After the Las Olas Boulevard drawbridge, I took the left fork off the ICW to travel northwest, up the Middle River. Lining both sides of the river were attractive custom homes with docks, but they were a degree or two less stunning than the mansions back on the ICW. We nosed under the Sunrise Boulevard Bridge, two hundred feet wide and nowhere more than eight feet from the water to its bottom. It wasn’t a drawbridge, it couldn’t open for water traffic. Every day, thousands of drivers saw the top of the bridge, but only a few boaters saw the underside between closely spaced cement pilings. We ducked beneath the overhead beams, vibrating with six lanes of traffic rumbling a yard above our heads.
Behind us the ICW had merited drawbridges, because it was part of an inland waterway system theoretically kept open for commercial vessels and pleasure craft, from the Chesapeake Bay to Key West. The Middle River merited no such consideration as it snaked its way from coastal megayachts and mansions far inland to slums and crack houses. A mile west of the ICW, the automobile reigned supreme and boat access was a distant afterthought. The commuting worker bees in their cars needed to get from their homes to their jobs without delay. Sunrise Boulevard was a major east-west artery carrying them in both directions. The neighborhoods beyond each low fixed bridge became uglier and cheaper by degrees.
There were no sailboats or sportfishers inland of the Sunrise bridge. The exact height requirement for each fixed bridge fluctuated with the tides, but anything higher than seven or eight feet above the water was filtered out at Sunrise. We passed only one boat coming the other way on the next northward leg of the Middle River. It was a generic Boston Whaler clone with an older man at the wheel. We gave casual waves as we passed. Just two boats on a stretch of water in South Florida, two out of maybe a million. There was no hint that one of the boats had just come from a foreign country.
We were a few minutes by water from where I hoped to stash the boat on the canal behind a friend’s house. But if we showed up with no warning, I’d have to tie up the Pantera and then cross their backyard to knock on the door. They might not be home, or they might even have moved away in the year or more since our last contact. New home owners might freak out, and this being South Florida, they could be armed and more than willing to shoot. Or nosy neighbors might report “intruders” to the police. Burglars and home invaders did not typically arrive in an expensive speedboat, so the risk was slight, but it was there. Far more bizarre crimes occurred a dozen times a day in Broward County. Above all, we were trying to maintain a low profile and avoid official attention.
The alternative to showing up unannounced was to risk a call from a pay phone. After one more hairpin turn we arrived at a Winn-Dixie supermarket that had the Middle River behind its receiving and unloading dock area. The supermarket was next to the north-south running U.S. Highway 1 bridge. It was another low fixed bridge, not even a speed bump on busy Federal Highway. The last time I’d been here, there had been a pay phone on the front of the store. I told Nick to get the fenders ready; I’d decided to risk the call.
There was no dock behind the Winn-Dixie, just a crumbling concrete seawall four or five feet above the water. Nick put the white fenders out, one on the stern and one just forward of the low wind screen, and got a pair of dock lines ready. We found a spot where there had once been a wooden dock, where some rotten timbers were still bolted to the seawall. He tied us up, and I hit the engine kill switch. Our rumbling engine noise was replaced by the humming of traffic over the Federal Highway bridge.
I stood tall in the padded bolster, stretched my neck, arms and torso, and pulled off my damp T-shirt. Then I crawled below into the cuddy cabin, opened my kit bag and removed a gray-and-red Hawaiian shirt. It’s not that I was a fan of Hawaiian shirts especially, but they’re normally worn untucked and their bold prints help to conceal gun bulges. Along with a ball cap and sunglasses, they were my primary South Florida urban camouflage.
My Glock 17 was in a zipper case made to carry shower gear. “Norelco” was prominently embossed on it in gold. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it was better than carrying the pistol in a recognizable gun case. Inside, the pistol was in a black plastic Blade-tech concealment holster. I slid the holster and pistol inside my belt on the right side, snapped it in place with two loops around my nylon rigger’s belt, and covered the exposed grip with my shirt.
