by Sean Rowe
We got strikes almost right off the bat, and by the time the first Coast Guard boat showed up, we had one cooler nearly full of dolphin fillets.
PART THREE
SNOW
19
THE NEXT FEW HOURS were like something coming slowly but definitely to a stop, decelerating in Key West and ending all at once in Miami.
The revenue cutter Diligence stood off from the Ya-Ya for thirty minutes while we sat on the stern in the glare of a big spotlight. At one point Manny tried to go down to the head but a loudspeaker crackled and a voice told him to stay where he could be seen and to keep his hands in plain view. The voice was polite and calm, but whoever was on the bridge of the Coast Guard boat seemed to be having trouble deciding what to do, or maybe he was waiting for orders from shore. After a few more minutes Manny stood up and took a leak over the side, face to face with the kid in the orange life vest who was trying to look fierce behind the big swivel gun mounted on the cutter’s bow.
At last they boarded us. I thought they would search the boat, tear into it with rams and crowbars, but I was wrong. One guy checked the engine room and the forward areas and got ready to take over the controls.
We were ordered aboard the cutter. An officer asked Fontana questions about where we had been and where we were going. Then they split us up and put us in separate cabins, and there was nothing more until we pulled into Key West.
I lay on a cot and listened to the engine drone coming through the walls. The cabin was white and blank, and I guessed it was just below the waterline. It was so clean and empty that I couldn’t tell if I had dozed off or not when the engine sound changed, and there were voices and footsteps and a gentle bumping of the hull.
I must have been the last one they came for. When the two men in suits took me up onto the deck in handcuffs and down the gangway to the waiting car, there was no sign of Julia, Kip, Fontana, Manny, or Bryant.
The driver lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, and I watched the old wooden houses of Key West pass by. It wasn’t far to the jail, and pretty soon I figured out they were winding around town, taking a ride.
The driver asked me about the cut over my eye. It was the damnedest thing, I told him. I was leaning over the side of the boat untangling a line when a barracuda jumped out of the water and smacked me in the head.
Could get infected, he said. But it looks like someone had the sense to sterilize it before they did a nice job sewing it up.
Julia, I explained. Julia Bonnell. I think she’s a nurse.
Think? said the guy in the passenger seat, turning to look over his shoulder. I go fishing with people, I usually want to know ’em pretty well. You could get in trouble otherwise, going off with a bunch of strangers on a boat. You could get mixed up in something you didn’t really mean to be mixed in with. Something that seemed like sort of a joke at first and then got serious, landed you in a heap of shit. Where’s she from, you maybe know that?
You’d have to ask her, I responded.
He laughed and said: We will. I guarantee you we will.
“Take a look,” said the guy in the passenger seat, opening a file folder and raising a sheaf of fax paper for the driver to see. A photo of Julia caught my eye. She stood in profile holding a bow. Other archers were in the background, all women.
“Southeastern Regional Collegiate Champion,” said the driver, reading the photo caption.
The other one nodded, putting the newspaper clipping back in the folder. “She went to school with Mike’s kid. Sweet piece of ass, huh?”
The two of them then, pretending I wasn’t in the back-seat anymore, the guy with the cigarette talking about me: He was one of us, you know that? The other playing dumb, saying, Yeah? Yeah, the driver said. You know what they called him in the Miami field office? Loose Cannon Shannon. The one looking over his shoulder again, saying, Hey. Why’d they call you that, anyway? Mr. Shannon? Loose Cannon Shannon?
I can’t remember, I said, and I didn’t say anything else after that. We drove on, getting to the jail with the sun coming up.
I figured I would see the magistrate in the early afternoon, but I was wrong on that one, too. Breakfast was red Kool-Aid and corned beef hash, and the hash was good. A wino was lying on the floor of the holding cell, shaking and moaning. One of the black guys across the cell gave me a glance, and I knew we were thinking the same thing, and pretty soon we split up the wino’s hash and ate it. There was nowhere to lie down except the floor, and I was about to do it, but the door opened, and then I was walking down the corridor and out through the sally port in an orange jumpsuit that was about two sizes too small.
A pair of marshals stood next to a prisoner van that had exhaust smoke coming out the tailpipe in the cold morning air. A street sweeper passed by, and I could smell garbage and rotting flowers from a nearby alley, the old, low-tide smell of morning in Key West. The marshals handcuffed my hands in front and attached the cuffs to a waist chain and put on leg irons. Then they put me in the van, which was about half full. Fontana, Kip, and Bryant were all in there, sitting toward the back with the rest of the prisoners, mostly young black guys and beat-up, middle-aged white men with leathery skin and long, stringy hair. We went north, and I watched the sights along the Overseas Highway until Key Largo, where I wet my pants, unable to hold it any longer. More towns and places passed by: Homestead, Naranja, Goulds, all the old whistle-stops along the railroad line that had been taken up years ago. And then we were pulling into the new federal building in downtown Miami, pausing at a guardhouse. There were steel barriers, like teeth, in the down-sloping driveway, designed to protect the building from car bombers. The barricades retracted, flattening slowly into the pavement. We drove into the basement, got loaded onto an elevator, and were marched across a skyway into the jail on the other side of the street. After the strip search I got a new jumpsuit and a private eight-by-ten cell where the lights never went off and I was tired enough not to care.
