I turned east on State Road 84. These days everybody from lobster fishermen to sport divers use satellite navigation to pinpoint exact spots on the ocean. The longitude and latitude coordinates are stored as way points in the machine’s memory. Whether or not Collazo and company knew about that, I wasn’t sure, but I decided I would like to take a little look around the megayacht on my own.
When I turned right onto Federal Highway, I noticed the dark blue car with tinted windows behind me. It turned at the same time. It looked like it might be a Camaro or a Grand Prix or something that had been souped up and undoubtedly had speakers with a bass volume that could rattle the fillings right out of the driver’s head. I slowed down and drove at the pace of an elderly French Canadian, letting most of the traffic pass me on my left. Normally, a car that looked like the one behind me would zoom around me in an irate huff. But this guy kept following and matched his speed to mine.
At the entrance to Fort Lauderdale International Airport, I veered to the right and drove down the off-ramp. The dark car followed. I drove slowly around the lower level, where arriving passengers collected their luggage and met their rides or boarded shuttles to the rental car lots. It was a busy Sunday, and the typically rude South Floridians tried to cut one another off, blew their horns, and double-parked, blocking traffic. Sheriff’s deputies were directing traffic and trying to get the pedestrians across to the parking garage without their being rim over. I pretended to be looking for an arriving guest, and I drove slowly, peering into the terminal and watching my rearview mirror. Whoever was back there behind those tinted windows didn’t seem to care whether or not I knew I was being followed. He made no attempt at secrecy.
Just in front of the United terminal, I noticed a group of about twenty-five people, all looking very overfed and wearing flowered shirts, as if they’d just returned from a cruise. The officer was getting ready to stop traffic, but she was waiting for a particularly large lady wearing tight white polyester shorts that highlighted every bulge and dimple on her rear end. She had on those odd beige-colored knee-high support hose and fluorescent green sneakers that matched the tight T-shirt, and she was lugging an enormous cruise ship handbag. I slowed until the lady and her group had almost reached the crosswalk and the sheriff’s deputy was starting out to stop traffic. The flowered-shirt people flowed into the right lane like ants out of a stirred-up nest. I hit the gas and yanked the wheel, squeaking around them on the left side. The officer blew her whistle at me and waved her arm, but I just kept going. The tourists flowed on across the street, blocking all traffic. In the rearview mirror I could see the dark windows, and I imagined the furious face behind the glass.
I sped on to make sure I would be through the section where the highways forked north and south before he was dear of those pedestrians. I turned north, the way I had come, hoping that he would assume I continued south. Back on Federal Highway, I turned into Port Everglades, just to make sure he wouldn’t find me again. Big tanker trucks rumbled out of the port loading docks. I wound my way in to my favorite spot.
A canal dead-ended by the roadside, and warm water from the electrical plant flowed into the canal at that point. A makeshift picnic area had once been set up around the perimeter of the water where a few scraggly pine trees survived in the shadow of a tank farm and the stacks of the power plant, but the authorities had removed the tables and attempted to cover the fence with blinds. What attracted people to this spot wasn’t the trees but what was in the water: manatees. The big sea cows had started coming to the power plant’s outflow during cold fronts. The warm water found there was a welcome relief from the cold winter temperatures. Eventually, people started feeding them lettuce and bits of fruit, and now the manatees came as much in hopes of a free handout as for the warm water. They tried to keep the crowds away, but die-hard manatee lovers had cut holes in the blinds.
I parked the Jeep as far off the road as I could get. There was a Latino family already there, with two little kids, about five and seven years old, all dressed up in their church finery. The littler was a girl, clutching lettuce leaves in her dainty hands, all pink ruffles and ribbons. Her daddy was holding her up so she could toss the leaves over the top of the chain-link fence down into the water.
“Mira, mira, Papa,” she squealed, excitedly pointing into the water.
