Collin snapped his phone shut. “No problem. One hour. She’ll call me. Now, what do we do in the meantime?”
I grabbed his hand. “Really? That easy?”
He squeezed my hand and lifted it to his breastbone. “That easy. She has specialized knowledge, and we’re lucky today. And we’re going to stay lucky. I feel it.”
My heart lifted. More hope. “Well, we have several things left to do here. I’d like to talk to that busboy, and we should circle back with Gabriel.”
Kurt said, “Yup, I agree.”
My iPhone buzzed. I held my hand up in the stop gesture while I read the message from A. Friend: “Nick would understand. We are in jeopardy. Please do not contact us again. Best of luck to you.”
Whoa. Not the helpful kind of friend.
I showed the screen to Kurt, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He had no words. For once, I had no words either.
Kurt called for Victor and I filled Collin in on the mysterious A. Friend as we made our way out of the commercial terminal. Victor ferried us back to Terminal Three, which now felt like a second home to me, if I had died and gone to hell. When we found Nick, I did not ever want to come back here, even if it was a gorgeous and inexpensive place to visit. To get back inside, we pushed our way through a sizable crowd gathered around an ambulance, the biggest crowd I’d seen at the private terminal yet.
The lunch rush had ended at the cafeteria, and only a few people were sitting in the dining area. When I asked the girl behind the cash register for the manager, she told me in a trembling voice that the manager was unavailable. I asked for our busboy friend. At this, she started to sob.
“He left, he gone. He not coming back,” she sobbed.
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“He walk out—” sob, “he walk out—” She pointed at the ambulance at the curb. “And he just fall down, and he dead. He dead,” she repeated, and then started crying too hard to speak any more.
Collin whirled around and loped out to the rubbernecking crowd. I stood in cement shoes and lost sight of him. Collin spoke Spanish like a native-born Mexican. He said it was a job necessity, working anti-drug in New Mexico. While it was not quite the same as Dominican Spanish, he would have no problems communicating here. Starting now.
Kurt spoke to the girl, his voice gentle.
She choked out, “Gracias, señor,” and ran to the swinging door that led to the kitchen.
Kurt put his arm around me. My shoulders were rigid. He pulled me to him anyway. I concentrated on drawing air in and out of the tiny space left in my lungs under the tremendous lead weight on my chest.
After what seemed like hours, Collin returned. “She had the dead part right. Someone shivved him. With a screwdriver. Poor kid.”
Kurt patted my arm with the hand he had around me. I’d talked to the boy. He was murdered because he talked to me.
Collin asked, “Any chance this is a heartbreaking coincidence, people?”
I couldn’t answer.
“None,” Kurt said.
“We’ve got to get moving, then. We don’t want to be next. Anything else we need to do before we bolt?”
They both turned to me, deferred to me. “No,” I managed to force out.
Kurt elaborated. “We were going to talk to the terminal manager, a man that has helped us. But we have what we need. Let’s go.”
Kurt pulled me along. I was falling down with each step but never hit the floor. The struggle to stay upright and keep walking brought me back to some sense of equilibrium.
So, again, we made the short trip from the airport to the hotel, and the long walk from the lobby to our casita, this time with me in quasi-zombie mode. As we walked, Collin asked us more about the possible link to the Chihuahua cartel. I forced the words out to explain their connection to Petro-Mex, and the clues that kept emerging about some mafioso-type involvement.
“I’ve read about the Chihuahuas’ feud with Petro-Mex, and I deal with them and other cartels every day. I just never imagined they would reach out this far. If you are Ramón Riojas and run the Chihuahuas, this makes sense, though, if you think it through. You said that refinery is one of the biggest in the world and supplies gasoline straight to mainland U.S.?”
I nodded. Barely.
“If the cartel could interrupt the refinery’s operations for even one day, it would raise U.S. gas prices. And the U.S. government would not exactly thank Petro-Mex for bringing their problems across the border.”
