The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series

by Chris Poindexter

  Anita Guerrero’s report was thorough and the boat still looked exactly like the file pictures. The cabin key was, as her report indicated, hidden behind the fire extinguisher that hung just outside the cabin door. We stepped inside for a look around.

  Boats this size were made to be operated by one person but could accommodate up to four. The cabin would be warm and dry in the worst weather and featured a functional galley with a two-burner stove, an AC/DC refrigerator, and a small head/shower combination. Below forward was a break table that would seat four people that could be converted into a V berth so you could work two-on, two-off. For a small boat it was very tidy setup.

  An empty set of brackets on the instrument panel showed where the Raymarine 500 GPS, plotter, radar and depth sounder combo unit was once attached. It was a nice system that made looking out the windows almost unnecessary. The skipper could see the location, depth and radar on a single combined display and mark the location of set lines and traps. There was a high-backed chair by the control panel that was on a pivot base so it could dampen some of the swells. In the middle of the pilot console was a hydraulic autopilot arm that could attach to the wheel so a single person could work outside and the boat would track along on its own on a course set on the navigation system.

  “This is really nice,” Q said in a surprised tone.

  We searched the boat, including the live well, and found she had been cleaned top to bottom. Whoever did it even cleaned out the boots and gloves in the changing area. The thorough nature of the cleaning job bothered me.

  “Whoever cleaned this boat knew their shit,” Q echoed my thoughts.

  “They didn’t do this in 20 minutes,” I observed. “It took them the better part of a day.”

  “Security cameras?”

  “Anita would have thought of that. In a marina this size there’s a lot of traffic in and out. We might ask the dock hands, though. They might have seen something.” It wasn’t much but whoever cleaned this boat was here for a day or they took it somewhere that took a day. It was a start and the first discovery we made that wasn’t in Marshall Guerrero’s report. She had not noted that the boat had been professionally cleaned.

  I took some phone pictures for Deek’s records and we retraced the most likely path Raphael would have taken to the parking lot with a dock cart. The carts were stacked up against the side of the office and looked a little like wheelbarrows except they had two wheels, like bicycle wheels, in the middle of the bucket. We guessed you could get maybe 250 pounds in it before the axle would start to sag. They were there for hauling gear and supplies out to the boats without moving the boat over to the loading dock. Like with anything at a high traffic marina, these had seen their share of wear and tear.

  “They’re all beat to shit,” Q observed.

  “Some more than others.” I pointed out one with a broken axle set apart from the others. The break looked recent as the outside of the axle bar was rusty but where the break occurred was clean metal. Q flipped it over.

  The inside was scratched up and I took a swab sample. Since Deek didn’t have our earpieces up and working in Miami yet, we had to go old school. I hit the speed dial on my cell phone.

  “Operator,” he said jokingly.

  “Need a lab to run a sample,” I informed him.

  “Couple options for industrial labs,” he informed, but none open until later. “I’ll add it to Amber’s itinerary.”

  A couple minutes later Amber made her weary way from the Swan wearing jeans and a white motorcycle jacket with pink trim, her black helmet with pink striping under her arm.

  “Deek texted me you had something,” she said, holding her phone so I could see it. Less than a 100 meters apart and we communicated by text message.

  I handed her the dirty sample swab in a small evidence bag. She inspected it, rolled it up and put in one zippered pockets of her jacket. Then she got up tip toes to kiss me.

  “See ya,” she said over her shoulder, making her way back down the dock to her bike which was parked at the end of the sidewalk just outside the foot entrance to the docks. She fired up the machine with a whooping, throaty roar. She put on her helmet and gloves with her bike warming up at idle and attached her phone to a special cradle on the handlebars. After one last check she gave Q and I the finger and growled off across the parking lot like some kind of cyborg beast creature.

  “I’m sure she meant that in the kindest possible way,” I joked.

  “I’m feelin’ it,” Q grinned.

  In truth I knew exactly what was bothering Amber and it was more than adjusting to new found confidence. For all her life she’d been fighting dragons. Fighting for acceptance, fighting for money, fighting a dysfunctional home life and clawing out a living and career path on her own. Yet now, in the space of just a few months, she didn’t need to worry about money or a house and had a corporate support network that took care of dealing with rents, leases, vehicle maintenance, balancing a checking account and all the things normal people deal with every day. She didn’t have to wait at the DMV for a driver’s license or even a line at the grocery store. She didn’t have to do her own laundry, cook her own meals or plan for retirement. In one stroke all the dragons in Amber’s life had been slain and then we put her through the crucible of fire and honed her into something solid and competent.

