by Matt Lincoln
“Did he say anything about what they said to him, or what they seemed to be doing here?” Ethan asked, leaning forward on the bench to show that he was intrigued by this new piece of information.
“No, he didn’t seem to know much,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “He seemed more enraged by the whole thing than anything else. Didn’t stop to think about it beyond that.”
“I bet he was,” Penny scoffed. “He was probably the one who had to clean it up. Probably one of the Johnson brothers. They’re good boys. Both work there until they go off to college. I think the oldest one is headed to Key West for school in the fall.”
“You really do know everyone around here,” Robbie chuckled as the sailboat left the bay, and they drifted out into the wide-open ocean, the sunset red and orange along the horizon and the brightest stars already beginning to poke out higher in the sky.
“Sure do,” she said brightly. “That’s the best part about retirement, I think. Staying in one place for more than a minute and really getting to know the people there. People outside of the military bases, anyway.”
“I can get that,” Ethan said, smiling at her.
“Like hell, you can,” Robbie chuckled. “I can never see you settling down anywhere. You’d get bored too fast.”
“That is a danger,” Penny sighed, thinking almost paradoxically that she would be sad when the MBLIS agents were gone, and this case was closed, as much as she wanted her island back from these drug dealers. She had needed a little burst of excitement in her life, she decided. Maybe she should go on vacation more often when this was all over. Just take her boat out for a few weeks and see where it took her.
“So what did you do when you were in the Navy?” Ethan asked innocently. “You taught at the Naval base for how long?”
“Oh, about fifteen years,” she said, gazing out across the water as she could feel his eyes lingering on her. “Before that, I was stationed abroad more often than not, and I did one more tour after I started on Key West, took a leave of absence from my teaching post.”
“You never considered going civilian sooner?” Ethan asked. “Or going into law enforcement?”
“Not seriously,” she said with a shrug. “I probably would’ve done that if the teaching thing didn’t work out, but that was always my first choice after I stopped shipping out. I learned pretty early on in my career that I had a knack for training new recruits, and my supervisors picked up on that. Couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my time for a while there.”
“So what made you decide to retire?” he asked, showing more interest in Penny’s life than she could remember any man—or anyone else, for that matter, frankly—doing for some time. “You said before that you always thought you might?”
“Oh yeah, I always knew I’d work until I didn’t want to anymore, and I also always knew that day would come at some point,” she said, casting a teasing glance back at him to indicate that she knew he had no such aspirations himself. “Eventually, I realized I’d done what I could, and it was time to pass the torch on to someone new at the base. There was a younger officer there I’d been training for years who’d just become available for my post, so it seemed like the perfect time. Haven’t looked back since.”
“Oh, come on,” Robbie teased, his kind eyes boring into her. “You had to have looked back at some point. If only just in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Okay, maybe in the last day or so,” she chuckled, nodding in his direction while keeping her eyes trained forward on the water. “I have enjoyed hanging out with the three of you. But I’ll be happy enough to go back to my quiet life when this is all over.”
There was some silence after that as Penny and the agents enjoyed the silent rippling of the water. It was a calm night, thankfully, Penny noted, as they would have a lot to deal with if these gangbangers showed up without adding a bad storm on top of it all. It was getting dark, however, and by the time that she could make out the outline of the caves on the horizon, the only light around them came from the stars and the moon.
Which, to be fair, was a considerable amount given how little light pollution there was in the Keys, and especially on smaller islands like Little Torch. Penny sometimes forgot this, but she had no choice but to remember as she watched each of the MBLIS agents become transfixed with the sky.
“Don’t get this in Miami, do you?” Penny asked after several moments of this, casting a teasing glance back at Ethan.
“No,” he said, his jaw slightly agape as he continued to gaze at the stars, leaning back on the bench in a manner that pleasantly flexed his muscles through his shirt. “No, we don’t.”
Robbie gave a low whistle and shook his head in wonderment to confirm this sentiment. Even Sylvia seemed to have forgotten her worries for the moment as she stared up at the moon and stars.
“Oh, is this it?” the female agent finally asked when the first of the two caves was upon them, shaking her head to bring herself back to the Earth from where she had been immersed in the stars with the others. Ethan and Robbie, still looking more than a little awestruck, followed her gaze and seemed to be surprised to find that they were already there.
Time passed differently on the ocean. Penny had always known this. Sometimes it was painfully slow, and other times it was just as painfully fast. This was no exception. They sat in silence some more, enjoying the time they did have, as they approached the second cave.
“Not quite,” she reminded them. “This is just the first cave, the one where we didn’t find anything before. The next one is just up ahead. We should be there in twenty minutes or so.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said, smiling at her. Then, turning back to his colleagues, “I forgot to ask you what you did after dinner.”
“Oh, right,” Sylvia said, rolling her eyes again. “Well, I fielded those calls from that bartender, and then we walked along the beach a bit and tried to talk to some tourists. Didn’t really learn anything there, either.”
