by Robert Lane
Three out of ten. Thirty percent of US presidents from 1861 to 1897 were gunned down.
Jim Harrison, the article said, joined the CIA after its inception in 1947. There were no more articles referencing his professional life until a terse paragraph on his death. He died on a business trip in a “tragic plane crash.” Like a museum that wasn’t historical, I wondered if a plane crash could be anything else. There were no details. Jim just stopped appearing in the photographs.
That’s what death is—you no longer show up in pictures.
I flipped through a photo album, and even late in her life Dorothy rose up to greet me. She was tall and confident and held her trim shoulders erect. Her energy burned the photograph, its toast-brown Kodak corners curled. The alcove, her bedroom, had been transformed into a shrine to her. I read every word. I viewed every picture.
I thanked the docent and strolled around the outside of the building. In the back, several large stones lay dislodged on the ground. They left a sizeable cavity, but there was nothing else to see. Someone had attacked Dorothy Harrison’s house over twenty years after she died.
I left my rusted bike inside the white picket fence, walked across the street, and claimed the end of a bench that wasn’t covered with baked-on bird shit. Dorothy had moved here at the height of the cold war. What was chasing her? Who did she know? A horrific combination of words. Cold. War. It’s always the short ones that pack the punch. They slug way above their weight limit.
A turquoise convertible from a few decades past crept by at a speed that allowed me to count the rotation of the tires. An older man drove and a woman with large white sunglasses rode shotgun, and everything in the car shone bright and new with the sun. I left the park to the old men smoking cigars and playing chess with discarded newspapers off to the side. I pedaled back to my house. Key West, only a few days ago, was suddenly shelved with events far more distant in the past. Yet things from that distant past hung in my mind like yesterday.
Time, in many ways, is just another ugly four-letter word.
I like print. By touching paper I save myself from becoming a computer with two legs. Who wants to make love to that?
Mary Evelyn had sent the email encrypted U//FOUO, unclassified, for official use only. I printed the fourteen-page dossier on Escobar, brushed a gecko off my seat, and settled into one of the soft chairs on my screened porch. An osprey flew by with a sheepshead in its talons—you don’t see that very often. It was stupid hot. I got up, turned the ceiling fan on high, sat back down, and held the pages with both hands so the fan wouldn’t whip them away. I skipped around for the salient facts.
Raydel Escobar, age forty-three, wanted to give the US government, actually return to the government, a letter. A letter, our government believed, that was hidden in the exterior walls of the museum. In appreciation, he would like the IRS to stop pestering him. Escobar was seven million in arrears.
The letter was classified and I wasn’t cleared to know its contents. I was certainly cleared to risk my life to retrieve it. Escobar claimed it dropped on his lap—he had no hand in securing the letter—and while he would dearly love to simply hand it over, he could fathom no reason to do so as long as the IRS was crawling up his ass.
Escobar operated a successful carpeting and rug business and owned three Tampa gentlemen’s clubs. The Welcome In was his first club, and he kept them under a different corporate umbrella. Not enough there to be seven mill behind. He had participated in a land deal for a new interchange, and depending on his cost basis, he might have struck gold with that. Escobar was known to associate with Paulo Henriques, a building contractor from Palm Beach who miraculously escaped the ’08 meltdown. No way was he clean. Henriques was linked to Walter Mendis, a Palm Beach mobster. The FBI circled Mendis for years, but had never gotten him in their talons.
We caught a break when the contractor who built Escobar’s mansion, Stuart Shramos, in return for leniency with his own IRS difficulties—see, we do negotiate—supplied the blueprints and nonpublic commentary on Escobar’s compound. It was across the bay at the tip of Kathleen’s island.
