Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  He came back with the water. She drank from the cup.

  He said, “You get what you need?”

  Jen held up the paisley purse so he could see it.

  “Right here,” she said.

  He pulled her up from the bed, loosened the rope around her feet just enough so she could walk. He guided her to the head and backed her inside.

  “Close the door,” she said.

  And this time he did as she asked.

  Her hands immediately went for the blindfold. She didn’t pull it all the way off. Just enough to peek over the top.

  She saw: A narrow stall, white fiberglass walls. Not much in there except for the toilet. One shelf with cans of Comet and Lysol and some rolls of toilet paper. Not even a sink.

  In the ceiling above the toilet—a Plexiglas vent, about eighteen inches square, the kind that can pop up to let in air or seal tight in a storm. It was up.

  She stood atop the toilet and did her best to peek out the vent. The opening was only about five inches high. It gave her a glimpse of the boat: Bigger than she thought, thirty-four feet at least, its deck pale blue. A sleek sportfisherman with a pair of fighting chairs near the transom and a ladder that led to the flying bridge.

  She turned atop the toilet, looking beyond the boat in all directions and saw: Open water. More open water. A scattering of boats at their mooring buoys, the closest maybe two hundred yards away. And a mangrove shoreline, at least a half mile in the distance, with a long dock, a few houses tucked here and there, a couple of spindly radio towers, and the flickering image of cars passing on a road behind the mangroves.

  Her spirits lifted. All this time she had thought they were at some remote location, an uninhabited cay, a hidden cove. Yet, here were cars and boats and houses—other people, the chance for escape.

  She pushed against the vent. It wouldn’t open any farther. Its top was fastened to the base on aluminum hinges. The hinges were attached to the base by rivets. Easy enough to work loose.

  A knock on the door.

  “You done in there?”

  She stepped down from the toilet.

  “Just a second,” she said.

  She pulled the Leatherman from the purse. It had several types of blades—a hacksaw, a file, a basic knife. None of them more than a couple inches long. Capable of doing some damage, but only if her first strike was directly on target—the middle of his forehead, an eye. If she missed or if the blade was deflected or any number of other misfires, then that was it. He’d be all over her. She didn’t have a chance of fighting him off.

  Better to use the Leatherman to undo the hinges on the vent. The vent was narrow but she felt sure she could squeeze through. But where to hide the Leatherman? She looked around. The only place was behind the toilet. She tucked it away.

  She sat down on the toilet. She put the blindfold back in place.

  Another knock on the door.

  “All done,” she said.

  13

  Charlie brought the plane in low and made a quick loop around Walker’s Cay before putting down.

  Over the centuries, all kinds of characters have dropped anchor at Walker’s Cay. Ponce de Leon visited the island during his search for the Fountain of Youth. Confederate blockade runners sought haven in the Civil War. And a long pro cession of treasure salvors have scoured the nearby shoals for sunken ships and hoards of gold.

  A fellow by the name of Bob Abplanalp bought the entire seventy-acre island back in the 1960s after he made the first of many, many millions from his most famous invention—the aerosol nozzle, the little thing that goes “sssssssst” on top of a spray can. Abplanalp was drawn here mainly for the fishing. More than a dozen world record catches have come from waters within just a few minutes of Walker’s Cay.

  Abplanalp spruced up the place, built the Walker’s Cay Hotel & Marina, and turned it into a favorite haunt not only for sportfishermen but those who wanted to kick back and enjoy themselves well removed from the public eye. One of Abplanalp’s pals, Richard Nixon, made several trips to Walker’s during his presidency.

  After Bob Abplanalp died, his family continued to run their little fiefdom as it had always been run, a gracious, low-key hideout for those who could afford it. Then came 2004 and the double whammy of hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. Walker’s Cay never recovered. The island was up for sale. Reported asking price—$20 million.

  In pre-Barbara days, I tallied my share of good times at Walker’s Cay. I’d caught bonefish in the flats, lost marlin in the deep water, and bunked down with more than one temporary sweetheart in a cottage overlooking the green-and-turquoise waters.

  Broke my heart to see the place now.

  Docks where sleek boats once lined up gunwale to gunwale during big money fishing tournaments had long since surrendered to the sea. Weeds and creeping vines had taken over paths that once wound through well-manicured grounds. A big portion of the roof on the resort’s main house had collapsed. And none of the cottages were without broken windows or crumbling porches.

  But the runway was clear, the asphalt in fairly good repair. And the blue, yellow, and black Bahamian flag fluttered above the glorified shack that passed for the customs house.

  Charlie apologized for the slightly bumpy landing.

  “Still getting used to the way this baby handles,” he said.

  Our greeting party consisted of a half-dozen or so land crabs. The black variety, not the white. They observed us defiantly from the edge of the runway, their crimson claws raised, ready to repel any attack.

  Land crabs are a delicacy in the Bahamas. Andros Island, to the south, has vast crab colonies in its piney wood interior, and Androsian bush cowboys round them up by the thousands each May for the annual Crab Fest. I attended it one year with Barbara, who was a judge in the culinary competition. Crab ’n’ rice. Stuffed crab backs. Crab dumplings. Spicy crab soup with whole scotch bonnets floating in the bowl.