I walked to the fence and wrapped my fingers through the wire. At the bottom of the pit, a mother manatee lolled on the surface, slowly drifting toward any debris on the water, checking out its edible qualities. Her gray back was crisscrossed with white scars where boat propellers had slashed her. In her wake was a tiny calf: an adorable, chubby, unblemished miniature of his mom.
Mother and child. My mother’s scars weren’t visible, and I had been a kid. How could I have been expected to understand? I watched as the crisscrossed manatee mother nudged the calf over to the lettuce. She wore her motherhood so effortlessly.
After watching the manatees for fifteen minutes or so, I climbed back into Lightnin’ and sat before turning the key in the ignition. I envied the little girl on her father’s shoulders. I couldn’t remember Red ever lifting me up like that. I was never Daddy’s little girl. He was proud of me in a different way, because I was smart and knew boats and could pull Gorda in to kiss the dock from the time I was about eight years old. From a very early age Red talked to me like I was an adult, treating me sometimes as the woman of the house. When he’d leave to go on a job down in Miami, before he’d go out that door, he’d crouch down in front of me and say quietly, “You’ll take care of your mother and your brothers, now, won’t you?" Red knew that Mother sometimes was there to mother us and sometimes vanished behind her door and didn’t come out for days. I would take over feeding the boys hot dogs and pork and beans for dinner and shushing them, telling them not to bother her. Then Red would come home, and I could be a kid again. God, I missed my dad. I didn’t know who I could trust anymore.
XV
When I heard the beeping, I was aware of where I was, and I really had to pee. I’d slept a few hours at the Paradise Hotel just to get away from everyone. The room was spartan and what little was there was tasteless. I’d wolfed down a Whopper with cheese and large order of fries while balancing the food on my lap. Nothing in the room looked clean enough to eat off. In fact, I’d decided to turn the air down and nap on top of the covers. I didn’t want to see what surprises might be on the sheets. The carbohydrate fix had made me even sleepier. I’d set the alarm on my watch for 1:00 A.M., and I was out the moment I was prone.
Now it took all the willpower I could muster to force my body up off that bed and into the bathroom. I sat on the john and wondered if I was a complete lunatic to try to break into a million-dollar yacht tied up to the docks of a United States Coast Guard base. My conclusion: probably. But I didn’t know what else to do at that point. I was certain that everything that had happened during these last four days was connected. Ely and Patty both had been killed because of some secret, and Neal was hiding out because he knew something about it. Men like Hamilton Burns and his clients really valued only money. At the moment, I could use some of it myself, and that was just one reason I was determined to find out if the Top Ten held any of the answers I was looking for.
The motel was quiet and the streets were nearly empty when I pulled out onto the highway. I’d found an old navy blue zip-front hooded sweatshirt balled up in the back of my Jeep, and I pulled it on to cover my bright T-shirt. The dark jean shorts would be okay. I also had a collection of baseball caps under the seat for days when the wind in the Jeep got to be too much. With my hair pulled into a tight ponytail, I chose a dark cap with Sullivan Towing stitched in faded gold across the front. It had once belonged to Red.
It had been a long time since I had last been to John Lloyd Beach State Park. The park was on a long peninsula that formed the southern side of the mouth to the harbor at Port Everglades. This narrow strip of land was really a barrier island that stretched all the way down to Sout
h Beach and the Miami Harbor entrance. The ocean flowed on the outside, the Intracoastal on the inside. At the tip of the peninsula, the Coast Guard had their facilities, but you had to pass through the park to get down to their station. The State Parks people manned a security gate there round the clock.
I turned off into the parking lot at Dania Beach and parked in one of the metered spots. The best way to get past the gate would be on foot, going into the brush on either side of the guard station. But then it would be a good two-mile hike down to where the Top Ten was docked. I didn’t think anybody would be on the road through the park at that hour. I grabbed the backpack containing my in-line skates. There was a flashlight under the driver’s seat for emergencies, and I dropped it in the backpack as well.
