Aground on St. Thomas (6 page)

Hog-Tied

SENATOR SANCHEZ STRUMMED
her fingers against the shoulder strap to her satchel-style briefcase, reflecting on how she’d wound up trapped in Fort Christian with Reverend Bobo.

•

JUST THIRTY MINUTES
earlier, she’d been hurrying down a hallway inside the Legislature Building, the leather pouch of her briefcase bouncing against her hip. She was late for a subcommittee meeting and in a rush to get to the designated location.

A few feet from the committee room, she stopped to straighten her skirt, whose snug fit had twisted around her hips during the dash in from her car. Reaching up, she unhooked the clip that held back her wavy hair. With a quick head shake, the shoulder-length locks fell free. She tucked a few strands behind her left ear, smoothed her silk blouse, and prepared to march, unflustered, into what would likely be a quarrelsome meeting.

A half step past a cleaning closet by the room’s entrance, a stiff hand grabbed her arm and pulled her inside.

She recognized her fellow senator almost instantly. A surge of indignation stifled her impulse to scream. She was about to knock Bobo over the head with her briefcase when he held a finger to his mouth and pointed to the two-inch crack he’d left open in the closet door.

Pushing aside a mop bucket, Bobo crouched to the ground and peered through the opening. Sanchez hesitated but eventually knelt beside him. She watched, stunned, as two black-clad federal agents moved stealthily through the corridor.

She gasped at the sight, causing Bobo to jab her with a shushing elbow.

“What’s going on?” she whispered at the first break in the hallway’s foot traffic.

Bobo mouthed the letters
F-B-I
.

“Why are they here?” she asked, troubled. “And why are we hiding?”

He leaned toward her so that his lips were practically touching her ear.

“They’re after
us
. All of us.” He raised a hand in front of her face and rubbed his fingertips together. “They think we’re on the take.”

Sanchez nearly choked on the smell of Bobo’s hair oil. “But I’m not, I mean, I haven’t . . .” she protested and then cut short her remark.

Another set of footsteps sounded outside the closet door, this time moving directly toward the senators’ hidden position. The rubber soles on the agent’s black combat boots squeaked, ever so slightly, against the tile floor.

Bobo gripped Sanchez’s arm, squeezing it tightly.

Scrunched down in the closet, her leg muscles cramping and her head swimming from the proximity of Bobo’s hair oil, Sanchez decided she’d had enough closet foolishness. It was time to put a stop to this nonsense.

She hadn’t received any bribes during her short term in office. She would simply step forward and proclaim her innocence. Wincing, she released herself from Bobo grasp and prepared to stand.

Before she could move, a voice called out, “Hey, you!”

It belonged to Gilda, the guard from the Legislature’s front entrance. The woman had worked in the building for decades and was a stickler for protocol. No matter a person’s rank or seniority within the senate, Gilda insisted that everyone abide by the full set of security procedures, each and every time they entered the building.

In the few months since Sanchez had taken her senate seat, she had been subjected to Gilda’s stern lectures more times than she cared to remember. Any deviation from the established protocol was met by rigid rebuke. She could only imagine Gilda’s rage at the sight of federal agents running roughshod over her domain.

Gilda moved in front of the closet and gestured down the hallway.

“I saw them run around the corner,” the security guard said in a convincing tattletale tone. “The two you’re looking for—they went that way.”

The rubber-soled boots jogged off toward a separate wing of the building.

“Stupid pasty boy,” Gilda grumbled under her breath. Then she rapped on the closet door. “Hurry up. You can’t stay in there forever.”

Bobo pushed open the door and leapt into the hallway, nearly knocking over Sanchez in the process. “Can you get us to the side exit?”

The guard nodded grimly. “Come with me.”

Sanchez stumbled out of the closet. “But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The guard put her hands on her hips. “You think that matters? You want to end up like the rest of your lot? They’ve got ’em hog-tied in the main meeting chambers. Every last one ’cept for you two. I heard ’em hollering for their lawyers, but the pasty boys aren’t letting anyone in.”

“Hog-tied?” Sanchez repeated, in obvious disbelief. Surely, Gilda was exaggerating.

