Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  Charlie steadied Donnie’s arm and looked at the knife sticking out of it.

  “In there pretty good,” he said.

  Then he grabbed the knife and pulled it out in one swift movement. Donnie screamed as the wound spewed blood.

  “I’m bleeding to death! I’m dying.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “You might be at that.”

  Donnie grabbed the wound with his free hand, tried to stop the flow. Blood seeped between his fingers.

  Boggy moved from behind the desk, pulling big brother with him. Charlie handed him the knife and Boggy cut away the duct tape that bound me to the chair. I stood.

  Sonny still had his shotgun leveled at us. He was frantic now, swinging the gun from side to side, moving from one foot to the other, not sure what to do.

  “Now the way I figure it,” Charlie said, “that twelve gauge of yours—it’s a shitty old Remington—it can hold seven shells. I can’t tell from here if you’ve got it plugged or not. But let’s say you’ve got it plugged. That means only three shells. And that means you’re empty.”

  Sonny looked down at his gun, then at big brother.

  “Ronnie,” he said. “You alright? I didn’t mean to shoot you.”

  “That’s OK, Sonny. I know, I know…”

  Sonny edged along the wall. Charlie turned to match his move, holding Donnie up in front of him. The wound didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as before, but Donnie was going limp. Shock was setting in.

  Charlie looked at me. He nodded to the doorway. I began backing toward it. Sonny swung on me, then back on Charlie.

  “But let’s say that gun of yours isn’t plugged,” Charlie said. “I’m betting you don’t leave it sitting around your house fully loaded. I’m betting that when you and your brothers ran out here to find my friend Zack, you didn’t go to all the trouble of sticking seven shells in it. You were in a hurry. You stuck three shells in it. Maybe four. Probably not five…”

  Sonny slapped a pants pocket.

  “I got plenty shells right here,” he said.

  “Good for you, boy. Good for you,” Charlie said. “But this nine-millimeter I’m holding, it’s an automatic. And it’s got a full clip. By the time you reload, I’ll have a bullet in both of your brothers and plenty left over for you,” Charlie said. “So let’s not go down that road, OK?”

  Ronnie strained against Boggy’s grip. He said, “Just keep your head, Sonny. We’ll get out of this.”

  Boggy put his knife to Ronnie’s neck and walked him toward the door.

  “You good to hold this one, Zachary?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  Boggy handed me the knife. I got an arm around Ronnie’s neck and poked the knife into his back just to let him know it was there. He jumped. I might have poked a little too hard. So sue me.

  Boggy pulled a bandanna from his pocket and walked back to where Charlie held Donnie. He pried Donnie’s hand from the wound and tied off the bandanna around it. He helped Donnie stretch out on the floor and knelt beside him, applying pressure to the wound with both hands.

  No one said anything. After a minute or two, Boggy spoke softly to Donnie, “The bleeding, it has almost stopped. You keep holding it. It is not as bad as it looks, but you need to see a doctor.”

  Charlie aimed the pistol at Sonny now, both hands on it.

  “We’re going to step out of here, real peaceful,” Charlie said. “And we’re going to take your brother with us. So don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Where you going with him?” Sonny said.

  “Don’t you worry,” Charlie said. “You just stay right there.”

  Charlie and Boggy backed away, and when we were all outside, I tightened my armlock on Ronnie and pointed him toward the hangar.

  “Let’s take a look inside that thing and see what we can find.”

  “I don’t have the keys on me,” Ronnie said. “I keep ’em in my desk.”

  I heard the sound of Sonny racking more shells into the shotgun.

  “Let’s leave it until the morning, Zack,” Charlie said. “We can come back with the police.”

  Sonny appeared in the doorway, gun leveled.

  “I got a full load now, you son of a bitch.”

  I gave Sonny another poke with the knife.

  “Talk to your brother,” I said.

  “Be cool, Sonny,” Ronnie told him. “Be cool and everything’s gonna work out.”

  We started moving toward the gate and the car. From inside the block house, Donnie hollered: “Sonny, get back here. You gotta take me to the doctor.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Donnie,” Sonny said.

  He moved out of the doorway and trailed us at a distance. He stopped at the gate as we loaded into the car.

  “Where you taking Ronnie?” Sonny yelled. “You hurt him, I’ll come after you.”

  He kept the shotgun pointed at the Hyundai as we pulled away.

  27

  All the way down that bumpy limestone road, I asked Ronnie Dailey questions. Was Chasin’ Molly in the hangar? Had he seen Jen Ryser? All I got was nothing.

  I gave him another poke.

  “How about I start cutting off parts of you with this knife?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Start cutting.”

  We got to where the limestone road met the hard top. I opened the back door and pushed him out.

  “Stay sweet. Don’t ever change. See ya real soon,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” said Ronnie Dailey.

  I gave Boggy his knife and he returned it to its sling. When we got a little farther down the road, I asked Charlie to hand me the pistol he’d taken from the Daileys. I waited until we were crossing a small bridge over a narrow cut in the mangroves. I rolled down the window.

