Cross Current (28 page)

“Hell if I know what goes on in that dude’s head. It’s all scrambled in there.”

The railroad bridge sounded the buzzer and the span began to rise. Perry said, “Much as I love chatting with you, sweetheart, I got a Hatteras down at Bahia Mar waiting for Perry to make his magic.”

The rest of the trip downriver hadn’t taken nearly as long since I had the current flowing with me. That was fortunate because the last half hour on the main river, with all the Saturday-morning boating crowd who were jockeying like it was rush hour on the Interstate, churning up the water and impatiently revving their engines, had come close to making me seasick.

My arms burned and my palms were blistered when, finally, I feathered my paddle to ease the kayak into the dock off
Gorda
's stern. When I reached up to grab the cleat on the dock, I saw a pair of familiar handsome brown legs walking toward me.

“Morning, Miss Sullivan,” Joe said. He was carrying two covered paper cups and a grease-stained brown bag. “Your cappuccino’s getting cold.”

“Where’s my brother?”

“Nobody here but the dog when I arrived. I knocked on your cottage door and was about to drink your coffee when I saw you come paddling this way.”

“I’m surprised Abaco let you back here.”

“Onion bagels are her favorite. She wouldn’t have done it for honey wheat. I tried that first.”

“Ah, so, do you always bribe women to get what you want?”

He grinned. “I usually don’t need to.”

I was attempting to execute the rather complicated maneuver required to climb off a kayak alongside a dock, and I nearly went into the river at this comment. The tide was high, so very little of the ladder was left above water, and I made an extremely ungraceful landing by sliding onto the dock on my belly. After tying off the kayak’s bowline, I dusted off my hands on my shorts and stood up. Joe’s mountain bike was propped against the trunk of an old oak tree, and he was again dressed in Lycra bike shorts, this time with a baby-blue tank top. He handed me a cardboard coffee cup.

“Thanks.” I inclined my head in the direction of the wood picnic table closer to the Larsens’ house. “Let’s get a ways back from the river. I’ve inhaled enough exhaust this morning.”

“So how’re things?”

I didn’t say anything, just looked into the bag he’d brought, pulled out a cinnamon raisin bagel, and spread the cream cheese on with a plastic knife. I knew what he was doing. Joe was trying to get back on my good side by bribing me with bagels. I’d take the bribe, but as for forgiveness, he was going to have to work for it.

I bit off a big piece and chewed slowly. “Hmmm. These are really good. The coffee, too. Thanks.”

“So, how’s that kid?”

“Fine.”

“Have you been to see her?”

“Yup.”

He tried to wait me out, make me need to fill in the silence. Not this morning. Not after what he’d said yesterday.

“Seychelle, look, I want to help you. I like you. I’m a retired cop and I’m bored, so I’d like to help out any way I can. You’re not experienced. You should use me. Use me and abuse me.”

“It’s nice of you to offer, Joe, but...”

“You’re still pissed off at me, aren’t you. First my daughter, now you. I seem to piss off all the women I try to help. This is about yesterday, isn’t it. About what I said about your old man.”

“Don’t call him my ‘old man.’ ”

“Okay, this is about Red, then. Hmm. I thought you were better than that, Sullivan.”

I glanced quickly at him, frowned, and turned away. The bagel tasted lousy all of a sudden.

“You said you were going to find that kid’s father,” he said, “and you sounded like you meant it. I believed you.” He balled up his napkin and crushed his empty coffee cup. “But now you’re so hung up on some old news about what did or didn’t happen more than twenty years ago, you’re gonna turn down a chance to use thirty years of investigative experience because you’re pouting over your daddy.” He stood and collected the bag with the remaining bagels.

I sighed. “Sit down.”

He stood there, waiting.

“Would you sit already?” I said.

“Why?”

“You’re gonna make me say it, aren’t you. Okay. Maybe I could use a little help. There. See, I kinda screwed up last night. Somebody followed me, and it nearly got ugly. I thought I’d made sure I didn’t have a tail, but I guess I’m not a very good Nancy Drew after all. I don’t want to make that mistake again. So, yeah. I’ll take you up on your offer.”