But suddenly, she didn’t feel quite so willing to announce her presence to the arresting agents. Maybe it would be best to slip out of the Legislature Building and regroup. She could make herself available for questioning at the courthouse—accompanied by her lawyer.

“All right,” Sanchez sighed, relenting. “Let’s get out of here.”

Sanchez slipped off her heels and crept barefoot down the hallway, her painted toenails treading behind Bobo’s worn huaraches. Following the guard’s hand-waving instructions, they made their way toward the building’s north flank.

Gilda strode about ten feet in front of the senators, casually glancing from side to side, jauntily swinging her baton. It was a good act, Sanchez thought wryly, but the guard was perhaps enjoying her role in the subterfuge a little too much.

At several points along the way, they picked up snippets of the ongoing protests in the meeting chambers. While it didn’t sound as if anyone had been tied up, the captured senators obviously weren’t happy about their confinement.

For Sanchez, the raucous audio confirmed her decision to flee. The Legislature was a contentious decision-making body; discussions over the most mundane policy matters could evolve into shouting matches. She cringed at the thought of being cooped up with the other thirteen accused. She’d made the right decision to sneak out.

Now all she had to do was lose Bobo.

Sanchez spied the rectangular exit sign above Gilda’s head. One last stretch of hallway to traverse and they’d be out the door.

She reached into her briefcase, feeling around for her cell phone. She’d call her lawyer, have him meet her, and then . . .

Bobo suddenly slid sideways into a recess created by a square column that jutted out from the nearest wall. Before Sanchez could object, she found herself yanked into the cramped space beside him. The Reverend’s repulsive hair oil once more clogged her sinuses as the linen sleeve of his tunic wrapped around her neck.

“You have
got
to stop doing that,” she hissed, trying to pull free of his grip.

“Shh,” he replied, spitting into her ear.

The familiar squeak of rubber soles on tile emerged from an intersecting hallway—accompanied by a man’s gritty voice. He appeared to be speaking into a wireless device.

“This is what we get for calling it Operation Coconut . . .”

“Agent Friday,” Gilda greeted him with regimented formality. She tapped the exit door with her baton as if checking to see that it was secure.

The man’s distracted reply was followed by the gradually disappearing squeak of his rubber-soled boots.

Sanchez squirmed free of Bobo’s arm as Gilda jogged back to their hidden position.

“You two are going to get me fired,” she sniped, signaling for the senators to come to the exit door.

Sanchez noted the harried expression on the guard’s face. The game had lost its appeal. Another close call and she’d blow the whistle on them.

“You’re on your own now,” the guard said as she dismantled the security alarm and ushered the pair through the opening.

“Bless you, Gilda,” the Reverend intoned in his placating preaching voice. He leaned in, as if to kiss her on the cheek, but the guard adeptly evaded his overture.

“Don’t touch me, Bobo,” the woman spat, wrinkling her nose from the acrid hair oil.

As the guard pivoted back toward the building’s interior, she issued a last piece of advice.

“Get off the streets, fast as you can.”

Blessed by God

THE WORLD OUTSIDE
the Legislature Building was not the one Julia Sanchez thought she’d left a half hour earlier.

How had she missed the navy vessel docked at the cruise ship terminal on her drive in to work? Had she been so focused on her upcoming committee meeting—and so worried by the fact that she was running late—that she’d missed the anomaly in the harbor?

If so, she was one of the few. By now, the presence of both the navy ship and the FBI had been noted by almost everyone in Charlotte Amalie—along with the abrupt termination of the island’s cell phone service.

Sanchez now joined in this last discovery. Still barefoot, she stood on the sidewalk outside the Legislature Building, punching buttons on her phone, trying to get a signal.

Bobo shook his head. He pointed down the block to a couple of taxi drivers cursing at their phones. “Forget it. It won’t work. Best to turn it off. They’ll only use it to track us.”

As Sanchez powered down her phone, she saw a pair of FBI agents, crossing at a streetlight not more than a hundred feet away. She sucked in her breath and instinctively stepped backward.

Another duo in black clothing soon appeared at the next corner.

