Caribbean Rim

by Randy Wayne White

  Tito had offered, but couldn’t promise, thirty minutes, maybe longer, before his guys allowed Donner and the others to return.

  Ford noted items he normally would have searched: a leather medical bag, a briefcase, an electronics suite, and—most tempting of all—a chart plotter. But he continued down the steps to the aft master cabin, where the AC was on high. His dive mask began to fog. He tilted it to his forehead and used a light with a red filter that confirmed Efren Donner preferred a very different assortment of masks. All kinds—plastic and feathers, and a tribal-looking African mask with straw hair.

  The boy was in the crew quarters, a closet-sized room, on a lower bunk. Ford had to take a calming breath because of what he saw. When he scooped the child up, he whispered, “Your grandfather’s waiting.”

  The boy fidgeted as if in a dream and slurred, “Sir, you be jumbey-fucked if he not.”

  Three life jackets, tandem-lashed, carried them out to sea.

  21

  Efren Donner knew he was in trouble when the guy he’d been dealing with, the generalissimo’s majordomo, asked, “If we’ve got her, why do we need you?” Meaning Lydia, which was okay, but why so snotty about it?

  Donner knew. He’d used variations on the same line to stiff street dudes or some gofer who’d hustled his ass off organizing a project but who didn’t have the brains to protect his assets before pitching the idea.

  “Not bad,” Donner would say. “But if the talent’s already on board, why do I need you?”

  That simple. Clean, like a knife.

  Wannabe actors didn’t care about a friend or mentor or butt buddy who got dumped along the way. Like a flock of crows, casualties went unnoticed. Sign the contract or there’s the door. Better yet, the couch. Verbal pitches, titles, log lines were not copyrightable. So send a one-paragraph treatise, registered mail, to an attorney before the dumbass street dude tried to get smart.

  “Theft of intellectual property,” the contingency bar hacks would claim.

  No, it was Hollywood—New York or Miami Beach. Atlanta was moving up, too. That’s the way the business worked, which, he hoped, was his ace in the hole.

  A patio outside the main house, with tiki torches, is where Donner gave the generalissimo’s guy a hard-on stare and replied, “You don’t need me, fine. Good luck peddling bananas while I shoot my next movie in Nicaragua. Honduras, maybe—those people hate your country, from what I hear.” Which didn’t play well, so he added, “Not that I wouldn’t be disappointed. I thought we had a deal.”

  The guy, a twenty-some-year-old colonel wearing medals and a uniform straight out of The Birdcage, said, “You speaking to these certain parties without our permission?”

  “No. Strictly hypothetical.”

  “What does this hypothetical mean?”

  Christ, he had to explain that to a man authorized to carry a fancy pistol but who spoke English like a pimple-faced teen.

  “Let me ask you, Señor Donner, what is the importance of”—a notebook had to be consulted—“Dr. Leonard Nickelby? Is he Ms. Johnson’s, how you say, experto for the salvage?”

  Off on a totally different tangent. Patience was required. “Nickelby doesn’t know shit. And he’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Of no use, in other words?”

  “Exactly in those words,” Donner replied. “Back to what I was saying. You guys brought me to the dance, which is why I haven’t spoken to anyone else. Why would I?”

  “Honduras, señor, did you know they once started a war because of a soccer match?”

  “Total right-wing assholes, I agree. Anyway, I’m so impressed by you, your people, the generalissimo’s commitment to creating a first-rate film industry, that I already have backers for a project. Two hundred million. Tropical jungle, the world’s most beautiful stretch of beach—that’s the setting. I have to shoot it somewhere. And shitty as Honduras probably is, if they appreciate what a man like me can bring to the table—”

  “You promised us four hundred million,” the colonel interrupted. “Instead, you show up with nothing. Only trouble. First the police. Next, possibly, the Coast Guard.” No eye contact. The man was too busy texting on his phone.

