Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  I didn’t panic. She might have gone to the bathroom; she might have wanted to wash her hands before lunch or taken a look at the river. Her drink was still on the table. I spun on my stool and looked around the restaurant but didn’t see much. I was surrounded by palms and a massive banyan tree. Then I saw her. The waitress was walking her to the host stand, where she handed Celia a phone. The house phone. Celia spoke to someone, half away from me so I couldn’t see her face. One hand held the phone to her head, and the other was pressed to her cheek. Then she was nodding, and then she hung up. I watched her return to her table and sit down, and then wave at the waitress. Celia made the universal sign to get the check, miming a scribble on a pad. She was leaving. She wasn’t planning on finishing that big drink. It seemed like such a waste. But the question was, why? Then the penny dropped, and I looked back to the host stand.

  A young hostess was holding two menus and walking away with a couple who both had skin the color of a fire truck. I slipped off my stool and weaved between the tables to the host stand. There was a phone on the desk, a fancy black thing with an LCD display and more buttons than Apollo 13. Some of the buttons had hand-written name tags next to them. Many of the buttons had specific functions. Such things really weren’t my area of expertise, but I saw one such button that said Number Recall. I reached over the stand, picked up the handset and hit the button. The phone dialed, and I got tone. I looked toward the sunburned couple who were perusing the menu. The hostess was out of view. Then the phone at the other end picked up.

  “Sharkey’s,” said a bright voice.

  “Hi,” I said brightly in return. “Where have I called?”

  “Sharkey’s,” he repeated unhelpfully.

  “Where are you?”

  “Key Largo, man. Where are you?”

  “Jupiter,” I said.

  “Cool.”

  “Listen, did you just make a call to here?”

  “Nah, man.”

  “Did anyone?”

  “Oh, yeah, maybe. The chick in the hat. She asked to use the phone.”

  “Which chick? What did she look like?”

  “Like they always look like, man. Blond, big hat.”

  I bent around the desk to see if Celia was on the move. “She a regular?”

  “Nah. She’s been here a few times in the past week, but that’s how it goes. What’s the deal, what’s this about?”

  “Not sure, pal. She called me. Thanks for your time.”

  “You ever in Key Largo, drop in for a drink.”

  I glanced back behind the desk. The hostess was standing there with hands on hips and a raised eyebrow .

  “Thanks,” I said to the guy on the other end, and I hung up.

  I smiled at the hostess. “Wrong number.” I didn’t get a smile in return, so I walked back to the bar. Celia was gone from her chair. I sat down and finished my beer and then dropped some notes on the bar and headed out. It was time for a road trip.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I STOPPED BY my apartment to collect my two guns and a couple extra shirts. I might be back in a few hours, or not. I didn’t know. As I locked the door I made a mental note to give notice to the landlord, and to call some movers. Then I scrapped the idea of movers. I could carry my own damned bag.

  It turned out Lenny had a lockbox under the rear seat in the truck, so I stashed away the guns. Lenny’s gun wasn’t in there, and I remembered that he took it out to Stiltsville, but it wasn’t collected by the cops, so that meant Alec Meechan had it.

  I drove down the freeway through Miami, and then hit traffic and crawled to Key Largo. It was conceivable that the traffic was going to continue that crawl all the way to Key West, which was no way to arrive in that particular paradise. But I got off and made my way to the east side of the thin slice of a key, and found the restaurant known as Sharkey’s. Like Guanabanas, Sharkey’s was a local institution, a favorite of boaters who enjoyed pulling up to the dock outside and stopping in for a quiet drink or a bite to eat. I watched some boats do just that. It was a multistory place with decks and a gas pump at the side for the boats. The place was busy but relaxed, the waitstaff brisk but not harried. I wandered over to the bar. A well-tanned guy with wavy hair and a porn star mustache smiled widely at me.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Back at ya,” I said.

  “What’s ya poison?”

  “What do you have?”

  His smile grew. “Lots of good stuff. Craft beers, rum buckets, you name it.”

  “Gimme something easy drinking.”