He sat down on the wood bench. “Okay, so you need to find this kid’s father.”

“Yeah. She says her father is an American, and she thinks she was being brought to America to join him. I figured the place to start, then, was the boat that brought her to America. I’ve set up a meeting today with someone who knows something about the
Miss Agnes
."

“Would you mind if I tag along? I could watch your back.”

I looked at his bike shorts and clean blue tank top. “I don’t know that you’ll still want to when you hear where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Swap Shop.”

What we now know as the Swap Shop started life back in the sixties as the Thunderbird Drive-in Movie Theater. When the owner began running a flea market on the blacktop expanse on weekends, the concept grew and grew, eventually becoming an indoor/outdoor collection of permanent booths with a food court and full-time entertainment including a circus, complete with elephants, rides, and an outdoor carnival. The place still showed movies at night, but the main business now took place during the day when the Swap Shop resembled the outdoor markets of third-world countries more than an American shopping mall.

We got lucky and found a minivan pulling out of a parking space. I whipped Lightnin’ into the spot before a hooked-up Honda Civic with booming bass could beat me to it.

“You like to live dangerously, I see,” Joe said.

Although most of the sky was blue, a small dark cloud just overhead began to spit raindrops on us as we walked across the parking lot. We picked up the pace and ducked under the tent that covered the long rows of outdoor stalls.

“You ever been here before?” I asked Joe.

“No, can’t say that this is my sort of spot.” He seemed to draw into himself, as if he were afraid he might catch something.

I like grit. Always have. And the Swap Shop was one of the grittiest places you could find in South Florida. And that was saying something.

Within a few minutes, the rain had stopped, and the fierce sun was out again, pushing the humidity into the nineties. The odors from fried foods, sweet cotton candy, and sweat mingled with the steam that was rising off the asphalt, making it difficult to breathe. I half expected Joe to pass out.

Hispanic families and East Indian men manned most of the stalls. They called out to us as we passed, offering us their assorted car parts or their knife and sword collections or their T-shirts with off-color slogans. The blacktop beneath our feet was throbbing with the bass from the reggae music as we passed a huge array of subwoofers. I didn’t see many Haitians among the stall owners, though folks in the crowd of patrons seemed to speak more Creole than anything else. I figured that most of the Caribbean islanders probably sold fruits and veggies over in the food market. Joe and I asked an elderly security guard for directions and discovered that Paris Kids was a children’s wear store inside the main building.

“What’s the plan?” Joe asked as we headed toward the double glass doors.

“I don’t have one,” I told him. “I’m supposed to talk to a girl who works in this booth. She supposedly knows something about the
Miss Agnes
, maybe came over on board herself. I’d like you to just keep back, see if anybody shows an interest in us. The
Capitaine
guy is a dark-skinned man, well over six feet tall, with a goatee and a mustache. If you see anybody around fitting that description, let me know.” 

“Sounds like a plan to me. Consider me invisible.”

From inside the building, we could hear an announcer’s voice booming over a PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . .” and it was clear that we had arrived in time for the circus performance. The crowd was so thick that we had to turn sideways to fit through the doors and fight our way into the building. An old mirrored ball flung dancing spots of light around the crowd, and neon signs advertising gyros and pizza and Tic Tac Dough lottery cards provided the only other light. I saw the sign for Paris Kids on the far side of the food court and squeezed my way through the crowd in that direction. I’d already lost track of Joe.

When I made it to the shop’s door, I felt like I had just paddled my kayak into a side eddy of the river. I paused to catch my breath, and before I became aware of anything else in the shop, a woman was at my side.

“Can I help you?” She was a matronly Haitian woman in her mid-forties.

“No, thanks. I just want to look around.”

“Do you have something special in mind?” Her fingernails were long and painted with some kind of intricate designs. Little jewels glued to the nails glinted in the fluorescent lights.

“No, I just want to look around, okay?”

The store was filled with hundreds of little white dresses. There were maybe ten out of the hundreds that were either a pale pink or blue. The rest were all white.

