Hawk Channel Chase (28 page)

They flipped off one of their million-candle-power zappers and aimed the other one into the water astern of us. There was still enough light to play a softball game. I could make out at least five silhouettes aboard the large craft. Two held weapons pointed directly at us.

“Now, what are you doing out here, captain?”

“We came out to drift around,” said Turk. “Enjoy nature.”

“We worship the sunrise,” said Marnie. “We come out here often. Do you want to interfere with our religious freedom?”

“We’ll get to you in a minute, ma’am. During the past half hour, captain, you were running a pattern, like a search pattern. We think maybe you were waiting to rendezvous with another vessel. We’ve got some great equipment here. Is there anything we can help you find?”

Leading question, I thought. They know about the half-sunken boat.

Turk shook his head.

They drifted to within fifteen feet of us. Another man said, “Where do you live, captain?”

“Rockland Key.”

“And your first mate, there?”

“Key West, Florida, USA,” I said.

The man exhaled, disgusted. “A wiseass. And the lady?”

“Key West,” said Marnie.

“Where do you work, ma’am?”

“I’m a news reporter. The
Key West Citizen
.”

“Would your publisher be happy to know that you’re out here?”

“My boss loves good stories,” she said. “If he learned how I’m being treated by government employees, he would be overjoyed.”

“Captain, we have you coming out of Varadero, departing the Cuban coastline a half-hour after midnight. Can you prove that you haven’t spent the past five hours crossing over from Cuba?”

Alibi-free, Turk was silent. I pondered and rejected the idea of tossing Beth Watkins’s name into the mess. She didn’t deserve to be dragged down by our folly.

Marnie came through. “I can absolutely prove where I’ve been,” she said. “I didn’t have any cash with me.”

“Okay, honey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was in Circle K—the one on the corner of Kennedy and North Roosevelt—at about 4:45 this morning. Four Key West police officers saw me and they all know me. I didn’t have any cash, so I paid for three coffees and Danish with Visa. I keep all my receipts.”

No one said a thing.

After a minute or so, the primary speaker said, “As you were.”

“What does that mean?” said Turk.

“Belay my previous commands.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Stand up and stand easy, captain. Identify your point of debarkation.”

“Jesus.”

“Sir?”

We all stood and Turk looked around his boat. “I don’t think I have one.”

I wanted to laugh at Turk’s expense but let the men on the black boat do it for me. They turned down their spotlight and maneuvered to come alongside.

“You want to protect your hull, put out fenders, captain.”

Turk lifted his seat cushion and I removed two oblong vinyl-coated tubes. Each had a length of fender line looped through an eyelet. I secured them to mini-cleats under the starboard gunwale and adjusted them so the big boat wouldn’t crunch Turk’s side rail. Two of the other boat’s crewmen used boat hooks to grab
Flats Broke
, to snug us toward them and keep the boats from banging together. When I stood I could see a younger crewman making entries to a laptop. It had a screen dimming overlay so only the person facing the monitor could see what was on it.

The honcho barked his standard speech. “Driver’s licenses, passports if you have them. Boat papers, captain. Copy of your most recent Coast Guard inspection.”

“I just had that inspection last week,” said Turk.

“Didn’t see your running lights.”

Turk looked baffled. “Maybe we were down in a trough between waves. I know my battery’s running low. You saw them when you got closer, right?”

“You were transiting southward when we blue-lighted you, captain. Where did you think you were going?”

“We thought you were pirates coming to hijack our boat to use for highly illegal activities.”

Marnie and I gave our licenses to Turk. He reached out to hand the paperwork to the main man. That man, in turn, passed our IDs to the kid with the laptop.

I spoke up: “What makes you so certain that we came out of Varadero and so clueless to our departure an hour ago from Geiger Key?”

The man hesitated, then said, “When was the last time you had an all-American knee in the balls?”

“Two years ago,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know, it was a law enforcement officer. Poor guy lost his job. When he tried to hire on with JIATF, they turned him down.”

The Joint Interagency Task Force, based in Key West, coordinates at least fifteen federal agencies and military branches to fight illicit trafficking. They’re our big fist against incoming drugs and illegal aliens. I had no doubt that the ugly black boat worked with the task force.

“What do you know about JIATF?”

“Their phone number,” I said, “for starters.”

He turned back to Turk. “Any weapons on board, captain?”

“The gaff, if you use it right,” said Turk.

“I’ve got a knife,” I said.

“We’ll have to take that.”

“Bullshit. I’ve owned it for twenty years and never harmed a human.”

“Sir, we’ll have to…”

“I keep it for personal safety, like every boat captain and fishing enthusiast in the Keys. You want to go on record as depriving me of safety equipment?”

“Religious freedom, safety on the high seas,” said Marnie. “Anything else you gentlemen wish to revoke this morning? It all makes for a better headline.”

The kid with the laptop spoke up. “Skipper, slight glitch here. You want to look at this?”

The pair with the boat hooks kept their eyes on us while the other three black-clad men huddled around the computer. Only then did I notice the matte-black weapon held by the shortest huddler. I was no expert but it looked in the dark to be an automatic rifle. Nasty and lethal.

The agent in charge quit studying the monitor and approached Turk. “We’ve got a case of mistaken identity, captain. We’re going to have to ask for your understanding in this matter.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Pardon me, captain?”

“My friend here wants an explanation of another topic.”

“We’re not in the explanation business.” He turned and smiled at me like I was a long-lost friend. It was all self-pride. I was a mouse on downers and he was a six-pack of cats.

I asked anyway: “That underwater music festival at Looe Key every year… Do you have to put plugs in your underwater ears?”

He handed Turk the sheaf of boat documents and our licenses then faced me. “Don’t ask that, bubba. I mean, you have every right to ask but, if I gave you the answer, we’d have a long day ahead of us. You folks enjoy the holy sunrise.”

