Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  “I’m just saying…”

  “Know of any boat thieves working the waters?”

  Pederson snorted.

  “You talking the Bahamas, man. Been boat thieves working these waters for nearly four hundred years, back to when they’d build bonfires on the beach and lure in passing ships and run ’em aground in the shallows.”

  “How they do it nowadays?”

  “Well, boats get stolen nowadays, it’s generally two types. Got your go-fast boats—the Cigarettes and Donzis and all that. People steal those kinda boats—hot wire them and haul ass—they’re doing business the next day. Running dope, running people, running guns. Running whatever it is needs running and that people will pay lots of money for. Boats like that they’re disposable. Boats like that they don’t try to sell them. They just sink them or burn them up and go steal another one,” Pederson said. “But boats like the one you’re talking about, that’s a whole different thing. Different kind of people working that. They got a system, a network. They’re organized.”

  “You talking Mafia organized?”

  “Wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But there are some slick operations and they are plenty bad-ass. Because there’s some big money to be made by stealing big boats. The Bahamas is just one part of it, like a passing-through spot. They steal the boats somewhere else. Florida, mostly. Florida’s got a shitload of boats and absentee owners and no one always around keeping an eye on things. On up through Georgia and the Carolinas, same thing. Way I hear it, they got crews. Some of them get paid for being spotters. They check out the marinas, backyard docks, that kind of thing, and find a likely target. Then someone else comes along, someone who knows boats, and they do the stealing. They get over here with it and deliver it to someone else who can make it disappear,” Pederson said. “You know how they got chop shops for cars?”

  “Steal a car, disassemble it, sell the parts…”

  “Yeah, well, they got the same thing for boats. Only boats like the one you’re talking about, they don’t have to worry about taking them apart and getting rid of the pieces. All they gotta do is maybe repaint them, slap a new name on the transom, jimmy-up the paperwork, and send them on down the line. Puerto Rico, the DR, Venezuela. Hell, they caught this one crew, working out of Cartagena, they had thirty-forty yachts loaded on a cargo ship. Were gonna haul them to Hong Kong, sell them to some rich Chinese assholes. Plenty of demand for fancy boats, especially if they can be had for a good price. And people don’t pay nearly as much attention to where a boat comes from as they do a car,” Pederson said. “Plus, there’s this other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “People who get their boats stolen, it’s not like they do a whole lot of squawking. People who can afford to go out and buy new boats like that, they got ’em insured. Gets stolen, they just gonna collect their money and buy another one. They ain’t going to a lot of trouble to track it down. That’s the way it works.”

  “But what about the insurance companies? They send out investigators, right?”

  “Yeah, they do. They certainly do. And we see them from time to time. Mostly they’re just interested in doing their paperwork, filing a report, dragging it out so they can get themselves a little vacation time in the islands. Every now and then, though, you get an investigator who actually wants to do some investigating. Wants to marshal the troops, work hand in hand with the local authorities to find the culprits and bring them to justice.”

  “Something in the air. Smells like cynicism.”

  “Like I said, sometimes it’s hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm on behalf of stupid, rich white people with fancy-ass boats.”

  “So Bahamian cops, they turn a blind eye to boat thieves.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Hey look, I’m trying here.”

  “What I’m saying, what I meant to say, there’s thieves. And then there’s some that’s worse than thieves.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Thieves just steal things,” he said. “They don’t kill people.”

  We let it sit there for a moment.

  “You’ve had some of that down your way?”

  “No, not here exactly. But plenty of other places. And over to Nassau, there was a pretty ugly incident not long back. Involved a Canadian couple. They’d spent a few years cruising around the Ca rib be an on their yacht, you know, living the dream. But they were getting up there in age and they needed to sell it. So they advertised it and this fellow, he was American I think, he kept dropping by the marina to take a look at the boat. Got chummy with the couple. Took the boat out with them a time or two. Kept dickering with them over the price. Finally, they settled on a number—this boat, it was worth a few hundred thousand—and he gave them some money as a deposit. I don’t know how much exactly. Not much. Say ten grand or something. And he asked them to get the papers ready—registration, a bill of sale, and everything—and he’d come around the next day, they’d do the deal.