  Donner felt his stomach knot—the descent, with no coke handy as a backup. “I already explained that. Look, you want the truth? I came here uninvited because I picked up a local kid, he’s hurt bad. So sue me for trying to help a little boy instead of leaving him out there to drown.”

  “You saved a child?”

  “Yes! That’s why I need to get back to my boat. What you don’t seem to understand is, I actually care about you people . . . I mean, all people who’ve gotten the shitty end of the stick. Equality is what I’m all about, man.”

  The colonel stared while speaking Spanish into a handheld radio, then said in English, “We’ll see.”

  He got up and went through sliding glass doors into a room filled with smoke and salsa music. A few minutes later, came out, just close enough to say, “Embustero,” smiling, not angry.

  Donner took it as a compliment. So wasn’t prepared when the colonel added, “There is no boy.”

  “What?”

  “My men checked.”

  “But . . . he has to be there.”

  “No, señor,” the twenty-some-year-old colonel said, cold-eyed, done with the subject. “I suggest you return to your vessel and see for yourself. What is the expression in Hollywood? ‘Don’t call us until we call you’?”

  Kiss my ass, is what he wanted to say, but not here, not alone in a compound that was fenced, security ninjas stationed along a downhill path to the dock. That was scary in itself. Had the punk colonel sent a text to one of them?

  Donner paused at the top of the path, where lights were strung to show the way, then decided it was safer to do the unexpected. Cross-country, he set off through the trees and down a rutted incline. A view of the water guided him until he came to a mountain of junk—the island garbage dump. A service road angled toward what seemed the right direction, but, goddamn, was it dark, like a tunnel roofed with leaves.

  He turned anyway, walking faster, almost jogging . . . then stopped. Blocking his exit was a man. His silhouette shiny, as if clothed in plastic, and carrying something long like a machete.

  “How’s it going, Efren?”

  The voice was unfamiliar or distorted by a sudden roaring in the film producer’s ears, like on the island three weeks ago when he’d been so goddamn scared that he’d run from an imaginary killer who might not have been imaginary.

  “Phil?” he called. “That you, ol’ buddy?”

  The silhouette responded, “Phillipé to you, asshole,” then had the fun of asking, “Now who sucks?” after he’d sprinted in pursuit and caught Donner from behind.

  * * *

  —

  Leonard said to Lydia, “Is that a coyote howling?”

  All she knew or cared about was that the guard outside their door had jogged toward the distant sounds, joined by two others, their gun belts glistening as they crossed the patio where the tiki torches blazed.

  “Come on, let me help you,” she said. “We might not get another chance.”

  “I’m not a cripple,” he responded, and did pretty well keeping up until they were almost to the dock. “Damn headache.” He stood hunched over and touched his temple. “Just a little dizzy, that’s all. I wonder where Efren is?”

  Lydia listened to the silence. It had been silent for a while. She noted the dock, an empty chair, usually occupied, and an ashtray, where a cigarette smoldered. “Honey, they’ll be back soon. You can lie down when we’re aboard.”

  Leonard said, “You’re right. Fuck Efren,” and helped her push the dinghy into water deep enough to start the engine.

  “The boy . . . I hope he’s okay.”

  Lydia said, “Keep your head down, Leo. They have guns
. Get ready with that line.”

  The air, the stars, the wash of waves outside the channel, descended like a weight during the minutes it took to land the dinghy and ready a yacht that was not theirs. The weight was fear. A tangible pressure every moment she was topside, her body visible, an easy target from shore. The forward anchor chock had to be cleared by hand. There wasn’t time to hoist the dinghy aboard. It would have to be left behind, but the cradle had to be secured or waves would turn it into a wrecking ball.

  Back and forth she went, then, finally, at the main controls, started the twin diesels and flipped the anchor retrieval switch. As the winch tractored the boat forward, Leonard hollered from below, “We can’t leave yet. Shut it off, shut it off!”

  Lights on the dock were commercial-grade, mustard yellow. Three men were there. One waved frantically in a threatening way.

  Lydia’s hand was poised above the ignition keys but she decided no, it was too late. She called, “I can’t. What’s wrong?”