  “Now, Zack,” Charlie said. “That’s a nice gun.”

  “Contradiction of terms,” I said.

  And I flung it into the water.

  I leaned up from my seat, gave Boggy and Charlie each a slap on the back.

  “The two of you did some pretty good work back there,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  Both of them nodded.

  “Only I was wondering…”

  Charlie said, “Wondering what, Zack?”

  “Wondering if you saw them come up and grab me by the hangar?”

  They both nodded.

  Boggy said, “I was watching from behind one of the boats.”

  “I was down by the dock,” Charlie said. “Saw it all.”

  “And you saw them drag me into that room and sit me down in the chair and tie me up?”

  They both nodded.

  “We came up in the shadows,” Charlie said. “And we were watching from just outside the door.”

  “And you saw that one brother whack me in the head with a pistol?”

  Charlie winced.

  “Bet that hurt, huh?”

  “And then you saw him whack me again?”

  They both nodded.

  “And yet you stood out there, watching, until I was whacked silly and he was getting ready to shoot me before you chose to do anything about it? That’s what I was wondering about.”

  “Timing,” Boggy said.

  “Timing? What the hell do you mean, timing?”

  “We were waiting for you to puke, Zachary.”

  Charlie laughed.

  “Waiting for me to puke? How could you possibly have known I was going to puke? I didn’t even know I was going to puke until it happened.”

  “I knew you would do something. You always do,” Boggy said. “And when you puked it was good timing and everything went according to plan.”

  “Plan, hell. You didn’t have a plan. You were standing out there, enjoying the show, making things up as you went along.”

  “Now, Zack,” Charlie said. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think? Considering we just saved the day.”

  “I’m just saying…”

  Charlie said, “I think you oughta practice.”<
br />
  “Practice what?”

  “Puking on demand like that. Maybe it can get your ass out of a jam when we aren’t around.”

  I leaned back in the seat.

  “Still got a bad taste in my mouth.”

  “We can fix that,” Charlie said.

  There was a store up ahead. Charlie parked the car and went inside and came out carrying a twelve-pack of beer and some beef jerky and some red-hot peanuts.

  When we got back to the Mariner’s Inn we sat on the patio behind my room and drank and ate and didn’t talk much. There was no postmortem of the altercation at the Dailey brothers’ boatyard. No talk of how we took it to them and how we got away.

  The beer went fast and Charlie stepped to his room and brought back a bottle of Havana Club, the seven-year-old, and we turned our attention to that. Boggy threw down a glass, called it a night, and excused himself.

  Somewhere in the very early morning, after the adrenaline settled and the nerves stopped being all jingly and jangly, Charlie reminded me that we hadn’t stopped at Lita’s Take-A-Way to pay Williamson the rest of his money.

  “Bet he’s still sitting right there, waiting,” Charlie said.

  “Bet he is, too.”

  “I could drive us out there.”

  “Yeah, you could.”

  “Only, I’ve been over-served.”

  “Yeah, you have.”

  “You could drive.”

  “Yeah, I could.”

  “Only, you’ve been over-served, too.”

  We kept talking around it and wound up agreeing it was a far wiser thing to settle up with Williamson by the light of day.

  The rumble of the boat’s engine roused her from her sleep. The engine idled for a few minutes, then revved and backed off and revved again. And then the boat was moving.

  She was feeling stronger now. They had fed her well enough and given her plenty of water and fruit juice. The deep weakness that had plagued her was gone. In the beginning, it had helped her sleep and make it through days of doing nothing. But now the tedium was setting in. She was restless, anxious.

  Nudging her face against the mattress, she succeeded in working the blindfold down just enough so she could peek out over the top, but not so much that she couldn’t get it back up in a hurry when they came to check on her.

  She also managed to loosen the bindings on her hands and legs. Not to the point that she could free herself—the knots were too tight for that—but enough that she was no longer so constricted. With enough effort she could roll over in the bed.

  She moved to her side and looked around the cabin. It was early morning and soft light came in through the two portholes. The door leading to the head and the main cabin was closed.

  The boat ran for at least half an hour, full throttle. The water started out calm and then it got rough and bumpy and then it got calm again.

  The boat slowed and idled along and then stopped as the engine was thrown into neutral and then reverse and then neutral. Jen heard the anchor line being fed out. The engine—reverse, neutral, reverse. And then the anchor caught hold and the engine went silent.

  Jen strained to hear the two of them talking up above, but she couldn’t make out anything. And then there was no sound at all—no voices, no movement on the deck. Just the gentle slap of water against the hull.

  She called out, “Hey. Down here!”

  No one answered, no one came.

  She called out again. She waited. And still no one came.

  This hadn’t happened before. Always when she called, someone had eventually come down below to find out what she wanted.

  Had they abandoned her? What if they had left for good and made their escape and now she was stuck here, alone in a floating coffin? How long could she survive without food and water? If she screamed would anyone hear?

  She screamed. She waited. She screamed again. She waited some more.

  Nothing.