You have to keep Glocks in holsters if you leave a round in the chamber. If anybody or anything pulls the trigger—on purpose or accidentally—a Glock will go bang every time. There is no safety except the rather paradoxically located one on the trigger itself. Glocks are very efficient and reliable, but they are also unforgiving of common human mistakes. What I mainly liked about them was that they were available anywhere in the world that you could buy a Coke or find an ATM. Guns are just tools, and it’s a big plus when a tool is available everywhere. Just put money in the machine, push the button and a Glock falls out. Well, almost. You have to know where to look and who to ask. And you have to have gold, or any other local currency that’s commonly accepted in that locale.
Next I found my pocket-size address book in its own ziplock baggie. I checked to make sure it had the needed listing: Mike and Sharon Delaney. I dropped an old plastic film can packed full of quarters into my pants pocket. It held seven dollars’ worth of the coins like a smaller version of the plastic tube containing my last ten gold Krugerrands, now buried deep inside my kit bag, in the toe of a loafer. Of course, using the quarters to make a call depended on there still being a functioning pay phone in front of the Winn-Dixie.
Now ready to go ashore, I told Nick, “Stay on the boat; I’ll be back in five or ten minutes.”
“What if you’re not?”
“Use your judgment. If you leave the boat, don’t expect it to be here for long. Get your .357 ready. But I don’t want to hear it unless it’s a matter of life or death.”
****
I climbed up to the top of the seawall using the old timber for a foot-hold, and I was back on American soil. Home sweet home. There was a narrow strip of dusty trampled weeds behind a high concrete wall bordering the back of the supermarket. The wall was composed of a line of preformed panels, ten feet high and four wide. A dozen vagrants sat on upturned buckets or abandoned lawn chairs with their backs to the wall and stared at me, the unexpected interloper from the speedboat. None of them said a word, smoking cigarettes and joints and picking through boxes of supermarket scrap for their dinners. If I wasn’t an undercover narc, then I was some kind of drug dealer or other member of the upper reaches of the professional criminal class. In either case, it was to their advantage not to interact with the tall stranger who’d climbed up from an expensive speedboat.
I avoided eye contact and walked along the trodden path to where a panel of the concrete wall had been dislodged and pushed into the river. I entered the truck loading area behind the Winn-Dixie and saw more shabbily dressed and badly groomed humans, black, white and Hispanic. They were dumpster diving and picking through discarded crates and boxes of spoiled or outdated produce, either scavenging their next meal or finding something fresh enough to trade or sell.
Groups of loitering men in their own tribal sub-groups studied me with feral, appraising eyes and decided I was not prey, at least not during the remaining daylight. It wasn’t as bad as Recife in Brazil or Colon in Panama, but it was bad enough. I hurried around the back of the supermarket and down the alley along its side. The front of the market faced a strip shopping center at a right angle. Half of the other storefronts in the shopping center were boarded up or for lease. An electronics shop declared a going-out-of-business sale. A government services center in the shopping center had a long line of people extending down the sidewalk from it. After six in the evening.
At the entrance of the Winn-Dixie, a private security guard in a black uniform carried a Benelli semi-auto shotgun across his chest on a tactical sling. He was a door greeter with firepower, there to make the non-criminals feel better about food shopp
ing in a dicey part of town. A second guard was stationed just inside the foyer on the other side of the glass doors, ready to push a button to open the normally automatic doors. I smiled a pleasant, affluent Anglo smile and he nodded to me, a potential paying Winn-Dixie customer, ready to buzz me in. But I walked past him.
Across the parking lot, the sign on a McDonald’s touted the return of the twenty-dollar double cheeseburger to its value menu. Another security guard with a shotgun was posted in front of its entrance, patrolling curbside. The shotgun-toting guards were new since my last trip to the States. Come and get your Happy Meals.
