by Tom Corcoran
“Do we have time for a short cruise up Sugarloaf Creek?” I said.
Turk eased his steering wheel to starboard. He’d led me to think he knew more about Sam’s caper than I did. He certainly understood my curiosity.
“Can we head back?” said Marnie. “My piece on Jerry Hammond’s murder hits this morning. I need to be in the office for feedback calls.”
“This man, Mister Alex, has a fine idea,” said Turk. “The first part of this tour was sponsored by Ms. Dunwoody. The second and final segment will be hosted by the world-famous photographer.”
“What birds will we see on this daybreak excursion?” I said.
“Maybe a fish hawk, an osprey,” said Turk. “Perhaps the odd cormorant. If we venture close to Sugarloaf Shores, we might see a fluffy-titted skinny-dipper.”
“Quit screwing with me,” said Marnie.
“Why do you think they let us go so quickly?” I said.
“I’m a reporter.”
“That helped,” I said, “but they were looking for lumps. We were a wrinkle.”
“Can we go with facts instead of imagery?” she said.
“Some file on their computer gave us a free pass. One of our names or Turk’s hull number… something waved a green flag. With their clout, they may have confirmed on the spot that you used a credit card at the Circle K. Once they decided we hadn’t crossed the straits, they lost interest.”
“Or they got redirected,” said Turk. “They left here fast on a single heading. That team on the beach found the real boat that departed Cuba. This won’t add an hour to getting back to Tamarac Park.”
“Does this detour relate to our reason for coming out here?”
“The ninjas pretended not to know about the sunken boat,” I said. “We came out here to draw attention. The swamped boat was meant to do the same. We weren’t the right flies.”
“And this creek we’re exploring leads to Bay Point?” she said. “Is the sunken boat connected to that fiasco on Sunday?”
“It crossed my mind, and I think Turk’s, too.”
“Does any of this intrigue lead us to Sam? Or help him out?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But we’re here. There’s not much else to do at this hour, and it’s all we’ve got.”
Marnie recognized her own words, bit her lip and nodded. “All right,” she said. She made a grand “Onward” gesture and moved sideways for a better grasp on the console.
Turk asked me to kneel on the bow to watch for coral heads, then brought Flats Broke to planing speed. With a freshening wind on our starboard quarter, it took five minutes to cover not quite three miles to Lower Sugarloaf. With shallows in sight, Turk dropped speed, raised his prop and let momentum carry us inshore.
At the inlet, with little headway in eighteen inches of water, I slid off the boat, held us in place, and looked around for prop scars in the grassy shallows. I saw old scrape marks but no torn grass, nothing recent. If Sam had taken this channel to duck a chase, he had done a clean job of it.
“How far north is open bay water?” I said.
Turk shrugged. “Couple hundred yards, if that.”
“Is there more than one way to cut through here?”
“Yes and no, depending on silt build-up,” he said. “Storms blow it open but quiet weather shuts it down. The locals know the way through.” He pointed to our right then swung his arm to the left. “They also know the shortcut to Bay Point, off that way, and know when to use it. A kayak would love it, but not this boat with the sun low and the creek in shadows. We’ll go the deep route.”
I pointed at a white one-by-four slat that stuck maybe fifteen inches above the water’s surface. “What the hell? Is that supposed to mark the funky channel?”
Turk said, “I don’t remember a post in here.”
I let the boat drift and wandered up the shallow cut. “Seems like a confusion factor, and a dangerous one,” I said. “Some innocent newbie could mistake it for the safe way to go. Maybe I should yank it out and toss it into the mangroves.”
“Leave it,” said Turk. “Somebody put it there for a reason. You might cause more trouble than you think you’re saving.”
I wiggled the one-by-four. It was jammed tightly into the sandy bottom. I left it alone, waded back to Flats Broke and rolled onto the bow.
