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

by Chris Poindexter

  Inside the crew was still putting together the displays, which Deek would have loved. There were two big LCD monitors and a small steering panel for the cameras. The back of the van was loaded with the usual gear one would expect in a phone van and the desk for the monitors folded up to look like a tool hanger.

  “You did all this in a day and half?” Q marveled.

  “Technically we did all this in about 11 hours,” Bobby confided. “It took us a day to gather up all the gear, some of which we had to get from Orlando. If you look close there are a lot of rough edges but it’ll pass a surface inspection.”

  In the middle of the roof toward the front was a low-profile 10,000 BTU A/C unit like you’d find on an RV and Bobby told us they would still install a fold-out manhole shelter that would also keep prying eyes from looking in the van. I had to admit it was brilliant.

  “Awesome job, Bobby,” I said with genuine admiration.

  “We just have the communications to go,” he explained. “We’re adding wifi and we made room for a cell station clone, so we can track and take over all the phones in a given area.”

  “You didn’t get that in Orlando,” I guessed.

  “We may have borrowed that from Poncho, so it’s probably best not to get caught with it.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon,” I informed him.

  Bobby nodded thoughtfully. “The paint may not be all the way dry, but we’ll be ready.”

  Teddy had business so Q and I decided to drive to the coast and contact Fred rather than risk having a call tracked to the park. With the Star’s communication system Fred could stand off from shore and still get signal on his emergency cell phone. He would make sure he wasn’t being followed or monitored and the ocean is a big place to hide. On our side we decided to go with one of our unused burner phones and left our park phones behind. It’s okay to be a little paranoid when the people who wanted to shoot at you were so damn good at it. The drive to the coast was a quiet one.

  “I’m going to miss the park a little bit,” Q decided on the way over.

  “I think it’s Miss Charlotte you’re going to miss,” I corrected.

  “I’m going to miss her a lot and the park a little,” he maintained.

  “What would you think of a more formal alliance between us and Teddy’s group?” I asked.

  Q thought about that one for a minute. “Did he say something?”

  “Not yet, but my hunch is he will,” I speculated. “He’s looking for a way to get out of weed before it’s legalized and we’re looking at hiring a crapload of people. Seems like there’s some room for discussion there.”

  “Maybe,” Q agreed. The idea for him came with a lot of conflicting emotions where Charlotte was concerned. If she was just a perk of the park he enjoyed as a guest, then what she did when he wasn’t around didn’t concern him. If we were going to have regular contact with Teddy’s group that relationship could get awkward.

  “Who would be in charge?” Q asked.

  “Who’s in charge of our organization?” I asked in return.

  That was a harder question than it seemed on the surface and, just as he was about to say that I was, it dawned on him that wasn’t entirely accurate. I wasn’t Fred’s boss. When it came to anything that happened on the water, Fred had the last word. He also had to remind himself that I wasn’t his boss, either. Fred, Q and I had an entirely voluntary relationship. Nobody told Deek how to run the tech side of the operation and sure as shit no one told V what to do. We could also now add Amber to that list and possibly Anita Guerrero in the near future. The more he thought of it, the more he realized we were more like a collection of entrepreneurs flying in formation and the people who gravitated to our organization generally made piss poor employees in the traditional sense.

  “Well goddamn,” he said after a minute.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s the same with Teddy.” Flower ran the park, Bobby ran the motor pool and none of them needed a “boss” in the traditional sense. If there was ever a conflict in one area the others could either work out a solution or someone would end up leaving. That kind of working relationship would never work in the military but it was crucial for an organization like ours as it was for Teddy.

  It only worked because we could both pick just the right kind of people and that’s why those who thought they could apply that voluntary organizational structure to an entire society consistently failed. Not everyone can function effectively in that structure and, ultimately, there still had to be a tie-breaking decision when there was conflict. That was my job for us and Teddy’s on his side. We weren’t anyone’s boss and yet every effective organization had to have a leader. It was, in a strange way, very similar to how pirates of old used to operate. In pirate days, captains were elected by the crew and could be displaced by a vote. Even pirates needed a captain, even when that position was merely the first among equals.

  “What about you and Teddy?” Q asked.

  “I think he wants to retire,” was my guess, “or maybe just share the load.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Would you want the extra responsibility?”

  “I’m in kinda the same mood as Teddy,” I said honestly. “I’m just tired some days.”

  “So how do you see it coming together?”

  “I see two big organizations, both in transitional states,” I said, thinking out loud. “I see a lot of compatibility in our organizations and the people we have. Instead of Teddy and I calling all the shots, I see a leadership council.”