  “Comin’ up.” He poured me a beer and passed it across the bar.

  I sipped and nodded my approval. “Say, were you the guy I spoke to earlier on the phone?”

  “Been here since opening, so probably me,” he said, wiping down the bar.

  “We were talking about the woman who made the call, the blond with the hat.”

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah, right. Thought you said you were in Jupiter, man.”

  “I did. I was.”

  “Got down here lickety split. You must really be keen on this broad. You’re not one of them stalkers, are you?” He smiled like it was okay if I was.

  “Just keen to chat with her. She took something from a buddy of mine. Just trying to get it back.”

  The barman nodded in the way barmen do. “His heart?”

  “His life,” I said.

  The barman nodded again as if he understood the metaphor, and I didn’t feel the need to explain that it was literal.

  “So you said she’s not local? ”

  “Nah, man. Never seen her before this last week. But she’s been here a few times lately.”

  “Does she often use the phone?”

  “You know, now that you say it, yeah, she does.” He shrugged. “Guess there’s still folks don’t use a cell phone.”

  Or don’t want calls to be traced to their cell phones, I thought.

  “Did she eat, drink?”

  “Yeah, drinks I think.”

  “Credit card?”

  “Cash, as I recall.”

  I sipped my beer. “You didn’t happen see a car, which way she came from?”

  “I did actually. She didn’t come by car.”

  “No?”

  He nodded toward the dock. “She always arrives by boat.”

  I looked through the restaurant toward the water outside. “That right? You know what sort of boat?”

  “Nah, didn’t see.” He nodded to a couple further down the bar like he had work to do.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “You bet.”

  I watched the barman pour a couple drinks and sipped at my own. I wondered who Celia was calling down here, and if she was another link to Alec. My bones told me she was. Maybe she was the third person, the one who had delivered the second guy to the house in Stiltsville, if Lucas’s theory was correct. The barman wandered back to me and I thought he was going to ask if I wanted another beer, despite being only halfway through the one I had.

  “Hey, I just had a thought. If you wanna know about that chick’s boat, you should talk to Links. ”

  “Links?”

  “Yeah. He handles the gas pump outside. He’d know about who docks.”

  “Awesome, thanks.”

  “Yeah,” he said, wandering away, picking up glasses as he went.

  I finished my beer and wandered out to the dock. There was fleet of motorboats, mostly hybrid craft designed for pleasure boating and a touch of fishing. At the end was a larger vessel, a sport fishing effort with a tower and swivel seat at the back to fight the big fish out at sea. A hose was connected to the tank, filling it with gasoline, and a stocky guy with an unkempt stubble was leaning against the hull.

  “Links,” I said.

  The guy looked at me through squinted eyes. He had wrinkles around his face like dry river beds.

  “The guy at the bar said you were the man to talk to,” I said as I got to him.

  “Uh-huh.”<
br />
  I explained the conversation I’d had at the bar, and the guy called Links didn’t move. He stayed leaning on the hull, his face like Monument Valley, changing, but only over the course of millions of years. Finally he spoke.

  “I ‘member. Never got gas here, though.”

  “You recall the boat, by chance?”

  “Yeah. Boston Whaler.”

  That was about as useful as saying male Caucasian. Every second boat was a Boston Whaler.

  “The small one, with a Mercury 190.”

  I nodded. I thought that was the engine size, but wasn’t completely sure. “You know where it came from?”

  “Aha. Smitties. ”

  “Smitties?”

  “Yeah.”

  Apparently I was supposed to know who or what that was, but I didn’t. “What’s smitties?”

  “Boat rental. Down key.”

  I thanked Links for his time and wandered back inside. I stopped at the bar and asked about the location of what I belatedly realized was called Smitty’s , and he gave me directions. I left him a healthy tip and got back in the truck and headed south.

