Wreckers' Key

by Christine Kling

  From the moment the masts appeared against the night sky, I had about twenty seconds before I was on the anchor line under the bow of the schooner. I dug the paddle into the water and pulled the boat across the current. When my fingers closed around the anchor rode, I could not believe the speed I was traveling, and I feared I’d get pulled right out of the boat. I gripped the anchor line in one hand and held tight to the Rapid’s bowline with the other. The stern of the Rapid swung around and nudged the black hull. I hoped the bump was not loud enough to alert anyone below.

  I crooked my elbow round the anchor rode, took the fishing knife out of my jacket pocket, and began to saw at the nylon. The knife’s serrated edge was sharp, and the anchor line parted with little work. I pushed the Rapid free and paddled across the current. The big schooner was adrift.

  XXXI

  To reach that inner anchorage off Boca Grande Key in the best of circumstances requires quite a bit of maneuvering through a minefield of shoals. With daylight and a working GPS, it’s easy enough; fishermen do it on a daily basis. In the driving rain, though, and adrift with the wind and current pushing her around, I predicted that Hawkeye would grind aground within minutes. While it was easy enough to back off when I went aground in the light little Rapid, putting a seventy-five-foot schooner on the reef was another story.

  The spreader lights blinked on, and I saw a man on deck. Ben had probably set an anchor alarm, which sounded when the boat moved outside its charted position. I heard the big diesel engine start up at the same time I saw the masts begin to lean over at an odd angle. Over the noise of the surf and the shriek of the wind came the creaking and grinding of a wooden hull hitting a hard bottom and coming to a fast stop. I was still sculling the Rapid in the current, and I could see now how fast Hawkeye had been traveling as she ground to a halt and tilted over at a thirty-degree angle.

  Despite the wind, I heard his voice amplified by the boat’s loud-hailer.

  “Pull alongside, Seychelle. I won’t mind giving her the same treatment I gave her husband.”

  I started the outboard and idled up to the spot where the black schooner lay on her side. When I touched the transom, I could feel the vibration through the hull as she lifted and pounded down on the reef with each wave. Ben had a small black gun in his hand. Neither of us spoke. I climbed over the boomkin and tried to stand on the sharply tilting deck. Ben took the powerboat’s painter and tied it to a midship cleat. In the darkness, the shape of Boca Grande Key blocked out the horizon no more than a hundred feet off. The schooner was perched on the hard coral shelf that surrounded the island, and the waves were breaking over the slanting foredeck.

  “Cutting the anchor line was smart. I have to give you credit for that one,” Ben hollered. Then he told me to place the knife on the deck. I leaned down and placed his fishing knife so that it would not roll downhill. He pointed to the cockpit and the ladder that led below.

  “Think you can get her off this shoal by yourself, Ben?” I shouted.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Just move.”

  I heard her over the noise of the weather and waves and engine before I got to the bottom of the ladder. She was on the settee, on her back, her hands and feet bound. She was grunting in pain. B.J.’s feet were lashed to the settee table base, his hands tied to a built-in bookrack over his head. His mouth was gagged with a red bandanna, but the eyes that shone in the yellow lamplight were not the eyes of my pacifist lover.

  I rushed to Catalina’s side and held her hand as she cried out in pain.

  “Get away from her,” he said. “Over here.”

  The noise of the grinding reef and the waves was even louder below, and the engine room, which was just aft of where we were standing, didn’t seem to have much sound insulation, either. I had to shout to be heard. “Just what was your plan, Ben? Were you going to show me that you weren’t a scared little boy anymore?”

  He never raised his voice or sounded angry—just tight, like he was having trouble breathing. “I said, get over here. Down on the floor.” He pointed the gun at Catalina, and I did as he asked. He told me to lie facedown, then hog-tied me. The line wound around my hands, then around my ankles. When he’d finished trussing me up like a farm animal, he sat on the cabin sole next to me. He spoke with his head so close to my ear I could feel the warmth of his breath.

  “How does it feel?”

