The Last Witness

by W. E. B. Griffin

  “Jerry,” Coughlin put in, “I wouldn’t mind having him on the case. He runs easily in those social circles—”

  “No,” Carlucci snapped, making eye contact. Then he sighed. “No, Denny, not right now. Maybe later—”

  His cell phone began ringing. He made a look of annoyance, then glanced at its screen, muttered, “Damn, McCain,” then put the phone to his head and answered in an authoritative, even tone, “Carlucci.”

  All eyes were on him as he said: “Who just heard from Maggie?”

  [TWO]

  Off Big Pine Key, Florida

  Sunday, November 16, 4:02 P.M.

  Matt Payne double-checked the lightly laminated NOAA navigation chart, then picked up the binoculars, scanned ahead of the Viking, and after a moment located what he was looking for—the outer markers of the channel that led to Big Pine Key, Little Torch Key, and Little Palm Island.

  If he had wanted, he could just as easily have looked at the screen of the GPS unit, which would have pinpointed the exact location of the markers and the entire channel, and the boat’s exact position relative to them, then dialed in the autopilot. But Matt, as much as he appreciated technology, liked to practice his map and compass, dead reckoning, and other navigation skills—believing that it wasn’t a case of if technology was going to fail but when it would crap out on him.

  As wise ol’ Murphy made law, “If anything can go wrong, it will—and at the worst possible damn time.”

  Only a fool tempts fate at sea. . . .

  The dark blue of the deeper water now gave way to a glistening aqua green. The depth sounder, confirming what he read on the chart, showed they were running in sixty feet of water. Closer to shore, and the clear, shallower water there, the white of the bottom could easily be seen.

  When he put the optics on the console, he saw his cell phone screen light up and a text message box appear:

  MICKEY O’HARA 4:03 PM

  CALL ME ASAP. I’M CHASING DEADLINE AND NEED INFO.

  Michael J. O’Hara, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and Matt had developed an interesting—if unusual—close friendship over the years. The wiry thirty-seven-year-old, of Irish descent and with a head of unruly red hair, was unorthodox but uncompromisingly fair—and thus had earned the respect of the cops who walked the beat on up to the commissioner himself.

  It was O’Hara who, when Payne had been grazed in the forehead by a ricochet bullet in his first shoot-out, photographed the bloodied rookie cop standing with his .45 over the dead shooter, and later wrote the headline: “Officer M. M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

  I’m not working any cases, Matt thought as he texted back: “OK. ASAP.”

  What could I know that he wants for a story?

  Matt turned to Amanda, who was reclined on a long cushion beside him, reading a book titled Cruising Guide to the Bahamas.

  “Almost there,” he said.

  “Great!”

  She put down the book and went to stand beside him.

  He pointed to a long narrow outer island.

  “That’s Big Munson. It’s about a hundred acres of little more than mangroves and mosquitoes.”

  “The one where you and Chad reenacted Lord of the Flies?”

  He looked at her. She was grinning mischievously.

  “Maybe Chad. He’s never shied away from power grabs. For me it was more like Treasure Island mixed with Crusoe, thank you very much. Anyway, Little Munson, which is all beach and palm trees and dripping with creature comforts, is next to it.”

  As he made a slight course correction to the north, putting the Viking on a compass heading of 310 degrees, another pack of the go-fasts appeared ahead. It was headed for the same channel, and after the first boat began slowing to idle speed for the approach, the others a moment later dropped their speed almost at the same time. Matt counted nine boats.

  He then eased back on the Viking’s throttles. As the big boat slowed, her hull settling lower in the water, he thought he heard the faint sound of a police siren.

  Immediately, he muted the music, looked back over his shoulder, and exclaimed, “What the hell?”

  There was in fact a siren. And it clearly was coming from a Florida Marine Patrol boat, its emergency light bar flashing over the center console’s aluminum tube T-top roof.

