Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  Charlie said, “Kinda leaves everything where it started, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So where the hell’s the real Jen Ryser?”

  The boat was anchored somewhere. It had been anchored for the better part of a day.

  A long distance to get there, through most of the day before and into the night. Across a lot of open water. Big swells, pounding seas, one hellacious squall. The boat heaving up and slamming down.

  It had bounced her off the bed and when he came down to check on her he was furious.

  “I told you not to move.”

  “I fell. The waves. I couldn’t get back up.”

  “I can’t keep coming down here just to check on you.”

  He made her take a pill. He put it in her mouth and gave her water and held her mouth shut until she swallowed.

  And after that she slept. She wasn’t sure how long. But when she awoke the motion had stopped. The noise, too. They were anchored.

  He came down to check on her every hour or so. He had little to say. He was brusque and impatient and whenever she needed to use the head he stood right outside and kept telling her to hurry up.

  Then he would go back up top. He never left the boat. She could hear him up there, sometimes pacing the deck.

  Waiting. For what ever would happen next.

  41

  Curtis brought Radiance all the way in. He jockeyed the engines and pulled alongside the dock with nary a bump. Edwin hopped off the boat and looped its bow and stern lines around pilings.

  “You get off and then I’ll anchor her out,” Edwin called down from the pilot house.

  We stepped off the boat and waited on the dock. It was several minutes before Mickey emerged from the salon. The young woman stayed in there, watching us from the couch.

  Mickey looked weak and drained. He used his cane to make it across the deck. I offered a hand as he stepped onto the dock. He pushed it away.

  “I can make it on my own,” he said.

  “You OK?”

  He squared off in front of me.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But you need to leave. You need to leave right now.”

  “Mickey, what…”

  He put up a hand to silence me.

  “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing. I don’t want to hear a thing. I just want you gone.”

  In the salon, the young woman got up from the couch. She moved close to the window and stared out at us. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Look, I don’t know what she told you,” I said. “But she…”

  “She told me all I needed to hear, dammit. You’ve been after her since we got on the boat. Asking her all those damn questions.”

  “She’s not your daughter, Mickey.”

  He looked away. Then he fixed me with an angry glare.

  “What proof do you have of that?”

  “Her story about selling the sailboat, for one thing. It doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

  “Just because it doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “Jesus, Mickey. Just think about it. Ask her to produce a bill of sale, a bank deposit, anything. No one just up and decides to sell a boat like a Beneteau 54 and finds a buyer right off the bat. It doesn’t happen.”

  Mickey’s jaw clenched.

  He said, “You got anything besides that?”

  “I found one of your daughter’s friends, Karen Breakell. She told me Jen had an accident on the crossing. Got a bad cut on her shoulder. They had to sew it up on the boat. That woman in there…”

  Mickey dismissed it with a flick of his hand.

  “Jen told me all about that. She told me this Karen girl was drunk the whole time and didn’t know what was going on. She told me she couldn’t wait to get her off the boat. Jen said it was another girl who got cut.”

  “Torrey Kealing?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make? But I’ll tell you one thing: I don’t appreciate you invading her privacy the way you did. Getting her cell phone, looking at her messages. What the hell, Zack?”

  “She was messaging someone from the boat.”

  “OK, she was messaging someone. There a law against that?”

  “She was messaging someone and telling them not to come yet. Not to come here to this island. Not until tomorrow. She tell you who that was? Or why they are coming here?”

  “Matter of fact, she did tell me about that, Zack.” He looked at me. “It was her boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  He let out some air.

  “She didn’t want to tell me about him before now. She said she wanted to meet me face-to-face first, see how it went between the two of us and go from there. But she’s got this boyfriend…” Mickey shook his head. “I think he was a big reason she got rid of the sailboat, wanted something a little smaller for just the two of them. What she did, she said she went to this marina in Marsh Harbour and struck a deal with them where they would keep the sailboat and she would take this other boat, a powerboat. Some kind of cruiser, I don’t know. Worth a whole lot less than her sailboat. Once the marina sells her boat, they’ll settle up on the difference. And that explains that. You satisfied?”

  “This boyfriend, she tell you his name?”

  “Will Something. I didn’t get the last name. All I know, she was messaging him and that’s what you found. Sticking your nose where you had no business sticking it. She’s upset. You owe her an apology.”

  I looked at Boggy and Charlie. They were as done-in by everything as I was. I looked at Mickey.

  I said, “Abel Delgado’s dead.”

  Mickey flinched at the news.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying someone killed Delgado night before last in Marsh Harbour. In his hotel room.”

  “Who?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Goddam. That’s awful,” Mickey said. “But what does that have to do with us? You’re not saying…”

  He turned and looked at the young woman standing on the other side of the salon window. Her face was unreadable. He looked back at me.

  “You’re not suggesting Jen had anything to do with that, are you?”

  “She’s not Jen, Mickey. I don’t care what she’s telling you and how much you want to believe it. I’m sorry. She’s not your daughter.”