“How old is your daughter?” the sales lady asked.

“I don’t have any kids.”

She made a sympathetic sound. “Awww, I am so sorry,” she said. “Are you shopping for something for a niece or nephew, perhaps?”

Hey, lady, I wanted to say,
bug off
. There’s nothing wrong with not having any kids.

Then the phone rang. "
Pardon
,” she said, and hurried into the back of the store. On her way through the door she hollered, “Margot!
Viens ici!
”

The young girl who emerged wore a deep, permanent scowl on her face and a large loose gray T-shirt that hid her body almost to her knees. A blue-and-white bandanna covered her head, and her face was makeup free. She looked about seventeen years old.

“Hi, Margot. I’m Seychelle Sullivan.”

She jerked her head toward the racks of dresses on the far side of the front door.

When we got there, I pretended to look through the dresses, sliding each little hanger around the metal bar. “Do you know who I am?”

She nodded.

“Juliette told me you would talk to me,” I said. “You know something about the
Miss Agnes
?"

“Yes.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Yes.” She didn’t say anything more, and I was beginning to think this was pointless when she added, “He killed my brother.”

The suddenness of her revelation startled me. “Who did?” 

“
Le Capitaine
.”

“The captain of the
Miss Agnes
killed your brother?” 

“
Oui
.” It sounded more like a sharp inhalation than a word. She looked out at the crowd and scanned the faces, then turned back to me. “Very bad man. In Haiti, he was Ton- ton Macoute. Everybody afraid of him.” She looked to the back of the store, and she sniffed. “I not. My brother was come from Haiti take me home. He pay
Le Capitaine
eight hundred dollar to come for me. Get away from Madame. That why
Le Capitaine
, he opened his head.”

“Your brother died of head wounds?”

“Oui, they told me
Le Capitaine
put everybody in the sea, then he cut Jean-Pierre. Push him in the sea, too. He like it when some can’t swim. He laugh.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, my voice shaky. Her dark eyes gazed past me, reflecting the red circus lights like a pair of smoldering coals. I actually felt scared watching the hatred in her face. I didn’t know much about Haiti, but I had heard of the Macoutes—Papa and later Baby Doc’s much- feared security force. No wonder this guy was so good with a machete. “Your brother didn’t want you to work as a
restavek
any longer?”

She shook her head. “1 come to Florida eight month ago. No school, only work. Jean-Pierre say he take me to school. Now ...” She shrugged.

“Margot, I am trying to help another girl. She’s younger than you are, and she came on the
Miss Agnes
this week. She was coming to live with her father here in the States, and I need to find him.”

She shook her head. “All the girl come on
Miss Agnes
are
restavek
here in Florida.”

I turned from her and held up a dress as though for her approval. My eyes swung across the crowd, and I noticed a familiar face. Then the face was gone. He had melted back into the sea of faces, but I would know that pockmarked skin and that zigzag eyebrow anywhere. What was Gil Lynch doing at the Swap Shop? Following me?

“Margot!” The saleslady emerged from the back of the shop shouting.

“Ma’am,” I called out to her, “is it okay if Margot helps me pick out a dress for my niece? She’s a very sweet girl.” 

The shop owner looked astonished that anyone would call this scowling girl sweet, but she was afraid to lose the sale, so she left us alone.

I pulled a dress off a rack and held it up, asking Margot to tell me what she thought. The music from the circus swelled, and the audience oooed. Apparently the elephants had entered the ring. I scanned the crowd again, trying to spot Gil. For just a second, I questioned whether he had really been there. Where was Joe?

The girl pointed to the lace around the collar of the little dress, and she said quietly, “You stop
Le Capitaine
?”

She wanted something from me that I couldn’t promise. I put the dress back, moved a little farther down the rack, and examined a pale blue dress with a deep V neckline. Why the hell would a seven-year-old kid wear a neckline like that?

“He know Madame,” she said.

“You mean the woman who owns this store?” I jerked my head toward the woman with the fingernail jewels and then whipped a dress off the rack and held it up as though for her opinion. “She’s a friend? Of the captain of the
Miss Agnes
?”