Oh yes, he was ready. The man’s right hand had a slight tremor as he waited. I gave him coordinates for the mailboat dock, even though I knew he wouldn’t show up tomorrow. Then I read off a series of numbers that began “North latitude two-four-four-zero-zero-four . . .”
The Garmin zoomed in like a missile. A flashing red waypoint anchored itself amid the pile of gold that was waiting a quarter mile off Marl Landing.
“Goddamn, man,” he muttered. “Always suspected that’s where Jimmy’s ex-girlfriend escaped to. But no idea the sneaky fool—”
“She’s dead,” I reminded him. “We had her journal stolen and got the numbers from there. Problem is, people on that island don’t know about the gold. Not yet, they don’t. But when they see us out there, salvaging something, they’re going to be damn suspicious.”
“The shit wouldn’t still be there if those people knew,” Rayvon reasoned. “But, hey, what they gonna do, call the po-leese? Not on a Bahamian customs vessel, they won’t. You one very smart gentleman, my friend.”
He sobered. “I don’t know, though, man. The Marl People—they bad news. People say they still cannibals, like in back times. Dude, when I used to patrol? We avoided the damn island. Cruise past at night, they’d be up there, dancing around fires, all savage-like.
“That can’t happen,” I said. “We can’t afford a confrontation of any type. No violence—understand?—or the deal’s off.”
Rayvon was ready for another beer. He got up. “That’s what you say now, but this here vessel is government property. They pull some kinda aggression . . .” He glanced forward, where the machine gun was draped in a blue canvas duffel, then decided he’d best change the subject. “Know how that island got started? A ship come over from England carrying witches—for true, man, it’s in the history books. Laws had changed over there, said they couldn’t burn witches no more, so the Brits was gonna dump them but ended up shipwrecked.”
He sat down heavily, something else on his mind. In texts, he had glossed over what had happened to Josiah, unaware that I knew already. So I took a chance. “How’s that old preacher doing? I was hoping to run into him.”
Rayvon was relieved that I had not. But the problem was something else. He finally got to it, asking, “On Marl Island, anybody see you—what was it, yesterday—when you shot that there video?” His focus did a slow shift from the GPS to me. He had small, limpid eyes that were flecked with green. “What I’m wondering is, why you only took two of them anchors, Moe?”
“Because I’m not stupid enough to go after something I wasn’t sure was there,” I said. “It was a quick recon. I rented a seaplane. We were in and out.” I waited for the man to blink. “You don’t trust me?”
His wide grin returned. “My brother, trust is what we got going for us. First day we met, we both prove that.”
The mood lightened. The man couldn’t wait to get me off the boat yet still played the role of host. He made a ceremony of assigning me a locker in forward berth, saying, “Stow your gear here, brother. Consider this your home.”
My phone buzzed—Tomlinson calling. I declined the call, but said, “I’ve got to take this,” meaning I needed privacy.
Rayvon claimed he had to use the head anyway.
I hurried up the companionway. Outside, I paused, knelt, and snatched two tubes of epoxy from the clutter. Then, with the phone to my ear, strolled forward as if interested in the machine gun.
The gun’s cover was loose. It was an M2 .50 caliber Browning. The boat’s forward windshield gave me a clear view inside the cabin. Rayvon was still using the toilet. I’m not a firearms expert, but I’ve been through close quarters combat schools and I have shot a variety of full autos. The basics couldn’t be much different. I hoped . . .
Phone to my ear, I carried on a merry conversation with myself while I moved fast. The gun’s retracting slide handle slammed back. I flipped the cover assembly clear. The chamber was empty. I squirted one tube of epoxy into the chamber, eyeballed the empty cabin, then added the second tube—a chemical hardener.
Quietly, I allowed the weapon’s bolt to slide back into place.
Tomlinson called again. I was so startled, I damn near dropped the phone because the thing was still against my ear.
“Plane’s cleared for takeoff, boss!” he yelled.