  The tiny cabin had grown hot and stuffy. She fought off the panic. She took long, deep breaths and told herself: OK, OK. Do something. Do anything. This is it. You have to get out of here. Now or never.

  She wiggled herself to the edge of the bed. Another heave and she tumbled onto the floor. She landed on her stomach. She rolled onto her back, feet pointed at the door, a body length away.

  Her arms were underneath her and that hurt but it helped her raise herself up just a little. She scooted her butt toward her feet and drew up her knees the best she could. Then she straightened out her legs and did it again. Like an inch-worm, moving toward the door.

  And finally her bare feet touched it. She moved a little closer and planted her feet flat against the door. It slid easier than she expected and when it was open enough to get her legs through she slid it open all the way and inch-wormed through the doorway and into the main cabin.

  Ten minutes it took her. She was sweating and exhausted and her shoulder hurt more than ever. What little energy she had left drained out of her when she looked around the main cabin and saw the steps, six of them, leading to the main hatch. The main hatch was closed. But that didn’t really matter because how was she ever going to get up the steps?

  She screamed. She screamed again.

  She lay there, panting, trying to calm herself. Minutes went by.

  And then she felt something—a bump against the boat. Footsteps on the deck. Someone had heard her.

  “Down here! I’m down here!”

  The hatch popped open. A figure outlined against the bright sky.

  Him.

  He leaped down beside her, bypassing the steps. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I was just trying…”

  “Trying to get out of here? Trying to escape?”

  “No, no. I wasn’t. Really.”

  She began to cry. She hated herself for it. She wanted to fight him, to kick and hit. But she was broken inside. She had been terrified to see him. But, at the same time, relieved that he—that someone, anyone—was here.

  “Water,” she said.

  He brought it to her and helped her drink it. When she was done, he said, “Now, I want you to do exactly like I tell you. You got that?”

  “Yes, yes. I understand.”

  “And you better not try anything funny. Or, I swear to God, that’ll be it.”

  “I promise. I’ll do what ever you say.”

  “Good.” He reached into a pocket, pulled out a cell phone. “Because we’re going to give your father a call.”

  28

  The hangover wasn’t as bad as I deserved. By quarter ’til eight I was out of bed and fairly presentable, with the help of three Alleve and five minutes of sitting on the shower floor with hot water massaging the back of my head.

  I rounded up Boggy and Charlie, and we went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. We got coffee and eggs and sausage and toast, and by the time nine o’clock rolled around, Will Moody still hadn’t joined us.

  We drove the mile or so to Dunning’s Cottages and asked a woman in the office if she could ring Will Moody’s room and tell him we were there. She looked at the guest book.

  “No Will Moody here,” she said.

  “Has he already checked out?”

  “Never was here.”

  “Tall guy, beginnings of a beard, dark hair, in his twenties.”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Not here.”

  We got back in the car.

  Charlie said, “So what do you think?”

  “I’m still chewing on it,” I said. “But while I’m chewing, how about we find the police station.”

  The officer working the front desk at the Marsh Harbour police station listened as I told him we had information about a possible boat theft. He didn’t speak. He didn’t nod. He didn’t write anything down.

  “You have a seat,” he said. “Superintendent will be with you.”

  We sat
in metal chairs. We watched the ceiling fan turn. We listened to the officer talking on the police radio.

  A woman came in and told the officer she wanted to file a report about her neighbor. Something about his dog killing one of her roosters.

  Another woman came in and said she wanted to see her husband who had been arrested the night before. The officer had her sign a logbook. Then he unlocked a door and showed her down a hall.

  Thirty minutes passed. It was closing in on ten o’clock.

  I approached the officer at the desk.

  “Think the superintendent could see us now?”

  “He’ll be along. Have a seat.”

  “Is the superintendent even here?”

  The officer looked at me.

  “He’ll be along,” the officer.

  Another thirty minutes went by. Charlie and Boggy went outside to get some air. They came back in. I walked up to the front desk again.

  There’s nothing people in the islands dislike more than pushy Americans who can’t tear themselves away from the clock and get cozy with the “Mon, soon come” mentality. I respect that. I really do. And I appreciate a good case of the slows as much as anyone.

  But this was pushing it.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but do you have any idea when the superintendent can see us? Because I’ve got plenty of other things I could be doing.”

  “Suit yourself,” the officer said.

  “Suit myself what?”

  “Go do these other things. The superintendent he usually does not come in until after lunch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?”

  “The superintendent’s comings and goings are not your business. He is a busy man.”

  “Would it help if I filled out a report or something?”

  “Not necessary,” the officer. “You come back and we make a report then.”

  “You want me to leave my name and my contact information so you can call me when the superintendent is in his office?”

  “Not necessary. You come back after lunch.”

  “Thanks so much for your time.”

  “My pleasure,” the officer said. “Enjoy your stay in Marsh Harbour.”

  I owed Williamson two hundred dollars for his tip about spotting Chasin’ Molly, but I still wanted to see the boat for myself before I paid him. And there was no way I was returning to the Dailey brothers’ boatyard unless the police were with me this time.