The next twenty minutes offered us nothing. Turk knew the perimeter channel, zig-zagged expertly around the open bay south of US 1. We motored to Sugarloaf Shores, made a long, slow S-turn then ran westward parallel to the road. He pulled power to go southward, seventy-five feet off the east shore of Bay Point. We passed a vacant, storm-shuttered home that stood out oddly among the show places along the waterfront. It looked especially weird because of signs of recent activity on the seawall. Scrape marks, a small, fresh oval fender left hanging on new-looking yellow nylon line.
Turk and I exchanged glances, shared the thought that Sam’s friend Cliff Brock and Sally Catherman had died there or were killed elsewhere, perhaps not far away, and were found in that yard. Then I recognized the place as a crime scene I had observed sixteen months earlier. A man had been hung on his boat lift davit, murdered because he knew too much about other murders.
The dropping tide and tough visibility into the sun forced Turk to take a circuitous route back to the creek. We approached its northern mouth this time from the west. At that angle, from my side of the boat, the bay bottom gouges were easy to spot. In recent days a single-engine speedboat, such as Sam’s Maverick, had barged through the creek, gone toward Sugarloaf Shores, then angled west. Turk saw me checking the scrape marks and slowed to look but kept quiet.
“Have you two accomplished what you wanted?” said Marnie. “I think that coffee went to yesterday instead of today. I have to piss bad and I’m getting a caffeine withdrawal headache and my hurry didn’t disappear.”
Running south, pushed by the outbound tide, Turk fought to maintain steerage. “We’re almost there,” he said.
We swatted aside low branches as the skiff snaked down the creek. I wouldn’t admit it to either of them, but I felt more hungry than enlightened. I had learned only that Sam, if in fact he’d come this way at speed, had all-American balls, size large.
“I feel like the cheese in a mangrove sandwich,” I said.
“You’re on my boat,” said Turk. “What’s to worry?”
“Just about everything,” said Marnie, looking away from both of us. “Can we tie up to a tree and talk a minute?”
Turk looked at the back of her head, his expression stating plainly that women fall back too easily on emotion. He pulled his shifter out of gear, reached outward, caught a branch and let the boat drift against the mangrove roots. No one spoke at first. We sat listening a few moments to wave slosh and bird calls.
“Starting now,” said Marnie, “I want to stop feeling like a three-year-old being dragged around a county fair.” She gave me a hard stare, turned to do the same to Turk. “You two have been holding out on me. I don’t deserve this.”
I felt her stare return to me. I fixed my eyes on the boat bottom. She had every reason to be pissed off. We’d held out on her, on Sam’s request.
“You think I can’t handle the truth?” she said. “Where the fuck is Sam? What’s going on in Monroe County that has law enforcement agencies locked in their own handcuffs? Why did a boatload of tooled-up feds become our long-lost pals? Why do we know lots of shit, but we don’t know the reason for all of this?”
Neither of us responded. I peered over the side and watched a barracuda drift with the current.
“Okay, I admit,” she said, “it was my idea to come out here, at least to Hawk Channel. And if that swamped boat was really found, which I now question, I still believe that Sam left it there.”
“You through?” said Turk.
Give her credit, I thought. No one else had suggested that the sunken boat was raw fiction. All pressures aside, I had to admit something, too. The possibility that she would go to press
with anything to injure Sam was miniscule.
“Why this creek?” said Marnie.
I said nothing.
“There must be some reason why your idea was pure genius. Did you get a tip through the grapevine, or what?”
I raised my shoulder. I shouldn’t have moved a muscle. Having been a reporter for years, she was expert at reading body language. My slight movement had rung a warning bell.
“Okay, Marvin Gaye, you heard what through the grapevine?” she said. “Don’t shut up on my account.”
I looked over her shoulder. Turk shook his head, warned me off. But he was too late. “Someone we know got chased by a boat,” I said.
“Go ahead, say the name ‘Sam.’”
“It was similar to the black one we just saw thirty minutes ago. His local knowledge saved his ass. I’m not sure exactly where…”
“Chased, Alex? Are the pieces coming together now? Did the elusive ‘they’ have him coming out of Varadero by chance? Is that what he’s been up to? Is my man a smuggler?”