Escobar’s twenty-four-by-thirty-foot study overlooked mangrove islands and the Gulf of Mexico. Its two-inch bulletproof glass faced west and was specifically designed to withstand UV radiation. Apparently bulletproof glass came with an SPF rating. In the eight-foot-wide hallway leading into the study, one of the walnut panels secretly doubled as a door that led to a safe room. The room was designed to hold his family and permanently house the security equipment. Shramos claimed that Escobar inquired if one layer of Kevlar built within the paneled door would be sufficient to deflect machine gun bullets. Shramos had informed Escobar that he had no experience with Kevlar or machine guns.
They put in two layers.
I couldn’t get excited about breaking into some Cuban’s bay front compound surrounded by hombres with itchy fingers who would have every right to unload on me. And there I am scrunching around for some envelope that could be anywhere; the bilge of his boat or behind a double Kevlar-reinforced wall. I wanted to get the lay of his property and then infiltrate his life. I already knew the ugly truth. We’d compose a COA—course of action—and by the end we’d wing it, hour by hour, minute by minute, until the split second when infinite divisibility disproved its theory. Garrett and I adhered to a simple dogma:
Operate at one level under your opponent.
An hour later I stepped around the end of the treated-wood fence by the sea wall that separated our properties, but not our lives, and entered Morgan’s house.
It was time to engage Raydel Escobar.
CHAPTER 4
“Let’s hook some trout,” I said.
Morgan sat on his porch with a tablet on his lap. He wore faded yellow swim trunks, a moon talisman around his neck, and nothing else. His sandy, frayed hair was tied in a ragged ponytail. Morgan never participated in a minute’s worth of exercise in his life, yet he carried not an ounce of fat on his bony frame. Hopping on and off boats, he claimed, was far better for your body—and mind—than any prescribed workout regime. A rotating fan in the corner behind him attached to a hose blew even more water molecules into the humid air.
“It’s early afternoon,” he said.
“Doesn’t that mist get on your pad?”
He closed the cover. “No. It hits me from behind.”
“I need to scout a house in shallow waters I’m not familiar with.”
“Not real fishing, right?”
Morgan knew I carried a Florida PI license and recovered stolen boats for insurance companies—that became public knowledge after two drug runners pulled a gun on me and bought the farm—or in this case, the Gulf—on a stolen Donzi about forty-eight nautical miles northwest of Key West. But after Garrett and I ambushed the posse of mob men, left the bodies on the sands of the state park, and then switched identities for Kathleen, he knew the boat business was a sidebar. Morgan was with us that night and was instrumental in finding Kathleen.
“I’ve got frozen shrimp on the boat and a few rods. It’s as legit as we need to be. Let’s go.”
Thirty minutes later, Morgan navigated my twenty-seven-foot Grady White center console, Impulse, around several mangrove islands to places I had never been to, although I could only marvel why. The flat surface, as still as the sky, reflected the mangroves, and mullet swam in the clear water above the sand and grass floor. He eased back on the throttle and Impulse drifted, with her twin Yamaha 250s raised, in about two feet of water. We were a few hours past low tide and had good enough water to get as close as we needed.
“This will do,” I said.
Morgan lowered the anchor into the water without the water even acknowledging its entry. I took a pole down from a gold rod holder, ran a hook into the bottom side of the shrimp, and cast a few times toward the mangroves.
The house towered above the flat land and presented a face of dark glass reflecting all it saw. I knew from the aerial photograph that it was the only
house on a cul-de-sac—Escobar had purchased the surrounding property to ensure his privacy. I placed my pole in a launcher and retrieved the Steiner marine binoculars from the radio box. I stood under the hardtop so I was partially blocked in the event someone was looking at me looking at them. There wasn’t much to see.
“Let’s take her around the mangroves for different angles,” I said.
I lifted the anchor, and for the next hour Morgan took the boat in and out of mangroves while I tinkered with my rod and viewed the house from different angles. A low chain link fence ran across the shoreline of the property. It was partially submerged, and I didn’t know what purpose it served in its present state. A stucco wall that matched the terra-cotta color of the house bordered both sides. It was tiered so that it was lower as it approached the water’s edge. I’d had enough and told him to head home.