  The crabs must have noticed the gustatory gleam in my eyes. They skittered into the high grass as we walked from the plane.

  A short, stocky fiftyish man appeared in the doorway of the customs office. He had the fair features and sun-blotched skin common among many white Bahamians. They trace their lineage to British Loyalists who fled the colonies during the American Revolution.

  The man was smoothing back his reddish hair and tucking the tail of his white shirt into his black pants, doing his best to look official. He put on a pair of glasses and peered out at us.

  “Catch you napping, Mr. Bethel?” Charlie said.

  “You supposed to radio, say you coming in.”

  “Tried that. Didn’t get an answer.”

  “Shoulda kept trying,” Mr. Bethel said.

  He turned away from the door. By the time we stepped inside he was sitting behind a gray metal desk. A boxy old computer occupied one end of the desk. Next to it a worn, black ledger book. And next to it, an assortment of rubber stamps and ink pads.

  On the wall behind him was a framed photograph of the prime minister of the Bahamas, a nautical chart of the Abacos, and a framed print of Queen Elizabeth that might have been hanging there since shortly after her coronation. Poor gal looked old even back then.

  “How’s your family, Mr. Bethel?” Charlie asked. “They doing alright?”

  “They doing.”

  A real bundle of good cheer and hospitality, Mr. Bethel.

  He stuck out a hand. Charlie gave him our passports and papers. For the next several minutes no one said anything as Mr. Bethel dutifully eyed everything there was to eye and then eyed it again. Occasionally, he would reach for a rubber stamp, ink it up, and give one of the documents an authoritative pounding.

  On the immigration papers, the line where it asks the purpose of your visit, Boggy and I had each checked the box for business rather than vacation. Mr. Bethel looked at me over the top of his glasses.

  “You Mr. Chasteen?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at Boggy’s passport, then
at Boggy.

  “And you’re Mr. Boggatonna…”

  He gave up.

  “Baugtanaxata,” Boggy said.

  Mr. Bethel studied both of us some more. He looked at our papers again.

  “What is the nature of your business in the Bahamas?”

  I said, “We’re looking for someone.”

  Mr. Bethel absorbed the information. It seemed to sour his stomach.

  “That’s your business? Looking for someone?”

  “On this trip it is,” I said.

  “And this someone you’re looking for, you think they’re here on Walker’s?”

  “No, but I’m thinking maybe they passed through here. Thought you might help me.”

  “Help you how?”

  “Find out if the person we are looking for cleared customs here.” I nodded at the computer. “Might be in your records somewhere.”

  “What’s this person’s name?”

  “Jennifer Ryser. R-y-s-e-r. She’d be in her early twenties. Would have arrived within the last month or so on a boat called the Chasin’ Molly. Nice boat, a fifty-four-footer.”

  If it registered with Mr. Bethel, he didn’t show it.

  “The immigration registry is a restricted government document and not open to public inspection,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I know and respect that,” I said. “I was just hoping you might see fit to make an exception in this case.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “This girl we’re looking for, her father is dying. It’s urgent that we find her and take her to him.”

  “You need to go through Nassau,” he said.

  “Tried that,” I said.

  Mr. Bethel studied my face for a long moment. Then he went back to examining our papers. He stamped our passports and handed them to us.

  He looked at his watch.

  He said, “About this time each day I step outside, walk down to where the docks used to be, and have a smoke.”

  He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights.

  He said, “Sometimes I have a couple of smokes. Depends. But I’m never gone more than half an hour.”

  He stood up from the desk.

  I reached for my wallet. I plucked out a hundred-dollar bill and slipped it under one of the ink pads.

  Mr. Bethel looked at it. Just the slightest hint of regret in his eyes.

  “You can put that back in your wallet,” he said.

  I gave him a look: You sure?

  He said, “I didn’t know that’s why he was looking for that young woman.”

  “He?”

  “Man came through here day before yesterday,” Mr. Bethel said. He glanced at the hundred again. “Wasn’t quite so generous.”

  “This man, he was looking for the same person?”

  Mr. Bethel nodded.

  “Only, he didn’t know the name of the boat she was on.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “Don’t recall.”

  “His name somewhere in your records?”

  Mr. Bethel shook his head.

  “No, he cleared customs at the airport in Marsh Harbour. Came up here by boat.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big, tough-looking. Said he was some kind of cop.”

  “He say he was a cop? Or did he say he was a detective?”

  “What’s the difference? He looked like what ever he said he was.”

  Mr. Bethel shook loose a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and headed for the door. He turned around just before he reached it.

  “That computer, the government sent it up here almost seven years ago now. I haven’t ever turned it on, not once,” he said. “Like doing things the old way.”

  He glanced at the black ledger book. Then he stepped out the door.

  14

  It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Only a few entries had been made in the ledger book since Jen Ryser’s arrival.

  I went down the list of names of those aboard the Chasin’ Molly. Charlie looked over my shoulder. Boggy wasn’t interested. He left the office to wander around outside.