  “He’s gone . . . goddamn it, the boy’s gone. Someone took him.” Leonard came up the stairs in a rush—a hunchback, half his face bloated in the shadows—and nearly fell when the anchor popped free. The hull jolted when she put the engines in neutral, and a breeze pushed them toward rocks at the channel’s edge. “Shit,” Leonard said, meaning the men, not the rocks. “I don’t care. We can’t leave him.”

  Lydia warned, “Grab something,” and throttled forward enough to keep them off the shoals. The boat swung. A starboard window panned the dock, where one man was climbing into the dinghy she’d set free. Another had a rifle trained on them while the third spoke into a radio. “Leo, we have to go.”

  “Not until I get my goddamn—”

  Engine noise blotted out the rest when she again jammed the levers forward. The sudden thrust lifted the bow, blocking her view, while the deck tilted aft. She heard the banging of a door and looked back to see Leonard outside the cabin on his knees like he’d been thrown there. The only way to level off was to increase speed. She did, yelling, “Hold on.”

  A boat the length of a semi responds like a plane during takeoff. For long, sickening seconds, her view was of stars and an anchor pulpit that gradually descended to reveal a line of unlit markers. They were in the channel, at least, but still a few hundred yards from a hedge of charcoal trees that might shield them from the dock. A quarter mile beyond was Dolphin Head, the rocky point where the compound sat elevated above the sea.

  Behind her, Leonard yelled something. Yelled again, only the words following us decipherable. She glanced to see him exiting the engine hold with a weapon he’d hidden earlier—the antique sword. It was in response to what was behind them: the dinghy closing fast in their wake. At the tiller, the driver stood holding a bowline for balance as if waterskiing.

  The image of a Jet Ski chasing a slow truck came to mind. But what could the guard do, should they refuse to stop?

  The answer was still visible on the dock, where a rifle tracked their escape. The rifle fired twice. Seaworthy windows are double-paned, yet glass exploded into the cabin. A third shot shattered the window to her right.

  Lydia screamed, “Leo, please get down,” and buried the throttles. For a time, she steered by memory. When a blur of mangroves swept past, it seemed safe to stand—but too late to react to a marker that should have been portside, not starboard. The hull bucked when it hit bottom. She was thrown forward but clung to the wheel and turned sharply, which freed one spinning prop to plow toward the channel.

  The sudden deceleration surprised the man in the dinghy behind them. At night, a black hull blends with the horizon. He tried to swerve, but not in time. A second impact knocked Lydia from her seat and showered the boat with a chaos of vague shapes, sounds, and water.

  Where were the damn light switches? Calling, “Leo . . . Leo, are you okay?” she shifted to neutral and began flipping toggles near the wheel.

  Leonard responded, “Don’t do it, I’m warning you right now,” like he was speaking to a third person.

  Finally, the right switch. The aft deck was illuminated, yet it took a moment to process what she saw. The rubber boat hung from a railing where its outboard had snagged after skipping over the transom. Standing against the transom was a man wearing a cheap plastic rain slicker over slacks and a turtleneck. He was dazed and bleeding from the nose but still powerful enough to swing a saw-toothed machete—and he did, making a slashing lunge at Leonard, then grabbed the transom as if waiting for his head to clear.

  “Don’t make me do this,” Leonard yelled, then had to back away when the man lunged again—a man with a bizarre tattoo on his wrist, Lydia noticed for the first time.

  It was not Prof. Nickelby who turned to her with an antique saber at ready. And the man she’d fallen in love with would not have ordered, “Turn out that goddamn light. I’ve had enough.”

  But Lydia had changed, too.

  “Leave him there and hang on,” she called. “Maybe you won’t have to.”

  At the controls, she killed the lights and plowed a span of shallows before jettisoning the dinghy with a burst of twin throttles. Maybe the man, too.

  It was a detail that, even later, Capt. León thought too dangerous to discuss.

  When they cleared the channel, the weight of what they had done descended. Murder, a stolen boat scarred by violence and blood—and a missing child that had to be explained.