  “So he shows up and he’s got these two other fellows with him. He says, ‘These are my partners in the boat. They just flew in this morning. They want to see how it runs and then we’ll do all the paperwork.’ He even brought along a bottle of champagne to celebrate. So they took out the boat, got a few miles offshore, and this fellow says, ‘OK, give me my ten grand back.’ And the man, the boat’s owner, says, ‘Why, don’t you want the boat anymore?’ And this fellow says, ‘Yeah, I still want it. But I want it for free.’ And him and his two buddies proceed to beat hell out of the man and his wife.

  “Still, the old man, he refused to sign over the bill of sale. So this fellow and his buddies they get out the anchor and the anchor chain and they lash the couple to the anchor. And then they say, ‘We’re gonna throw you overboard unless you sign over that bill of sale.’ So the man, he signed it.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then they threw them overboard anyway. Took the yacht down to St. Martin and sold it there, two months later.”

  “Jesus…”

  “Joseph, Mary, and all the saints, too,” Pederson said. “Finally caught the bastards who did it. But there are plenty more out there just like them.”

  “Not easy, though, stealing a big boat like that.”

  “No, not like stealing a car. Not like stealing some go-fast boat either. Can’t go a hundred miles an hour and get the hell away with it and disappear. Takes some time to dispose of. Which means disposing of anyone who might miss it right away. And making sure they aren’t missed right away either,” Pederson said. “That couple that got thrown overboard, it was almost a month before their family back in Canada got worried about them.”

  “Because they were accustomed to not hearing from them for long stretches of time.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pederson said. “That’s the way it is in the islands with people on boats. That’s why they come down here—to be out of touch.”

  “Sell the house, quit work, tell friends and family they’ll hear from them when they hear from them.”

  “No clock, no commitments…”

  “No worries, mon.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh, that’s just exactly how it is, Chasteen. Shit,” Pederson said. “If there wasn’t a ton of worry in this world, then I wouldn’t have myself a job.”

  “What took you so long? I thought you’d be back a couple of hours ago.”

  “Took me a while to find an ATM that had any money.”

  “The ATMs are out of money?”

  “Yeah, I talked to this guy at a convenience store and he said it happens all the time. Especially in the evenings. And especially when there are lots of Americans on the island like now. He said the ATMs get refilled in the morning and if you want to get money then you better do it before noon.”

  “But the bank card worked?”

  “Yeah, it worked just fine. She gave us the right pin number.”

  “How much did you get?”

  “A hundred.”

  “That’s all?�
��

  “Yeah, I just wanted to see if it worked. It gave me the balance. Take a look at this.”

  “Holy shit. Even more than we thought.”

  “Lots more.”

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Yeah, I figure tomorrow, first thing in the morning, you can go into town and get a couple thousand.”

  “But what if the ATMs are still out of money?”

  “You aren’t going to use the ATM. They max out at five hundred. So you’re going to walk inside the bank, hand the teller the card, and tell her you want to make a withdrawal.”

  “But what if the teller asks for ID?”

  “Well, she’s goddam sure gonna ask for ID, you can count on that. So you show it to her. You’ve got the passport. You’ve got the driver’s license. You’ve got all the ID they could possibly want.”

  “You think it will work?”

  “Yeah, it will work. It’s not like you’re dealing with Homeland Security. It’s a fucking Bahamian bank teller. She’s going to look at the photo and see a white girl with lots of blond hair. And then she’s going to look at you.”

  “I’ll wear my hair down, like in the photo.”

  “Yeah, and smile like she’s smiling. The smile helps.”

  “Maybe I should wear sunglasses or something.”

  “No sunglasses. That could make them suspicious. Just go in there with your hair down and smiling and, trust me, everything’s going to work just fine.”

