Lost Key

by Chris Niles

  “What?” William leaned toward her.

  “Oh, nothing. Just wondering what it would be like … Never mind.”

  William raised an eyebrow. “We have all the time in the world, and I’m curious. What are you wondering?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “What it’d be like to have someone be proud of you?”

  Kate fought to hold her face neutral.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But can I try to guess? Parents aren’t thrilled with your choice to live on a broken-down houseboat in Key West? Expect you to settle down and get a job and get married and —”

  Kate grabbed her beer bottle, stormed into the twin stateroom, then slammed the door behind her. She collapsed on the bed as William tapped on the door. “Kate. Kate, whatever I said, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. Please, forgive me?”

  Kate pulled a pillow against her belly, wrapped her body tight around it, and cried until she fell asleep.

  She woke when her body lurched toward the starboard bulkhead. The light in the stateroom was dim, the pale dusk sky fading through the small porthole in the wall. The boat heeled hard to port as she fumbled toward the cabin door. After wrenching it open, she spotted William’s feet disappearing through the hatch as he climbed to the cockpit.

  Kate heard shouting from the deck above.

  “Man Overboard! Man Overboard! Man Overboard!”

  She tore open cabinets and lockers, quickly locating the emergency kit and a few spare towels and blankets. Then she tossed them on the settee before dashing to the cockpit.

  William stood at the transom holding a white ring, a thickly coiled rope on the deck at his feet. The white fiberglass glinted under the clear moon as the boat bobbed and lurched in the sea. All the men shouted and scanned the water for Alejandro.

  Suddenly, a shout came from the bridge. “Wait … There! Four o’clock, about twenty meters out falling astern! Get that life ring out to him. I’ll come around and keep him to starboard. William, get ready!”

  Kate looked over the starboard rail and saw nothing. William nudged her out of the way, took position at the widest point of the boat, then leaned over the rail with the life ring in his right hand. She still saw nothing when he sent the ring sailing like a Frisbee across the dark water. He shouted a rapid string of Spanish words, too fast for her to try to decipher. A moment later, she spotted splashing and a darkened figure tugging at the ring as it drifted back and the line pulled taut.

  The boat took a slow, wide turn to starboard, keeping the line clear. Then they drifted toward the boy clinging to the life ring.

  William frantically pulled in the line. “Cut the engines!” His deep baritone carried through the thick night air.

  A moment later, the boat lurched as the engines shifted quickly into reverse then fell silent.

  Waves and lingering wake rocked the drifting boat from all directions. Kate grabbed a rail and hung on. The men slid down the ladder to pull the ring toward the boat’s swim platform. She carefully climbed down to the cabin, gathered the supplies she’d laid out, then returned with two large beach towels and a blanket.

  When the men pulled Alejandro aboard, Kate wrapped him in the towels, then they settled him into one of the fighting chairs mounted in the center of the wide cockpit. His body trembled, and William rubbed his arms and legs to warm him.

  Kate braced herself against the lurching and waited as the men dried Alejandro. She traded a fresh, dry blanket for his wet towels while Steve left them for the cockpit.

  As the engines fired up and the boat nudged its bow back to the east, she scrambled to the transom rail then threw up.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Perched in the port seat on the flybridge, Kate stared into the inky distance.

  “Sea legs coming back yet?” Steve asked. His features were shrouded in red highlights and deep black shadows, the bridge lit only by a dim red light.

  She nodded as both of them scanned the area lit by the boat’s bright forward-facing floodlights for any debris or hazards too small for the boat’s radar to have displayed.

  Kate moaned. “The Coke is helping. Watching for junk is helping more.”

  “Good. You can take first watch, then. We lost a lot of time back there. We were almost upon him when I saw something fly off their stern and hit the water. I swerved, Alejandro went over the gunwale, and here we are. Unless they stop for fuel, we probably won’t catch up with them until close to daybreak. We should be just off Havana by about that time.”

  Kate gaped at him. “Wait, what? You want me to drive the boat? All by myself?”