There must have been a hundred ways to dig myself in deeper. I couldn’t think of a single word to save my ass.
“You bastard,” she said. “You talked to him, didn’t you? That’s why you were so sure he didn’t have a girlfriend, that everything would be all right.”
I had no answer. Even my silence was a lie.
“You make me wish that man had kneed you in the balls. I’d try it right now if I didn’t think I’d fall overboard.”
Turk kept quiet. His tactic worked, though his guilt matched mine. She ignored him and stayed focused on me. No words. Just daggers. From a woman who, for a time, had kept up her black belt status in karate.
“The only thing you don’t know,” I said, “is that he was taking things into Cuba, not away from there. He was working with some do-good doctors, delivering drugs to legitimate doctors down there.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “He makes damn good money chartering. He lives to fish. They couldn’t pay him enough to risk it all.”
“My impression is they paid for his gas. That’s it.”
“So it’s community service in Castroland?”
“Sums it up,” I said. “Except something got screwy Sunday night. I got the impression that he didn’t expect to be intercepted. He got away by running through a creek. It could have been this one, it could have been any other cut between the mangroves from Key West to Bahia Honda.”
“Well, fuck,” she said. “Are the do-gooders local?”
I shook my head. “One of them is here in town, somewhere. He’s a surgeon from Georgia and he’s worried just like us. Everybody’s waiting for another shoe to drop. I’m just afraid it’ll be five shoes at once.”
Marnie ran out of questions. She turned to look at Turk. He faced her eye-to-eye, stonefaced, a bit sheepish and, I could tell, not convinced that I’d done the right thing in telling her all. Or almost all.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “I hear my office phone ringing.”
The day had begun for the rest of the Lower Keys. Nearer Geiger we could see highway traffic, the inbound rush hour from Cudjoe and Summerland and Ramrod suburbia, the day’s first tourists who had made it only to Key Largo from their late evening landings in Miami. Now we were navigating under the plane traffic, take-offs from Boca Chica, arrivals to Key West International’s landing pattern.
I tried to think again about what we had learned, if anything, and what I had done. It added to zip except for jamming a white marker stake next to a shallow channel. Perhaps it might make a small difference, misguide a non-local, provide an advantage for Sam the next time he had to evade pursuers, if there was ever a next time.
We returned to Tamarac Park each in our own world. One more quiet period in our collection of silences. After we entered the canal, I readied the fenders to protect Turk’s gunwales when Marnie and I climbed from the boat.
Alongside the seawall, Turk said, “Marnie, please take Alex home and meet me at the Bight. I’ll need to come back here to get my truck. We can stop at your office if you need to pick up messages.”
“Thank you for making the trip, Turk.”
I was sure she meant it, though her voice sounded stiff.
The dropping tide put us a foot lower than when we’d left. Marnie went first. I gave her bottom a chaste flat-hand boost up the wall then handed the fender lines to Turk.
Under his breath he said, “The weapon that dude was holding? A Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifle with the ten-inch barrel. Very high end. The fucker weighs less than seven pounds. Even cops can’t get them. It’s Delta Force-level stuff.”
I must have looked puzzled by his sudden expertise.
He shrugged. “I read magazines. Keeps me out of the bars at night.”
I grabbed a cleat on top of the wall and hauled myself up. Turk drifted several yards while he re-stashed the fenders, then chunked Flats Broke into gear and headed back out the canal.
“You’re stuck with me,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I can disable the passenger-side air bag. Shit, I don’t have one, but don’t worry. I’ll aim for a soft tree. Wait in my car while I urinate behind those bushes. It should only take me about six minutes.”
Another silence. No further discussion for eight or nine miles.
Driving down Palm Avenue, a quarter-mile from my house, Marnie said, “I’m sorry for screaming and whining. Whatever Sam’s doing isn’t your fault. It’s his decision, his ass and my heart, and you’re the bystander who was ordered to keep me sheltered. I don’t know what I’d be doing without you. You wanted to be straight with Sam and straight with me and you were caught in…”
“Quicksand?” I said.