I pulled my cap down low over my face as I crossed the Whiskey Creek bridge. I was in full view of the ranger station about fifteen hundred yards ahead, but I was guessing that the person on duty either had something to read or some music and he wouldn’t pay much attention to my end of the road. At the bottom of the bridge, I turned off into the forest of tall Australian pines. The thick carpet of pine needles on the forest floor made it easy walking, although the trees didn’t provide much cover. I passed the ranger post about a hundred feet away. I could see the headphones on the young man’s head.
The road took a turn another couple of hundred yards past the guard post, and I sat on a chunk of dead coral on the side of the road and pulled on my skates.
The road through the park was dark and desolate. Pines lined the right side of the road, and on the left, short mangrove seedlings covered the bank before the dark water of the Intracoastal. I skated near the side of the road, ready to jump into the trees if a car approached. The asphalt was rough, and I tried to get into my steady rhythm of side-to-side sweeping strides.
Just across the Intracoastal, the mangroves began to thin out and the bright lights of the busy commercial port lit my way. On one side was the loamy smell of the dark pine woods, while across the water came the noises and machine smells of ships’ engines and generators. Toward the end of the peninsula, the road curved, and through the trees, I could see the lights of the dormitories and buildings at the station.
There were several compounds out on the end of the peninsula that marked the southern half of the entrance to Port Everglades. After I replaced my skates with my sneakers, I checked the whole area over to make sure I was jumping the right fence. The entrance to the Coast Guard station had a closed chain-link gate that operated electronically, but no guard. Not even any barbed wire on top. Up until now, everything I’d been doing had been minor but breaking into a U.S. military installation was a major offense. My pulse was throbbing in my neck as I hooked my fingers through the chain link. It took me several minutes to force myself to make the first step. Once over, I made my way around the perimeter of the compound to where I could see the Top Ten berthed behind a forty-foot cutter.
The gangway was down and no precautions had been taken to keep people from boarding. The Coasties probably didn’t expect anybody to get this far without being challenged.
Stepping onto the deck, my memory flashed back to when I had jumped aboard last Thursday. The same eerie feeling came over me as soon as I stepped aboard. Lots of sailors and fishermen get to thinking their boats have personalities and wills of their own. I’ve always been a skeptic about this, but this ship did feel as though she had lost her soul.
I started at the bow on the lower deck and worked my way aft, jiggling all the doors and windows, trying to find my way in. The police had placed yellow crime scene tape across the doorways, but at this point it was the locks that were most effective at keeping me out. On the stern, I made out a dark shape on the side deck that I hadn’t noticed the last time I was aboard. A black oilcloth tarp covered what looked like some kind of machinery. Yachts of this size and caliber didn’t normally need to have machinery stored out on deck. I pulled off the cover and found what looked like a small engine mounted on top of a pair of tanks. Squatting down below the level of the bulwarks, I clicked on my flashlight and examined the aluminum plate on the side of the red steel tank: Powermate Contractor 5.5 HP, 120 PSI Max. Pressure. It was apparently some kind of gas engine-driven air compressor. Red had installed a small compressor on Gorda that we sometimes used for filling tanks. What was this one for? For filling dive tanks? That didn’t make sense. The Top Ten already had an electric compressor in her engine room below deck. I wondered why on earth Neal had brought it aboard.
I heard a loud scraping noise aft, and I clicked off my flashlight. At first I heard nothing but my own heart pounding and the whistle of the air in my nostrils as I tried to slow down and breathe normally. Then I heard the noises of the port across the turning basin, the beeping of forklifts loading containers onto ships, trucks and tugs moving and working. A pilot boat passed on the channel side, and the Top Ten strained at her dock lines. The aluminum companionway creaked as it rolled on the seawall. When my heart finally slowed to a mere gallop, I stood and peered around the cabin on both sides of the yacht. There was no one there.
On the seaward side, I found a window left open a crack for ventilation. I slid it open wider and managed to squeeze through, although I had to leave my pack outside on the deck. I was in the main salon, close to Neal’s cabin.
In the beam of my flashlight, I could see that the police had left the place a mess. They had probably already found everything that was worth finding, but I had to try.