  Key Largo is the biggest of the Florida Keys, and the closest to the mainland, so for many Floridians it feels just as rushed and crowded as Miami, and the least keys-like. I drove down the Overseas Highway at no more than twenty miles per hour, and was thankful when I got to pull off just before Tavernier at the south end of the key. Key Largo had become famous for the movie with Bogie and Bacall, which itself had been shot on a backlot in Los Angeles. The part I visited now was more backwood than backlot. A travel guide might call it off the beaten track. There were a lot of mangroves, which served to hide a lot more hurricane wire fencing, which always gave a place that penal colony quality that realtors loved so much. The lots were large, the homes small and the yards full of rusted cars and trucks, discarded refrigerators and boats that seemed better maintained than anything.

  Smith’s Boat Rentals was at the end of a dead-end street, no cul-de-sac, just a clump of mangroves before you hit the water. It was a small tin shed that played the part of an office, and a dock that needed some work but had probably been through more hurricanes than the fences. I parked and took a look down at the boats on the dock. There were only a couple, and on one the cap was off the motor, as if brain surgery were being performed. Each had Smith’s Boat Rentals written across the hull in small stick-on letters, followed by a serial number.

  I walked into the shed. There were two desks, both messy with papers and such, and one man. He was at the desk furthest from the door. A bank of handheld CB radios stood in a charger station on the first desk, alongside a large unit that looked like an old ham radio. The guy was thin and reedy and had dark eyes that seemed to move on springs. He had the kind of angular face that would make a parent push their child behind their legs if he offered the kid a lollipop. I made to walk over to him and he hopped up quickly to meet me beside the first desk, and ended up way too close, for someone I had no intention of kissing.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Yes, I think so. I’m looking for a woman who rented one of your boats this week. A blond woman.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  “I don’t suppose you do. But you rented a boat to her.”

  “No.”

  “No? You didn’t? She was seen in one of your rental boats on several occasions this week.”

  “You a cop?”

  If I were a cop, I was from somewhere a long way away, and I was on vacation. I looked down at my palm tree print shirt as way of explanation, but he didn’t seem to get it. “No, I’m not a cop,” I said. “Are you Smitty?”

  “I don’t have time to chitchat with time wasters.”

  “Perhaps I want to hire a boat.”

  He looked me up and down. “Don’t got any to spare.”

  I looked him in the eye and he looked at me. Then he shifted his gaze away, and back again. He was a fidgety unit. But he wasn’t sharing, so I left. I didn’t feel much like saying thank you, so I didn’t. I just walked out and sat in the truck and looked at the business before me. It wasn’t a fancy operation—in fact I was sure in a thesaurus under antonyms for fancy there would be a picture of Smith’s Boat Rentals. I watched a boat returning to the dock from a day out, two guys in shorts and tank tops with a large cooler. More drinking than fishing, I suspected.

  I hadn’t seen any signage on the highway for the place, so I didn’t know how a tourist would get wind of it, and even if they did, I had to think the folks coming down from Maine and Vermont and Ontario would turn tail and run at the sight of the place. So it begged the question, who was he renting to? Clearly the place and the attitude were tailor-made for customers looking to do no good. I could imagine if I were a pirate, this is the place I’d come for a boat. So I got out my new phone and called the closest thing I knew to a pirate.

  Lucas answered with a laconic yeah?

  I explained to him events with Celia and the mystery woman, and my no result at Smitty’s.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of Smitty. A favorite of low-rent drug runners across the Caribbean.”

  “So how do I find out who this woman is? Any ideas?”

  “You say she’s had the boat for the week—then she might be reporting in.”

  “What is that?”

  “Most rentals are day rents, so the boats are back by the end of the day. But some places rent for longer periods, and they usually require a radio call each evening to report where the boat will be mooring overnight. That’s probably logged somewhere. A computer or something.”

  “Not sure this guy gets that technological.”

  “Then a logbook. ”

  I looked over at the shed office. He wasn’t going to show me his logbook. But there was more than one way to tack a boat. I smiled to myself at that cunningly clever metaphor, and I thanked Lucas.

  “You need any backup?” he asked.

  “Not right now.”

  “If you do, don’t be a hero.”

  “You bet.”

