Ocean Burning (2 page)

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I said have a good night.” The officer handed back the passport. He pointed. “Just turn there and keep driving. About four miles, you will see it.”

“Thanks again,” the leader said. The officer tipped his hat, and he and his partner turned and headed back to their cruiser.

The leader started the van and drove away, then headed up the street the officer had indicated for a few miles. When no on followed the van, the leader doubled back. The plan had alternate locations built into in, and alternates for the alternates.

The first alternate was the alley again, where the leader parked. When the two men inside saw the van was gone from the front of the building, they could go out a side door and circle around here.

The leader waited again, counting on the darkness of the alley to protect the van. Five minutes passed, then ten. Then fifteen.

They were late. The leg started to jimmy again.

At the eighteen minute mark the big man turned the corner, the duffel slung over his shoulder. The bag was much more filled out that it had been before, and when he slung it though the side door and climbed in after it, it made no sound, like it had been padded.

The leader started the engine.

“Wait,” the big man said, and held up a finger.

The slight man turned the corner, limping slightly, and yanked himself up into the passenger seat. The leader pulled out of they alley, flicked on the headlights, and drove in a new direction, not the direction the cops had headed and not the up the street they had indicated.

“Trouble?” the slight man said.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Not really. I hurt my leg a little getting the side door open.”

“Will someone notice what you did to the door?”

“Eventually, yes. The latch is bent a bit. But it could be written off as carelessness, a simple accident.”

The leader’s lips pressed into a hard white line. “Will it be?”

“That depends,” the slight man said.

“On?”

“On whether they put two and two together once they notice the money’s missing.”

“The money isn’t missing,” the leader said, and smiled.

The big man loudly patted the fat duffel leaning against him. “This tends to disagree with you,” he said.

“So you’d think,” the leader said. “But no, what we have here is a mistake on the paperwork. Banco United
thought
they had that money in the vault. But it was never there to begin with. It certainly wasn’t stolen.”

“What’s the difference?” the slight man asked.

“Well, one means a flurry of memos. And the other one means life in prison.”

“Someday,” the slight man said, “I’m going to ask you how made that happen.”

“Don’t,” the leader said.

The van reached the highway that ran along the Pacific coast. It gunned up an entrance ramp and then cut across two lanes of traffic to make a left-hand exit, then spiraled around a cloverleaf and down into a parking lot crammed under the highway junction. The parking lot was abandoned except for the used needles laying everywhere, and the sound of the surf pounding somewhere close by.

The leader shut the engine off. Quiet like soft velvet, the dull hum of cars on the highway above.

“Wipe it down,” the leader said. They did. The keys were left in the ignition. With any luck the van would be stolen again, further obscuring the link between it and them. If not, that was alright to, it couldn’t be connected back to anyone in the group.

But it would be taken. The leader was sure.

“Good to get part one out of the way,” the slight man said.

“I just hope you’re ready for part two,” the leader said.

The slight man gave a thumbs, and the big man clapped him on the back.

The leader turned to walk into the darkness, paused, turned back. Smiled at both of them, satisfied.

The slight man nodded.

“See you on the water,” he said.

Chapter 2

October had never been a big month for vacationers, and this October was no different.

I spent most days sitting on the little balcony on the second level of the
Regal Purple
, casting my line and reeling it in while taking in the yellow Pacific sun. My business was in what most people would call the tourist industry. I owned a boat—the
Purple
—and chartered it out when I could find a customer, other Americans mostly.

They say the key to a good business is understanding your customers, but I’d never understood the busy months, or the slow months, or the interplay between them. Intellectually I suppose I knew that people had jobs in offices or time cards they had to punch, but it always seemed unreal, as if my pale fellow countrymen had turned to each other and said, “Did you hear, the weather’s nice in Mexico right this second, so we had better head down there.” They would all come south together, just like the flocks of vultures that would arrive like clockwork each and every winter.

The weather was always nice in Mexico. Compared to the five months of winter I had endured growing up in the Midwest, it was heavenly. Sitting on my little balcony, I turned my face up at the sun, that glowing ball of warmth and happiness, and for the umpteenth time I resolved never to have to own a winter coat ever again.

The little radio crackled. It was a hand-held walkie, not part of my boat’s built in electronics. I only used it for communication between my slip and the marina office.

“Conway, estas ahi?” The soft feminine voice barely made it out of the speaker.

Stretching out one lanky arm, I dragged the walkie-talkie toward me by the rubber antenna, refusing to move from my spot in the sun. Thumbing the big green button on the side almost seemed a trial. My eyes closed again, and I pressed the button.

“Yeah, I’m here,” I said.

“Algunas personas estan aqui.”

“There are people everywhere, Maria. What’s it got to do with me?”

“They want to charter a boat, Conway,” she said.

I opened my eyes and stared at the handset, then closed them and focused on the heat of the sun on my face. Tried to think. It wasn’t like Maria to send customers my way. And this was the off season—ten or more boats were just sitting here in the marina, every one of them aching for the business. And lately, she and I weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye. Maybe this was a good sign.

I thumbed the stiff green button again. “Does this mean I’m off your shit list?”

“They asking for you, Conway. Otherwise I wouldn’t even point out you exist, you
mamoncete
.”

That was more like it.

“Well, thanks anyway.” It had been on my mind to win Maria back over, but I had yet to actually take any action in that regard. I made a mental note to get it done before spring break. “Send ‘em down,” I said.

I stood up and stretched, feeling the click and pop of joints all over, hearing the worst of them. I’d been sitting for too long, and I mean that in the broader sense. The
Regal Purple
hadn’t been out to sea in over a month. I’d been living on it, catching what fish I could and eating the rest of my food out of cans. Most of those cans were still down below and needed cleaning up, among other things.