Escaping the Legislature, she realized, was only the beginning of their ordeal.

“This way,” Bobo said, jogging across the street to the rear of Fort Christian.

Sanchez dropped the phone into her briefcase, tugged on her shoes, and scampered after the Reverend—immediately regretting her decision to follow when he hopped through the gap in the fort’s rear fencing.

“IT’S A MIRACLE
we made it here without getting caught,” Sanchez summed up from her position inside the fort’s courtyard.

“Blessed by God,” Bobo replied, once more touching four points across his chest.

“Right,” she replied, trying to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “What do we do next?”

The senators listened to the noise outside the fort. The air carried a volume of angry voices overlaid with the repeating
pop
of ammunition.

Bobo nodded toward the base of the fort’s front tower. “There’s a ladder inside to access the clocks. Let’s climb up and see what’s going on.”

•

WEAVING AROUND PILES
of discarded construction material, Bobo and Sanchez picked their way across the courtyard.

As they passed the little room that had been set aside for the museum, Sanchez caught a glimpse of a well-tended display area with exhibits dedicated to various aspects of the island’s heritage. There were black-and-white photos, framed documents, maps, and, hanging on the far wall, one of the ubiquitous cutlasses that had been used to cut sugarcane.

Someone had taken a lot of care with the layout, she thought as she followed Bobo through to the fort’s front foyer. It was a shame the rest of the structure was in such disrepair.

The Reverend reached the open shaft that contained the clock tower’s rusty ladder. He slung his rainbow scarf over one shoulder and began pulling himself up the steps.

Sanchez looked at the shaky rungs and decided to once more abandon her heels. She waited until Bobo made it to the top and stepped onto an adjacent platform before she began her climb. Leaving the heels on the floor beside her briefcase, she hiked up her skirt and scaled the ladder.

A narrow ledge ran around the tower’s outer circumference, just a few feet below the clock face. Sanchez crossed the platform, ducked through an opening in the wall, and joined Bobo on the outside ledge.

They had views to every direction, including the harbor, the downtown waterfront, and Government Hill.

“Good grief, they’re everywhere,” Sanchez said as she watched another group of FBI agents gather outside the Legislature. If she and Bobo had been a minute later leaving the building—or crossing the street to the fort—they would have been captured.

Turning, she rotated her gaze to look toward the central downtown shopping district.

Just past a line of fire trucks and emergency vehicles parked against the fort’s west wall, she found the now-empty vendors’ plaza. Across the next intersection, a pricey jewelry store that occupied a prime corner lot had been locked up and secured with its nighttime barriers.

“What is going on?” Sanchez asked, stunned by the scene.

Bobo intoned as if speaking from the pulpit. “Hellfire and damnation are raining down on this island, that’s what.”

Sanchez scowled in frustration. It was unheard of to see Charlotte Amalie’s downtown shuttered on a day when a large cruise ship was in port. But the only pedestrians on the street were disgruntled locals. It appeared the passengers—and their dollars—had been kept on board the vessel.

The thought of all that lost revenue made her blood boil.

She thrust her arms in the air, gesturing at the agents outside the Legislature Building. “Do they know how much damage they’ve caused? What kind of bribery investigation results in a complete government takeover?”

Bobo offered a noncommittal shrug. “I’m still trying to figure out how all those people were on the take.” His voice sounded almost offended. “If someone was handing out money to senators, they sure didn’t give any to me.”

Sanchez dropped her hands to her sides, slapping her palms against her hips.

“Look, Bobo, we need a plan.”

A pickup drove past the empty vendors’ plaza, blaring its radio at full capacity. Enormous speakers had been hinged to the back bed so that they could be rotated outward. The rear tires bulged from the extra weight; the bumper nearly dragged on the ground.

Despite the static feedback, Sanchez recognized the KRAT broadcast.

“The pasty boys are still looking for the Governor,” Dread Fred reported. Whaler let out one of his distinctive high-pitched whistles and added, “We’ve got a signed T-shirt for the first person who sends us a picture of the big man in handcuffs!”

Dread squeezed in a last comment before the broadcast jingle started to play.

“Run, Guvvy, run.”