  Steve laughed. “Yeah. But not all on your own. The autopilot is set to match their current course, so really, you just need to keep an eye out for anything that might go wrong. Debris in the water, they change course… You know, anything out of the ordinary.” His hands rested naturally on the boat’s wheel.

  “You know my boat doesn’t have an engine, right?”

  “You’ll be fine. You’ve piloted the Island Hopper plenty of times. Just give William another hour or so, then he can come up and take over when you need some sleep. Susan and I’ll get up a bit before sunrise, then we can figure out where we are.”

  “Aye, aye, Capt’n.” Kate filled her voice with fake confidence. The extent of her boating experience was holding the wheel of his boat for three minutes at a time while he used the head and paddling her kayak between Shark Key and the beach on the other side of her little channel.

  Steve patted her shoulder then climbed down the ladder.

  She settled into the seat in front of the boat’s wide instrument panel and popped the cap off a fresh bottle of fully-sugared Mexican Coke.

  “Fishsticks!” She wrapped her lips over the top of the bottle and held it as far away as she could reach as amber foam gushed up the neck of the bottle and flowed down the side, dripping on the brown turf covering the deck. She slurped the foam, let out a loud belch, then quickly looked around, suppressing the urge to excuse herself. There were advantages to the solitary watch.

  Within a few minutes, a routine formed. She scanned the limit of the lights from three o’clock at starboard to nine o’clock port, and back again, then conducted quick spot-checks behind at five and seven. Followed that with a quick look at the GPS to check to be sure they were still both on course. Ended the cycle with look at the radar to see if anything else was in front of them, then back to the swath of sea ahead of the bow.

  Her stomach finally settled. She started to feel lulled by the wind swirling behind her and the steady drone of the boat’s engines. Three o’clock. Nine o’clock. Five, Seven, Dash. Repeat.

  Kate’s gaze was skimming past ten when a hand rested on her shoulder.

  “About earlier.” Even at its quietest volume, William’s deep voice filled the bridge. Kate continued watching the sea. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  She shrugged.

  “I just know a little bit about the fallout from choosing an uncommon path.”

  Kate shook her head.

  “I also know a little bit about how it can rot you from the inside if you don’t deal with it and talk to someone.”

  Moonlight sparked on the low swells in the water ahead of them.

  “I was the first in my family to have a chance at graduating from college. When I dropped out to start my own business doing maintenance on boats, my mother flipped out. ‘William, your mama did not work three jobs so you could drop out of school to scrape barnacles off no white man’s sailboat!’ But I needed to be outside. And I did use what I’d learned in my business classes. I built up a network of good clients. Marinas, private yacht owners, and the like. I studied for the Captain’s test and passed it on my first try. Bought a boat, then a second one. Grew a successful business, received awards from the community. But Mama still saw me as cleanin’ up after The Man. She was ashamed and always changed the subject when her friends asked how I was doing. My bi
ggest regret when she died was that she never understood my definition of success was different from hers.”

  Kate pulled her knees close to her chest and rested her forehead on her folded arms. “But you have Michelle.”

  His quiet affirmation drifted across her shoulder.

  “I was supposed to have Danny. But that didn’t work out the way it was supposed to.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But sometimes …”

  “He was a cop. A rookie, but still a cop. I was supposed to be ready, to know every time he walked out the door, he might not come back. The other wives gave me all the tips. ‘Tell him you love him. Don’t hang up the phone mad.’ All that stuff. And I was okay with it. But nobody told me to expect him to bleed out in the doorway to our bedroom.”

  “Oh, Kate.”

  “Yeah. I had run to the store. I wasn’t gone for long, but it was long enough to lose everything. When I came back, the front door wasn’t closed all the way. There’d been a series of mid-day home invasions, but I never thought about it. It was a Wednesday, and Danny was off. But apparently, these junkies sat around neighborhoods waiting for someone to leave the house. They just walked onto the porch and tried the knob, thinking our house was empty and, lucky them, I hadn’t locked up. They walked right through the front door. But Danny surprised them. So they cut him. Bad. He was gone before the EMS got there.”