The Winn-Dixie shopping carts could travel no farther than the front of the store, penned in by a corral of yellow-painted steel posts at curbside. I watched a departing shopper to see how it was now done. The new protocol seemed to involve retrieving your automobile and loading the groceries at the curb, your food-laden cart left under the watchful eyes of the armed guards. The line of yellow steel posts also seemed to mark a no-vagrants/no-panhandlers zone, enforced by the armed greeters. A modern version of the old dead line: cross it and you’re dead, if you come to steal or injure.
A few years before, there had been a pay phone bolted to the front of the Winn-Dixie. I hoped the phone had not been crowbarred off the brick wall, and that it was still in working order. It was still there on the far side of the market’s double glass doors, but within the protective boundary of yellow posts. I supposed that too many of the locals needed to use the public phone for any of them to vandalize it. The security guards with their shotguns might also have had something to do with its survival. That and the ubiquitous video surveillance cameras I assumed were still in front of every supermarket, as they had been on my last visit to the States. I pulled the bill of my cap lower and looked downward while avoiding the urge to search for their all-seeing eyes. Nothing gives a better view of a face than that quick look up for the cameras. “Hi, Mom, it’s me, the idiot you raised.”
Making the phone call was a calculated risk. It cost me twenty quarters for a three-minute local call. The machine also accepted dollar coins, but I didn’t have any of them. I punched the numbers and waited. A female computer voice said, “This phone is not in service.” The machine returned all twenty quarters, a minor miracle. I punched in a second number, for their landline at the same address. After four rings, a somewhat familiar female voice said hello. I turned my back to the brick wall, so that I could better observe my fellow citizens while talking.
“Sharon?”
“Who’s this?”
“Dan, from Cozumel.”
“Dan? Oh—my—God! Where are you?”
“I’m close. Real close.”
“Let me get Mike! Hold on just a sec, okay?”
After a short pause I heard a male voice. “Dan? That really you?”
“It really is. Good to hear your voice, man.”
“And yours! Where the hell are you?”
“Just around the corner.”
“No kidding! Are you coming by? You driving? You have a car? I’ll meet you at the gate and let you in.”
“Um…no car this time.” I didn’t want to give specifics on the phone. I tried to sound blasé. “Say, Mike, you don’t know where I can find dock space for a couple of nights, do you?” Even in bad times, Broward County was home to a million boats large and small, and they all had to fit somewhere.
“Well, we’re renting our dock out these days, but the guy won’t be here for weeks. Sure, come around and tie up outboard of him. It’s a white Four-Winns, a thirty-footer. You can’t miss it. How big of a boat are you on?”
“Smaller than that.”
“Oh, well, no problemo, amigo. We’ll see you in a few minutes. Sharon is so excited—we can’t wait to catch up.”
2
I had met the Delaneys in Cozumel, Mexico, during my first Caribbean voyage. Rebel Yell was at anchor, and they were on a time-share vacation. I first saw them in a bar a few blocks from the relative safety of their resort. Mike had stayed out past midnight, long after his wife had left with another American couple. Later I’d seen him with another group of gringo tourists at the bar. I was sitting at a table with a gang of Canadian kids on holiday.
When they departed I remained behind, watching. Mike was practicing his Spanish with a barmaid and trading jokes in both languages while slugging down tequila shots. The last Americans finally left but Mike stayed on, flirting with the señorita. Then I noticed some local interest in the solitary drunken gringo. When Mike staggered from the cantina, he was followed close behind by three men. I left by a different exit a few seconds after them.
The skinniest of the men crossed the street into the darkness and scurried to get ahead of Mike, who was wobbling a bit. Once the speed walker was half a block in front, he crossed the street again and lamely pretended to look for a light for his cigarette. The trap was sprung. Mike paused, unsure, as the other two men swept up behind him. I saw a knife held at the low position as I made my own approach. When it’s one against three and you get the first try at the man with the weapon, you don’t take chances, give warning or show mercy. You sucker punch the sucker-puncher first. You go straight for maximum damage. At the last moment the man asking for the light saw me coming, but too late to warn his friends.
