Castigo Cay

by Matthew Bracken

  Kelly said, “Throw your coat in the back with the bags. You can’t hang it up.”

  “Why not?”

  “The AC doesn’t work. We have to keep the windows down. You hang it up, and it’ll fly out the window.” The lack of air conditioning explained her choice of a skimpy top and shorts.

  I passed the jacket behind the front seat to Nick, who laid it beside him alongside the bags. I climbed in and closed the door, with my green daypack under my knees. I settled in and buckled up, pleasantly surprised to discover more-than-adequate legroom and headroom and an ergonomic fabric-covered bucket seat.

  Nick was directly behind me, so I asked him, “How’s the legroom back there?”

  “Can you give me an inch?”

  “I can give you two.” I slid the seat forward and then un-zipped my daypack and fake shower kit and took out my Glock. Two more loaded magazines were in the shower kit. I placed the weapon into the map pocket in the side of the door and covered it with an open mini road atlas. I packed the other folded maps on both sides of the atlas, making the narrow door pocket appear to be full of nothing but harmless paper. It would pass inspection if we were stopped for only a visual check, but in a real search it would be found in ten seconds. We could have wired the weapons up under the chassis, but I wanted my Glock at hand, ready to grab. It’s all a tradeoff. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

  Kelly pointed past my knees at the map pocket and said, “You didn’t tell me you were bringing a gun. If it’s unregistered, that’s ten years in the slammer. Federal.”

  “I thought you were in a hurry for me kill Richard Prechter.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So you didn’t see me put it there. If you’re asked, you had no idea it was there.”

  “You mean if the cops ask me.”

  “Yeah. But that won’t happen, because we have a great driver and we’re not going to be stopped by the police. Not today.”

  “Exactly. But still…”

  “Do you have a problem with guns?”

  “No. I understand this could get, well…ugly. They’re not going to hand over your girlfriend just because you ask. I just like to know what I’m getting into.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  5

  We said goodbye to Mike and Sharon in their driveway, promising to return by sometime that night. Kelly slid her sunglasses down over her eyes, reversed the GTI out into the street, shifted into first and accelerated us away. She worked the pedals with dexterity, her feet in running shoes with anklet socks. I was glad to see she wasn’t wearing sandals or flip-flops, as most girls her age wore in hot weather. If she had to run today, she could. It showed a sense of tactical awareness that I appreciated—even if it was only on a subconscious level.

  As we headed up her street I folded the sun visor forward, then slipped on my sunglasses and a black-and-teal Florida Marlins ball cap, a loaner from Mike Delaney. Most traffic surveillance cameras are aimed at the windshield at a downward angle. Anything that made Big Brother’s job harder I was for automatically. And it’s always a good idea to use local camouflage, whether it’s a hometown ball cap or local vegetation placed into the loops of your boonie hat.

  The last time I had visited the Delaneys’ house by car, there had been no gate at the entrance to 18th Terrace. Now at the end of their street there was a palisade fence of black ornamental-iron bars topped with more-than-decorative barbed spear points. Their sharp tips were at least ten feet from the asphalt. Barbed points were also welded onto the upper and lower crossbars, where you would need to place a hand or a foot to scale the fence.

  A pink stucco guardhouse stood just outside the closed gate. It was about five feet wide by eight long and topped with red clay tiles, so it didn’t look too ugly. The rear corner of the guardhouse formed the attachment point for the rolling gate. It might be crashed through by a heavy truck with some speed built up, but nothing smaller would ram it successfully. I’d seen worse setups outside embassies. Kelly stopped before we reached the gate and stuck a plastic card into a metal box on a steel pedestal. Bolts clanged open and the iron gate rumbled away from the guardhouse, driven by whining chains. The opening was wide enough for only a single vehicle at a time.

  Kelly said, “There’s no guard during the day. We just use our key cards.”

  I examined the long side of the guardhouse as we passed it. There was a two-foot square of some type of glass, presumably bullet resistant, with a reflective coating. A glance back showed another mirrored window on the narrow front of the house that faced the outside world. Beneath the over-hanging red tiles at the top were cameras, loudspeakers and spotlights.