  I said nothing.

  “How does it feel to have everybody think you’re crazy?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you try to tell the police that someone broke into your house? Tried to run you down? Why not? What about Gramps? Did he believe your story?”

  “You’re the crazy one. All this shit you’ve been doing, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  His teeth glowed white in the lamplight. I wondered how I could ever have found that face handsome.

  “Your dog loved me. She let me in anytime I wanted. I watched you sleeping.”

  A shudder shook my body more violently than the engine’s vibrations or the pounding of the waves. I felt sick, violated.

  “See,” he hissed in my ear. “See how it feels.”

  I turned to look at Catalina, her face contorted with the pain. She wouldn’t hear my words. “So how did you do it? At the Wreckers’ Race? How did you get to Nestor?”

  “Neville was out there with one of our launches, hoping to pick up some tourist chicks. I saw Nestor out on the windsurfer and recognized him. I’d met him in Fort Lauderdale at the Downtowner.”

  “You were at the Downtowner?”

  “So were you. That was when it started. He told you he was going to Key West. Like I told you, I was able to walk right by people I’d known before and they never recognized me. You didn’t. I wasn’t the fat kid anymore.”

  “You haven’t changed that much,” I shouted.

  “You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to get where I am. Do you know what it takes to lose a hundred pounds? Look at me,” he said.

  I kept my head turned away.

  He grabbed my head and forced it around. His hands were on either side of my face, squishing my cheeks, distorting my lips so I must’ve looked like a fish.

  “Don’t you see what I look like now? All the other women stare at me, talk to me. They all want to screw me. You? You still look at me like I’m fat Ben, Old Glub, the freak. The kid who pissed his pants.”

  He lowered his face and smashed his lips against mine. It was crude and clumsy, like the kiss of an adolescent boy.

  I tried to wipe my mouth on my shoulder. I didn’t want the taste of him on me. “What did she do to you, Ben?”

  “Shut up. She always hated you. She said you were going to tell. She said it was my fault.”

  I moved my head to indicate Catalina and B.J. “Why don’t you let them go? If I’m the one you want to hurt, then let them go.”

  He laughed. “You’re so fucking predictable. Thanks to you, I lost everything. My father hates my guts. The only one I ever loved is dead. Now it’s your turn. Now you’ll see what it feels like. You’ll watch them die.” He waved the gun at Cat and B.J. “And when you’re hurting so bad you wish you were dead, when you’ve got no one left but me, I’ll decide if I want to keep you.”

  “While you’re down here talking, your precious boat is self-destructing.”

  “You’re going to beg for it,” he said. “For me.”

  He sat next to me for another minute or so, waiting for my response. When I didn’t say a word, he climbed the ladder topside and began the job of trying to get the schooner off the limestone shelf she’d grounded on.

  The engine roared and raced as he tried to work her off in reverse.

  I squirmed my way downhill, across the floor to the settee that held Catalina. Her hands were bound in front so she could lie on her back. I rolled onto my side, and with my head against the settee, I worked an elbow under me. Then I inched my shoulder up the settee until I was in a sitting position.


  “Cat, can you sit up?”

  She was breathing like a horse that had just crossed the finish line. She nodded.

  “Reach into the right front pocket of my jeans. I’ve got a knife.”

  Between contractions, she managed to reach down around that massive belly of hers and squirm her fingers into the front pocket of my jeans. She worked my rigging knife up and out.

  “Just drop it on the floor. I’ll get it.” I heard the knife clatter onto the wooden floor. Cat collapsed back on the bunk.

  I fell over on top of the knife and worked it to my fingers. First, I cut the line that connected my hands to my feet. Catalina’s screams grew louder and she began crying out in Spanish, saying things I could not understand. I was able to bring my hands under my butt to the front, and once I could see what I was doing, it was no problem to cut the line on my feet. I cut loose B.J.’s hands before mine. Within a matter of seconds he had cut me free and he was at Catalina’s side.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  He stood, and his eyes flicked up past my shoulder. I turned to see feet coming down the companionway stairs.

