“They better be,” he said from the other room. “I need to get home.” Mr. Sensitivity wasn’t big on afterglow.
She disappeared out of sight after him, giving us the briefest peek of a muscular flank before the blouse tail came down and cut off the view.
“Damn!” Deek swore. “I got like two frames of booty.”
I cranked my head back around, it was starting to get a little claustrophobic in the closet.
“I’ll clean up,” she soothed. “You go home to the missus.”
“Thanks,” he said, followed by a smooching sound. “If the...uh, other mess isn’t cleaned up by Friday, I can’t save the deal.”
“I said it’s handled,” she reminded him.
“Alright then...remember to set the alarm,” he said as the outer office door opened and closed. A few seconds later the elevator dinged. There was some rustling from the other room, probably our lady of the meeting table getting dressed, followed a few seconds later by the tick-tick-tick of business heels on a tile floor.
“Male leaving,” V announced.
A couple minutes went by before the ticky-tack of Italian shoes returned, followed by the sound of broken glass being pushed around before rattling into a trash can. Once again the shoes receded, there was some clattering and a minute later Mrs. Meadows came back into the meeting room with a bottle and a clean glass and slumped down heavily in one of the chairs and poured herself two fingers of rum and knocked it back in one toss. She slapped the glass back down and poured herself another two fingers.
“You can come out now,” she said to the view.
Q’s eyebrows went up and he reached tentatively for the door before I grabbed his hand shaking my head.
She sighed heavily and knocked back another finger of rum. “Goddamit, Donnie, where the hell are you?” The window and empty office had no reply.
Finishing off the rum in the glass, she picked up the bottle and wiped a stray drop of liquor off the table with her finger. She kicked the chair back into place the as tick-tack of her shoes faded into the next room followed by a rattling of the bottle in one of the cabinets. More minutes passed each becoming more interminable as my legs, back and feet were getting sore. Finally there was a distant toilet flush and the running of water, followed a few minutes later by the fading tick-tack of high heels on tile. The alarm started beeping indicating she was in the lobby and the rattling of keys in the front door indicated she was gone. The elevator dinged and a minute later V confirmed she was out of the building.
“Whew, goddamn!” Q gratefully pushed through the closet doors. The blast of fresh air was delicious and the office air still smelled distantly of a combination of rum and pussy.
“I thought we were so busted,” Q said with relief.
“That would have been hard to explain,” I agreed. “We should leave.”
The alarm started beeping a warning once the motion sensor noted our presence. We walked quickly to the panel and entered the code.
“What now? Eighth floor?” Q asked tiredly.
“Nah, we’re done here,” I said flatly. “V, as soon as we’re clear head for the beta site and give Deek the day off. Deek, where’s Fred?” Fred was the captain of our salvage ship The Salvage Star, not as new or as posh as Mission Parameters but a very big, heavy and functional member of our fleet.
“Fred’s in Fort Lauderdale,” Deek replied. “I just texted him to expect company.”
“Awesome. Now you’re outta here,” I responded, entering the code in the alarm keypad once again. The box started beeping, signaling our 90 seconds grace period to get out the door.
“Signing off,” Deek confirmed.
We stepped outside and peeled off our headsets. Q used the zip pic to lock the door and, more out of habit, we gave the office one last look before calling the elevator. V’s car was still in the dark corner of the garage; she’d wait until we were clear and confirm no one followed us out of the garage before heading to the beta site.
Q drove to Fort Lauderdale, the lights of the near continuously developed I-95 corridor whizzing by our windows. I was reminded that it was drug money that built nearly all the infrastructure in southern Florida since the 1970’s when Miami wasn’t much more than a backwater shanty town. There still was a lot of drug money in Florida and, despite the fact you could almost walk from patrol boat to patrol boat and not get your feet wet, Florida was still a smuggler’s paradise. The only difference these days was that the drug trade had gone corporate. Today it was corporate smugglers and distributors funneling money to corporate banks. The old school cartel leaders, who were really not terribly sophisticated, had been replaced by a new breed of button-down bean counters that were as ruthless as they were ruthlessly efficient.