  I looked around to see if there was another pedestal-mounted card reader on Kelly’s side to close the gate, but once through the fence she kept driving. She must have read my mind because she said, “It’ll close in thirty seconds if nothing is in the way. If there is, an electric eye keeps it from shutting.”

  “Couldn’t somebody run through while it’s still open?” Nick asked.

  “Actually, we’re supposed to wait outside the gate to be sure it closes. My bad. But to answer your question, yes, I suppose they could, but we have cameras all over the place too. That’s how we do it during the day, when there’s no guard on duty.”

  I asked her, “Did you have to get a permit to build it? I mean, it blocks off your street.”

  “A permit? I don’t know about the rest of Broward County, but in Wilton Manors it’s no big deal. We had a vote, and we built it. There was no problem with permits that I know of.”

  “It looks pretty nice,” I said. “Not homemade, or like a jail. Well, not too much.” Ornamental-iron spears were at least more attractive than chain link and razor wire. People freely choose to live behind decorative steel palisades. Nobody chooses to live behind razor wire.

  Kelly said, “I’ll tell you one thing—there’s more of these private gates all the time. It makes back-street GPS navigation pretty worthless. There are new cul-de-sacs all over the place where GPS still shows roads going through.”

  The last block of her road beyond the security fence was zoned for low-rise apartments, and terminated at 26th Street. There was no signal, and traffic was heavy enough on the six-lane main drag of Wilton Manors that we had to wait for a rare simultaneous opening in both directions before we could make the left turn.

  Nick asked, “So, how do you work it at night? Rent-a-cops?”

  “Nope, we do it all ourselves. We have forty families on 18th Terrace, and we rotate guard duty. Mostly it’s the men, and some families can’t do it at all, but it winds up you pull a six-to-midnight or a midnight-to-dawn every other week. In our family, my dad does it. There’s a toilet in there and a little refrigerator and a microwave. You can bring your computer or watch TV, so it’s really not too bad. It would be perfect for homework, but you have to be twenty-one to be a guard. An armed guard, anyway.”

  Traffic slackened just an iota and Kelly punched the gas while hooking left, slinging me back against the side of the bucket seat as she threaded the GTI into traffic. We were heading toward I-95, which lay three miles to the west. Our progress was measured on the GPS unit perched on the dashboard. Like changing television channels, her private cul-de-sac neighborhood of small homes backed by parallel canals was replaced by tire stores, pawnshops, storefront churches and burger joints.

  Nick said, “There’s only one guy on duty at night?” If there’s one subject grunts understand all too well, it’s pulling guard duty.

  “Yeah,” Kelly replied, “that’s how we do it now. One guy—and it’s not always a guy, either. But he’s behind two inches of bulletproof glass, and they talk on a speaker to people in cars or people who just walk up. Mostly they know everybody who lives on our street, so it’s not hard. And it’s got an air conditioner.”

  “The guard has a gun?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. A shotgun and a pistol. A legal pistol—it’s registered. Everybod
y uses the same two guns for guard duty, so we don’t get in trouble with the cops. But all the guard has to do is push a panic button and then lights and sirens go off, and when that happens a bunch of people are out on our street in like ten seconds flat. Some of those guys are pretty gung-ho, almost like our own neighborhood SWAT team. Of course, dirtbags can still sneak over in a boat, or even swim across the canal, but at least they can’t just drive right in and pull a home invasion. Those are the worst: home invasions. Two years ago there was a bad one across the canal from us on 19th Avenue.”

  “What happened?” asked Nick.

  “A gang of Jamaicans killed almost a whole family over there with knives and machetes. The mom, dad, and three kids. Stayed in their house for two days, doing…really bad things.”

  “They catch them?” I asked.

  “Hell no. They got away.”

  “Then how do you know they were Jamaicans?” asked Nick.

  “Their daughter hid behind the water heater, and she heard the whole thing. They say her hair turned white in one week, from the roots out. She was only fourteen. After that we built the gate.”