20
THE DOOR of the conference room swung open. A man with a briefcase stepped inside and the trusty went back out and locked the door behind him.
The briefcase was black, and not one of these fashionable wafers. It was big and heavy-looking: a briefcase that had some real work going on inside it, that got opened and closed a lot in the course of any day.
The man wore a tan suit and a tropical tie. He was in his late forties or early fifties, with skin that looked embalmed.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Shannon,” he said. “My name is Carl Sandolin. I’m your lawyer.”
“I didn’t hire a lawyer.”
“No,” he replied. “That’s true.”
He clicked open the briefcase and took out two airline bottles of Scotch. Then he shut the briefcase quickly, as though something might escape if he left it open very long. The bottles didn’t clink when he held them because they were made of plastic. He set them down in the middle of the table.
“You can, of course, decline the legal counsel I’ve been hired to provide you,” he said.
I looked at him while I reached out for one of the bottles. I could feel my hand shaking.
“Sleeping OK?” he asked.
“Like a baby.”
He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He sat down across the table from me while I finished the first Scotch and started on the second. He frowned to himself, looking out into space, and began rummaging in his coat pockets. He kept frowning and tried his pants pockets. While he was stirring around I noticed he was wearing suspenders. The suspenders had little dollar signs all up and down them.
“Well,” he said, “the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida has got it in his head that you helped hijack a cruise ship, murder three DEA agents, and steal a bunch of money that belongs to a drug baron.” He coughed. “Or baroness.” He had found what he was after in his pants pocket, and now he was taking a cough drop out of a yellow paper package. “That’s a problem.”
He sucked on the cough dro
p for a while. “Fisherman’s Friend,” he said, handing over the package. “If you’ve never had one, you’re in for a treat. This is the aniseed version. There’s the original variety, too, and they’re even stronger, which you’ll find hard to believe.”
I took one out and put it in my mouth. The cough drop had a good, strong licorice flavor that went nicely with the aftertaste of the Scotch.
He settled back in the chair. “On the bright side, the feds don’t seem to have any evidence. Except, of course, circumstantial evidence. They think it’s a wee bit suspicious that the security director for a cruise line should be discovered floating around on Halloween night in international waters a stone’s throw from the site of a cruise ship hijacking. But we’ll deal with that later. Meanwhile I’m going to get you out of here on probably two hundred thousand dollars’ bond.”
He was watching me a bit more carefully now. “The same goes for Miss Bonnell. I’ve already met with her, briefly. She seems just fine.”
“What about Fontana?”
“Mr. Fontana has been questioned and transferred to Mount Sinai, where there’s an FBI agent sitting by his bedside. Mr. Purvis and Mr. Rodríguez Colón have already bonded out. Mr. Bryant may be lingering in the federal system for some time. He’s being asked about an armored-car holdup in Tacoma from nineteen ninety-two and another the following year, in Fresno.
“Now,” he continued. “Let’s make sure we have our facts straight. You got off work on Friday, drove to Key West, and went fishing with your stepbrother, Jack Fontana, and some friends. You thought it might be the last time you would have a chance to go fishing with Mr. Fontana because of his illness. Mr. Fontana brought along a lady friend, Miss Bonnell, a registered nurse from Minneapolis vacationing in sunny Florida. You invited your old army cohort, Kip Purvis, and he in turn brought an acquaintance, Bobby Bryant, whose alleged felonious adventures in the past you knew nothing about. A good time was had by all, except that Mr. Fontana got sick, so you started back to Key West early. You don’t know a thing about the October Twenty-eighth Brigade or the hijacking of the Norwegian Empress except what you’ve seen on TV or heard secondhand.”
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t.”
“The only thing you can figure out is that this is some sort of bizarre stratagem to get you fired from your job as security director for Festival Cruises.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”
He laughed. He laughed so hard he started coughing, but the whole time he was laughing and coughing his skin stayed the same color. Then he stopped laughing and sat there, looking at me.
“Any questions, then?”
“Yeah. A minute ago you said something about three DEA agents. About them being murdered.”
“Correct. Three DEA agents were shot and killed in a fracas that took place in the ballroom aboard the Norwegian Empress at some point during the hijacking. They were part of a security detail assigned to protect a government witness who had agreed to testify against members of her own criminal organization. I’m referring to the lady cocaine kingpin from whom you purportedly helped steal thirty million dollars.” He scratched the side of his nose and frowned. “Or should I say queenpin? You see, Mr. Shannon, this drug baroness and those three DEA agents were on their way to a rendezvous in the Cayman Islands, where she had pledged to identify a high-level Colombian drug supplier and otherwise assist the DEA in arresting him, by acting as lure. Whoever hijacked the Norwegian Empress seems to have inadvertently interrupted a rather complicated and sensitive undercover sting operation. More questions?”
“How do you know all this?”
He smiled. “I read several newspapers each and every morning.”
He kept smiling and raised his eyebrows.