“My back hurts from being bent over in that closet,” I complained.
“That’s what she said,” Q joked.
“What?” It was hard keeping up with the younger generation’s humor.
“Never mind,” Q dismissed. “That was quite a show,” he chuckled, “but I’m still not entirely certain what’s going on.”
“Nothing that hasn’t been going on since the beginning of time,” I sighed. “Greed, lust and betrayal.”
“Same shit, different century.”
“Totally boring,” I lamented. “I keep hoping for something interesting but it’s always the same shit. Money, plus arrogance, plus opportunity. And always fucking amateurs.”
“Something to do with that horse park?”
“Definitely, but it’s going to Deek a day to unravel it and he needs some down time.”
“So, what do we do in the meantime?”
“I don’t know about you,” I offered. “But I’m going to get majorly shit-faced and whistle up a couple girls.”
“We have time for that?”
“Just,” I guessed. “I need to go give our distraught wife an update and check in with the local cops but that can wait for tomorrow. Things are going to get pretty strung out toward the end of the week so we should relax while we can.”
In our business retirement was not an option so we took our retirement in installments.
Q kept it at the speed limit and it took us the better part of an hour before we found ourselves in the posh side streets of Fort Lauderdale. Parts of town are broken up by narrow channels and inlets, some natural, some manmade. The secure gates of million dollar homes in front of multi-million dollar boats tied up at private docks drifted by the tinted windows. This was the part of Fort Lauderdale tourists rarely got to see. Away from the beach and coastal hotels this part of town was a fusion of hipsters and high class; big money Bohemia where trophy wives tanned topless on the upper deck while the husbands lit up downstairs. A place where Birkenstocks and bond funds collided in jasmine scented European sedans and tiki torches fluttered in the evening breeze next to hot tubs where swimsuits were optional.
Our little piece of this heaven was the house at the end of a cul de sac that one of our front companies picked up in a foreclosure sale. The house wasn’t particularly attractive; a two-story yellow-orange Spanish colonial that was all plaster and tile inside yet still managed to smell vaguely of mold. Fortunately we didn’t buy the property for the house. We bought it because the dock was out of sight of the neighbors behind a small bend and the somewhat industrial looking Salvage Star wouldn’t look decidedly out of place next to her sleek, modern and fiberglass neighbors. As far as the neighbors knew the house belonged to the CEO of a treasure hunting and salvage operation which had scored it rich when they found the wreck of a tramp steamer from the early 1900s loaded with gold and silver coins. The salvage company story would explain The Star’s somewhat odd appearance and the racks of dive gear and occasional appearance of our deep sea ROV that we called Ziggy, which we did actually use for deep sea salvage. Most of the time it wasn’t silver coins we were dredging up, more often it was long buried secrets that many would prefer never saw daylight again.
V opened the gate fo
r us, noting our arrival on the very well-hidden security cameras. We left the rusting camera housings from the previous owner and anyone seeing them would take cover in the very places we had the new surveillance system set up to watch. We parked around back and followed a twisting and well-manicured path back to the dock. Fred was there to meet us.
Fred “Tow Boat” Jeffers was a short, solid man in his late 50s. Despite his age he still wore his hair back in a long ponytail, his red hair now mixed with a lot of gray. He didn’t look his age; only the crinkles around his eyes and the sagging skin under his neck gave away that he was pushing 60 with a short stick. Even though Fred was Florida born and bred he was unlucky enough to be a ginger growing up in a tropical paradise and had avoided spending too much uncovered time in the sun, usually opting for a broad-billed straw hat instead of a baseball cap.