  “Like a motorcycle gang.”

  “Very much like that,” I agreed. “That’s why we maintain a split between the corporate and operational side and Teddy does kinda the same thing.”

  “There would be a lot of details to work out,” Q observed.

  “That there would,” I agreed, “and we’d both lose some people.”

  “V?”

  “She’s got her little ranch in the middle of the jungle,” I pointed out. “Someday she’s just going to stop coming back.”

  “Deek?” he asked.

  “Doubt it,” I observed. “He likes what he does too much and no one else would let him run his own shit the way we do.”

  “You’re assuming I’d stay,” Q observed.

  “No, I’m assuming you’d want to,” I countered. “You like what we do. You like this lifestyle, even if it means occasionally getting shot at by Russian Special Forces.”

  “I do,” he agreed, “but not necessarily the getting shot at bit.”

  “That was my fault.”

  “We’ve been through this,” he reminded me.

  “I think Charlotte’s the sticking point for you,” I pointed out, bringing the discussion back to where we started.

  “Fuck,” he agreed, now seeing where the whole issue fit into the bigger picture.

  “Relax,” I said. “You should trust Flower and Charlotte. Those kind of women run the relationship side of things, so you can figure they’ve already thought this through.”

  “I don’t like that,” Q said honestly.

  “I don’t like it with Amber, either,” I reminded him. “But that shit is what it is. The option is paying $1,500 an hour for a less complicated alternative or dating some complete twit. That’s the price tag for a relationship with strong women.”

  “I don’t like those options, either,” Q agreed, then he had a sudden thought. “Fuck! Do you think they talked about...you know...the thing?”

  “You’re asking if they talked about your dick?” I clarified. “I’m going to take a wild guess that did come up in conversation.”

  “Fuck,” Q gripped the steering wheel tighter.

  I laughed out loud at that. “What else do women talk about?”

  “Fuck.” Q was stuck in a mental predicament that men found themselves in from the beginning of time. The human race muddled through and so would he.

  “You’re doing alright,”
I encouraged. “Flower and Charlotte both like you, so you got something going on. They’re pretty selective.”

  “I’d rather defuse an IED,” he grumbled. “At least if you fuck up it’s over quick. A bomb won’t make you feel like a piece of shit.”

  We both got a laugh out of that. As we approached the coast we decided to go north instead of risking showing up anywhere around West Palm. We opted for Jupiter, which is actually pretty isolated from the rest of the Treasure Coast, more of a bedroom kind of community. Sergei wouldn’t be watching that far north. We drove to the park at Jupiter Inlet and I put the battery in the phone and dialed.

  “I was wondering when I was going to hear from you,” Fred answered. The signal faded in and out so they were a ways offshore.

  “You whole?” I asked him.

  “Just barely and thanks to your A1A,” he said. “Otherwise we would have had Ziggy in the water when they rushed us.”

  “Someone took a swipe at you?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “Yeah, a couple mercenary types with silenced rifles and some people who could have been Pierson’s crew. They were pretty sophisticated, had some kind of jammer that mucked up our comm.”

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “We had Jory take one in the arm and Ziggy got hit--”

  “They shot Ziggy!?” Q looked over at that revelation. “Those bastards!”

  “Jory’s fine, by the way,” Fred went on. “But we had to run him into the aid center in Freeport. We managed to pass it off as an industrial accident but it was a pain in the ass and they asked a lot of questions. I really needed my medic.”

  “I get it, Fred,” I said by way of apology. “I’ll have a talk with her about the personnel issues.”

  “We managed to hold them off with small arms until the shop guys got the big stuff together and they gave up after that. We had a bunch of broken windows on the bridge, a few cuts from flying glass and a couple bruises and bumps. We might have gotten one of them.”

  The Star didn’t carry assault rifles all in one piece. They were built into various pieces of the ship’s equipment and had to be assembled. The bigger problem was the ammo, which was hidden in sealed containers in the bilge. Someone had to go down in the bilge to retrieve them. Once they had a couple A-4s together they would have been shooting back with actual 5.56mm ammo and not subsonic rounds, which was a poor choice for on the water. Sergei probably knew getting the Star was a long shot but he needed to make sure they weren’t available to help us. Still a couple AK-47s instead of those underpowered 9mmx39 AS Vals and it could have been a lot worse.

  “I feel like I let you down,” I said honestly.

  “Other than making off with my medic that A1A saved our ass. We were already mobile by the time they caught up with us.”

  “Can you make it to our favorite place tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s pretty nice out here. We can take one of the runabouts in. You thinking later in the day?”