  ****

  The closest highway entrance onto I-95 was off of Oakland Park Boulevard, parallel to and five blocks north of 26th Street. Morning rush-hour traffic was thick and moving slowly. Half of South Florida used 95 for commuting to work, so the feeder routes were packed.

  “Cell phones first?” I asked Kelly.

  “Yeah, cell phones first. A place on Oakland Park; it’s on the way to the highway.”

  “You didn’t bring any other phones, right? Nothing that transmits.”

  “No, because last night you told me not to. But I don’t see why I couldn’t bring my i-phone. It would be a big help today.”

  “Why? Because if any of your internet searches raised a red flag, then they could be monitoring your computers and your phones today. Which means they could even follow this car, minute by minute.”

  “I don’t see how they could. No, I mean, I know they could. Technically. I mean, it just seems awfully unlikely. Who are we? We’re nobody.”

  Nick said, “That’s what a lot of Taliban thought, right until the Hellfire missile came down through their roof.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought,” Kelly replied drolly.

  “Remember The Terminator?” he asked her. “Well, just think of Google as Skynet. The whole internet belongs to Big Brother. Everything wireless, everything digital.”

  “And that,” I added, “is why we’re going to get clean cell phones for this operation.”

  I studied the car’s scuffed and torn black interior, the dashboard instruments, the GPS, and the radio. My legs were encased in unfamiliar khaki tubes. For months I’d been wearing shorts. I had to think back to when I had last worn these long trousers. It was at a club de yates dinner party near Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, before the Bahamas. The outdoor dance floor and patio deck overlooking the bay were surrounded by flaming tiki torches, and the merengue band was top notch. Cori was stunning in her red sequined minidress held up only by the thinnest spaghetti straps, her long legs made even longer by her sparkly red high-heeled sandals. We would have stayed longer in the DomRep, but we left in a hurry when a scheme of mine unraveled and our continued health and well-being were endangered by the bodyguards and secret police employed by the mark.

  Beside me in the driver’s seat, Kelly’s bare legs were busy on the clutch, brake and gas pedal. My sunglasses concealed my downward glances to the left. Her seat was set forward of mine, giving me a slight advantage in angles when looking her way. My eyes drank in smooth girl skin from trim ankles and calves to thighs and from unpainted fingernails to bare shoulders with just a hint of peeling sunburn on top. Her seatbelt slanted down between her smallish breasts. A leather purse was on the floor beneath her knees.

  I especially liked the very top inch of her tanned legs, where they swelled just a bit after escaping the restraint of the white cotton shorts stretched tautly across the tops of her thighs. She was quite an attractive girl, I decided. Even her elfin chin was rather cute. Her teeth were so even that I wondered whether she was just genetically fortunate or had done her time in orthodontic servitude. If so, her parents must have had money in the recent past. Maybe they still did.

  Instead of her silver jewelry from the previous night, she was wearing a black string necklace with a fan of red stones in front. Bright red stones dangled from her earlobes, matching the necklace. Even her ponytail was tied back by a thick red elastic band. She wore no rings or bracelets, only a white plastic digital watch on her left wrist. I had the thought that perhaps Kelly’s red tank top and jewelry, and not only the long pants brushing my legs, had triggered that Puerto Plata memory of Cori Vargas in her red dress.

  “Hey, sorry about no air conditioning,” she said, probably misinterpreting my study of the dash controls and vents (and her legs) as a search for a way to cool off the car’s interior. Beads of perspiration formed on her top lip.

  My right elbow was hanging out the open window. My folded sleeve cuffs showed half of my forearms. It wasn’t so hot out yet anyway, barely in the eighties. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said. “I’m grateful for the ride.”

  “It won’t make us stand out. No AC, I mean. Half the cars in Florida are in the same boat. Almost everybody is driving an old car now, and when they stop blowing cold, who can afford to get them fixed? Not many people I know, I can tell you that much. They’re lucky if they can afford gas. Just look around at all the open windows, and it’s going to hit the nineties today. But you get used to it.”