  Mickey’s eyes twitched. He shook with anger. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a passport. He handed it to me.

  “You look at that and you tell me what you see.”

  I opened the passport. The photo was of the young woman in the salon. The passport said her name was Jennifer Anne Ryser. I handed the passport back to Mickey.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

  “You can tell me you made a mistake.”

  “The passport could be fake.”

  “Can’t fake a U.S. passport anymore, Zack. Not since 9/11.”

  “It can look like a passport, but it might not act like a passport.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “She’s playing you, Mickey. Let’s you and I go back in there right now and talk this through with her. I’ve got plenty more questions I could ask.”

  Mickey shook his head.

  “You’ve asked her all the questions you’re going to ask.” He tapped a finger on my chest. “You need to leave. You need to leave right now.”

  42

  We retrieved our bags from the house and headed down to the seaplane. The tide was up and the plane floated in plenty of water. We took off the shade-cloth camouflage, rolled it up, and stuck it under the chickee hut on the beach. Then we waded back to the plane and settled into our seats.

  Charlie started the engine, let it warm up.

  It was dark now. Radiance was still at the dock. It was too far away for me to tell for sure, but the salon lights were on and I could only guess th
at Mickey and the young woman were still sitting on the couch, talking.

  Charlie said, “You sure about this, Zack?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  “I’m low on fuel,” Charlie said. “Ate up a bunch of it fighting that squall off Andros. I can’t make it all the way to Harbour Island on what I’ve got.”

  We had decided that the best course of action would be to connect with Lynfield Pederson and lay out everything for him. That way, maybe he could run interference while things got sorted out and I wouldn’t get thrown in jail. Trouble was, if we called Pederson on the plane’s radio it would alert other police to our whereabouts and, well, it could complicate matters. So that meant flying to Harbour Island to see Pederson in person.

  “Where’s the closest place to get fuel?”

  “Airport in George Town.”

  “Any chance of flying into there without the police knowing about it?”

  “Chance is slim to none. And Slim, he’s done left town. Got a police station right next to the terminal,” Charlie said. “Could try Barraterre, about a dozen miles north of George Town.”

  “It got an airport?”

  “No, but I used to keep some honey pots there.”

  “Honey pots?”

  “Fuel drums,” Charlie said. “Back in the day, I had fuel stashes all up and down the islands. Tuck in, fill up, and get the hell out. Still know folks in Barraterre. Might rustle up someone who could help out.”

  “It’s worth you giving it a shot,” I said.

  “Especially when it’s the only shot I got.”

  Charlie motored the plane slowly offshore, putting Radiance farther behind us. We were approaching the south tip of Lady Cut Cay, bouncing gently along the water.

  Charlie looked at me.

  “You ready, Zack?”

  “Let’s do this thing,” I said.

  I opened the door on my side. The air coming in was warm and sticky. Boggy handed me a waterproof bag. It held a pair of binoculars, a big beach towel, some bug juice, and a bottle of water.

  “See you soon, Zachary,” Boggy said.

  I stuck out one leg onto the plane’s pontoon. Then I pulled the rest of myself out, balancing there with a hand on a strut.

  “OK, what I’m going to do is flip off all the lights,” Charlie said, talking louder now to be heard above the engine. “That’s when you jump. I’m only gonna leave the lights off a couple of seconds. Because there’s a pretty good chance Mickey is watching us and if the lights are off any longer than that he’ll notice it and think something is up. So jump and get your ass as far away from the plane as you can. And then I’m outta here. You got it?”

  “Piece o’ cake.”

  “On three,” Charlie said.

  He counted it down and when the lights flicked off I leaped from the pontoon and into the water. Not an Olympic-caliber entry—the Bulgarian judge would have given it a 6—but it put plenty of distance between me and the plane.

  By the time I surfaced, the plane’s lights were back on and it was speeding away.

  The water was shallow, only up to my chest. I stood there, watching the plane take off. As it gained altitude, it made a lazy loop back toward Lady Cut Cay and passed right over Radiance, Charlie just making sure that Mickey spotted him leaving the island.

  I slung the bag over a shoulder and waded toward shore.

  43

  The binoculars weren’t the night-vision kind, so they didn’t help at all.

  Not that it mattered. There wasn’t much to see.

  I found a spot of high ground between the landing strip and the dock. The underbrush was thick but I stomped it down enough so that it didn’t keep scraping against me.

  I could look out between some wax myrtles and see Radiance. If I turned the other way and bent back the branches of a bramble bush, I could see up to the house.

  All in all, a decent little hidey-hole. Not that I wanted to set up permanent house keeping. But it would do me well enough until Charlie and Boggy made contact with Lynfield Pederson and could get back here. In the meantime, it would let me keep an eye on things in case there were any visitors, such as so-called boyfriends in powerboats.

  About an hour after I came ashore, I spotted a figure walking down the dock toward Radiance. Octavia. Checking on Mickey, making sure he took his meds, maybe giving him a shot.

  Shortly after Octavia left, the lights went off in the boat’s main salon and I saw Mickey and the young woman walking along the dock. They got into a golf cart and drove away.

