.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“Couldn’t sleep.” He knew it was because of Trufante, and the drugs, but still wasn’t sure if he should tell her.
She sat down next to him. “Nice glasses.” Taking them off his head, she placed them on hers and took the pages from his hand. “Thought we’d seen the last of this.”
As she looked over the g
lasses, Mac felt her gaze penetrate him and knew why she had a reputation for being ferocious in a court. “I was reading the solar inverter manual, and they fell out.”
“So what happened?”
“I just picked it up when you walked in.”
Mel glanced at the pages. “Care to share?”
Starting from the beginning, she began to read the journal out loud. “So, this is how you found it.”
Mel had been chasing leads in New Orleans when they had discovered the gold-filled bell. “With a little help from the chartplotter and Google maps.”
Mel continued to read.
Mac already knew the beginning, but when she got to the part where Van Doren and his crew left the cache, she stopped.
“So, there’s more …”
Nine
When her phone rang, Pamela quickly reached into her pocket and glanced at the display. Placing it to her ear, she turned her body away, letting Sloan get an unexpected view of some side-boob, and answered.
“What do you want?”
After hearing the pissy start of the conversation, Sloan wasn’t sure he wanted to get on her bad side.
She listened for a minute and disconnected. Turning back to Sloan, she finished her drink. “That road trip of yours still open?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“It was Billy Bones. Something to do with Tru falling in with some bad guy, named JC.” She gave him a serious look. “I hate when people go by their initials. Kind of reveals something about them.”
Sloan flinched when he heard the name, knowing exactly what the initials stood for: Juan Cristobal was his father. Hearing that he was involved made this go from bad to worse. “You bet. I’m on my sailboat though—no car.”
“We can take the Beamer,” she said, jingling the keys. “I might have had a few too many. You okay to drive?”
Whether he could blow less than the limit was questionable, but Sloan had no other options. He took the keys from her hand. “I’m good,” he said, motioning the waitress over with the universal “check” signal. He paid for the drinks, and they headed out the door to the car.
“What about your wife?” Pamela asked.
Sloan stopped short. After two failed trips to the altar, he hated that word. “Girlfriend,” he corrected her. When they reached the car he pulled out his phone and sent a quick text to Eleanor that he would be late and for her to either take the dingy back to the boat or get a hotel. He expected she might stay the night with the turtle, anyway.
Pushing midnight, the traffic was light, and Sloan drove the BMW hard, slowing at the same time that Pamela warned him about speeding through Big Pine Key at night. The entire island was a Key deer refuge, and had strictly enforced speed limits. The nighttime speed limit was thirty-five, especially agonizing with the open road and the horsepower under the hood, but it was widely known that after dark there was a speed trap on the island, the only question being exactly where. Flashing lights ahead caught his eye and he checked his speed. Realizing he had drifted over the limit, he slowed again until they were past the police car. Once off the Key, he accelerated again, and glancing over, he saw a smile on Pamela’s face. She clearly enjoyed speed; just another attribute in the plus column.
Settling in at sixty, Sloan started to think about the implications of his father being involved. It was no secret the old man was into anything that would make enough money to placate the gods he worshipped. Sloan was only a quarter Cuban, enough that it gave him the dark look that girls loved, but not Hispanic enough to be obvious. His father’s blood was not as diluted, and it was through his full-Cuban grandmother that JC had learned of the Santeria, and their gods. Hoping for their blessings to offset his shady means of support and lifestyle choices, JC’s offerings had become more lavish and expensive, contributing to the downward-spiraling prophecy he was trying to avoid.
The gods aside, Sloan tried to focus on what he needed to do. Getting the drugs back was paramount. After spending money for so long intended for Sloan to set up a facade that the family was legitimate, the old man finding out that he was involved in smuggling would not go well. If his father was involved, he would have to get them back by stealth.
They cruised past Cudjoe and Big Coppit Keys in silence, a comfortable state that usually took years to build. Trying to fill every void, Eleanor talked incessantly. He found himself enjoying Pamela’s company even more, though he knew he was subconsciously sabotaging Eleanor to rationalize his new fixation.
“Did he say where he was?”
Pamela held up the screen for him to see. “Front Street. I’ve got an address here.”
After looking at the bright screen, Sloan temporary lost his night vision and swerved into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, there was no traffic, and he corrected his course.
Though his parents had been divorced for ten years, his mother still ground her axe whenever she could, sending Sloan detailed reports of his father’s activities. The address was his father’s latest venture. It was kind of brilliant in a backwards way: Building a shrine to his gods in the form of a bar, and using the profits to create even more lavish offerings might just get him the results he was after.