From the main cabin, Rayvon made his way aft and walked me to the gangway. “Brother, we gonna be rich. See you around noon tomorrow.”
In my head, I was thinking, More likely, in about four hours.
* * *
—
My guess was way off. That evening on Josiah’s island, a little after sunset, I confessed to Tomlinson, “I think I might have seriously screwed up. They should have been here by now—in the water and almost done.”
Rayvon and his crew of one—not two, hopefully—had yet to appear.
“She had to be warned,” my friend said, referring to Leo’s wife. “Want me to send another text? Like from a normal person’s phone. There’s no guarantee she got the first one.”
I still had Nanette’s card, her cell and room number written on the back. My conscience had battled my good judgment into submission. Yes, I had warned Leo’s wife. The message she’d received from my satellite phone was succinct—go home, your daughters need you.
There had been no reply.
“It was too damn obvious,” I said. “She probably showed it to Rayvon and he spooked.”
Until now, all the little pieces seemed to be falling into place. This afternoon, Leo’s contacts at the IRS had alerted the FBI attaché’s office at the U.S. Embassy in Nassau. Two days ago, as backup, through my connections, the clandestine branch of the Bahamian National Intelligence Agency had also been notified. They had been warned that a government employee, in a government vessel, planned to heist a fortune in gold.
Tomlinson was smoking a joint—perfectly acceptable here on Marl Landing where village law ruled. “Shallow up,” he said. “Marion, dude, you really need to relax. Besides, we can’t see diddly-squat from here. Come on. Let’s find Josiah.”
The old man had left us alone on a footbridge with an east-facing view of the pier and fish-cleaning table. The last silver thread of daylight was being pushed westward by a purple veil of stars. Locals had avoided us. They remained shadow people, fleeting images, backdropped by huts, tethered goats, cooking fires. I trailed Tomlinson up a path into the gloom of coconut palms where there was no light. Halfway up the hill, a charcoal figure emerged.
It was Josiah. “Government boat’s coming, gentlemen,” he called. “That Babylon filth is finally here. Follow me.”
It happened. From a limestone crest, we watched the refurbished DEA Interceptor round the point, lights out. It slowed and began a robotic search under GPS control. When the vessel was a quarter mile offshore, a figure appeared on the stern. A marker buoy was dropped. Underwater lights flared, yet the boat continued a slow search grid. Back and forth . . . back and forth . . .
After ten minutes, Josiah muttered, “Idiots. They either blind or too drunk to see what’s down there on the bottom.”
“Or scared,” I said. “I sent the customs guy a video. Told him that from up on the surface the anchors looked a little like stingrays covered with sand. Geezus—maybe he’s afraid of getting stung.” I was getting frustrated.
After another pass, the 31 Interceptor circled back to the marker buoy. There was a reverse thrust of engines. A chain rattled, the anchor splashed. Engines idled for a time, then went off.
In the abrupt silence, the vessel’s black hull floated on a mushroom of LED submersible light. The foliage around us roared with trilling frogs.
A second figure exited the cabin. The clank of air tanks, the rubberized thud of scuba gear being readied, reached us across the water.
“Can you make out who’s aboard? I only see two people.” Tomli
nson had binoculars to his eyes.
Josiah had never tried night vision technology before. “Take a look,” I said to him, and offered him the little monocular I’d been using.
The old preacher marveled at the increased number of stars. Their infinite galactic swirl seemed to take the breath right out of him. Then he focused on the cabin. “Two men . . . Yeah, just two of ’em so far. But we’re too damn far away for me to make out . . .” He paused. “Wait . . . One of ’em is lighting a cigarette now.” He lowered the lens. “Could be him? The foreigner with the snippers?”
I knew what he was thinking. So did Tomlinson. “Brother Bodden, if you start stomping around on that pier, you might be trading one problem for another.”
By calling the sharks, he meant.
Josiah wanted to get closer. I remained alone on the crest with the NV lens. When I was convinced that Leo’s wife wasn’t aboard the Interceptor, I joined my friends on the footbridge. For the next hour, we took turns using binoculars and night vision. Rayvon and his helper had hoisted twenty-one golden anchors aboard—more than a ton—when the old man wandered off and returned with a brass ship’s spyglass.