  It wasn’t the job or bizarre schedule Amber was having trouble dealing with, it was the sudden silence. Everything she’d fought to get away from was suddenly gone, everything she struggled to gain was suddenly provided and even more. She had everything but did not have to carry the burden of owning anything. For most of us on the team that lifestyle had developed gradually. For Amber and many others the transition was virtually instantaneous and it was disorienting. People like Ashley dealt with it by maintaining a life apart from the company, but that wouldn’t work for Amber and her turmoil had no point of focus. I had no doubt she would adapt but not without an internal struggle.

  We could hear the throaty roar of her bike a long way in the early morning quiet. The low growl continued through the parking lot to Pan American Drive and then wound up through the gears as the sound disappeared behind the traffic circle.

  “That is a nice bike,” Q observed.

  “It’s a rolling backache,” I complained.

  Q chuckled. “Maybe for an old guy,” he said slyly.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Kinda is,” he assured me.

  The marina office is open 24 hours, so we checked in there to ask the night staff about boat cleaning services and if they kept logs on contractors. It was going to take Deek a couple hours to get us a car; my last minute change of plans put all our logistics out of sorts. Because of the short notice our car would lack the usual electronic sophistication. I didn’t like relying on our phones, which somehow felt limiting and slow. I had to remind myself that’s how most of the world gets by and it wasn’t that long ago when a cell phone was the size of a football with a battery the size of a brick. My very slim phone, with more processing power than the computers on the space shuttle, beeped a message.

  FRED ON WAY

  That was good news. It would take the Salvage Star about four hours, which would give Amber time to finish her errands and help arrange industrial size dockage for the Star, which would be decidedly out of place here.

  The night clerk was still on duty and we introduced ourselves as private detectives working for the family. She was slightly overweight, with her hair back and wore a Dinner Key Marina polo shirt. Her name tag read Darcy and she had an expression of perpetual boredom. Marinas are a little like hotels with floating rooms and anyone working the night shift at a busy marina had seen it all.

  “The cops have already been here,” she informed us, “and there was some lady cop here asking questions a few days ago...FBI or something.”

  “5’10, dark hair, and fit?” I asked. “And she had a crooked tooth.”

  “Yeah!,” Darcy brightened a little r
emembering that small detail.

  “She’s a U.S. Marshal.”

  That didn’t seem to mean anything to the clerk. To her cops were cops and we were rent-a-cops, which put us in the same league in her book.

  “She was really nice,” Darcy observed. “Said she was related to Rafe but you can’t always tell.”

  “According to her notes you saw Mr. Valle on more than one occasion,” I observed.

  “Rafe,” Darcy clarified. “No one called him Mr. Valle. I saw him a couple times but didn’t think much of it. This is a pretty busy place.”

  As if on cue we were interrupted by a couple liveaboards stopping by to pick up their mail on the way to breakfast. This pair, like a lot of people who live on boats, were dressed one step above homeless people. All the same it was a big mistake to assume they were poor. People who were attracted to living on boats were like us in that most who adopted the lifestyle were doing so to drop off the radar of traditional society. Darcy pulled their mail out the box and handed them each a pile.

  “I can’t really tell you much more than I told the lady cop,” she said. “If you want to know more you might want to talk to the Harbormaster.”

  The business office wouldn’t be open for a while yet so we decided to launch out and talk to some of the deck hands. Most of them were students working part-time and were just rolling into work. They were nice enough, most knew Raphael but didn’t have anything to add to what we already knew and most also indicated they had previously talked to the lady cop. It wasn’t unusual to see Rafe, as everyone called him, working around the docks at odd hours and moving gear between his truck and boat.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Q concluded, equally frustrated with the pace of this operation.

  “One more,” I said, spying the security guard on his little electric golf cart.

  He was an older gentleman but neat. He wore khaki shorts, deck shoes and a white shirt with SECURITY in big letters across the back and a shiny gold badge. Besides the uniform he had a cell phone, a flashlight and a fat key ring on one of those retractable wire things that clipped to his belt. He was low-key but direct, just the right combination of rules and good nature for a job where sometimes rowdy guests were coming to have a good time. His name was Daryl, a retired CPA from Pittsburgh, and he was a liveaboard working off his slip rent by putting in 20 hours a week as a security guard.

  Unlike the night clerk he actually asked to see our credentials, which we had and would check out if he followed up and my impression of Daryl was that he just might. He too had already talked to Anita Guerrero so we spared him going over all the same ground. I only really had one question.

  “Do you remember anyone coming in to clean Rafe’s boat?”

  He thought it over for a minute. “Yeah, there might have been someone, now that you mention it.”

  Every RV park and marina has a group of mobile mechanics and service people who do odd jobs for boaters, including boat-sitting, which involves showing up once a month to charge the batteries and pump the bilge, clean, do minor maintenance and other errands and odd jobs. For big repair jobs the boat would have to go to haul-out center but for anything else you could usually find someone to come to you.

  “Did you mention that to Marshal Guerrero?”