As they passed through Stock Island, Sloan could see Pamela was getting anxious. “We’ll find him.” He tried to reassure her.
“And then, I’m going to kill him.” Pamela was no stranger to Trufante’s adventures.
Sloan was good with that as long as it was after he disclosed the location of the drugs. He crossed the bridge and turned right onto North Roosevelt. Growing up here, he knew the area well, and they were soon pulling into a parking space in front of a newspaper-covered storefront. They exited the car and walked to the door.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s here,” Pamela said, peering through the window.
Sloan could see that there were no lights on. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy, but it was a place to start.
A few minutes later, a bicycle-powered rickshaw pulled up to the curb. Pamela wasted no time, and went directly to the man in the carriage. The shadows made it difficult to see who she was berating, but he guessed it was her boyfriend. Turning away from him, she went to the driver and scolded him, too.
“We can go now,” she said, returning to Sloan’s side.
He couldn’t allow this opportunity to evaporate. “You sure he doesn’t need a ride back to Marathon?”
“Too bad that sailboat of yours doesn’t have a remote control. We could just take off.”
Sloan’s heart skipped a beat. She had no idea how close the Surfari was to being able to sail remotely. The entire boat was automatic, requiring only a few switches to raise, lower, and trim the sails, as well as operate the engines through its chartplotter. Unfortunately, the boat would no longer be his if he was unable to recover the drugs.
“We came all the way down here. Maybe we should have a drink and decide what to do.” Sloan couldn’t let the opportunity to talk to her boyfriend slip away.
“I suppose there’s a good story, anyway,” she said.
Sloan watched her butt as she walked back to the rickshaw. Checking his phone, he saw no message from Eleanor. There was no worry there; the turtle would come first for her. The clock on his home screen showed that it was almost 2 a.m., but you would never know it from the party going on around them. It probably wasn’t as busy as had been earlier, but the lack of quantity was made up for by the enthusiasm of the crowd fueled by the extra hours of alcohol consumption.
“We’ll head over to the Turtle,” Pamela said, going for the passenger door.
Sloan knew the place. Just off Duval, it was more of a locals’ hangout than the more touristy bars on the strip. That was both good and bad; the quiet would allow him to hear the story and question her boyfriend, but there was a chance he would be recognized, and since his father’s spies were everywhere, he would quickly find out his prodigal son was here.
That was undesirable. Looking around for another option,
he saw a flyer stapled to a telephone pole advertising a drag show. That might be the perfect opportunity. There’d be no way he’d be recognized by anyone willing to admit that they were there. The female patrons got off on watching the entertainment, and the guys would be uncomfortable, more worried about being seen than interested in searching out a familiar face. It was a perfect storm of anonymity.
“Hey, Aqua has a show that starts soon. We can sit at the outside bar. Maybe a little payback for you.” Sloan knew the “queens” liked to torment the guys.
She screwed up her face at the idea, then thought for a second. An elfish look came over her. “I’d like to watch those two squirm for a while.”
“Great. Tell them we’ll meet them.”
“Better yet, let’s take a ride.”
JC stood on Higgs Beach, site of the African Cemetery and Slave Memorial. His arms were open to the sky and at his feet lay a box of fruit. Once he had completed his prayer, he would bring the fruit to the water’s edge, where the tide would take the offering to the goddess, hopefully appeasing her—at least for while. It was a nightly ritual, one that washed away the dirt from the day. Whether the goddess would be receptive, he didn’t know, but he was too scared to stop.
Watching the waxing gibbous moon, shrouded by a thin layer of clouds that foretold a coming front, he reflected on the day while waiting for the tide. The drug score would be profitable, but there were some issues attached to it. To survive and thrive in a small community like the Lower Keys for so long he had needed to be careful and smart. Some of his competitors never said “no” to a deal. JC wasn’t like that and believed in the “stink” test. If a load of fish stunk, he refused; same if a deal was tinged with stink.
Buying the drugs from Billy Bones was innocuous enough. The involvement of Trufante wasn’t. By himself the Cajun was harmless, but his relationship with Mac Travis troubled him. Travis was too clean. He had a reputation for getting his hands dirty, but it was always in a do-gooder kind of way. He still remembered the judgmental look on Travis’s face when he saw the bins of fish in his facility. The only saving grace was that Travis was not the kind of guy to go running to the authorities. His reputation was that if he was going to do something about a situation, he would do it himself. Their last run-in had caused JC to up his offerings and watch his back for a while.
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