I shook my head.
“Fine,” he said. “I guess that’s it, then. If there’s any talking to be done, let me do it, please. Don’t volunteer anything.” He put a white card on the white table. “I want you to contact me as soon as you’re released.”
He sat there for another few moments waiting to see if I would say anything. Then he stood up and knocked for the trusty.
“I’ve enjoyed our time together,” he said. “Would you like another cough drop?”
“No.”
“Again, Mr. Shannon, you do want to call. You want to hang on to my business card almost as though your life depended on it. Will you?”
“Sure. I’ll keep it right with me.”
There was no way in hell I was walking out of there on a $200,000 bond, or any other bond. But the next morning, around ten thirty, I did.
21
THEY LET ME OUT the same way they had brought me in, through the sally port behind the new federal building. I walked three blocks to the south and then a couple more to the west, watching the birds circling the top of the old courthouse on Flagler Street. I stopped to look in a window full of cheap electronics and glanced back down the street. Two-car surveillance is what I would have used, with at least one agent on foot because it was so congested down here on Monday mornings.
I spotted a Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows and the right kind of antenna and wondered if it was someone’s idea of a joke: I had checked the same vehicle out of the motor pool about four years ago for a job. A young guy was window-shopping across the street. He had been with me, about two hundred feet back, ever since I walked out of the jail. I couldn’t see a second car.
I went up Flagler Street and into Sally Russell’s and sat down at the bar. It was dark inside and bright on the street, and even though it was early for lunch, people were coming into the restaurant. Every time someone came in, I could see out the door. The window-shopper came by, looked at the door, and kept moving. He reappeared across the street and bought a hot dog from a vendor. He stood there and looked at it for a while before he ate it.
I ordered a drink and waited. The traffic on Flagler was creeping along. I put the glass down on the bar and watched the nose of a Mercedes edge into the slot view I had onto the street. Then the door closed. When it opened again the Mercedes was still there, broadside to the doorway so that I could see both its front and rear windows. The front window was lowered, and I saw the lawyer, Carl Sandolin, sitting in the driver’s seat. The rear window started rolling down just as the door of the restaurant closed. I waited again. A fat man in a suit came through the door. When he had walked past me I looked out into the street. Right there at the curb the Mercedes had its rear window rolled all the way down. The woman’s face, the face of Miriam Benages, was turned straight at me. She took off her sunglasses and kept staring, her eyes looking into mine. Then she put the glasses back on. The window started rolling up, and the door onto the street closed. As soon as it did, I started for the back of the restaurant.
The bathroom was a fancy one, three stalls and urinals, a big mirror and sinks along one wall. An old black guy was sitting on a stool reading a newspaper. He watched me in the mirror while I went into a stall and locked the door. I knew what I was going to do but I wanted to think about it for another minute. After I did I flushed the toilet, came out of the stall, and went over to the sink like I was going to wash my hands. The guy on the stool looked at me, and I looked at him. Then I dropped my eyes and bent over the sink.
As long as you look at someone they stay alert and can sense what you’re going to do next. But now I was looking down, reaching for the faucet, and scanning the bottles and cans the washroom attendant had spread out in front of the mirror beside a stack of hand towels and a tip basket—aftershave and cologne, talcum powder, breath mints, Grecian Formula hair tonic.
I came up fast and hit him. The punch was off a little, almost as though he’d moved. Then my left ear exploded. Just as quick I felt the breath go out of my body from where he had hit me in the rib cage. I was so surprised I almost went down. In fact, I had started to. I used that place, that sort of crouch, to come up from with an uppercut. But he had moved, stepping toward the door. I tried to get in close, but
he circled past the front of a stall and got his back around by the sink.
I noticed two things then, in that special way you notice things right before you realize you’re probably going to get your clock cleaned. The first was the chain around his neck with a cross pendant. It wasn’t a necklace at all. It was a tattoo, the whole thing—cross, chain links, and all—done in prison-yard blue. The second thing was a clutter of shiny little trophies way over on the left near his tip basket. The trophies had figures of boxers on the tops of them.
I tried a jab, but he slapped it away. He said, “Guess someone woke up on the wrong side of bed.” I kept my hands up close to my head, waiting for an opening. I faked with a right and tried to tag him with another jab, but he moved again. “Guess you got some reason for tryin’ to whip a old man’s ass,” he said, keeping his feet busy. “A old man never did you no harm.” Then he said, “Stop fightin’ me for a minute.”
There was nowhere for him to back off to, so I stepped back good and far, back toward the door. He put his hands down in front of him. I did the same, chest level anyway, not taking any chances.
“What you want?” he said. “You want money, I ain’t givin’ it. That’s all I got.” He meant the tip basket. There was a dollar bill and some coins in it. “I put the dollar in there myself, make it look like some big spender come through.” He looked me up and down, looked at my shoes. “You don’t need money,” he said. “Someone after you?”
“Several someones,” I said.
He nodded. “What you want?”
“To look different,” I said.
“Different clothes,” he said, nodding. “Different hair, maybe. Walk right outta here. They gone try to hurt me if I help you?”
