Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  Boggy telling me, “It bodes well that you found it, Zachary.”

  I didn’t know what it boded. All I knew was that my hand fit neatly into the shell, sliding inside the lip and gripping the spine. It was like wearing a big pair of brass knuckles, brass knuckles with a rigid, pointy end, like the onion dome of some Russian church.

  I got settled under the canvas covers. Brass grommets were spaced along edges and I positioned one of them so I could see onto the deck.

  Shallow breaths through my nose. I tried not to move. The sun beat down with its full afternoon rage. It was stifling under the canvas. The heat a liquid thing, nauseating and all-consuming. I fought back the urge to squirm, to lift up a corner of the canvas and let in some air.

  I couldn’t see beyond a small portion of the aft deck, but I heard Hatchitt as he tethered his boat alongside Radiance.

  He called out, “Show yourself, Chasteen. You come out, I won’t shoot. All you have to do is promise to let us get out of here.”

  I heard him step onto the deck. His feet came into view as he moved slowly into the sitting area. A good sign that he hadn’t spotted me already.

  I gripped the conch shell, willing the rest of me to be still. I held my breath.

  He took a couple of steps and stopped by the galley door, looking through the window.

  All he had to do was go inside. Go inside and then head down to the cabins looking for me and that would give me all the time I needed to jump on his boat and get out of there.

  He reached for the galley door, then stopped just short of opening it. He turned. He stood there a moment. And then he strode toward the transom, heading straight for me. I saw the shotgun rising…

  I sprung up, flinging the canvas over him. A blast from the gun, tearing a hole through the canvas, missing me.

  I charged him, driving him back against the gunwale, the force of the impact releasing his grip on the shotgun and sending it overboard. We tumbled to the deck and he flailed beneath me, trying to get out from under the canvas.

  I slammed the conch shell against the side of his head. It stunned him. I hit him again, just a glancing blow. Still, his body went slack.

  I pulled myself off him, headed for the other boat. Just as I was boarding it I heard a roar from behind and turned to see him coming at me, the canvas still draping his torso as he leaped and knocked me into the cockpit of the other boat.

  I landed hard on my back, knocking the breath out of me. I lost my grip on the shell as he landed on top of me. And now he covered me in the canvas, bunching it across my mouth and nose, butting my head with his head.

  I fought for air and flopped beneath him trying to get purchase with my feet. I bucked up, toppling him to one side, and then I was upon him, the canvas still between us, covering his head now.

  He tried to roll out from under me, managed to free both arms from beneath the canvas. He grabbed my neck, digging his fingers deeper and deeper.

  The conch shell lay just beyond him. I pinned his shoulders with my knees and his fingers clawed into my neck, his thumbs finding my wind-pipe and squeezing it with ungodly force as I leaned out to grab the shell, touching its lip, dragging it closer, and then finally getting a grip on it.

  The canvas folded over his face as I clasped the shell and brought it to me. The world was going wobbly. I couldn’t breathe. I raised the shell and brought it down with both hands, its pointed end striking his head. He groaned and let out air.

  I struck him again and he dropped his hands from my neck.

  Many times I’ve thought back on that moment. Yes, I could have stopped right there.

  But the rush of air into my lungs—adrenaline and anger and some atavistic urging from my very core. A final blow, brought down with everything I had and the sickening sound of a skull rent apart.

  Blood seeped across the canvas cover—his death shroud.

  52

  Yeah, there was remorse, the kind of remorse that will hang with me forever, the kind of remorse where I will wake up at two o’clock in the morning and it will be staring me in the face, asking, Why, Zack, why? Justin Hatchitt was not the first man I had ever killed. There were two that preceded him. I could justify them all. That didn’t mean I could live with it.

  But right then was not the time to settle up accounts in my soul. I untethered the boat from Radiance, pushed off, and turned for shore. Torrey Kealing stood at the end of the dock, still straddling the two duffel bags. She had both hands on the pistol and it was pointed out at me.

  Behind her, Jen Ryser had begun to back away. That was good. Keep going, Jen. Keep going.

  I came in slowly, the engines chug-chugging just above idle. When I was about thirty yards out, Torrey yelled, “Where’s Justin?”

  “Put down the gun.”

  “Where’s Justin? Let me see him.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Put down the gun.”

  I heard a pop, saw her arms jump. I flinched long after any bullet would have hit me. The shot didn’t even hit the boat.

  I ducked down as she emptied the pistol. The first several shots went wide but she zeroed in with the last two, one dinging into the flying bridge, another ripping into the hull.

  I kept bringing the boat in, driving blind.

  No more pops.

  When I raised up, the dock was only ten yards away. Torrey grabbed the shotgun, leveled it at me.

  And from behind her Jen charged, head down, bulling into Torrey’s back, the shotgun firing high as both of them tumbled off the end of the dock.

  I cut the engines and let the boat glide. I ran to the side.

  Torrey surfaced and swam away from the boat. I let her go.

  I looked around for Jen, right and left. Finally she bobbed to the surface. With her arms bound behind her, she was struggling to get her head above water. She coughed and sputtered, on the edge of panic.