  About two hundred yards ahead of the police boat was a twin-engine, thirty-foot-long center console fishing boat. Matt grabbed the binoculars. He could make out a lone, shirtless, dark-skinned man aboard, his dreadlocks flying almost straight back as he stood with a death grip on the steering wheel.

  “What’s that boat doing?” Amanda said.

  “Not to sound like a smart-ass, but I’d say he’s running. He’s got to have that thing at wide-open throttle. There’s little more than the props in the water. But why? You can’t outrun the cops here.”

  “Looks like he’s headed for those Poker Run boats.”

  The go-fasts now were beginning to form a single-file line as they approached the channel’s first outer marker.

  In no time, the fleeing boat caught up with the back of the pack of go-fasts, the police boat in hot pursuit. It began weaving in and out of the line, coming dangerously close to colliding with the first two that it passed. The captains of some of the other boats, realizing what was happening, quickly maneuvered to get out of the way. A few lay on their horns, shouted, and, fists pumping, made obscene gestures as the boat flew past.

  The police boat broke off its high-speed chase but still followed.

  The burly man with the dreadlocks, not slowing, then entered the channel.

  Matt saw that a thirty-three-foot Coast Guard boat with triple outboards and its emergency lights flashing had appeared farther up the channel near the end of a small island. It turned sideways, effectively shutting down the channel.

  “See? Nowhere to run,” Matt said, his tone incredulous. “He’s headed right into the hands of the Coast Guard.”

  The boat then made a hard turn to the right, leaving the channel.

  “I’ll be damned! He’s trying to cut across the shoal at Big Munson!”

  The boat’s propellers began churning up sea grass and sand as it entered the shallow, maybe two-feet-deep, water. Another center console police boat—this one with a large golden badge and the words MONROE COUNTY SHERIFF on its white hull—then appeared ahead of it, at the far end of the thickly treed key.

  The speeding boat started to make a zigzag course, the man with the dreadlocks clearly trying to come up with some evasive course.

  Then he suddenly made a hard 90-degree turn to the left.

  “He’s going to run ashore!” Amanda said.

  The boat was headed directly for the sandy white beach and thick vegetation that edged Big Munson.

  Just as the boat got close to the beach, the driver throttled down.

  The boat appeared to settle softly in the shallow water—then shot up onto the sandy shoreline and suddenly pitched up. It went airborne briefly before landing in a more or less cushion of mangrove trees, stopping with the bow pointed skyward. The impact had thrown the man with the dreadlocks to the deck.

  The boat’s twin outboard engines, their exhausts no longer submerged and muffled, made a deep pained roar. After a long moment, the stunned man was able to get up and, one at a time, shut them down.

  Matt could now see that the area forward of the center console had some sort of cover. And people had started scurrying out from under it.

  Then, from the tree line twenty yards away, one, then two, then a half dozen more boys in T-shirts and dark green shorts suddenly ran out onto the beach, then turned and went as fast as they could toward the boat. Slung on the shoulder of the last one in line was a medium-sized white duffel bag with a red cross on it.

  “Well, how about that,” Matt said. “Here come
the real first responders—Scouts in action.”

  The burly man with the dreadlocks hopped down onto the beach. The others began to follow quickly, one by one sliding over the side of the boat and landing on the sand.

  A couple of them began limping. The man with the dreadlocks helped them to a spot on the beach, then directed the others to sit with them. They more or less made a line paralleling the shoreline.

  “Oh my God!” Amanda said, shocked. “They’re okay after that? It’s amazing they weren’t killed! I should see if they need a doctor.”

  “There’s no way to get you there—even if I thought they’d let you.”

  The Boy Scouts arrived at the scene and immediately began checking the injured and performing first aid.

  The police and Coast Guard vessels came in as close to the island as possible without running aground.

  “Why aren’t the cops rushing ashore?” Amanda said.

  “Why should they? Those people aren’t going anywhere. They’re on an island surrounded by what looks like ten levels of law enforcement.”

  —

  Five minutes later, Matt lined up the Viking to follow the Poker Run pack through the outer markers of the channel.