  I hung up the call and started the truck and drove back up the key toward Sharkey’s, to kill some time. The same barman was still there. The guy worked a long day, but he hadn’t lost his smile. I ordered some fish and a beer and sat on the deck, overlooking the water. The place was getting busy, folks coming in from a day on the ocean to swap fishing stories and sunburn remedies. It felt like a fine place to while away some time, and I was tempted by another beer or two, but I held off. The barman made me a Virgin Mary that satisfied more than I thought it would, and I watched the water change color and the birds hurry about with last-minute errands, and the night fell. The buzz in the restaurant picked up as I walked out, sad to go but like the birds, things to do.

  I drove back to Smitty’s. I parked farther up the road by a seaside shack that appeared to be shuttered and walked down to the shed. I wasn’t too concerned about any kind of high-tech security, but there were thoughts of guard dogs and shotguns playing in my mind, so I made a wide reconnaissance sweep. I found no dogs, but I did run into an obstacle. It seemed Mr. Smith, if the reedy guy I had met in the office was he, lived on a boat tied up to the dock. I could see a number of other boats had returned from their days out, and Smitty sat on the deck of his own boat, something that looked like a miniature tugboat, drinking from a Solo cup and smoking a cheap cigar that was wafting in my direction. I didn’t have much choice but to wait, so I pushed myself against a throng of mangroves and set about that waiting.

  Smitty fell asleep in his chair. I wasn’t sure if he would spend the night there, but given the look of him, anything was possible. I crept over to the shed and took a look at the door. It was locked with a padlock that wasn’t giving way with the tools I had, and not without a great deal of noise. I stepped lightly around the shed, over crushed shell that sounded like a marching band to me. Fortunately the night wasn’t silent. Bugs, the slap of water on boat hulls and distant traffic filled the air with a hum of white
noise. I made my way around the shed and found one suitable candidate. At the far end of the structure, an old air conditioner hung limply in the window frame. I didn’t recall it working earlier in the day. I tested the window above, and found it rusted and salted in place. I lifted the air-con unit up and tried pulling it out, as quietly as I could. There wasn’t much give between the sill and the window, and the heavy unit moved only by wobbling it from side to side. The same action also made a grinding screech that would have had the night animals scurrying. I stopped, skipped to the corner of the shed and looked over to Smitty’s boat. He hadn’t moved and I hoped he was in a rum slumber. I returned to the window and gave it a second effort, lifting and pulling and edging, and the hefty unit eased out. I was hoping it wasn’t plugged into an outlet, because pulling it out was going to be easier than pushing it in, and as it kept coming my wish was granted. The unit came free from the window and the full weight fell into my hands and I nearly dropped it, grabbing it at the last second against my groin. I pulled the electrical cord free of the window and a brown ooze the consistency of blood spilled from the air conditioning, running down my shorts and onto my leg. I didn’t even want to think about what that stuff was. I just placed the unit on the ground with a soft seashell crunch, and then sat on the window sill. I ducked my head through the window, spun my hips around and flicked my legs over and into the shed.

  The office was dark. The moon was only a day or two off being full, but years of grime and sea salt covered the windows and kept the moonlight at bay. I flicked on my small flashlight and made immediately for the desk next to my open window. It was the rear desk from the door, where Smitty had been sitting when I arrived earlier that day. The desk was a sea of paper, haphazardly discarded and spread across the desk. There was no order to it at all. Hand-written notes in a cursive scrawl, computer printouts and Post-it notes, along with receipts for gas and storage and fishing tackle. There was nothing that resembled a logbook. I figured it was possible that Smitty kept such information in his head, but I stepped around to the second desk for the sake of being thorough. Most of the second desk was taken up by the CB radios, the big unit and the handheld units in the charging station. The bigger unit was old, but the handhelds looked like the newest things in the entire place. The rest of the desk was clear. I checked the drawers and found the detritus one always found in drawers, but that was all. I did a sweep across the walls, looking for shelves and such, but I didn’t recall any from earlier that day and I didn’t find any now. I took a last look across the desk, at the big CB radio, and that was when I saw it.