  “According to this they arrived eight days ago.”

  “Six of them on board,” Charlie said.

  Jen’s name was at the top, listed as captain/owner. It showed her date of birth—she was twenty-two—and listed her passport number.

  I found a pencil and paper in one of the desk drawers and wrote down names and pertinent information for the five other people on board: Justin Hatchitt, 28; Torrey Kealing, 25; Karen Breakell, 23; Will Moody, 22; and Pete Crumrine, 22.

  Below the list of names, Mr. Bethel had duly noted that Jen Ryser paid $300 in cash for a cruising permit good for three months, including departure tax.

  And below that was the notation: “Benelli: M4-L38777634 and M4-L38777704 (4 boxes/24 per).”

  I said, “Who’s Benelli?”

  “Not a who, it’s a what,” Charlie said. “Shotgun. Italian made. Kind of a chi-chi designer gun. Run about two thousand dollars each and up.”

  I looked at Charlie.

  “How do you know these things?”

  He shrugged.

  “Some things need knowing,” he said.

  “So they have one of these Benellis on board?”

  “Two of them, actually.”

  “And that’s legal?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “It’s OK to bring guns into the Bahamas on a boat, but you have to declare them, give the serial number, and show exactly how much ammunition you have on board. You also have to keep any weapons under lock and key at all times. If authorities board the vessel somewhere down the line, they can ask you to produce the ammunition. And if it’s not all there, then you better have a good explanation.”

  I looked at him.

  “You got a gun on the plane?”

  “Zack-o, please. If I had a gun, I would have declared it, wouldn’t I?”

  I waited.

  “Like I told you, some things need knowing,” he said. “And some don’t.”

  I don’t like guns. I don’t carry any guns on my boats. But I could understand why some people did, especially young women setting out on long cruises.

  I scanned other pages in the ledger, but there was nothing that jumped out or looked as if it would be helpful in leading me to Jen Ryser.

  I put the ledger back where it had been sitting on Mr. Bethel’s desk. We stepped outside.

  Charlie looked down the runway, toward a sprinkling of small islands across a channel to the east.

  “I’m thinking we ought to hop over to Miner Cay,” Charlie said.

  “See if Cutie knows anything?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Cutie knows all,” he said.

  I looked around but Mr. Bethel was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t think it would hurt his feelings if we didn’t give him a formal good-bye.

  Heading for the plane, we spotted Boggy in a ditch that ran the length of the runway. It looked as if the ditch had been backhoed fairly recently, probably to help drain the runway.

  The walls of the ditch exposed layers of crumbly shell and soft limestone. The bottom of the ditch was mud soup. Boggy knelt in the mud, his knife in one hand. It’s more dagger than knife really, a short, well-honed piece of steel with a bone handle. Boggy used the knife like a pick, chopping away at the ditch walls. Then he would pluck out pieces of this and that, examine them, toss some pieces away, and put others in one of the leather pouches he always carried with him.

  “Yo, Louis B. Leakey,” I said. “Time to go.”

  Boggy finished extracting something from the ditch wall—looked like a dark rock of some kind—and stuck it in the pouch.

  He climbed out of the ditch. His shoes and pants were covered in mud. There were splotches of mud on his shirt and splotches of mud on his face and in his hair. The overall effect was Neanderthalic.

  Charlie said, “Afraid I’m gonna have to ask you t
o clean that crap off before you climb into that new plane of mine.”

  Boggy looked himself over, as if he was only in that moment realizing exactly what a mess he was.

  He kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants, took off his shirt. All he had on was a cowskin knife holster that hung between his shoulder blades from a piece of rawhide worn around his neck. He put his knife in the holster and walked bare-assed through a break in the mangroves, squatting by the water to scrub his clothes.

  We stood there watching him.

  Charlie said, “Think you’ll ever figure him out?”

  “Stopped trying years ago,” I said.

  15

  “Chasin’ Molly? Oh yah, mon. I remember her for sure.”

  We were sitting in Cutie’s Place, talking to Cutie.

  While the double hurricanes had spelled the end for Walker’s Cay, at least for the time being, they had created a windfall, so to speak, for Quentin Taylor “Cutie” Pattison.

  Legions of hard-core anglers, scuba divers, and sailors still made regular treks to the tiny islands of the northern Abacos. They needed a place to eat, drink, bunk down, or tie up their boats. With the marina and resort closed on Walker’s, that left Cutie’s as the only option.

  We had flown low over the channel separating Walker’s from Miner Cay and set down in the water just beyond Cutie’s brand-new docks. Seven minutes from takeoff to landing.

  Most of the slips at Cutie’s were filled—sportfishing boats primarily, with a few trawlers and sailboats mixed in. A cluster of new rental cottages sat just back from the dock. And the bar/restaurant had a new addition.

  It had been a few years since I’d seen Cutie, and he’d become a walking billboard for his prosperity. He carried an extra fifty pounds on an already considerable frame, along with plenty of bling—a gold pendant, flashy wristwatch, and a couple of sparkly rings, one with a big “Q” in diamonds.