I reeled in my line and stowed my rig, folded up the camp chair and hung it on its hook, barged down the short staircase and started shoving garbage into whatever bag I could find. Once I had it tied up and sitting near the gangway, I closed the door to the bedroom and gave every flat surface a quick wipe.

Lastly, I turned to myself.

I pulled open the door to the head and stretched its accordion folds out into the room. A small mirror hung there, and I braced myself before looking into it. My skin was dark brown from a few years in the sun, darker still where it hung under my eyes. I wouldn’t have called them bags, but they weren’t exactly a glow of health either. I ran fingers through my patchy stubble, and wet a razor before dragging it over the lower part of my face.

Appearance was a priority.

For some reason, people become keen gauges of professionalism just before climbing onto a small, curved piece of floating wood and pushing off into the vast and endless sea. Worse still, they judged professionalism at a glance. Were your shirts ironed? Were your shoes shined? I’d seen tourist after tourist walk the line of boats here at the marina, and more often than not they’d climb aboard with Petey. Petey's boat—ostensibly white—matched his teeth, but Petey was a life-long smoker. His boat's hull rode alarmingly close to the water line, but old he never bothered with many repairs.

Because Petey had an ace in the hole: his captain’s hat.

He had purchased it years ago in a gift shop not a hundred feet from the marina. It had been blue the day he got it, but summers in the sun combined with a two-pack-a-day habit had yellowed it along with the vessel and his teeth. None of that mattered. What mattered was that it had a big anchor prominently displayed on the front. When the time came Petey would use his cigarette to light the curved pipe he kept packed and ready, plop on his special headgear, and the tourists would start lining up, desperate to experience a tour given by an authentic old salt dog like Petey.

I knew for a fact Petey had worked a manufacturing line in Detroit until his mother died and left him some money, and he had never even seen the ocean before his fiftieth birthday. Still, the customers came. He always swore—when he was sober enough to swear to anything at all—that it was the hat. The hat was the key.

“Try and give them a good show,” he’d say. “That’s all they want, a real life sea adventure to go home and tell their neighbors about.”

“But it’s not a real sea adventure, just like you’re not a real captain—that’s the point,” I always responded.

He’d snort at me. “Get yourself a hat, Frank. Or at least crawl up out of the bottle every now and then.”

The pot calling the kettle black,
I thought, still staring into the mirror, shaking off the memory.

I splashed water on my face, discarded my aging tank top and pulled on a fresh white Guayabera without an undershirt. I combed my hair through my fingers and headed up the stairs.

Back on deck I could see two figures made small by the distance between us. They were picking their way down the main concrete path towards my slip. I grabbed the trash bags and launched myself deftly over the ropes and down onto the wooden dock and raced away in the opposite direction, heading for the dumpsters.

I hated to admit to myself how much I needed this charter, but visions of canned tuna and a solid month of solitaire games danced in my head. It couldn’t be denied, not even by a celebrated self-deluder such as myself. The garbage bags felt greasy in my hand, and I prayed there weren’t fish guts dripping down the leg of my only pair of khaki shorts.

The lid of the dumpster lifted easily, and I flicked the bags over the edge before heading back the way I had come.

My two customers had grown only slightly in the distance, partially owing to the fact that I had walked away from them down the dock. Now we were approaching the boat from opposite directions, and I judged that we would meet right in front of it. That seemed like as good a spot as any. I slowed my pace, trying to time it just right.

Heat reflected off the white concrete. At first the two of them were shimmering balls with legs and arms. Moments later they resolved into two distinctly human shapes, and then into two figures I could with fair confidence identify as one man and one woman. The man was wearing a green t-shirt and khaki shorts that I could tell were pressed, even from here. The woman wore a rose-colored sundress. It had a bottom made of translucent lace, but not much of it: it stopped short just above the middle of her thigh.

Something about the way she walked—long and careful steps, like she was picking her way through a mine field—reminded me of someone. She threw her head back and laughed at something the man had said. Her hair flicked though the air, catching the light, a shimmering auburn mass.

My mind faltered.

I lost my train of thought.

One of my hands had been trailing along the railing, and it dropped unbidden to my side. I stopped walking.

Stared.

I knew that laugh. I had listened to it every day for more than a year. My eyes squinted, protection against the mid-afternoon sun, and I focused intently, trying to resolve the details of her face.

“It can’t be,” I muttered to myself.

She laughed again, a low, sensual rumble from somewhere deep inside her. The moment I heard that I was sure I was right: I knew it in my bones.

Carmen.

It was Carmen walking down past the pilings toward me.

I used to live for that laugh, for God’s sake. Her face came into sharp relief then, high cheekbones and full lips. Her eyebrows were still too big, but I had always found the somewhat comic effect they added to her face endearing.

She was stunningly beautiful, of course, but it was her eyebrows that made her one in a million.

I realized my knuckles had started to turn white from the squeezing I was giving them. One by one, I relaxed my fingers and forced them to lay smooth. I hung my arms straight down by my sides in a way I hoped was natural-looking.

She waved at me.

My arms felt like dead weight, but, heroically, I managed to lift one and then move it side to side.

She reached out and grabbed her companion’s arm, pulling him along. They trotted the last hundred feet. I froze in front of her, and before I could move a muscle or say a thing she jumped up and threw her arms around me.

“Frank!” she yelled out. She loosened her grip and put one hand on each of my cheeks. “It’s good to see you.”

I put my arms around her. I had sworn never to do that again. “You too,” I said.

Her hands drifted downward, never losing contact, and grabbed me by both biceps. She looked me right in the eyes. “What has it been? Four years?”

“Five,” I said, and regretted it. I had a weakness for her, always had. If she hadn’t known before, she certainly did now. After all, I had cared enough to count the passing years.