“Shoulda used this from the start,” he said. “It was my great-granddaddy’s.” The bridge’s handrail served as a brace. He extended the tube, focused, then began to pace and fume. Tomlinson took a look, then handed the telescope to me.
Rayvon’s partner, as I’d anticipated, was Ellis Redstreet. I confirmed it just before the Australian somersaulted backward into the water.
“The man with the snippers,” Josiah said again. His bitter monotone raised the hair on the back of my neck. “I’ve showed the Lord my patience long enough.” He started toward the pier.
Tomlinson whispered to me, “Can’t blame him.”
By some unseen signal, a group of villagers joined the old man at the fish-cleaning table. What I at first perceived as drumming was not. It was a dozen bare feet stomping in perfect, rhythmic unison.
Maybe Rayvon heard it in time. More likely, he had decided there was no more gold to salvage. He was mounting the boarding ladder when, suddenly, a flood of underwater shadows ascended.
I moved closer and watched. They were oceanic whitetips. Unlike tiger sharks, whitetips sometimes hunt in packs. The speed, their bulk, was sufficient to cause the 31-foot boat to rock in their wake of displaced water. Behind Rayvon, the surface exploded. There was a second explosion off to port, where Redstreet had just entered the water.
In a panic, the customs agent scrambled aboard. The man tripped and fell . . . wrestled his fins off. He took a quick look over the side, where a dark froth had clouded the glare of LED submersibles.
Rayvon didn’t bother hauling up the anchor, breaking the chain free with a pry bar. Alone in the cabin, he buried the throttles. The vessel reared, fishtailed, nearly out of control. The hull’s chines gradually found purchase, and he turned southwest toward the Exumas, where his cargo van awaited.
That was okay—or so I believed at the time.
The night vision lens revealed something the customs agent would see soon enough. From the direction of George Town, a helicopter had levitated itself over a fast, distant boat, blue lights flashing.
TWENTY
Two weeks later, Tomlinson said something that stuck with me. It was the same day I found out that Lt. Rayvon Darwin had been promoted to captain, not jailed, for “heroic action while intercepting contraband.” It was cop-speak for the gold stolen by the con man Jimmy Jones.
The Miami Herald had picked up the item from the Nassau Guardian, the largest newspaper in the Bahamas. Internationally, the recovery of the missing fortune had already made headlines. Most stories focused on Jones and the fascinating backstory. A Mystery Finally Solved video on the internet had gone viral, even though it misrepresented old underwater footage of the treasure as being recently shot.
From story to story, details had been provided by a spokesperson from the island government. Credit for the discovery was given to the Royal Bahamas Police Force, which, “for many years” had been working in concert with the Ministry of National Security to unravel the case.
So far, there had not been one written word that mentioned Rayvon. Or had hinted at the truth.
I’m not a newspaper reader. Lately, it’s tough to even find a paper, so many have gone out of business. But I’d grabbed the last Herald at Bailey’s General Store, more interested in a headline about human trafficking in South America. I had finished with the paper, I thought, and was busy with a siphon hose, cleaning fish tanks, when Tomlinson flip-flopped into the lab. He took a seat, then folded the Herald to a section that was headed “Caribbean News Briefs.”
We talked about things friends talk about. Delia’s father had moved on to home hospice, which I already knew. Figgy had lied about his age—again—and had been booted out of a Red Sox tryout hosted exclusively for high school prospects. Rhonda and JoAnn, aboard Tiger Lilly, had had another raucous lovers’ spat. The rumor was, they were putting their soggy floating home up for sale—for the third time in five years.
“It’ll never happen,” I said.
Tomlinson chuckled and folded the paper into quarter sections. “If those two don’t get married, they’ll end up adopting a bunch of damn cats and making everyone miserable. The relentless flow of life,” he said. “Everyone’s afraid of getting stuck in a rut.”