  “Doubt it,” Daryl said frankly. “We got people coming and going for all kinds of stuff...cleaners, maintenance people, crew, cooks…” He let the list trail off. “It just wasn’t that odd to see someone cleaning a boat. I wouldn’t have even thought of it if you hadn’t said something.”

  “But you remember seeing him?” I asked. At a marina with nearly 600 slips and anchorage for another hundred that was pretty specific information.

  “Well, I didn’t exactly see who was doing the cleaning but I’m certain,” he assured us. “I remember because there’s a Larson 37 just down from Rafe’s slip that the owner lets his nephew use on the weekends sometimes. Well, he always gets the music going a little loud and sometimes brings some of his friends and they get a little rowdy and if they want to be loud they have to go tie up on one of the buoys, we don’t truck with that kind thing here on the docks. I didn’t actually see anyone on Rafe’s boat, but I remember a big cart of cleaning supplies sitting on the dock. They’re not supposed to leave it sit like that,” he said with air of someone for whom rules are rules.

  “So anyway, I was going to say something about moving the cart after I talked to the boy but by the time I got back the cart was already gone.”

  “So this was a weekend?” Q asked.

  “I’d have to check the logs but I think it was a Friday night, maybe two weeks ago.”

  I gave him a card, wrote my current direct number on the back and asked if he’d mind calling after he checked the security logs and he said he’d be happy to do that.

  “Hey,” he asked releasing the brake on his golf cart, “you two came off that Alexander, right?”

  “That’s us,” I answered.

  “That’s a damn nice boat. What kind of private detectives can afford something like that?” he asked.

  “Really good ones,” I joked.

  “Yeah, I get it. None of my business,” he grinned. “Rafe’s not in any kind of trouble is he?”

  “Not that we know of, we’re just helping out the family.”

  “That lady marshal,” he guessed.

  “We don’t talk about our clients, Daryl,” I said as nicely as I could.

  “Probably what makes you such good private detectives,” he said with a wink. “I’ll see what I can find in the logs. Enjoy your stay.” With that he zipped away, the golf cart making a gentle purr. My phone chirped.

  SWAN LEAVING

  We walked out to see the Swan on her way, the twin Cat C32 ACERT marine diesels already growling their readiness to head to sea. The Swan wasn’t fast but she wasn’t a lead mine either; she had power to burn and could cruise nearly 1,500 nautical miles on the 3,000 gallons of diesel in her military spec aluminum tanks. Mack would run a slow race track course just off the coast and assured us he could meet us anywhere in the area in less than an hour.

  The mate and Ashley cast off and we watched watch Mack navigate the narrow channel into the marina. This was one of the last missions for Platinum Swan, as we had already made plans for an upgrade. For all her power and comfort, the Swan was still basically a party girl. She was perfect for cruising up and down the south Florida coast in comfort but she couldn’t cross the ocean. Her replacement, being built in a shipyard in China, would have a range of 7,000 nautical miles and be able to deal with 50 knot winds and 30 foot seas. Though I didn’t really spell it out for Fred during the design phase, the Swan’s replacement, which didn’t have a name yet, was a ship we could live on for months at a time. More like a private cruise ship than a big boat. It would require three times the crew the Swan normally carried and there were many places along the Florida coast that she wouldn’t be able to draft. Next month Fred was going to spend a month in Xiamen, China, to oversee finishing construction.

  “Would it really kill us to spend two nights in the same place?” Q asked, watching the Swan head out to sea.

  “It might,” I replied honestly. “It just might.”

  Chapter 4

  The office manager was just getting settled and I felt a little bad barging in on her before she had time for a cup of coffee. She was in her 50s, trim and efficient with the battle hardened look of someone who had worked her way up through 20 years in the hospitality industry. She was polite, direct and helpful, informing us that there were nearly a 100 contractors of various types working at the marina now and then. They were supposed to check in at the office but she admitted they didn’t all do so all the time and it would have been trivial for one to sneak past the office.

  “Our security is to keep people from breaking into boats,” she confided. “If we get too strict we end up annoying visitors. We give them a contractor pass that looks like one of these,” she turned to cabinet an
d extracted a blue card with the marina logo and CONTRACTOR in big letters. “If that’s on the dash the gate generally waves them on through, especially if it’s a busy time of day.”

  She also suggested checking the guard logs and we indicated that Daryl was already working on that for us and thanked her for her help. Our car was finally here and we decided it was late enough to go visit the wife.

  On the drive to Olympia Heights, along the route that would have familiar to Rafe --even I had started thinking about him by that name. I texted Deek to check the marina gate video footage we got from Anita Guerrero for any vehicles that might have a blue placard in the window. I also asked him to see if she could get the truck sent back home this morning. After we talked to the wife and visited the warehouse I’d call Marshal Guerrero with an update.