  A few minutes later, Radiance moved from the dock and came to rest at anchor about fifty yards out. I saw its dinghy putt-putting back to the dock and then Edwin and Curtis got into their golf cart and drove away.

  The lights went off in the house not long afterward, and that was pretty much it for the evening’s excitement.

  I stripped down to my briefs, hung my shirt and shorts over a tree limb. The clothes wouldn’t dry overnight, not with all the humidity, but at least it would air them out, get rid of some Zack funk.

  The little biting beasties weren’t bad, not with the breeze, but I lathered up with bug juice anyway in the name of pre-assault deterrent. I spread out the beach towel, wadded up the waterproof bag for a pillow, and stretched out on my back.

  I was hoping to look up and find a majestic firmament unfolding on my behalf. No better place for stargazing than the Out Islands. But clouds had blown in from the west, and instead of an expansive view of the heavens, the sky was a soggy gray blanket, looming low and oppressive.

  Funny how the mind works at times like this. Seldom did I recall much from my high school Latin class, but I did now. The Latin word for island is insula. From which we also get “insular” and “isolated.”

  So here I was, on this island, where things had started out rosy enough then quickly gone to hell. And now I was feeling pretty insular and isolated.

  An A-plus in vocabulary, Zack. Poor, poor pitiful you.

  I rolled over onto my side and was rewarded with a glimpse of the rising moon trying to shine forth from behind a heavy haze. It was kind of like a burlesque queen performing a fan dance. The fact that the moon wasn’t fully exposed made it larger than life and all the more alluring.

  I stared at it for a while. I had no pretense of actually falling asleep. The ground was hard and I was wound tight. No way would I doze off.

  Pretty moon, though.

  Not quite a full moon.

  The full moon still a few days off.

  And by then I’d be home.

  Home.

  I like my dreams with a soundtrack. And for this particular dream, I had me some Marley:

  Don’t worry/’bout a ting/’Cause every little ting/Gonna be alright

  I was in bed with Barbara, bouncing Shula on my stomach. Lots of giggling going on. The windows in the bedroom were thrown open. A baby cardinal landed on the sill and started chirping its fool head off.

  Rise up this mornin’/Smiled with the risin’ sun/Three little birds/Perch by my door step

  Dreams. Sheesh.

  Part collective unconscious, part the outside leaking in.

  Then two more cardinals appeared. And they made this trio. Daddy sang bass, momma sang tenor. All that goofy crap.

  Singin’ sweet songs/Of melodies pure and true/Sayin’, this is my message to you-ou-ou

  It was the “you-ou-ouing” that finally roused me out of dreamland.

  I jolted up. The sun was out.

  And there stood Edwin, on the other side of the wax myrtles, in a clearing by a golf-cart path, an iPod plugged into his ears, singing his fool head off.

  He was getting into it, too. Eyes closed. Hitting the high notes. Facing the east and waving his hands. Like he was conducting a sunrise reggae symphony.

  I moved, trying to get deeper into the underbrush, so he wouldn’t see me. It was the moving that caught his eye.

  He jumped. I jumped.

&nbs
p; He said something like, “Ou, ou, ou…”

  I said, “Edwin, easy now.”

  He kept backing off, looking like he might run. Couldn’t blame him. Me showing up outta nowhere, on this little island where no one ever showed up unless everyone knew about it.

  I stood up.

  “Edwin, be cool.”

  He recognized me. Still scared as hell. But he recognized me.

  He pulled out the earbuds.

  “What you doing here?”

  “Just keeping an eye on things.”

  Edwin thought about it.

  “Something wrong?”

  So I sat him down and told him everything he needed to know. When I was done we sat around and he thought about it some more.

  Then he looked at me.

  “You hungry?”

  44

  Edwin brought me johnnycakes wrapped in aluminum foil, still warm from the kitchen. There was a pork chop in there, too.

  I sat in my hidey-hole, Edwin watching me gobble down food.

  “You put the fright in me,” he said.

  “Sorry. Wasn’t expecting anyone to come out this way.”

  “I come out here most every morning,” Edwin said. “It’s my singing spot.”

  “Your singing spot?”

  “Yeah, it’s a good spot. Look out that way you see the bay. Other way, you see the ocean. I come here, punch up a playlist on my iPod, put in my buds, and I sing.” He tapped his shirt, where the iPod was. “Got 2,763 songs right here in my pocket.”

  “Whole lot of singing.”

  “Got everything by Buju and Tosh. Got all the Marleys—Bob and all his sons, got Ziggy and Damian and Stephen and Julian.”

  “Got Ky-Mani?”

  “Yeah, I got him, but he goes a little too hip-hop. I like it roots, you know?”

  “What about Rohan? You got him, too?”

  “Rohan don’t sing. You think he would. Married Lauryn Hill, had some kids. But mostly, Rohan he’s all about the clothes. Runs that Tuff Gong line. Doing pretty good at that.”

  “I met him once.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s that?”