“I was thinking something more septic, but okay. After I shuttle Turk back to Tamarac, I’m going to blow off my job and go home to sleep for eighteen hours.”
“I want you to be careful. Be aware of your surroundings.”
“That’s my job description, Alex. Are you saying I might be in danger?”
“Just pay extra attention. Consider the chance that your knowledge or your sources could make you a liability. Don’t assume you’re always safe.”
“Thank you for thinking of me. I will now transfer your debt.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll kick Sam in the nuts. If you see him, tell him not to wake me if he comes in late.”
“Right.”
“Wrong,” she said. “I’m starting to get hysterical.”
A note was wedged into my screen door. My first thought was that Bobbi Lewis had come by to make nice. In the past year she had left me humorous, often risqué notes in that same place. But that wasn’t it. On an unused Harper’s subscription card: “Call or come by.” No signature, but I knew the scrawl. Duffy Lee Hall would not have visited if he hadn’t dug up some background info.
I got his answering service. I said, “Call my cell, please,” and hung up.
Someone, either Beth or Carmen, had left the front section of the Citizen on my porch table. I dropped my shades, small camera and boating essentials next to the paper, went inside and started a strong pot of Cuban. Too tired to change out of my salt-stiff clothing, I returned to the porch to read Marnie’s front-page Hammond story. A quick scan found, to my relief, no mention of Carmen and only one quote from Beth. I had every intention of finishing the article, drinking all of the coffee, trying again to reach Duffy Lee. Maybe checking off ten other things on my list.
I woke from a dream in which a man was knocking at the screen door. I figured it was Bob Catherman with a get-rich-quick offer, but it was Bobbi Lewis’s lover, Marv, whom I didn’t know.
Like the ringing phone in a dream that’s the real phone next to the couch, there really was a man at the door. I didn’t know him either. He didn’t look like a vinyl siding salesman, religion peddler or real estate broker. Then I broke out of my dream fog and saw the Dodge Charger parked in the lane.
“Hello, Marv.”
“Yep, Bobbi said she blew my cover. Got a minute?”
“Last name?” I said.
“Fixler. You won’t remember and you won’t have to.”
Marv Fixler looked like a military man in civilian clothing. A plaid short-sleeve shirt with only the top button undone, once-washed, creased Levi’s, a close-cropped crewcut, bulky forearms. You would call him “medium-build” and admit that you’d hate to tangle. He appeared capable of defending himself, perhaps in surprising, unorthodox ways.
“Look,” I said. “If this is about my relationship with Detective Lewis, you need to know…”
“It’s not about that,” he said. “I don’t want to punch you in the nose or compare dick length. I came here for the open exchange of words and ideas.”
“That’s wonderful, Marv. Come on in. I may not be at the top of my intellectual game this morning. I didn’t get a healthy night’s rest.”
He pointed at the Ziploc full of nautical gear, the bosun’s knife and whistle in plain sight. “Been out night-fishing?”
“Helping a friend look for her dog,” I said. “Contingency planning always pays off. What’s up?”
Now inside the porch, looking part paratrooper, part thug, Marv stood with his boots just far enough apart to be ready for anything. Real cowboy boots, rare as snowshoes in the Florida Keys. He had the eyes of a Boy Scout, the sneer of a street punk. Old damage to his nose suggested real rumbles, not just sparring. His left ear was much larger than the right one.
“Mr. Rutledge, you’ve come recommended by the Monroe County Sheriff.”
“Why do I need a reference? Which law enforcement mob do you work for?”
“I’m not at liberty to say right yet.”
“It’s a free country, Mr. Fixler. You can say anything, and I can say nothing. If you don’t tell me who you work for, I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Yep, you look distracted,” he said. “What’s on your mind this very moment?”
“How do hydrophones work, triangulation?”
Fixler shook his head. “Ancient technology. You know how to dig a foxhole?”