  I leaned out and pulled her in. I carried her to a bench in the cockpit and set her down. I found a knife in the console and cut her hands free.

  She stared at the bloody canvas on the cockpit floor.

  “Is he really…?”

  I nodded.

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of your father’s. I knew your mother, too. I met you when you were just a little girl, a long time ago.”

  “Last week was a long time ago,” she said.

  “It’s over, Jen. You beat them.”

  She started to say something, stopped. She tried again and this time she broke down. I put an arm around her and held her close as she sobbed.

  Torrey Kealing stopped swimming. She treaded water, catching her breath, looking back at us. There was nowhere to go and she knew it. A young woman lost and the world closing in.

  I could go get her. Or not. I was pretty wrung out.

  A voice over the radio: “Lady Cut Cay, Lady Cut Cay. Come in, do you read?”

  I looked out toward the channel. Saw a big boat throwing off wake and heading our way. I grabbed the handset.

  “I read you, Lynfield. Talk to me.”

  “Shit, Chasteen, how about you talk to me?”

  “Got one dead on the boat. Another one in the water. Alive. Need you to fish her out on your way in.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Chasteen?”

  “Too much to tell,” I said.

  53

  It took the better part of a day to smooth out everything that needed smoothing out.

  Pederson called in a doctor from George Town. She took care of the wound in Curtis’s leg, plucked some twelve-gauge shot out of my thigh, and examined Jen Ryser. She dispensed some painkillers and antibiotics, told us we’d be fine, and headed back to George Town.

  While all that was going on, Pederson was on the radio with the police in George Town, getting Charlie and Boggy out of jail.

  Charlie gave me the whole story when he and Boggy returned to Lady Cut Cay later that afternoon. After dropping me off in the seaplane the night before, they had made the s
hort hop to Barraterre looking for fuel.

  “That place has gone to hell since the last time I visited,” Charlie said. “Got a real law-abiding element living there now. Upstanding citizens and all that. It’s sad.”

  Someone spotted the seaplane as it approached the fishing village and identified it as the same one the police were looking for. They summoned the local authorities and within minutes of landing Boggy and Charlie were hauled off.

  After refusing to tell police where to find me, they had been denied the opportunity to call Lynfield Pederson.

  “Police here sure are territorial,” Charlie said. “Those George Town boys got their backs up about Lynfield coming down and messing around on their turf.”

  Boggy and Charlie spent the night in jail and it was almost noon the next day before they were able to convince the George Town police that something was going down on Lady Cut Cay. By then, Lynfield Pederson was already on his way there from Harbour Island, having covered for me as long as he possibly could.

  “We tried like hell to get someone there sooner, Zack,” Charlie said. “But we had already pissed them off and they weren’t about to act real fast on our behalf.”

  “Kinda makes me feel bad for cussing you the way I did,” I said. “But just kinda.”

  Pederson spent several hours interviewing Torrey Kealing before sending her off on a police boat to George Town. In Kealing’s telling of it, you could already see her cobbling together a defense she might use in court. She was a victim, an innocent young woman seduced by Justin Hatchitt, fearful for her life if she didn’t go along with him.

  They had worked a couple of boat thefts together, subcontracting for an outfit that set up yachts for them to steal in Florida and the Carolinas. That was their connection with the Dailey brothers. They earned a few thousand bucks per boat for their end of it.

  “Hatchitt had himself some bigger ideas,” Pederson told me when the two of us sat down afterward.

  Hatchitt found Chasin’ Molly on his own and began laying the groundwork to steal it—hanging around the marina, spreading the word that he was looking for work on a boat. After learning that Jen Ryser had lots of money, and plenty more likely to head her way after Mickey died, a more ambitious plan evolved.

  “He set the fire that burned down that house, the one belonging to the fellow who was supposed to go on the trip,” Pederson said.

  “Coach Tony and his girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, then Hatchitt made it a point to show up at the bar in Charleston on the same evening when Jen Ryser and her friends were trying to decide whether to scuttle their trip. Torrey was there, too, staging her own little seduction—of Pete Crumrine. She and Hatchitt, they didn’t want the others to know they were a couple, since Hatchitt intended to put the moves on Jen Ryser,” Pederson said. “Fellow must have felt real confident in his courting skills.”

  I remembered something Karen Breakell had told me about Jen: “It was more like she needed to be with a guy to define herself.”

  Far be it from me to delve into the psychology behind it. An absent father. The need to please. Basic self-esteem issues. We’ve all got our own little ticks. And natural-born predators like Justin Hatchitt are quick to take advantage where any advantage exists.

  According to Torrey Kealing, Hatchitt had “brainwashed” her into thinking the two of them could assume brand-new identities and live the good life with their newly found riches. Since Mickey hadn’t seen his daughter in more than twenty years and had no idea what she looked like, it would be easy enough for Torrey to become Jen Ryser. Hatchitt knew a thing or two about altering passports. And the fact that Torrey and Jen shared some basic physical characteristics—tall, blond, athletic—was a bonus. Hatchitt would assume the identity of Will Moody, at least for the short term, until he needed to become someone else.