I gulped for enough air to get out my next thought. “What I don’t understand is if this is related to the Chihuahuas or some other cartel, why would they use two St. Marcos locals, and not two cartel thugs from Mexico?”
“Oh, they use local talent all the time. I wouldn’t expect anything different,” Collin answered. “How is this tied to Nick’s investigation around the guy who died in your driveway, though?”
“We have no idea,” I said.
We entered the casita and Kurt threw himself on the sofa in front of his laptop. I planted myself in front of mine at the table and Collin set down his bag and joined me.
“How can I help you, sis?”
My phone rang. Julie. I held up a finger and Collin nodded.
“Julie?”
Static. The call dropped. Crap. I dialed her number. No answer. I left a voicemail. Damn the phone service in the rainforest. Damn the cartel. Damn the guys who killed the busboy. I needed a hug. From Nick.
“That kid died because he talked to me, Collin.”
He shook his head. “He died because of bad people doing bad things.”
Collin’s phone rang.
“Tamara! Yo, talk to me, gorgeous. Wait, I can barely hear you. Let me walk outside.” He left the room and shut the door behind him.
My father-in-law was studying the laminated map on the table and the screen in front of him. I was the odd man out with nothing to do. Well, I needed to re-focus on mission-critical work and quit wallowing in this. A young man was dead, but my guilt wasn’t going to bring him back.
I scrolled through my email. One from José Ramirez asking me to update him, letting me know they’d found no trace of Nick visiting the refinery before he disappeared, and asking if I’d listened to his voicemail. Later. I scrolled through Nick’s email. Nothing from A. Friend. I checked my texts. Again, nothing. No voicemail, either.
Not normal. I hadn’t logged one single voicemail since we’d arrived in Punta Cana, and I normally received three to four a day. Granted, Nick always left some of those messages, but I still got one or more from a caller other than Nick every day. And when I’d talked to her earlier, Julie had said she left me a voicemail, and now Ramirez had as well.
I called it, just to be sure. “You have five new messages and one saved message.” Mother Fuuu . . . I hated the F word. I hated these missing voicemail even more. I hated everything about this situation, starting with a husband who had lied to me and ending with a dead busboy.
First message. Ava. Checking on me. Updating me on the slave graveyard research.
Second message. Julie. Sorry she missed the texts. Thanks for my email. She missed us. She was scared.
Third message. José Ramirez. “I reached Mrs. Monroe on her mobile number. She said that, yes, she has returned to Mexico, and does not plan to come back to St. Marcos. She said that her husband’s suicide broke her heart, and she asked me to please consider her feelings and cease the investigation. I have very mixed feelings on this, Ms. Kovacs, but I have been instructed to tell Stingray to stop investigating on our behalf. Please send me your billing up until this time. I suspect I would also be told not to give you Mrs. Monroe’s number, so I did not ask permission.” He spoke the digits into the phone.
Jesus. Why had the voicemail notification not worked? I scratched the number down on a yellow pad on the coffee table and pulled up the texts on my phone as I continued to listen to my messages. Sure enough, Elena’s number matched one that had texted Nick, one I had texte
d myself, but from which I had gotten no response.
Fourth message. Emily, my best friend from my old life in Dallas. “Katie, I just heard about Nick. I am praying for you guys. I love you.”
Fifth message. Detective Tutein. “You think you can get out of trouble by running away and leaving your mother-in-law to take your heat? The judge is gonna rule within a week on the injunction evicting your family from your house. I know the judge well. His wife is the sister of my sister’s husband. Any cooperation with me goes a long way in his court. I am a reasonable man, and I think I see ways for you to make all your troubles go away before then. Nice family, by the way. I especially like those kids of yours. I look forward to seeing you soon, lovely Katie.”
Bile rose in my throat and my stomach threatened upheaval. That bastard. How brazen was a cop that left a voicemail like that, knowing he would get away with it? He wasn’t going to, not if I could help it, but right now my one and only worry had to be finding Nick. I should be getting help from local law enforcement, and instead, I got this. It sounded an awful lot like a threat against my children, and here I was, stuck in the Dominican Republic.