Fred was also one of the smugglers helping shape the Florida economy of the 70s and 80s. Unlike the stupid ones that got caught, Fred was a careful and paranoid planner who brought in thousands of kilos of pot and cocaine by air and sea, sometimes right under the noses of federal authorities. He got the name “Tow Boat” because he actually used to run a marine towing service, which was also one of his favorite ways to slide a few tons of coke past watchful authorities. A ship taking on water would explain why it was riding low and, in those days, no one ever thought to search a sinking boat under tow. It also gave him the perfect cover to buy the warehouses on both sides of his marine salvage and towing operation which had delivery trucks coming and going at all hours of the day and night.
Over the years Fred carefully developed a network of informants and lookouts, picking people he knew from his childhood growing up in the area. At least one of the families out fishing and snorkeling in the Intracoastal would be reporting the movements of the sheriff and Coast Guard boats back to Fred and he had several people on the payroll in local law enforcement and the dispatch center. Fred also used to take small amounts of pot and cocaine and whiz them up in a blender, mix them with kerosene and spray the mixture all over the docks and buildings around his salvage center. That way if the police ever brought drug sniffing dogs, they would be alerting on virtually everything in the area. His air operation was even more sophisticated and Fred and his partner once ditched a brand new twin engine Cessna loaded with 500 kilos of cocaine when one of the lookouts reported suspicious vehicles at the drop zone. Fred and the co-pilot bailed out over land with the plane on autopilot and let a million dollar airplane and its multi-million dollar cargo disappear into the Bermuda Triangle. That planning and paranoia is why Fred never got caught at his previous occupation until the IRS caught up with him almost a dozen years later, somewhat ironically after he’d gotten out of the smuggling business and gone legit.
That was also how I’d made Fred’s acquaintance, even before I knew Q. I pulled some strings and got Fred’s tax troubles dismissed if he agreed to pay an eye-popping fine and join our team; we’d been working together ever since. Fred wasn’t the first criminal to end up working for The Man and his constant paranoia and attention to detail saved our collective asses more than once. He was also one of our fixed and rotary wing pilots. This night he was walking up the dock to meet us, The Salvage Star looming like a great gray shadow behind him.
“Hey, boss,” he said with a smile, extending his big paw for a handshake. Fred’s hands were strong as welding clamps and calloused from a lifetime of tending lines. He had gray-green eyes that narrowed to a slit when he smiled and a touch of peeling skin on his nose indicated he had skipped his hat at some point recently.
“Good to see you, Freddy,” I didn’t have to fake sincerity for Fred.
“So, we going somewhere or hanging out?” he asked, shaking hands with Q.
“Just hanging out,” I replied with a big grin.
“Ah, I see,” he said with a well-weathered smile of his own. “Time to wish upon The Star, I take it.”
“I need a beer,” Q complained.
“You know the way,” Fred advised. “I’m going to go see to the entertainment.” He waved over his shoulder as he trudged up the trail to the house to order up the party favors.
Q and I made our way onto The Star which, unlike the MP, was all industrial on the outside. She had a tall superstructure and high nose for plowing through heavy seas. Amidships and aft were removable panels to accommodate a variety of cranes, hoists and lifting mechanisms, none of which were installed unless we needed them. With the right rigging The Salvage Star could be mistaken for a fishing vessel and, more than once, we dressed her up to play that part. Even cleaned up and rigged for cruising The Star still looked like the rough and tumble working girl she was.
We stepped aboard and descended to the lower decks, which were nothing like the rest of the ship. While outside The Star was all metal and rough edges, the inside was appointed for the comfort of people who had to spend weeks and months at a time at sea. The main salon was fitted with a big screen TV and entertainment system and the carpeted in interior contained a variety of couches and moveable furniture that could be rearranged to fit the occasion. Forward, beyond the salon, were a series of staterooms and more crew quarters. The galley was located in the lower decks forward. Directly underneath the salon The Star had the most sophisticated self-contained machine shop that ever floated. Customizations to the gear or ship could be fabricated and installed in a matter of hours. Under the shop was the command center, from which we ran all the ocean going salvage operations.