The crew’s quarters were up forward in the bow. I had visited Neal’s cabin several times before we finally broke it off for good. The door stood ajar. Most of the personal possessions in the cabin were the same ones I had picked up and put away over the months that Neal had lived with me in my cottage: his clothing, a machete he’d picked up in Panama for opening coconuts, a scrimshawed whale’s tooth. Nothing there told me anything new about the life he had been leading. I closed the door to his cabin and headed up to the bridge.
Somebody had cleaned up the blood. I began to search through the paraphernalia. Various letters, bills for boat maintenance, marina charges, fuel receipts. Neal never had been very good at bookkeeping. Finally, I picked my copy of Bowditch’s The Practical Navigator. Inside the cover there were some personal letters and some photographs, including several of me.
I leaned against the helmsman’s seat and examined a picture of the two of us taken down at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. We were up on top of the fort, sitting on the ramparts with the various blues and greens of the anchorage in the background. From that picture, you would think those two would never be apart the rest of their lives.
Tucked between the pages of Bowditch, I found some odd sketches. I had no idea what they were. Obviously the police hadn’t thought they were important, if they’d looked at the book at all. Near as I could tell, the drawings delineated some compartment or container. The measurements were sketched in as well as the rough calculations of the square footage of the space. I slid the sketches and the photo back into the book. I felt fairly safe taking it now. I doubted the cops would even notice it was gone.
It wasn’t difficult to find the GPS, but I had never used this model before, so it took me several minutes to figure out how to recall the way points that were stored in memory. Neal had way points for Miami Harbor entrance, Bimini, Marathon, West End, you name it. Each way point was named with a three-letter code name like MIA, MAR, or WND. The last position entered was located just north of the entrance to Port Everglades. I lifted up the chart tabletop and rummaged around inside for a slip of paper and a pencil. I wrote down the coordinates, latitude 26°09.52’N, longitude 80°04.75’W, as well as the name, BAB. What the hell did that mean?
I slipped the papers and photos back into the book, let myself out the side door and made my way to the aft lower deck, where I’d left my backpack. I slid the copy of Bowditch in between the skates and zipped the pack closed.
I heard a noise behind me. I whirled around,
twisting in a crouched position. The next thing I knew was blinding, searing pain as a blunt object slammed down on my left shoulder. A figure dressed in black grunted and pulled a fire extinguisher back into the air preparing to hit me again.
My attacker looked like a giant Pillsbury Doughboy in blackface. He growled a deep animal-like noise and came at me again. This time I rose up swinging the pack with every bit of pain and fury I had in me. The pack smashed into the black ski mask. I heard him groan, then gag and spit. I raced for the aft deck, looking frantically for another weapon, anything.
He hadn’t stayed down more than a couple of seconds. I tried to turn around at the end of the main cabin area, but my feet slipped on the sharp right turn. I heard him before I felt his hands grab hold of the cap hanging from my ponytail. He threw it to the deck and grabbed my ponytail. He yanked my hair so hard, I could hear some of my hair being pulled out at the roots, and then he slowly pulled my head farther back. I thought he’d break my neck. I couldn’t breathe. Every time I struggled, he pulled harder.
“Bitch,” he breathed in his deep voice.
He forced me to the back corner of the deck opposite the covered compressor. Just as I thought I was about to black out, I felt his other hand reach between my legs and grab me by the crotch.
He yanked my hair back harder and when I tried to scream, nothing but a pain-scrambled gurgle came out. Then I was rising, being lifted by my hair the hand between my legs. I saw the turbulent black water of the inlet beneath me.
“Adiós, bitch.”
He heaved me into space.
Grabbing the swim step would be my only chance to stay with the boat, a lesson my father had taught me since childhood. As I fell, I swung my right arm in the direction of the teak platform. I heard the skates crash onto the wood, and my wrist slammed down onto the steel strip at the edge of the step. My right hand went limp, releasing the strap, unable to grab hold of the swim step, as a new, mightier pain tore up my right arm.
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