And Nick. I couldn’t stop to think about Nick, what shape he might be in now, whether he was even alive.
He told you he was all right. You just have to hurry.
Funny, he was communicating more clearly with me now than he had before he disappeared, which would really make me mad if I let myself think about it.
Collin burst in. “Hold the press, team. I’ve got information.”
This got Kurt’s attention.
“Here’s what Tamara and her buddies came up with. You probably already know or you wouldn’t have asked for this information, but rum is a double whammy on a piston-driven engine. The alcohol overheats the cylinders, and the sugar caramelizes on the pistons. The question is how much rum, and how long would the plane fly before the engine shut down, given the varying amounts of rum possible.”
I broke in. “The witness said there were several of the big Cruzan bottles.”
“That’s what Tamara thought. She said if someone knew enough to use the rum, surely they’d know the right amount, which would be about a gallon in each tank, call it four liters per tank.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Our witness said the bottles filled a trash bin. Can you imagine someone standing there, pouring eight liters into the tanks? He must have had a hand trolley or cart of some kind. Not that it matters. Keep going.”
“Yeah, the asshole had some balls. So, assuming he had time to get three or four liters per tank poured in, and assuming Nick set his air speed at a hundred and sixty knots, he could probably make it thirty to thirty-five miles before he lost the engines. Tamara and her buddies expect he’d be at an altitude of 8,500 feet when it happened.”
His words pierced my heart. I knew Nick had to have crashed, I had known it in my core for days, and I knew the current goal was to find his crash site. But hearing this made it real and more painful. My hands started shaking and I clasped them together. So much. So much all at once.
Collin kept going. “So let’s assume a couple of positive things. First, that Nick keeps his ditch kit in the co-pilot seat, like any good pilot would do over water. So he’s going to have an inflatable life raft and a survival kit.”
“Yes, he does,” I said. “He always does. When I fly with him, we put it between my feet. He never flies without it.”
“Excellent. Next, we’re going to assume he coasts to a picture perfect deadstick landing on the water. Here’s another positive: Piper Malibus have retractable landing gear. Nick will have the landing gear up, so when he hits the water, the plane should stay upright. And he’s got a minute, up to three, to ditch. That’s no problem whatsoever for a guy like him. He gets out with his ditch kit, pops the inflatable on the raft, hops in, and paddles away before the plane sinks. I can see it happening. And last but not least in the good news department, the seas were calm at one to three feet forty-eight hours ago.”
This was encouraging. I could see it, too. This is how it would have gone down. Tamara was an expert. And Nick had told me he was fine. But what if he hit his head on the dash when the plane hit the water? It could have knocked him out. Or what if we were wrong and there was no rum in the plane? What if he had a stroke or a heart attack and just crashed the plane? What if the bad guys had planted a bomb, and it went off?
STOP IT.
I had held off an anxiety attack so far. I had to stay positive. Nick was counting on me.
“OK,” I said, and both men looked at me like I had pierced their eardrums. I ratcheted back. “Show me on the map. Where is he?”
Kurt pulled his map around for Collin and me to see and took out his wax pen and a ruler. He positioned the pen on Punta Cana and drew a straight line from there to St. Marcos along the ruler. Then he measured the distance against the scale on the map. He drew an X at the thirty-mile mark. He drew another X at the thirty-five-mile mark. Then he took out his compass, slipped the wax pen into it, and set it to draw a circle around the center point between the two X’s with a ten-mile radius.
“Some people would be more precise, but this is the quick and dirty,” he said. “Let’s say he landed somewhere in here.”
“That’s almost exactly where Tamara said to look,” Collin said. “Which way does the sea move out there?”
Kurt tapped his pen on an area to the east of the center point of his circle. “Primarily westward. Although this passage here—the Mona passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic—is a tough one. Lots of variation in current, lots of sand bars. But it moves mostly to the west.”