The salon featured a double-size industrialized refrigerator which today was stocked with beer, but during salvage operations alcohol was not allowed on board. Q pulled two long necks and popped the tops.
“Cheers,” he said handing me one.
“Saluda!”
Q drained half the bottle in one gulp. “Goddamn that tastes good!” He punctuated the comment with a loud belch.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said heading for the forward staterooms. We had spare clothes stashed on all our boats and I needed to change.
“Shit, me too,” Q said, falling in behind me.
Thirty minutes later we were back in the salon, shaved and refreshed. A couple fresh beers and we were feeling fine. Ten minutes later the security system beeped Fred’s return, the video system automatically switching over to scan the new arrival. A few minutes later Fred came in trailed by the finest pussy $1,500 an hour would buy and this group of four was particularly spectacular.
Like everything else Fred did the girls would have been pre-screened. On the menu were one petite blond, a tall redhead who caught Q’s attention, a dark haired gal who could have been Hispanic or Italian and a girl of oriental descent who appeared to have some Pacific Islander blood. It was a truly impressive lineup.
The blond carried two bottles of Patron, while two of the others had bottles of Maker’s Mark. It was going to be one of those nights. I know the active ingredient is exactly the same but somehow it seems different with tequila, which makes people crazy.
“Party time!” Fred announced, producing a flat black stash box. He popped to lid to display a collection of condoms, cocaine and impossibly thin joints. Given his history as a smuggler and careful person it was no surprise that Fred’s weed was legendary. There was a rumor he had it grown to specifications on a farm in South America. What was a fact was the Fred used the GC mass spectrometer to do his own QA on weed shipments. Better living through science.
The girls made themselves at home setting up an impromptu bar in the kitchen and started pouring a round of shots.
“Okay, I’ll leave you all to it,” Fred said, depositing the black box on the coffee table.
“Why don’t you hang, Fred,” I suggested. Fred stayed out of jail mostly by staying clear of the product he delivered, but once in a while he would partake. He looked surprised.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Q agreed. “Light one up.”
“We’re not going anywhere tonight, Fred,” I explai
ned. “Deek’s on furlough, V’s covering from the beta site. How often do you get a chance to light up with the boss?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” he smiled, extracting one of the thin joints and lighting it.
“Here we are,” the short blond wheeled in with a tray of shots. The other girls arranged themselves around the couches and started pouring Makers and cutting up lines on a small mirror. The redhead settled in next to Q.
“What do I call you?” The blond asked.
“The Fat Man,” I replied.
“You should be fatter with a name like that,” she observed, slamming back a shot of Patron without batting an eye.
“And what do I call you?” I asked in return.
She introduced herself as Heather and then went around introducing the rest of the girls with what were certainly fake names.
“So, Heather, let me guess…nursing student.”
Her eyes flashed startled recognition before professional detachment reasserted itself. “Do you need a checkup?” she joked. The other girls laughed.
“You’re also not doing this for the money, which is really interesting,” I went on, smiling. “Your parents are pretty well off, maybe not house-in-the-Hamptons rich, but doing pretty well.”
The smile never dimmed and she didn’t flinch this time. “You want to pay me to talk about my parents?” she asked, letting a little more Manhattan creep into her accent.
“Dad’s in…” I mulled the possibilities for a moment. “...a car dealership,” I guessed.
“I don’t know how you’re doing this,” she said turning serious. “Did you tell him?” she directed that question at Fred.
He held up his hands. “Not a word,” he protested. “It’s just what he does.”
“Annoying as fuck,” Q added.
“Like a psychic,” the Asian girl chimed in. “How interesting! Tell us more about Heather,” she challenged.
“It’ll be fun,” the dark haired one echoed.
“You don’t want to do that,” Q cautioned.
“Don’t be chicken,” the Asian gal taunted Heather.
The Rogue Horse Recovery: Book One of the Recovery and Marine Salvage Inc Series (Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc.) Page 5