  He heard more sirens, these coming from the Overseas Highway. All the action on the water had caused the heavy weekend traffic to slow to a crawl. Weaving through it were two Mobile Intensive Care Unit ambulances, their sirens screaming. They came to a stop beside the water’s edge at the foot of the bridge.

  “And here come the paramedics.”

  From the corner of his eye, Matt noticed something moving quickly. He looked to his left and saw a big blue-hulled Fountain speedboat overtaking the Viking. It roared around them, then cut its speed and smoothly dropped in behind the last boat in the pack.

  Lucky for him it really isn’t a race, Matt thought. He’d have come in dead ass last.

  But what a beautiful boat. I wonder if they’re going to screw it up with some stupid shrink-wrap design like those other go-fasts.

  Clearly it doesn’t need them to attract hot women. Look at all of them!

  Amanda did not notice. She was looking through the binoculars and watching the police. They now were wading ashore and approaching the accident scene.

  “Well, that’s curious,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The people who were on the boat are smiling at the cops like they’re long-lost friends.”

  [THREE]

  Little Palm Island, Florida

  Sunday, November 16, 7:15 P.M.

  The resort’s intimate dining room featured warm wooden floors, a high-pitched ceiling, and a wall of windows that offered a picturesque view of the pristine white beach—lined with tall, leaning palm trees—and beyond it the vast Atlantic Ocean. The room, which was maybe half full, held only twenty-five round tables, each with seating for four. They were nicely separated so that the guests—and their conversations—would not be on top of one another.

  Amanda Law, wearing a simple but elegant linen dress and sandals and with her thick hair now unbraided, sat between Chad Nesbitt and Matt Payne, who looked almost like twins—Chad was a little shorter and stockier—both dressed in khaki slacks, cotton knit shirts, navy blazers, and deck shoes.

  Matt had his stainless steel Colt .45 Officer’s Model tucked inside his waistband at his right hip.

  “Even if you had broken bones, you’d be smiling, too,” Chad said, stirring his second Myers’s dark Jamaican rum and tonic cocktail. “Goodbye, Communism. Hello, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”

  “And that happens all the time down here?” Amanda said as she delicately squeezed a slice of lime into her glass of club soda.

  Chad shook his head. “There are far more quiet landings than a wild running aground like today. I heard someone today say it’s up to eight thousand people so far this year—and that’s just here, not counting coming up through Mexico. The Cubans are willing to do anything for freedom. You’ve heard of the wet-foot, dry-foot policy?”

  Matt shook his head.

  “What—” he began, then stopped as he saw the waiter approaching with a full round tray.

  “If you’ll please pardon the interruption,” the waiter said, placing an enormous bowl before Amanda. “For the lady, our coconut lobster bisque to start.”

  “That looks wonderful,” Amanda said. “Thank you.”

  He put a plate in front of Chad and said, “The seafood seviche with crisp plantain chips.”

  And then he put two plates in front of Matt, who was taking a sip of eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt whisky.

  “Crab fritters, sir,” the waiter said. “And this, of course, is the tuna and oyster sashimi you called about earlier.”

  Matt looked at the waiter and was about to ask a question when he saw another waiter coming toward them with an enormous round plate piled high with finely crushed ice, on top of which were two dozen oysters on the half shell. The waiter put it on the table at the empty place setting.

  “Enjoy,” the second waiter said, then both left.

  “Can anyone tell me,” Matt said, looking between Amanda and Chad, “whose brilliant idea it was to instruct servers to say, ‘Enjoy!’ Is that an order? The entire purpose of why we came is to enjoy the meal. It’s not like we need to be told to.”

  “Want to explain why you’re about to enjoy two dozen raw oysters?” Amanda said. “And oyster sashimi?”

  “I thought you knew, my love, that these mollusks have a special, shall we say, romantic effect,” Matt said, smiling as he held up one of the half shells with an oyster. “Please enjoy one . . . and by one I mean help yourself to a dozen, of course.”