  Ben pointed the gun at Cat as she let loose with another horrible scream. “Drop the knife or I’ll shoot her.”

  I did as he asked.

  “Where is he?”

  I turned to look where B.J. had been standing a minute before—and he had vanished. The dark companionway that led forward was empty. Before I could turn back around, Ben’s arm slid around my neck and he held me against his body, the barrel of the gun pressed to my head.

  “You’d better come out or I’ll shoot her,” he yelled.

  On deck we heard heavy footsteps. “He’s going for the boat, Ben. You know that boat is our only chance of towing this schooner off.”

  He swung me around and pushed me toward the stairs. “Move it.” I began to climb.

  It happened before I had time to register that I was seeing someone. I stepped out onto the deck and something pushed me down. As I fell I heard a shot and the two men crashed down the companionway ladder. Then it went quiet. When I peeked down the stairs, I saw a dark shape on the cabin sole. He wasn’t moving.

  I inched carefully down the ladder. Over by the settee, B.J. was placing a blanket across Catalina’s legs. The pants he pulled from under the blanket were dark and wet—with what, I couldn’t tell. He gazed up at me, a blank look on his face I had never seen before. “I’ll take care of her if you can see to the boat.”

  “What about him?” I pointed to Ben.

  “He’s done. Broken neck.” He said it simply, without any emotion whatsoever, and went back to his preparations.

  I tried the schooner’s VHF radio, hoping for a helicopter that could fly her off and put an end to those screams, but Ben had disabled that, too.

  Out on deck, I surveyed the situation. The wind was now blowing at more than thirty knots, pushing the water and waves and boat farther up onto the reef. With each bounce, she moved a fraction of an inch higher. When I’d cut her loose, her bow had blown around in the wind, and she now lay on her starboard side with greenie waves breaking all the way over her bow.

  I began digging in his lockers, making my preparations with lines, blocks, and anchors. The gear on that big heavy old boat nearly did me in. I found a spare Bruce and a big old Fortress anchor in the aft lazarette and after dumping both of them, two sections of chain, and two three-hundred-foot coils of nylon line into the Rapid, I jumped down myself and motored forward.

  Working on the bow was hell. Most of the waves just swirled around my legs, but the occasional larger swell would knock me off my feet and wash me into stanchions and hatches and rigging. My body was so bruised, I hurt with every movement, but rather than driving me to give it all up, it just made me angrier. Curses flying, I rigged a towline on the bow then used the Rapid as a tug to swing her around so I could have running room to increase her heel. I set one anchor a hundred yards off the starboard bow parallel now to the reef, and with that line tied to the main halyard running through a snatch block at the staysail stay, I used the anchor windlass and winched her over to a thirty-five-degree heel.

  The pounding was worsening, and I hated to think of the effect on B.J. and Catalina below, but I had to get the boat on her side, off the keel, in order to slide her off the reef. I worried that I’d hole her before I got her loose, so I tried to work faster. Pulling with the Rapid, I dragged her to the edge of the ledge, and then an hour after I’d started, with me back at the helm and the engine screaming, she slid off the coral shelf. I threw off all the anchors. We could return and retrieve them another day. I set her on autopilot on a course for deepwater at the Key West Harbor buoy and went below to check the bilges.

  I realized that the screams had stopped some time ago, only I didn’t know when. Perhaps it was while I was out in the boat setting the anchor, or while the waves had been battering me on the foredeck. I paused in the shuttle hatch and took a deep breath of the fresh ocean air. I knew I was going back down to face Ben’s corpse, and exhausted as I was, I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

  At the bottom of the ladder, it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark cabin. Either B.J. had turned out the lights or the electrical system had failed. With all the water that had poured below, the latter was likely.

  I saw B.J. sitting on the settee in the dark. The front of his once white shirt was now mottled with stains. He held what looked like a bundled infant in his arms, but his head rested on the settee behind him and his eyes were closed.