  Nick said, “We’re sailors—we’re already used to it. And before that we were soldiers. Believe me, we’re more than used to it.”

  I didn’t mention that unlike his small sailboat, Rebel Yell did have working air conditioning…when I could afford to burn the diesel fuel to run the primary generator.

  Nick was sitting directly behind me, probably so that he could see more of Kelly than only the back of her head. I didn’t blame him for that. She had a very cute profile, some would say pretty, with an upturned nose and an unblemished complexion.

  Tactically, I’d have preferred that Nick was sitting behind Kelly, and he would also have had more legroom behind her. But he had already folded down the left seatback to hold our gear and to provide him a rapid exit in the worst-case scenario. Nick had no choice in the matter of windows. The rear side windows were opaquely tinted but did not open.

  The lack of AC in the car didn’t bother me for another reason besides my being accustomed to heat. Yes, I would have preferred to ride in air-conditioned comfort, hidden from view behind tinted windows like Nick. But I prefer open windows when it comes to shooting. Standard automotive glass doesn’t provide any ballistic protection against inbound bullets, but it sure as hell interferes when you’re in a hurry to send lead outbound with any kind of accuracy past close range. And if you are going to preempt an imminent ambush and fire first, it’s better to do so with the greatest accuracy possible. Not to mention the negative attention that driving around with shot-up windows brings, if you do manage to escape. So why shoot through your own windows if you don’t absolutely have to?

  If you’re stuck in the kill zone in an unsupported one-car convoy and can’t drive out, the only chance to prevent a vehicle ambush from succeeding is by outshooting the shooters. And if they’re professionals and know their business, that’s a slim chance. Inside the GTI we were not surrounded by inch-thick Lexan polycarbonate bulletproof windows, boron-carbide ceramic plates and layers of laminated Kevlar. The first full-auto burst from an assault rifle or submachine gun fired at close range at a soft-skinned vehicle usually settles the matter for good. Cringing low among shattered glass and hoping to be missed on the next volley is a dead man’s choice. If you can’t drive out of the kill zone, you have to get out of the trapped vehicle and move to solid cover, shooting all the while.

  I had the advance geograph
ic knowledge provided by the four-inch GPS screen on the dash, a tactical force multiplier if it came to the swift navigation necessary in a pursuit. Any pursuit, front or rear, fox or hare. We crossed over the double set of railroad tracks I’d already seen in cartoon form, and then Kelly immediately turned right, heading north and driving parallel to them. Traffic on the six-lane Dixie Highway was down to a walking pace, and for long minutes at a time it came to a standstill.

  When that happened, shabbily dressed homeless men and some women and even small children walked out into traffic to try to sell bags of nuts, fruit or flowers, or just to beg. All along the fallow twenty-yard right-of-way on the other side of the railroad tracks a tent city spread out at the base of a high wall. Colorful nylon camping tents, blue tarps and some cardboard and corrugated shacks. Yard-high rusty angle irons were bolted vertically along the top of the wall, to hold three horizontal strands of razor wire surrounded by a roll of concertina. Through the wire I could see the upper stories of three- and four-story apartment buildings with common exterior hallways. Along Dixie Highway in Wilton Manors, a half mile of cinderblocks stacked ten feet high separated lower-middle-class America from a new fell-off-the-earth class.

  “Damn! Do they live there?” I asked.

  “More all the time,” said Kelly. “Lots of places, not just there.”

  From behind me Nick said, “You know, this whole scene reminds me of Hajistan. I used to freak out in traffic after I got home. If I didn’t have a clear lane in front of me, if I couldn’t keep my speed up, I’d totally freak out. All I could think about was vehicle-borne IEDs and RPGs and what sitting ducks we were. I had some close calls over there, and I was there when some other vehicles got hit. I saw some bad, bad things. It took me a long time to get over it. I thought that was all behind me, but after being in the islands for a while I guess I got un-used to traffic again.” Nick’s voice was uncharacteristically flat and controlled.