  William’s huge, warm hand gently squeezed her forearm.

  “Thanks for not saying you’re sorry, or he’s in a better place, or you can’t imagine. I get that people mean well when they say that, but … this is why I don’t talk about him. I can’t take being pitied.”

  “There’s a difference between the pity of strangers and care from your friends.”

  She pulled her arm out from under his touch and started scanning the ocean again. “It’s easier just to keep it between Whiskey and me.”

  “Maybe easier, but it gets pretty lonely. I’m —”

  A sharp cackle from the VHF interrupted him.

  “M/V Mariella hailing Astillero Mariel. Wake up, you old man!” The voice repeated the request.

  A sleepy Cuban accent cracked through the speakers. “Mariella, this is Mariel Fuel Dock. Go to twenty-three. Two three.”

  Kate flipped the radio to channel twenty-three and glanced at her own fuel gauges, showing nearly a quarter of their main fuel tank remaining and the reserve tank full. On the new frequency, Kate’s radio remained silent.

  She sighed and checked the fuel gauges again. Just before midnight, the Mariella had veered east away from Key West, heading straight up the Gulf Stream toward the Bahamas. The boat would need fuel somewhere near Havana. Steve had predicted the captain would try to go unnoticed and blend in with the shrimp boats coming back toward the rising sun after a night of fishing.

  Steve was wrong.

  Kate tapped an intercom button marked Master Stateroom. “Uh, Captain? This is the bridge.”

  “Yeah, what’s up, Kate?”

  “They just radioed in to Mariel. I lost them on the radio, but they have to be going in for fuel.”

  “Oof. I’ll be right up.”

  Moments later, Steve joined them on the bridge. Susan handed up a Thermos and coffee mugs a moment later.

  William checked the GPS. “We’re still about fifteen miles short and twelve off the coast. They’re not angling into Cuban waters yet, but we’ll have to be on our toes when they do.”

  “Let’s think about this a minute,” Steve said. “They clearly don’t realize we’re following them. We’re good on fuel. We could still head north and get back home on what we’ve got with plenty to spare. What if we overshot Mariel and caught him as he comes back out?”

  “First problem — his fuel tanks will be full. He could draw us out and run ours dry.”

  “He could, but we’ve still got a couple hours of fuel before we would have to abort and head for the nearest fuel dock in the Keys. We’d have to do a little fast talking to explain Alejandro, but we can deal with that when the time comes.”

  “Ambushing him sure beats chasing him all over the Strait.”

  “And it’ll certainly catch him off guard.” Steve tapped new coordinates about thirty miles to the northeast of Mariel into the GPS and set the autopilot. “Y’all go get a little more sleep. I’ll wake you when they clear Cuban waters.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  As the northern tip of Cozumel fell off to starboard, Vince angled the large cruiser toward the east, tweaked the throttles, then set a course in the autopilot.

  “Ramiro!” Vince shouted into the small microphone. His voice screeched from every speaker on the boat. The boy scrambled from the cabin and up the ladder to the bridge.

  “¿Sí?”

  Vince leaned back in the captain’s chair with his feet resting on the corner of the instrument panel.

  “You understand English?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good. This trip could go really great for you, or it could be terrible. It’s your choice.”

  Ramiro’s hand inched up, his forearm close to his body and his hand stopping just above his shoulder. “¿Señor? Sir, where are you taking me?”

  “It’s not where I’m taking you, son. It’s where you’re taking me. We’ll end up in Key West, but I don’t want to attract any attention coming in, if you know what I mean. So we’ll cruise with the gulf stream along the Cuban cost, then slip up into the Bahamas before coming back across toward Miami, where we’ll get lost in traffic. Everything goes smooth, you’ll get a full tank of fuel and a nice cash bonus in Key West, and this never happened. “

  “What if …?”