  “And there’s no way they can trace this?”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know, the bank, the cops, whoever. They see we’re taking money here and somewhere else down the line and they can find us.”

  “Yeah, they can trace it. But who’s looking? No one. Not yet anyway. I figure we’ve got a week at least.”

  “What then?”

  “Then everything’s going to fall in place. Just like we planned it.”

  12

  By ten o’clock the next morning we were taking off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in Charlie Callahan’s brand-new seaplane.

  “Not just any seaplane either, Zack-o. A Maule-MT-7-420. Only a dozen like it in the world,” Charlie said. “Rolls-Royce engine. Seriously overpowered. Off the water in four seconds if it’s just my skinny ass on board. I can land it in less than a foot of water. Or put it down on the runway. Just about anywhere you want to go, this puppy can take us.”

  I said, “How long to Walker’s Cay?”

  “No more than an hour. Just hold on to your dipstick and leave the flying to us.”

  The plane was a four-seater. I sat up front with Charlie. Boggy sat in the back.

  Charlie wore his pilot’s “uniform”—flip-flops, a pair of faded Madras shorts, and a T-shirt that said, “Hell yes, I’m the pilot. Got a problem with that?” For extra flourish, his T-shirt boasted Army surplus gold-braid epaulets. His hair had gone to gray but he still had plenty of it—a gnarly mane of dreadlocks that descended halfway down his back.

  When I first started playing for the Dolphins, Charlie was the team pilot. But an incident involving two Dolphins cheerleaders, a boa constrictor, and Dolphins owner Joe Robbie’s private cabin on the plane—I was never quite clear about the details—got him booted from that gig.

  After that, the legend of Charlie Callahan only grew. According to some stories he was running guns to Nicaragua. Others had it that he was doing everything from flying dope out of Colombia to delivering mercenaries to sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t know if any of it was true, but what ever he was up to it probably wasn’t missionary work.

  When he finally resurfaced, he had enough money to buy a small fleet of planes and start Sorry Charlie’s Island Charters. Reputation and appearance worked in Charlie’s behalf, an effective if inadvertent marketing plan. His well-heeled clients liked the idea that they were flying with a Genuine Colorful Character. It gave them stories to tell. And Charlie had all the work he wanted.

  All I knew was that Charlie was a steady hand, a good man in a tight spot, and if someone had to fly me around the Bahamas looking for Jen Ryser or Abel Delgado or whoever I could find first, then I wanted it to be him.

  Fifteen minutes out of Fort Lauderdale and Florida’s armored coastline was just a glimmer on the horizon. Below us, the Big Blue River—aka the Gulf Stream—churned northward on its way to make the British Isles a slightly more habitable place.

  Every now and then, I’d spot a patch of white on the water and make out the lines of a sailboat. Sometimes I’d spot a patch of white and think it was a sailboat, only it would turn out to be a trawler or a fishing boat or the froth from a big breaker.

  It is devilishly hard to spot boats on the water when you’re flying at safe altitude. Harder still to determine exactly what kind of boats they might be. And damn near impossible to pick out a name like Chasin’ Molly on the transom.

  With its big jib flying, a Beneteau 54 would offer a highly visible profile. But on any given day there are hundreds of pleasure boats cruising the Gulf Stream. By the time you reach the protected waters of the Bahamas, the hundreds become thousands. Combine them with thousands more that are moored at marinas, tied up at docks, or tucked away in coves and, well, no way we could just bop around on Charlie’s seaplane and count on finding the boat we were looking for.

  So I had devised a plan. Not much of a plan but the best plan I could come up with considering what little we had to go on.

  There are more than thirty official ports of entry in the Bahamas. Upon reaching Bahamian waters, foreign vessels must make it their first order of business to clear customs and immigration at one of these ports.