  “Let’s get rid of these right now,” she said, and tossed Efren Donner’s goodie bag overboard. “He’ll blame us for everything, Leo, you know that. Those men will never stop looking for us.”

  “Not just them,” he said. “The feds will try to nail you for what Jimmy Jones did just on Donner’s say-so. I know how those stiffs think, and they’ve got nothing better to do.”

  He would’ve done the same in a previous life.

  The list of felonies they might be charged with grew as stars rotated on the horizon. Marl Landing was still an hour away, according to the GPS, when Lydia decided, “We can never go back, you know.”

  Leonard, cleaning his saber with a towel, replied, “Why would we?”

  22

  When Celeste, a Cat Island dive master in training, asked Tomlinson if he’d ever experienced feelings of love underwater, she was puzzled by his answer, which was, “Do you mean with a partner?”

  “Say what?”

  He repeated the question.

  “Are you talkin about . . . ?”

  He nodded.

  The girl was still confused. “What other way can it be, unless you’re one of them that prefers . . .” She paused and dismissed the notion as absurd—the man was too obviously, yet charmingly, a lover of women.

  “As in, with another person,” he explained. “When you’ve logged as much bottom time as me, decompression stops can get freaky. Occasionally, you have to, you know, let your mind soar and take matters into your own hands.”

  “There’s something I haven’t tried.” She smiled. “But I’m willing to . . . Whatever it is you’re talking about . . . Don’t that sun feel hot on your shoulders? Man, I can feel it down my spine.”

  She stretched, yawned, and listened to the boney American hipster reply, “For sure, like sticking one’s fun receptors into a light socket. Back when I was a boy, I pissed on an electric fence. Changed my whole outlook on life. Yeah, you should definitely give it a try.”

  “Say what? Where I’m gonna find a fence ’round here that’s—”

  “No, getting off while you’re decompressing.”

  “Does that mean . . . ?”

  “Hope so. It’s all about maintaining sanity during periods of solitude. See, I’ve got this pal who’s constantly going off, leaving me in the lurch. Underwater, on land, I can’t tell you how many countries. Like now.” He had to look around to get his bearings. They were anchored inside a reef south of Andros, close en
ough to glimpse Cat Island if he were to climb the mast of the 42-foot sailboat he’d chartered out of Fernandez Bay near the airport. “He’s somewhere up the rim looking for the guy I told you about—after ordering me back to the States like I’m some flunky.”

  “Your friend that’s looking for the treasure hunting thief?” she said.

  “Straightest dude you can imagine, most of his life.”

  “Your friend?”

  “The thief. An office drone—until he disappeared. But let’s not get into that. As far as my friend’s concerned, I could be slobbering drunk in some godforsaken South Beach bar.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Drunk? Nope, only a couple of beers. That reminds me—” A tiny leather bag appeared from beneath his tank top.

  The woman scolded him, whispering, “We ain’t smokin’ no kef before a dive, crazy man. We’re not alone. And I’ve got to take this serious. But later, maybe?”

  Celeste gave the last part a saucy inflection. Standing on the forward deck, lean legs honey brown in a crimson thong, and a white T-shirt, its Jack Bay Dive Shop logo elevated by the angle of her breast. Pretty face, smile, and eyes that pierced the heart.

  The smile vanished when her instructor, Tamara Constance, came up the gangway carrying a clipboard and an extra regulator. “Why y’all talking instead of finishing the checklist?” she asked, frowning. Then removed some papers from the clipboard and found a pen. “You need to sign these. This is my dive spot, Celeste. Exclusive, which means once you get your ticket—if you graduate—you still have to call for permission. And no talking about what you saw down there. Understand?”

  “Yes, Ms. Constance.”

  “It’s Captain Constance in public,” the woman said, softening a bit. “Just Tamara will do out here.”

  She didn’t speak as gently when she got Tomlinson off by himself. “Marion was right about you. Don’t be messing with that young girl’s heart.”