We studied the map together.
“How long could he stay afloat, just drifting?” I asked.
“Indefinitely,” Kurt said. “But he only has enough water in the survival kit for a few days. After that, he needs rain.”
I looked out the window. Nothing but blue skies out there.
Kurt saw my glance. “Don’t forget, though, Katie, there are squalls nearly every afternoon. He’s getting some water.”
Collin spoke. “Look here, guys. I know the water is moving to the west, but look at these islands. One of them is pretty big and it’s close to our projected splash zone. What do you know about Mona and Monito?”
Mona Lisa, I thought.
Now why had those words come into my head? Mona Lisa? I had never heard of those islands.
Kurt said, “I dunno. Guess we could get online and find out.” He started typing his keys.
Thoughts ricocheted around my head. Rubber raft. Tackle box with a picture of Mona Lisa. My Wild Irish Kate.
What was I supposed to be seeing?
The opening beats of “Eye of the Tiger” thumped in my head in time to my heartbeat, and I knew.
Holy shit.
Nick had been telling me this all along. He had tried to tell me, and I didn’t get it, but now it was clear, so clear that it was undeniable. But how could I explain it to Kurt and Collin—this insanity, these dreams, these messages from Nick to me?
“I’m not crazy,” I blurted out.
So they both looked at me like I was.
Chapter Twenty
I babbled incoherently about the dreams, Mona Lisa, the raft, Wild Irish Kate, about how Nick had told me he was fine, not to give up, but to hurry because he was counting on me to come for him—me and only me—and not to rely on anyone else. When I was finished, my eyes dropped from theirs and I sat without breathing.
Please believe me.
Silence.
Then Kurt spoke in his matter-of-fact way, as if I had presented them with a spreadsheet of scientific formulas leading us to this conclusion, instead of the nonsense I had just spewed. “Can we get to Mona from here?”
He and Collin trained their eyes on the map.
“It looks like it’s about halfway,” Collin said. “We can’t get there from here tonight by boat. We’d have to leave in daylight. So, I guess the ques
tion is how do we get there the fastest: boat, plane, or some combination?”
I huffed a breath out. I swallowed. They didn’t think I was crazy.
Kurt said, “It has to be faster from here.” He pointed to Rincón, the westernmost town in Puerto Rico closest to Mona. “If we could be here, on a boat at daybreak, we’d have a following sea. I’d guess it’d be a four-hour trip out there with a good boat and decent weather, maybe less.”
I sat down at my laptop and pulled up Expedia and typed in a travel search. “We can’t fly to Rincón, but we could fly from Punta Cana to Mayagüez at eight tonight, and from there it’s probably a thirty-minute taxi ride over to Rincón.”
We all looked at the clock: 5:30 p.m. Very doable.
“We need to call the FAA and the Coast Guard. I can do that,” Kurt said.
“I can get on the phone with Julie and see if she can help with a hotel and boat charter,” I said.
“I’ll book the tickets,” Collin said.
“All I have left to do is click to purchase,” I said.
“Cool. Then I’ll paint my toenails. Can I borrow some nail polish?” Collin replied.
I rolled my eyes at him.
Collin mock-sighed. “OK, I’ll call Tamara instead and run our conclusions by her for a final logic check. I’m going to fill her in about the Chihuahuas, too.”
When we were all done, we would still have an hour to pack and grab food at the airport before hopping on the plane.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
We scattered to our tasks. I tried Julie and got voicemail, so I texted her: “Julie, we can’t reach you on the phone. We need help. Skype?” Come on. She answered immediately. Yes.
“Skype open. Ready.”
I connected. “No time for details, Julie, but we’ve made progress and need your help. Drop-everything kind of help.”
“Ruth is here with the kids. I can do whatever you need.” I heard something in her voice. Maybe my excitement was infectious? No. My stomach knotted. No time for more trouble. I pushed on.
Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) Page 15