He had a better idea and we ended up at Dockside, a waterfront tin roof shack that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in fifty years. We both ordered grouper salads with a dozen oysters on the side and iced tea. No booze. When I lived on Fort Myers Beach for a year, I kicked off my weekends on Monday morning and never looked back. I was lucky to escape. Now when I feel myself slipping, I place an old alarm clock—I bought it at a neighborhood garage sale—on my porch and set it to 5:00 p.m. No drinking until Tinker Bell, with her double silver bells on top, gives me the all clear. When Barbara, my ninety-something-year-old neighbor, inquired about the alarm, I spilled a full confession. She smiled and said it usually coincided with her second glass of wine and not to reset it any earlier. She didn’t want to be playing catch-up.
Morgan started each day with half a beer, and after that nothing alcoholic graced his lips until late afternoon.
“She had some quiet moments, you know,” he said as we sat on high wood stools facing the narrow channel. A weathered gray plank served as a table and a damp roll of paper towels sufficed for napkins. “I’m glad you insisted on Kathleen. Tough call to make when she was under, but she’s fine with it. Although I did like Maritana Rowe,” Morgan said.
“You never told me where you got that from.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Not going to, are you,” I said.
“You’re a bright guy.”
“And how did you know she’d like ‘Kathleen’?” Morgan asked.
“I didn’t.”
We were quiet, both of us comfortable with silence. A center console went by pushing the tide and a woman stretched out in the front exposed as much of her body as possible to the sun. The captain stood behind the wheel under the hardtop and wore a long sleeve shirt and a wide brimmed hat. I finished my salad and the oysters were gone, although I wished they weren’t. I was still hungry so I opened a pack of crackers, but the Florida humidity had beat me to them. We hadn’t discussed the events that preceded Key West—the four bodies left on the beach or the contents of his old red spinnaker bag. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t waiting for me.
“I know it got pretty ugly on the beach, but it’s not always like that. We really try to avoid—”
“Jake.” Morgan rarely interrupted people. “Never justify yourself to close friends and certainly not to yourself.”
I was often uncertain as to what my friend was talking about, and in such cases I’d learned to defer to him. I was trying to unlearn much of what I had been taught or assumed about life and was discovering that unlearning is a far more difficult task than learning. It takes a concentrated effort to realize the baggage you carry is largely the unnecessary byproduct from being dragged through society. Like a wet dog, you need to shake it all off. Morgan carried no such baggage and personified Twain’s adage to never let schooling interfere with your education.
Morgan and his sister were raised and homeschooled aboard a forty-four-foot Morgan charter sailboat. His father wanted to christen him “Jib” and his mother insisted on “Winston.” The issue was never resolved. His sister got “Catalina” and still ran the business. Morgan and Catalina didn’t know their own ages. Their parents didn’t want them, especially at the bookends of life, to be burdened with the expectations and then the limitations that numbers imply. They were permitted to leave their vessel, Solar Wind, and venture into the world only after they read one hundred books selected by their parents. But there were gaps in his resume that one can naturally expect after cruising the Caribbean for decades.
His uncommon calmness under fire that night on the beach warranted its own set of questions.
I took a sip of iced tea and said, “I didn’t see enough today to really help me.”
“I figured as much.”
“I’d like to see it at night.”
“My favorite time to be on the water.”
“I thought around nine would be a good time.”
“Eleven thirty will be better. The moon sets at 10:13, and high tide is 11:08. A dark night and high water.” Morgan measured time by the synodic month, or moon phases, and was acutely aware of the position of the earth’s sole satellite and the largely unheeded effect it cast over all living things.
“Meet you at the dock at eleven?” I asked.
“Looking forward to it. After being on the water the last two weeks, I was feeling a little down today. My natural state is to float.”
“It was sweet,” I said as I drained my iced tea. I allowed a couple pieces of ice to slide into my mouth.
Morgan said, “Every man has a part of him that wishes he lived in Key West.”