  Since the bureaucrats in Nassau were showing me no love, I had opted for a grassroots approach. Pick the most likely port where Jen Ryser might have entered the Bahamas, win over the local authorities with my great charm, and hope they would bend regulations, give me the information I was looking for, and let me know if I was on the right track.

  In the Seventh Edition of Chasteen’s Complete and Unabridged Dictionary, the synonym for “my great charm” is “bribe money.” And I had a pocketful of that.

  Jen Ryser and crew had set out from Charleston. I was betting they had chosen the quickest route—a straight shot to the Abacos, the chain of islands at the upper tip of the Bahamas.

  The Abacos offer several ports of entry. Most cruisers head straight for Marsh Harbour, the sailing hub of the Bahamas, with plenty of marinas and places for provisioning.

  But Walker’s Cay is the northernmost port in the Abacos, and although its luster has diminished in recent years, some boats choose it for clearing customs. Besides, I am nothing if not methodical. I liked the idea of starting at the top of the Bahamas and working our way down. So Walker’s Cay would be our first stop.

  This is not to say my brilliant plan didn’t have plenty of holes in it.

  According to Helen Miller’s snooping around, Jen Ryser had bought Chasin’ Molly only a few months earlier. Chances were this was her first significant outing in the boat. No matter how seasoned a sailor she might be, maybe she wasn’t comfortable with the notion of immediately setting out on a four-hundred-mile open-water crossing. Maybe she had taken a more prudent route, stuck close to shore, run all the way down to Miami, made the fifty-mile crossing to Bimini and cleared customs there. That would put her closer to Exuma and Mickey Ryser’s place on Lady Cut Cay.

  The previous few weeks had brought some rough weather. Late-season blows out of the northeast. Maybe Jen and her crew had stuck to the safe confines of the Intracoastal Waterway, or The Ditch as it’s popularly known. A boring haul, but it comes with one redeeming factor—numerous rowdy watering holes along the way, from Savannah down to Lauderdale. These were kids not long out of college. Maybe the idea of leisurely barhopping their way south appealed to them more than dealing with heavy seas.

  Or maybe, after so many years of not knowing her father, Jen Ryser had decided against paying him a visit. Maybe
she still bore him a grudge. Maybe she had just said to hell with it. Maybe she had bypassed the Bahamas altogether and was now cruising the Virgin Islands, heading for more distant ports.

  So many maybes.

  So little time to find Jen Ryser before her father’s ship set sail.

  They both came in and fed her breakfast. After that, they left and closed the hatch behind them, and she could hear them talking from up above, on the deck.

  “Where should I go to?”

  “I saw a Scotia Bank near the dock. Try it.”

  Moments later she heard him call out: “Straight there and back, you got that?”

  Jen waited a few minutes. No more talking. It was just him and her on the boat now. How to make that work to her advantage?

  She yelled up to him: “Hey, down here. I need some help.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to use the head.”

  He took his sweet time getting there. Finally, the hatch slid open.

  He said, “You just went a little while ago.”

  “Yeah, but I started my period.”

  A groan of disgust.

  “So what do you want me to do about it?”

  “My backpack,” she said. “There’s a little purse in a side pocket. Cloth with a paisley print. It’s got some tampons. Just open it and get me one.”

  Another groan.

  Guys. They could be so squeamish about this kind of thing. Exactly what Jen was counting on.

  “Here,” he said, putting the backpack on her lap. “You get it.”

  “You need to untie my hands.”

  He paused, thinking about it.

  “OK, but no funny stuff. You understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “How about the blindfold, too?”

  “No, that’s staying on.”

  After her hands were free, Jen rummaged around in the backpack and felt the cloth purse. She felt the other thing she was looking for, too. But she knew he was standing right there, watching her.

  “Can you get me some water?”

  She heard him step away, and she quickly stuck her Leatherman into the little cloth purse. The only time she had ever really used it was for the corkscrew. But it was like one of those Transformer robots. It could turn into almost any kind of tool—chisel, file, needle-nose pliers. Eighty-seven different uses. Or some such thing.