  “Sounds good,” I said without mentioning any places or times. Fred also liked the Twist so he would know what I was talking about.

  “I’ll leave you a message if we run into any problems,” he said, signing off.

  “What happened?” Q asked, not being able to hear both sides of the conversation.

  “One wounded, Ziggy got clipped and a lot of busted windows.”

  “Could have been worse,” Q agreed.

  “Still a fuck up,” I maintained.

  “Did you override any of us saying we should hold back?”

  “No,” I said, “but I might have.“

  “But you didn’t and none of us were arguing to do something different. We’re not kids,” Q scolded. “There was a day you would have let us walk into an ambush as a learning lesson. What happened to that guy?”

  It was a profound question and he was absolutely right. “Oh my god, I’m turning into a hand-holder,” I said in surprise.

  “Not quite that bad,” Q corrected, “but we can’t function unless you’re on your shit. That Sergei asshole surprised us and it put you off your game. You can’t be afraid and you can’t hesitate to uncork the bottle if the situation calls for it.”

  I hate it when Q’s right.

  “We’ve handled people who make that douchebag look like a hotdog vendor,” he reminded me. “And you took those motherfuckers apart like they were a science project.”

  One of the reasons I hate it when Q’s right is because he just keeps talking until he beats the dead horse into a bloody pulp. That quality can be good and bad, depending on the situation. In those horror movie scenes where someone knocks down the bad guy and then just walks away and the bad guy gets up again. That would never happen to Q. He would still be beating on the bad guy’s bloody remains when the cops showed up two days later. He didn’t put one extra round into the bad guys when they were down, he’d empty the mag into their face.

  “So focus,” he went on, “and take this asshole down.”

  If I didn’t say something he was going to keep talking. “Fine,” I said after a brief pause.

  “That’s it?”

  “You want me to put it in comic book form? I’m going to pull our team together and unwind that fucker in spectacular fashion.”

  “Well, that’s more like it,” Q smiled.

  Still, I had gone squishy for a moment and he was right that could be deadly. If we were going to take out Sergei I’d have to operate with the kind of old style abandon that built our entire organization. I could do it but, like Teddy, it was getting to the point where I wasn’t sure I wanted to anymore. Teddy had an advantage that he could take a less active hand and his organization would get on just fine; if I did that people would die. It was food for thought but the knowing of it would have to wait for another day.

  The drive back was quiet and uneventful. I nodded off briefly, waking up as we passed through Okeechobee late in the day. When we pulled up to our houses there were notes on our door; a blue one on Q’s and a yellow one on mine.

  “That’s Charlotte,” he guessed. “Am I in trouble?”

  “Kinda. How many notes do you think Charlotte leaves for men around here?”

  Q shrugged.

  “She’s annoyed you left without telling her but knows she doesn’t have any right to expect anything from you,” I guessed. “And she’s been kicking herself all day for leaving the note in the first place, probably thought about coming to get it a half dozen times.”

  “What about yours?” he asked, changing the uncomfortable subject.

  “That’s from Flower,” I said. “She’s annoyed we didn’t take our phones but that’s probably just a dinner invite.”

  Q started to open the door. “If she’s pissy, she’s mad at herself for starting to like you,” I told him.

  “And that’s my fault?”

  “Now you’re catching on.”

  I looked at my note, which was Flower pointing out we weren’t answering our phones and should come to dinner at 7:30 at their place because there wasn’t any dinner at the community house today. She signed all her letters with a little heart next to a little daisy. Love, Flower.

  My park phone was blinking a message, somewhat predictably two from Flower and one from Amber saying she was on her way. A few minutes later Q got in the golf cart and headed off somewhere, probably to smooth things over with Miss Charlotte. It was a bad idea to chase her but Q was right about what he said in the truck earlier and this was one ambush I’d let him figure out on his own.

  I decided to have a beer and get in the hot tub for a while. Imagine my surprise to find Miss Charlotte already in my tub and her golf cart parked out of sight behind my house.

  “You want a beer?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she said easily. I went back in the house, grabbed four bottles and a bucket of ice and headed back out.

  “Cheers,” I said, handing her a cold one.

  “You’re not a bit surprised I’
m here,” she said with a puzzled look.

  “Everyone has to be somewhere,” I pointed out. “You’re not here on business; you would have sent one of the other girls for that.”

  “And you got a girlfriend,” she reminded me.

  “You’re annoyed at Q but know you don’t have a right to be,” I went on, “so you’re going to let him drive around the park for 45 minutes. Which proves nothing--”