18

That half hour before sun-up, a pale cyan haze of vacant sky and light-chop water, no visible horizon. Nasty and full of thunder but hauling less emotional punch, the black boat roared eastward. Its wake a pale, turbulent strip in the monotone ocean. The agents had their job to do and we weren’t it.

Turk restarted his motor, slipped it into gear, idled slowly toward Geiger Key.

“Not to be unladylike,” said Marnie, “but what the fuck was that? Those faux-ninjas called me ‘lady.’ Ladies are dumpy old broads in grainy movies who wear bowl-shaped hats with veils. The other bastard called me ‘honey,’ like he’s buttering up some waitress in a diner. Or talking to one of his daughter’s playmates.”

“They protect our nation’s coastline,” I said. “Did you copy their chatter?”

Marnie yanked a zipper, pulled out the digital voice recorder then an earpiece from another pocket. She fitted them together and tested. “I got every word. They sound like they’re on the boat with us, but I’m not too sure I got a story. Your all-American knee in the balls, however, might go to the Sports page.”

“Do we have time for a short cruise up Sugarloaf Creek?” I said.

Turk eased his steering wheel to starboard. He’d led me to think he knew more about Sam’s caper than I did. He certainly understood my curiosity.

“Can we head back?” said Marnie. “My piece on Jerry Hammond’s murder hits this morning. I need to be in the office for feedback calls.”

“This man, Mister Alex, has a fine idea,” said Turk. “The first part of this tour was sponsored by Ms. Dunwoody. The second and final segment will be hosted by the world-famous photographer.”

“What birds will we see on this daybreak excursion?” I said.

“Maybe a fish hawk, an osprey,” said Turk. “Perhaps the odd cormorant. If we venture close to Sugarloaf Shores, we might see a fluffy-titted skinny-dipper.”

“Quit screwing with me,” said Marnie.

“Why do you think they let us go so quickly?” I said.

“I’m a reporter.”

“That helped,” I said, “but they were looking for lumps. We were a wrinkle.”

“Can we go with facts instead of imagery?” she said.

“Some file on their computer gave us a free pass. One of our names or Turk’s hull number… something waved a green flag. With their clout, they may have confirmed on the spot that you used a credit card at the Circle K. Once they decided we hadn’t crossed the straits, they lost interest.”

“Or they got redirected,” said Turk. “They left here fast on a single heading. That team on the beach found the real boat that departed Cuba. This won’t add an hour to getting back to Tamarac Park.”

“Does this detour relate to our reason for coming out here?”

“The ninjas pretended not to know about the sunken boat,” I said. “We came out here to draw attention. The swamped boat was meant to do the same. We weren’t the right flies.”

“And this creek we’re exploring leads to Bay Point?” she said. “Is the sunken boat connected to that fiasco on Sunday?”

“It crossed my mind, and I think Turk’s, too.”

“Does any of this intrigue lead us to Sam? Or help him out?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But we’re here. There’s not much else to do at this hour, and it’s all we’ve got.”

Marnie recognized her own words, bit her lip and nodded. “All right,” she said. She made a grand “Onward” gesture and moved sideways for a better grasp on the console.

Turk asked me to kneel on the bow to watch for coral heads, then brought
Flats Broke
to planing speed. With a freshening wind on our starboard quarter, it took five minutes to cover not quite three miles to Lower Sugarloaf. With shallows in sight, Turk dropped speed, raised his prop and let momentum carry us inshore.

At the inlet, with little headway in eighteen inches of water, I slid off the boat, held us in place, and looked around for prop scars in the grassy shallows. I saw old scrape marks but no torn grass, nothing recent. If Sam had taken this channel to duck a chase, he had done a clean job of it.

“How far north is open bay water?” I said.

Turk shrugged. “Couple hundred yards, if that.”

“Is there more than one way to cut through here?”

“Yes and no, depending on silt build-up,” he said. “Storms blow it open but quiet weather shuts it down. The locals know the way through.” He pointed to our right then swung his arm to the left. “They also know the shortcut to Bay Point, off that way, and know when to use it. A kayak would love it, but not this boat with the sun low and the creek in shadows. We’ll go the deep route.”

I pointed at a white one-by-four slat that stuck maybe fifteen inches above the water’s surface. “What the hell? Is that supposed to mark the funky channel?”

Turk said, “I don’t remember a post in here.”
 

I let the boat drift and wandered up the shallow cut. “Seems like a confusion factor, and a dangerous one,” I said. “Some innocent newbie could mistake it for the safe way to go. Maybe I should yank it out and toss it into the mangroves.”

“Leave it,” said Turk. “Somebody put it there for a reason. You might cause more trouble than you think you’re saving.”

I wiggled the one-by-four. It was jammed tightly into the sandy bottom. I left it alone, waded back to
Flats Broke
and rolled onto the bow.

The next twenty minutes offered us nothing. Turk knew the perimeter channel, zig-zagged expertly around the open bay south of US 1. We motored to Sugarloaf Shores, made a long, slow S-turn then ran westward parallel to the road. He pulled power to go southward, seventy-five feet off the east shore of Bay Point. We passed a vacant, storm-shuttered home that stood out oddly among the show places along the waterfront. It looked especially weird because of signs of recent activity on the seawall. Scrape marks, a small, fresh oval fender left hanging on new-looking yellow nylon line.

Turk and I exchanged glances, shared the thought that Sam’s friend Cliff Brock and Sally Catherman had died there or were killed elsewhere, perhaps not far away, and were found in that yard. Then I recognized the place as a crime scene I had observed sixteen months earlier. A man had been hung on his boat lift davit, murdered because he knew too much about other murders.