  “There were a couple of bags on that boat of theirs that had all sorts of stuff in them,” Pederson said. “Cannibalized passports that they’d stolen, different photos, lamination sheets, a portable laminator.”

  It was essential that Chasin’ Molly make it to the Bahamas and everyone on the boat go through customs and immigration before Hatchitt and Kealing put the murderous end of their plan into action.

  “That way, when someone from back home got worried and came looking for them, it became a Bahamian problem. Another layer of bureaucracy to slow down the hunt. Plus, the two of them didn’t seem to have a high regard for the ability of the Royal Bahamian Police and its investigative prowess,” Pederson said. “Imagine that.”

  They hadn’t counted on Karen Breakell bailing out when they reached Miner Cay. The plan was to drug her and toss her overboard on the passage to Marsh Harbour, just like they did with Will Moody and Pete Crumrine.

  Neither had they counted on Abel Delgado showing up so quickly, sticking up posters, trying to sniff out where they might be.

  “The way the Kealing woman tells it, Hatchitt didn’t go into Marsh Harbour that night with the idea of killing Delgado. But he got a little jumpy when you showed up. Then when you answered Delgado’s cell phone and took the call from that fellow…”

  “Mr. Williamson,” I said. “The one who said he had seen Chasin’ Molly being hauled ashore by the Daileys.”

  “Yeah, that’s when Hatchitt decided he had to act fast to cover up the trail.”

  “Kill Delgado, burn down the Daileys’ boatyard…”

  “And almost kill Karen Breakell.”

  “That one’s my fault,” I said. “I led Hatchitt straight to her.”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, Zack. Makes you feel any better, the Breakell woman came out of her coma. She’s going to be alright.”

  “And to think you suspected me…”

  Pederson shot me a narrow look.

  “Come on, admit it,” I said. “You had your doubts.”

  “I never once thought you attacked that woman.”

  “But killing Delgado? Burning down the boatyard?”

  Pederson looked away.

  “Hatchitt had you wrapped up pretty good for it, Zack. Give me that at least.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll give you that.”

  There still was nothing directly linking Justin Hatchitt to Delgado’s murderer. But Pederson was expecting that to come, as soon as they had the results of forensic evidence taken from the pillow used to smother Delgado.

  As for the Dailey brothers, they were already in police custody in Marsh Harbour.

  “Still waiting to charge them with something officially but that’s only a matter of time,” Pederson said. “A couple of insurance investigators are already there, siftting through what the fire left behind. They’ve been able to identify at least four vessels that were reported stolen by their owners. Probably more to come.”

  “Any evidence that Chasin’ Molly was in there?”

  “Not yet. But Torrey Kealing verified that she and Hatchitt left it with the Daileys. Said they traded for that other boat, the one they showed up here in.”

  “Not a great trade,” I said.

  “No, but they were anxious to separate themselves from the sailboat. What they were thinking, if the whole thing worked with Torrey Kealing becoming Jen Ryser and all that, they were going to file an insurance claim for Chasin’ Molly being stolen and collect on it that way.”

  “Some cojones,” I said.

  “Big brass ones,” said Pederson.

  The police superintendent in Marsh Harbour was still trying to horn in on things. He wanted to haul all of us up there for questioning. But Pederson interceded, saying he had conducted all the necessary interviews.

  “I told him that to duplicate the efforts would be a tremendous waste of government resources in this time of dwindling revenues when we must all of us be very sensitive to any superfluous drain on public funds.”

  “You actually said all that?”

  “Yeah, only I wrote it down and gave it to the Nassau Guardian first, as part of my official statement. I
don’t think you’re going to hear anything else from that superintendent,” Pederson said. “There was another reason I didn’t want him butting in on the investigation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those two duffel bags of cash that Mickey Ryser handed over to Kealing and Hatchitt? I have a sneaky suspicion our friend in Marsh Harbour would have called the money in as evidence and Mickey would never see it again.”

  “You going to mention the money in your report?”

  “Been thinking about that. Been thinking it might complicate things, create a whole lot more paperwork that I don’t want to deal with,” Pederson said. “Bring more than ten thousand dollars in U.S. currency into the Bahamas and you’re supposed to declare it and fill out forms. I can’t imagine Mickey did any of that.”

  “And you’re just going to turn a blind eye to it?”

  “Don’t see how it’s going to hurt anybody. Give the man a little peace, let him enjoy what time he’s got left.”

  “Good of you.”

  Pederson shrugged.

  “But I did count that money. Just so I’d know.”

  “And?”

  “Five hundred thousand,” Pederson said. “In each bag.”

  54

  We left Lady Cut Cay early the next morning. But not before sitting down to a going-away breakfast from Miss Rose—big bowls of chicken souse with more of her johnnycakes.

  Curtis was on the mend and already giving Edwin a long list of chores for the day. I was hoping Mickey would feel like joining us, but Octavia said he wasn’t up to it.

  “Yesterday took it out of him,” she said. “He’ll bounce back, though. That man’s got him some steel.”

  Jen Ryser was remarkably improved by sleep, a shower, and Miss Rose’s cooking. We didn’t discuss her ordeal over breakfast. We talked instead about what she’d studied in college—art history—and what career she intended to pursue—not a clue.