Somehow, the subject of marriage—or being stuck in a rut—swung back to me in the devious form of a question. “How are you holding up? I know Hannah’s been chartering almost every day.”
It was true. All the guides were busy because fishing had never been better. Tarpon, cobia, snook, redfish had returned, and more tripletail than most locals had ever seen. A freak summer, some were calling it. But there was nothing freakish about it. I motioned to the desk and the folder I was still assembling on historic references to red tide.
“I’m fine, fishing’s great, and it’s no mystery—take a look for yourself,” I suggested a little too sharply. “After the worst lethal blooms ever recorded, fish have always rebounded in a big way despite all our human screw-ups and pollution.”
“Geezus, you don’t have to bite my head off,” my pal replied. “Stop being so sensitive. And stop avoiding the subject.”
He was right. “Okay, I’m in a rut. And it sucks.” I wrung out a towel, dumped a bucket of turbid water over the railing, then returned and took a seat. “Every day, I’m up before sunrise. If Hannah needs bait for a charter, I put a cast net in the boat and meet her halfway. Then I look after Izaak. Feed him, change him, take him for a boat ride if he really gets pissed off at nap time. That part’s fun. I love it, really. But dealing with Hannah’s crazy mother . . . Those goddamn soap operas of hers . . . Do you know she claims to have killed three men—helped killed them anyway—and buried them out back?”
“I like her stories about the King of the Calusa better,” Tomlinson chuckled. “That woman truly is a pisser.”
I took a breath, miffed at myself for allowing Loretta’s tactics to rattle me. “That’s putting it kindly. Fact is, she doesn’t want me around, so we’re interviewing nannies. Well, she’s interviewing nannies. Loretta’s going to win. I know it and she knows it. And I think Hannah is falling in love with the guy she’s dating . . . There, end of rant, end of confession . . . On the bright side, Hannah’s taking the next few days off—maybe a whole week—so I’m free. For a while.”
Tomlinson had drifted off, his attention suddenly on the Herald, but recovered enough to make the remark that would stick with me. “Beautiful,” he said. “It’s the days that pass by unnoticed that are probably the best days of our lives.”
More Zendo nonsense, I thought.
He focused on the paper and sat straighter in his chair. “You believe this shit? When’s the last time you talked to Rayvon? Or that IRS dude, Leo what’s-his-name?”
I hadn’t. Protocol after a con job is the same as concealing a covert act. With rare exception, all contact had to be suspended. I’d trashed my BTC cell phone and had refused Leo’s many calls, nor had I spoken with Hal Harrington, my agency handler. “What’s up?”
“You really want to think karma sucks? Read this.”
He handed me the newspaper, and there it was:
NASSAU CUSTOMS AGENT HONORED
Rayvon Darwin, a fourteen-year veteran of the constabulary, was promoted to captain Tuesday in a ceremony held at Government House, New Providence . . .
I looked up from the paper. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Keep reading,” Tomlinson said. “That Babylon spawn is being treated like a hero.”
The story was only two paragraphs. Rayvon had been awarded a citation for taking part in a classified operation. He’d played a key role in the recovery of a “substantial portion” of contraband that was of “inestimable” value to the Bahamian government.
No shit.
“What they awarded Ray was a bounty. Or he bribed someone,” I said. “Had to be more than one person. I doubt if he’s got much, if anything, left. How the hell did he weasel out of that jam?”
“Go big or go to jail,” my pal reasoned. He gave the story another look, then tossed it aside. “Josiah’s happy. No more treasure hunters snooping around—not after the first couple of days anyway. And no more reason for bad guys to search for the girl. That’s all we care about, right?”
Lydia Johnson, her husband, and two children were doing just fine, as we both knew.
I couldn’t help being curious about Leo. Presumably, his wife, Nanette, was still alive. One way or another, they would make their own way. All people do. I said, “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened. Well”—I made vague gesture toward the dock—“except for . . . you know . . .”
Salt River Page 24