I occasionally wonder if that Mexican has ever been able to hold another knife or anything else in his right hand. His elbow, wrist and shoulder were chicken-boned in directions they were never meant to go. That’s the beauty of what is usually called jujitsu, although it goes by many names. The same techniques that can be applied gently to discourage an obnoxious drunk or achieve a tap-out in a mixed-martial-arts contest can be used to permanently destroy joints with just a little more force. At the knife wielder’s scream of shock and agony, his compadres took off at a dead run and I was able to steer Mike back to his time-share resort.
My new American friend was understandably grateful for my intervention. Sharon was equally grateful that I’d returned her husband to their suite in one piece—and without the involvement of the Mexican “justice system.” I left out the part of the story about Mike’s lengthy flirtation with the señorita serving his drinks, and I know he was grateful for that omission. We’d kept in touch off and on since then. Mike and Sharon always appreciated a postcard or an email from exotic ports. I guess it was a way for the two schoolteachers to vicariously experience some adventure. They were never going back to Mexico, that was for sure. They repaid my one-time favor by doing some mail forwarding and package holding for me. I especially appreciated their canal and dock. It had come in handy before.
****
Mike and Sharon Delaney lived in Wilton Manors, a tiny city of two square miles tucked against Fort Lauderdale’s north-west shoulder. On the inland side of the Federal Highway bridge, across from the Winn-Dixie, the Middle River splits in two. Wilton Manors occupies the land within the fork.
About six feet above the waterline was the maximum height that could sneak under the Federal Highway bridge even at low tide. No problem for the Pantera. We just crouched down in the bolsters and slid through the ten-foot-wide space between concrete bridge pilings.
The South Fork of the Middle River forms the lower boundary of Wilton Manors. Extending north from the South Fork are six canals, each about a half mile long. Mike and Sharon lived halfway up the canal between Northeast 18th and 19th Avenues. Their home might have been eight winding water miles from the ocean, but they still owned fifty linear feet of South Florida waterfront. It was toward the lower end of what constituted waterfront property in Broward County, but it was waterfront. If you owned waterfront but you didn’t even have a boat, during good economic times you could almost pay your mortgage out of your dock rental.
There were twenty houses on Mike’s side of the canal. Each property was fifty feet wide by a hundred deep, with tiny backyards occupied mostly by screened-in “Florida rooms,” cement patio decks and tiny swimming pools. A bare ten feet of open s
pace separated neighboring houses. Mike and Sharon Delaney had bought their place decades before when they’d moved from New Jersey to Florida. That was when Wilton Manors was considered comparatively cheap waterfront property. Now there was no such thing.
The canal from seawall to seawall was maybe eighty feet across. With docks and boats on both sides, the fairway was reduced to about forty feet. The Delaneys’ dock was halfway up the canal on the right. I passed it and turned around. I always parked—car, boat, anything—with an eye for a rapid exit. The boat tied to their dock was the Doctor Zinn. It was squat and bulgy, trying to pack forty feet of comfort into thirty feet. I guesstimated that it could squeeze under the fixed bridges only on a very low tide, so it was here for cheap long-term storage. Meaning the doctor with the corny sense of humor rarely visited.
Nick hopped over to the cruiser and tied us to its unoccupied canal-side cleats. After climbing across its cockpit, we stepped onto the narrow wooden dock and were met by Mike and Sharon.
The last time I’d seen them was here at their house a few years before. Both were over fifty, getting up in age for Broward County public school employees. Mike taught history; Sharon was some sort of administrator. He had been short, chubby and balding when I’d met him. He was still short, still had the same amount of hair, though a little grayer, but he was no longer overweight.
Sharon appeared unchanged to me, but she had been slim to begin with. She’d been coloring her shoulder-length hair ash blond for as long as I’d known her, so there was no change there. Mike was wearing khaki shorts and a green T-shirt, Sharon was wearing white shorts and a matching top, almost like a tennis outfit.
Castigo Cay Page 18