“We ended up scaring some of them, I think,” Robbie snickered. “Nobody wants to think there’s some kind of criminal activity going on during their vacation.”
“No, I’d think not,” Ethan chuckled.
“Is this it?” Sylvia asked, pointing at the next cave as Penny angled her sailboat toward its mouth.
“Sure is,” she laughed and headed straight inside as the MBLIS agents grabbed for the flashlights they had left beneath the bench the night before.
27
Ethan
The cave was dark and dank like I remembered, except I wasn’t as concerned about running into gangbangers right away this time. If they were to come looking for the drugs, they would no doubt do so when it was less likely that others would be out on the water. It was a weeknight, so that probably meant an hour or two from then. There was a reason we had left right as the sun was setting. We had to get out ahead of them if we wanted to catch them red-handed.
Our three flashlights illuminated the cave as Penny maneuvered the sailboat inside, revealing that my intuition was correct and we were alone.
I was also relieved to see that the Coast Guard hadn’t cleared out the wreckage from the Jamaican smuggling ship or the remaining cocaine packets that had spilled out of it, though I had noted that they were gone from the dock when Penny and I had arrived there.
Not that I didn’t trust Muñoz to make sure the Coast Guard held off until tomorrow, but I didn’t necessarily trust her message to make its way through the bureaucratic mess that inevitably filled up inter-agency and military branch communications. Even so, I was glad that we had them on speed dial while we were there. You never knew when another branch might come in handy on a mission, as Holm and my recent experience in New Orleans with the FBI proved.
“Where’s that Coast Guard outpost again?” Holm asked, mirroring my own thoughts. As was often the case, each of us was eerily in tune with what the other was thinking.
“Key West,” Muñoz said, pursing her lips. “But I have them
on standby in case we need them. They know all about our little plan tonight.”
Muñoz too, apparently. She really was going to leave a gap when Holm and I branched off to get back to work on our own cases without her. She was newer to the agency, having replaced Birn’s old partner after she transferred to another MBLIS outpost, but everyone had taken to her quickly, including Birn. I could see why even better than I had before now.
“Good, that’s good,” I murmured. Then, turning to Penny, “Is there a way we can get the sailboat in deeper, hide it so that we can stay out of view if they do come looking for the drugs? Leading them into the cave will probably be our best bet for catching them.”
“Agreed,” Penny said with a curt nod in my direction. “I’ll do what I can, but you guys had better get out and stand off to the side first. I might get wet, and I’ll no doubt have my back turned to the entrance.”
“Good thinking,” Holm said, hopping off the sailboat and onto the side of the cave floor, which was only in water about an inch deep.
Muñoz and I quickly followed suit, making our way with Holm around the perimeter of the cave until we were where we had been when we first discovered Dante, across from the original shipwreck in the cave’s far righthand corner.
I crouched down low to the floor, shining my flashlight out over the water so that its beam didn’t reach the mouth of the cave, and also helped illuminate the way for Penny as she sailed further back. Muñoz and Holm quickly caught on and did the same themselves.
Penny anchored the boat far in the back corner of the cave, between us and the shipwreck, and then finally waded out through the shallower portion of the water to get over to us. The water came up to her waist there, while I judged that it was probably about eight feet deep in the middle of the cave.
When she was close, I walked up to around my knees into the water and reached out to help her over. I knew she probably didn’t need my help, but I wanted to offer it anyway, and I could tell by the smile on her face that she was glad that I had. Her skin was cool to the touch but pleasant even in the colder environment of the cave.
While the air was cooler inside there, the Florida humidity was still present, causing some condensation to rise beneath my elbows and on the palms of my hands.
We waited in near silence off to the side of the cave for what felt like an eternity but was really only a couple of hours. There were a lot of times that I wanted to call it quits, in the strange humid cold, and with the dank, musty smell of the cave itself. And it was wet. So wet all over the place. Not in a refreshing way either, but in a kind of slimy, mildewy way.
It wasn’t like any stakeout I’d ever been on before. Usually, it was just Holm and me in a car, waiting and watching from a seated position. To sit down in this situation would mean to get wet all over and just feel worse, however.
Even despite all this, we stuck it out the whole time. For Birn. I knew that all of us were hoping beyond hope that we would get something out of this, that we wouldn’t waste a whole night of our colleague’s possibly precious time as Muñoz had so feared back at the hotel.
By the time the third hour began to elapse, I could hear the ragged breath of my companions to either side of me. None of us dared complain or suggest that we should go back, but I found myself wishing we had some equipment that would have helped us stay warm and comfortable back with the SEALS.
I stared intently at the mouth of the cave, hoping with each passing moment that something, anything, would barrel through.
It wasn’t until around midnight when the cave was pitch black, but for the starlight at its mouth since we’d turned off our flashlights to conserve their batteries, that it did.
At first, I only heard the soft chug of a motorboat above the sounds of the calm waves outside of the cave. I exchanged a look with Penny, who was to my left. We all sat in bated silence as we waited to see if the sound would pass us or turn inward toward the cave just as we had when we arrived in Penny’s sailboat.