  Vince shrugged. “You will want to make it go smoothly.” He dropped his feet to the fiberglass deck and leaned forward. “Now, how ’bout you show me around this beauty?”

  “But, señor … what to keep watch?”

  Vinced rolled his eyes. “Auto. Pilot. Auto means it’s automatic.”

  Ramiro’s eyes widened, and he started to shake his head.

  “You don’t want to make trouble, kid.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes then toward the boy. “I’m watching you.” He hopped off his seat and waved Ramiro down to the cockpit.

  As Vince started down the ladder, he clearly heard the boy mumble, “Yeah, I make good trouble, asshole.” In English.

  Vince followed Ramiro down to the cabin. The boy turned. “Why I don’t take boat back to home now?”

  “Because if you take me where I need to go, you’ll get more cash than you ever imagined you’d see at once.” Vince pulled out a wad of cash then handed Ramiro ten twenty-dollar bills. “There’s plenty more when we get to Key West. You can take the boat back to Manuel then. Tell him you overpowered me, or you attacked me while I slept, I don’t care. Tell him anything you want, except where I went.”

  Ramiro eyed the cash. “Sí, señor.”

  “But if you try anything funny, I’ll feed you to the sharks.”

  The boy knew the boat well, and his charter guest tour was well-rehearsed. But Vince sensed he was rushing through it. Here’s the galley. Here’s your stateroom. Here’s how to operate the marine head. Let’s go back up.

  Ramiro’s gaze constantly flicked to the water outside the windows in every cabin. When he wound down and started for the bridge, Vince opened the door to the cramped engine compartment. “Show me around the mechanical systems.”

  “Oh, sir, you don’t need to worry about any of that. I will take care of everything and get you where you’re going.”

  “How much fuel does this baby have on board?”

  The boy’s eyes flicked upward for a second while he searched his memory. “This boat, she carry over two thousand liters diesel fuel. She make it to Key Largo, no problem.” He glanced at a small gauge mounted on a panel on the port bulkhead. “But Bahamas? No.”

  “Don’t you keep reserve fuel on board?”

  “Sí. But n
ot enough to get to Bahamas. If the seas and the winds are just right and we go slow and burn less, we might get close to Andros. But this boat, she won’t make it all the way.”

  “Slowing down is not an option.” Vince glanced at his watch and thought for a moment. “I know a guy at the shipyard in Mariel. We should get there just before dawn. We can slip in, fuel up, then get out before anyone realizes we’re there.”

  “Is dangerous, Cuba. No passport.”

  “No problem. You just stay hidden while we’re in port. I’m just a guy taking a vacation on his very nice boat.”

  Ramiro’s eyebrow popped up, and his glance fell down toward Vince’s bulging pocket.

  “You want more money? Fine. Two hundred to stay out of sight.”

  “Si, señor. Mariel should be very good, then. No problem.”

  “Good, good. Now, I have an important question. I need you to think carefully before you answer, and you will want to be honest.” Vince’s stare bored into the boy. “Do you have any weapons on board?”

  Ramiro’s eyes flicked back and forth.

  “Anything that could be used as a weapon? Anything at all…”

  “There’s some fishing gear in the rear cockpit locker. Maybe a knife to clean fish.” His shoulders seemed to relax a bit.

  “Anything else?” Instead of waiting for his answer, Vince began rummaging through toolboxes and lockers in the engine room. “What’s this?” He pulled a bright red object shaped like a pistol with an unusually wide barrel.

  “Just a flare gun, señor. Emergency equipment for, um, emergencies.”

  Vince grabbed the boy’s shirt, pulled him close, shook him. “What else is on board?” He snatched a deep canvas bag then dropped the flare gun into the bottom. “Everything. In this bag. NOW.”

  Ramiro spent the next half hour going through every locker and hiding spot on board. The canvas bag slowly filled with a random assortment of items Vince imagined could be used as weapons.

  Finally satisfied all threatening items were stacked safely in the bag, Vince led the boy to a large fish box in the cockpit. “Give me the keys.”