“Or is Key West a part of every man?” I countered as I split the ice and heard it crack.
I picked up the tab, and we untied Impulse and headed around the corner, past the big white Contender with the blue bottom and a single blue canvas that covered her twin outboards, and back to my lift.
We headed out at eleven o’clock, but with no guise toward fishing.
I brought along my night goggles, wore a black warm water wet suit, and painted my face with liquid latex black paint. My five-inch serrated knife was strapped to my left thigh. I wore Vibram FiveFingers water shoes. Morgan cut the engine well before sight of the house, and we poled our way up tight against the mangroves. He again slipped the anchor soundlessly into the shallow sand, and I slipped over the starboard freeboard—into two feet of water.
I crept to the corner of the property where the low chain link fence that bordered the front of the property stopped and settled next to mangroves. Rhizophora mangle are pretty from a distance, but their root structure makes it nearly impossible to get up under them. Plus, they stink. Birds use them for a crap house. My feet were on solid ground, although my right foot rested on a root. In front of me was the terra-cotta stucco wall that ran down both sides of the property. It was four feet high by the water and stepped up to six feet as it got closer to the house. From the home’s rear, the occupants had a sweeping view of the mangroves and Gulf of Mexico.
He rose out of the darkness, standing at a window.
Raydel Escobar stared dead ahead, as if he couldn’t tell where the sky started and the water ended. He wore beige pants and a black shirt and held a cell phone to his ear. Doing business at midnight. His frame filled the large window and then he was gone. As I started to leave, a man with a shotgun appeared from the corner of the house and made his way toward me. The guard was slow and looked bored and passed not more than ten feet in front of me. My right foot suddenly slipped off the root and I made a perceptible splash as my body settled. He stopped and peered in my direction. I stopped breathing. He must be afraid of the dark, for he suddenly pivoted and left. Escobar wasn’t getting his money’s worth.
Lights, an armed guard, and high walls. I wasn’t going to fight this battle on Escobar’s terms.
“Let’s go,” I said quietly to Morgan when I returned to the boat.
“What’s next?”
“Let’s get close to his boats.”
The aerial photo of Escobar’s compound in Mary Evelyn’s e-mail revealed two boats, a yacht and a fishing b
oat. The yacht was bigger than my house. That’s not saying much.
Morgan grabbed a pole and pushed Impulse around to the front of the yacht so that the yacht’s massive bow blocked us from the house. He switched to a paddle when he lost the bottom. We were in the channel, in all likelihood dug out for Escobar’s toys. I put on my flippers and slipped overboard into the food chain, but this time my feet found no support.
I moved silently through the dark water, in and around both boats, passed under the dock, and rubbed against the large, crusted pilings. I maneuvered behind the smaller boat that was on a lift that barely cleared the water. It was a forty-foot center console Intrepid powered by four 350-horsepower Yamahas. Fourteen hundred horses on forty feet of fiberglass. I’d be surprised if her forward hull even got wet with the throttle shoved down. I got out my Intova LED flashlight from its Velcro strip that I jerry rigged onto my wet suit and kept the beam low. No name on the side or transom. No registration numbers. The stainless steel props were in good shape, but not new. Escobar could have recently purchased it and not gotten around to putting the hull numbers on, but my bet was he didn’t want the boat to be traceable.
There were faster boats, but a four-engine forty-foot center console was about as fast as you could go without screaming that speed was your intent. Put five engines on a similar boat, or have a juiced-up Fountain, and everyone knew it was all about speed. Law enforcement heads would turn. If I wanted to be unnoticed, yet be able to outrun 99 percent of the boats on the water, Escobar’s power pack on the Intrepid would be the ticket. What did he need her for?
The yacht, a deep blue fifty-five-foot Carver Voyager, was a different matter. Chica Bonita was prominently scrawled across her stern and she carried Florida registration numbers. She hadn’t left the slip for a while—she displayed a prominent water line. I couldn’t make out the name on the tender, it was too high and my angle wasn’t right.