It turned, and we all hugged the wall of the cave so that we would be obscured from view, at least at first.
It was a small boat, a little smaller than Penny’s sailboat, and there were four occupants whose silhouettes I could make out if I really squinted in the dark. My companions and I were so hunched down in the corner that I was confident that if the motorboat’s occupants could see our own outlines, they wouldn’t be able to tell that we were humans and not just rocks or pieces of wreckage from the shipwreck.
“Damn, where is it all?” a man’s voice called out as the motorboat came upon the first packets of cocaine strewn across the cave floor from the crates that tumbled in the shipwreck. He spoke in an American accent.
“We do not know that this is all there is,” another man, this one speaking in a Jamaican accent, assured him. “We can’t see far enough back yet to know that it’s all gone.”
“More of it must’ve washed into shore than we first thought,” the same American complained, unconvinced by his Jamaican companion’s line of reasoning. “And we couldn’t gather it all up because of that damn agent.”
I felt Muñoz stiffen on my other side at the mention of Birn. I strained my ears, hoping to find out whether he was alive or… well, I didn’t want to even think that word at that point. We still weren’t there yet.
“How could they be so stupid?” a third voice, also speaking in a Jamaican accent, piped in. “Taking an American military man like that. We are all going to get into a lot of trouble if we get caught.”
“You need to lighten up, Davis,” the American barked back.
“Lighten up?” the man repeated, incredulous. “You are the one who is complaining about not finding more cocaine that’s been sitting around in a moldy cave for a week! Who is going to buy that, anyway? I don’t even understand why we are here.”
“Because if anyone survived, we don’t want them tracing it back to us,” a fourth, more measured voice said now, also in an American accent. “We need to erase any trace of this shipwreck. The police are probably onto us already, with all the kidnapping one of their own and all.”
“The police,” the other American scoffed. “They don’t know their heads from their tails around here.”
“I wouldn’t want to bet on that,” the first, more nervous Jamaican man called Davis said, his voice trembling slightly. “And that man they brought back with them didn’t look like a normal policeman to me.”
I noted as I was sure Muñoz and the others had, too, the use of past tense in this second reference to Birn. I didn’t like that, not one bit. But at the same time, the men talked about another group of goons bringing Birn somewhere with them. That meant that, as the MBLIS lab techs had thought, he at the very least wasn’t killed on the scene. So there was still a chance he was out there somewhere. The big question was where they had taken him in the first place.
“Come on, let’s take a closer look,” the first American man said, and I heard a small splash as he hopped out of the motorboat and onto the cave bed.
I held out my hands to indicate to the others that we should still hold back, but they were way ahead of me, continuing to crouch down away from the starlight. I noticed that on either side of me, Penny and Muñoz had their hands to their sides, where I knew their guns were kept. I was doing the same, and I imagined Holm was, too, though I couldn’t see him in the darkness all the way on Muñoz’s other side.
It was best to wait until the men were closer to us, to minimize the chances that they could make it back to their motorboat and escape before we had a chance to catch them. No, it was best to maintain the element of surprise as long as we possibly could.
Flashlights clicked on across the cave, but they were dim and still far away. We still had some time, though not much.
We squinted into the darkness as the men crept around the other side of the cave, opposite from us and closest to the shipwreck.
“Anybody in here?” one of the Americans screamed, right before almost stepping o
n the body of Dante’s sailing companion. “Oh, damn, well, that answers that question, I guess.”
“Wasn’t there one more?” the other American asked.
“Yes, Dante,” the Jamaican man whose name we did not know said quietly, his tone filled with worry. He must have been a friend of the sailor’s.
“Dante, you in here?” the other Jamaican man, Davis, called out in a heavy accent. Then he yelled something in Spanish.
There was, of course, no answer. Because Dante was lying in an ICU bed somewhere on Key West, attempting to recover from his extensive injuries after surviving alone in this cave for so long.
“Guess that answers that question, too,” the first American man chuckled.
“Joe, you could have a little more sympathy,” the other American hissed at him. “These are their friends.”
“Whatever,” Joe said, and I could practically hear his eyes rolling from across the cave.
As the men crept forward, sifting through the wreckage and lamenting about how much money this whole thing would cost them, they seemed to have a singular focus, not casting their flashlights beyond their immediate vicinity. This was to our benefit because they still hadn’t noticed Penny’s sailboat tucked away in the very back of the cave or us pressed against the other side. Eventually, they were directly across from us and still hadn’t noticed that they weren’t alone.
Then, at long last, it hit them. The calmer Jamaican man cast his flashlight around the rest of the cave until it landed on Penny’s sailboat.
“Wait,” he said in a hushed tone. “What is this?”
I glanced back at the motorboat. It was pretty far away from the other men by then, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to get between it and them. Holm was clearly thinking similarly as he rushed out into the shallow end of the water as quickly as he could, closely followed by Muñoz and then myself and Penny.