  Mounds of blood-soaked towels littered the cabin sole. On the opposite side of the salon, the blanket B.J. had used to cover Catalina’s legs now covered her whole body. Her knees were no longer drawn up as they had been when I had last seen her. Now she was stretched out beneath the blanket that peaked over her toes and then stretched nearly smooth to the point of her nose. It took my exhausted brain several seconds to comprehend why the blanket covered her face.

  “Oh no, God no.” I rushed to the settee. When I leaned against the cushion, I realized it was soaked with blood. I pulled back the blanket. Her long dark lashes curled against the smooth cocoa-colored skin of her cheeks. I pressed my cheek to hers. “Cat, no, not you.” I took her shoulders in my hands and started shaking her. “No, not now, you can’t go.”

  Her body shook like a flaccid bag of bones. Her head rolled to one side. I pulled back my hands and stared at her, my vision blurred by the tears. Slowly I pulled the blanket up and re-covered her face.

  I crossed to the opposite settee and slumped on the cushion next to my lover. His eyes remained closed. I watched his chest rising and falling with his breaths, and I reached out and touched his cheek.

  He turned his head away as though burned by my touch. Finally, he sat up, pulling the bundle to his chest. For the first time he opened his eyes and looked down into the folds of the blanket.

  With one arm he held the tiny bundle toward me. There in the shadows I saw blinking eyes and a tiny mouth opening and closing. “She told me we’re to call him Nestor.”

  XXXII

  Faith gave us the keys to the place. She said the house belonged to some relatives of her second husband and that she had many happy memories of escaping there when the stresses and strains of their daily lives had grown too heavy to bear. The house, located on Lower Matecumbe Key, had been built in the 1960s in the shape of an octagon up on stilts, and because the place stood over six feet off the ground, it was possible to park several cars in the space beneath. Part of the interior was broken up into smaller bedrooms, but most of the floor plan consisted of the great room that was part living room and part kitchen. The view overlooking Florida Bay was spectacular on those clear blustery March days, but when we’d first arrived after all those hours with cops and in court, seeing judges, making statements, dragging out records, we’d been just too exhausted to notice.

  We’d sailed Faith’s boat Annie down, again at her insistence, cutting through the Chan
nel Five Bridge and turning back north to make the short tack up around the point and into the bay off the house. The lovely old boat now bobbed in the boat basin, tied to the concrete seawall, and B.J. was out there daily keeping himself busy with new coats for her brightwork. He wasn’t talking much these days, but at least he was keeping himself busy and out in the sunshine.

  Once we’d arrived and moved into the house, neither of us went down below inside Annie's cabin if we could avoid it. In the main salon, behind the dining settee, there were two white cardboard boxes that I knew we would need to deal with eventually, but we had plenty of time. We were having trouble enough dealing with the living, much less the dead.

  So much had changed in the last month. Melvin Burke had dropped his lawsuit when Jeannie met him in the halls of the Broward County Courthouse, where he was wearing a cervical collar and walking with a cane. She showed him the photos I had taken, but the coup de grace was the fact that she had met up with his daughter in the ladies’ room and learned some very specific details about his boat—and how he had intentionally sunk her—in the exchange.

  The deaths of Nestor Frias and Quentin Hazell were reclassified as homicides, the cases closed with the demise of the perpetrator. Ben’s boats were both seized by the government, as was Arlen’s house on the canal, but by the time the cops got there, Sparky and his little boat were long gone. They haven’t found him since. I’d like to think that he’s holed up somewhere out in the back-country in the Ten Thousand Islands waiting for the mess to blow over, but it’s just as likely he put his boat on autopilot, set an easterly course, and sailed off on a last cruise to nowhere. I didn’t expect to ever learn the outcome of that one. Arlen would remain one of life’s mysteries.

  The authorities discovered that Neville Pinder was in the United States on a tourist visa that had expired twelve years earlier, and the government promptly deported him. Since I knew he wasn’t welcome back home in Man O’ War, I wondered what poor little cay had wound up inheriting Neville.