  “Really, Matt?” Chad said, shaking his head and grinning. “You’re absolutely shameless.”

  “I think, Romeo, that you’ve already caused enough trouble being overly romantic,” Amanda said playfully, picking up her soup spoon. “And thanks to the condition you put me in, I have to be careful about not eating high-mercury fish. I really wanted some tuna.”

  “Well, suit yourself,” Matt said, then put the half shell to his lips and slurped the oyster out. Hand on his chest as he chewed, he looked at Amanda with an exaggerated face of extreme gastronomical satisfaction. Then he swallowed, exchanged the empty shell for a full one, and looked at Chad. “What were you saying about that dry-wet policy?”

  “Wet-foot, dry-foot,” Chad corrected, as he piled seviche on a plantain chip. “It’s U.S. immigration policy, unique to Cubans trying to come to America. If a Cuban national can step on U.S. soil, he or she can stay, and a year and a day later becomes nationalized. If, however, they get intercepted at sea—anywhere on the water, even if it’s a foot deep, that’s the ‘wet foot’—they get shipped back to the Castro Brothers’ Happy Havana. Which they just risked their lives to flee—maybe for the third or fourth time—because the Castros don’t exactly welcome them home with a brass band.”

  Chad ate his seviche, and began piling more on another chip.

  “And the cops try keeping them from reaching land?” Amanda said.

  “As you saw, that can get almost comical, a real cat-and-mouse catch-me-if-you-can game. But they have to. Otherwise, if word got to the Cuban masses that everyone could just step ashore and begin enjoying the bounty of America, Florida would be flooded. I mean, c’mon, they’re not exactly rushing to Haiti, which is half the distance. It’d be worse than during the Mariel Boatlift. Remember that, Matt?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said, after washing down another oyster, “when Castro let something like a hundred thousand leave in 1980. And it happened again in ’94. The luckier ones landed packed in boats barely able to float, carrying little more than their Eleguá.”

  “‘Eleguá’?” Amanda parroted.

  “The West African–Caribbean Santería god that they believe contro
ls their paths, their destiny. Eleguá is represented by a clay disc that’s the face of a child. Castro cleverly cleared out his jails and loony bins, forcing them onto the boats. The more desperate lucky ones used rafts smaller, and less seaworthy, than a bathtub. Little more than tire tubes and blocks of Styrofoam lashed together. God only knows how many did not survive the trip.”

  Amanda considered that for a moment and, sadly shaking her head, said, “And you acquired this vast knowledge how?”

  “Next door, around the campfire when we were kids camping on Big Munson. And, later, on family trips to the Caribbean.”

  “So now,” Chad went on, “out of Miami’s Little Havana, the exiles there have created a cottage industry of sorts. They charge Cuban-Americans upwards of ten grand to have a relative snuck out of Cuba and snuck ashore here.”

  Matt nodded thoughtfully. “Which explains why that guy was determined to get those refugees onto land. A dozen people at ten grand each comes to a hundred and twenty thousand reasons.”

  “What happens to the guy running the boat?” Amanda said.

  “Likely nothing,” Chad said. “Often he’s a Cuban, too. They don’t earn even a dollar a day—and that’s in pesos, which are worthless anywhere but Cuba. So, he’s broke. But if he produces a Cuban national identity card, he’s home free—literally. Even if he gets locked up, he probably won’t serve any real time, and when he’s released, wouldn’t surprise me that someone slips him a nice cash payment. And maybe puts him and his Eleguá in another boat for another run.”

  “Frightening,” Amanda said.

  “Yeah,” Chad said, then drained his drink. “But I’ll tell you what’s really becoming frightening.”

  “What?” Matt said.

  “Philly. Just when you think it’s bad enough, things get worse.”

  Matt grunted. “No argument there.”

  “I mean it’s something new every day. Did you hear what happened to Maggie McCain’s place? Daffy drove by it this afternoon. I just heard about it shortly before that.”