“Janga soup for me,” Carl said with a grin.
Getting up from my stool, I said, “Think I’ll go out and have a word with Rufus.”
Out on the deck, I strode over to the kitchen door. Charlie was inside, helping Rufus serve customers. That was just her way. If something looked like it needed doing, she just pitched in and did it. Her kids were out in the backyard, running and playing with Pescador.
“You got a minute, Rufus?” I called into the kitchen.
The old Jamaican man turned and smiled. “Sure ting, mon.” He came to the door and we sat down at an empty table nearby. “Ah see dat you been taking bettah care of yourself,” he said.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Think you can give me some ideas about eating? What to stay away from?”
“Ya, mon, I can do bettah dan dat. I and I wrote a cooking book. Yuh wanna copy?”
I told him I’d love to borrow it and he left, trotting across the yard to his little shack, as Charlie came out of the kitchen carrying a tray. The smell of Carl’s soup reminded me how hungry I was.
A moment later Rufus returned with a thin, professionally published paperback cookbook and handed it to me. I don’t know why, but I was expecting a handwritten notebook. The old Jamaican never ceased to amaze me. On the cover was a picture of him, shirtless and standing on one foot in knee-deep cobalt-blue water, the setting sun highlighting the white chest hair and beard against his ebony skin. His back was arched, arms raised over his head, grasping his other foot in a vertical split. I’d seen him go through his sunset routine a few times.
“Dis book have some of my favorite recipes, Cap’n. Not tings I and I make here at di restaurant. But tings Rufus make fuh his own self.” He grinned broadly. “Tings dat keep di old feeling young.”
Looking at the guy, his eyes still sparkled with life and though he was small, I knew he was in excellent shape, having watched his evening routine. He’d stretch for a few minutes then go through a series of slow-motion karate-style moves, flexing every muscle.
“When you said a book, I assumed a notebook,” I said. “This is really cool and I promise I’ll get it back to you after I try a few.”
He laughed. “Yuh keep dat, mon. I and I have many. Dere comes a time in a man’s life when he must also use di cosmic forces in di battle wit time.”
“Thanks, Rufus. I think.” I raised the book and said, “None of the ingredients in here illegal, are they?”
“No, mon,” he replied with his wide, gap-toothed grin. “All of Rufus’s recipes come directly from di gods to man. Nuts, berries, herbs, and di fish and crawlers from Mudah Ocean. I and I used to dabble in di other tings, but dat was many appearances of di Suhdurn Cross ago.”
I grinned back at his reference to the annual winter event in the Caribbean, including here in the Keys. Contrary to popular belief the Southern Cross constellation can be seen here, but only for a short time late at night and for only a few nights in winter.
“Well, thanks,” I said again. Rufus was rarely so talkative, preferring his seclusion at the back of the property. “I’ll try some of these out.”
“Yuh do dat, Cap’n. Time be a vengeful demon.” He went back inside the kitchen and I headed back to the bar, flipping through the book. Each page held a different recipe, probably a hundred in all, each one with a professional-looking color picture of the finished dish. Must have cost a small fortune to have them printed, I thought.
Reentering the bar, I saw Charlie by the door, yelling at some guy. “Take that crap on back to Key Weird!”
I tucked the book into the back pocket of my pants and took my stool at the end of the bar. “What’s going on?”
“Some crack monster was trying to sell his shit to Charlie,” Carl replied, calmly eating his soup.
Charlie isn’t a very big woman, shorter than Rusty and about a third his weight. However, she at least matched the big man in heart and grit.
“What the hell makes those idiots think I smoke crack?” Charlie mumbled as she came back to sit beside her husband.
“Who was he?” I asked Rusty.
“Never seen him before,” he replied. With him having grown up here, as had his family for many generations, that meant the drug dealer wasn’t from anywhere around here. There weren’t many people in the Keys he didn’t either know or know about. “He came in about a half hour ago for lunch and a beer. Ugly little guy. I made him for a crackhead as soon as he sat down. Rotten teeth, pimples, and you can smell it on ’em.”
I walked to the door and watched as the little man scurried along the driveway. He was dressed like he’d slept in his clothes for at least a couple of days and his black hair was stringy and greasy looking.
When I sat back down, Rusty pulled a credit card receipt from the box under the bar. “Name’s Michal Grabowski. Ain’t never heard of him, neither.”
Ripping off the coke dealer on the bus was easy, but didn’t produce much gain. There wasn’t any cash in the guy’s wallet, and two of the three credit cards he found in it were maxed out. No telling what he could do with the third card. It had already been two days since Will Byers had pinched the guy’s wallet while standing in the crowded queue at the bus station in Miami. Byers had boarded the bus in Orlando, nearly broke and recently evicted from yet another roach-infested furnished apartment. He had spotted the dealer right away. The telltale white flakes clinging to his mustache hairs were a dead giveaway.
The guy’s coke was good, but not exactly Byers’s drug of choice. Though he was down to less than four hundred bucks, he sprang for an eight ball anyway, not wanting to dip into his own stash of crack. The price was right and the shit was primo. Byers knew he could always lift another wallet. He was good at it.
Byers had assumed the dealer kept his cash in his wallet and was disappointed he didn’t. The guy was careful. Byers had persuaded the dealer to give him a sample on the bus, but when he offered to buy an eighth of an ounce, the guy said he’d have to wait until the bus stopped again. He’d finally made the buy at the last stop before Miami. Both men got off the bus and walked into the parking lot, making the deal between two parked cars.
Aside from the bus they came in on, the next one out of the little redneck town on the shore of Lake Okeechobee wasn’t until the next day. Byers tried to get close to the guy at the ticket counter there, but some fat lady with two kids managed to beat him to the next spot in line.
On the trip out of Belle Glade, Byers offered the dealer a hit from his stash, as repayment for the sample the dealer had given him earlier. The guy didn’t want anything to do with the crack, so Byers went back to the bus’s lavatory and lit up a small rock.
Finally, after wolfing down a greasy cheeseburger and fries at the downtown Miami bus station, Will Byers saw another opportunity as the coke dealer was waiting to board another bus. In the jostling crowd, Byers managed to get close enough to lift the dealer’s wallet. He disappeared into the crowd and, after the bus left, used the guy’s card to buy a ticket to the end of the line in Key West.
Byers got into an argument with the bus driver as they entered the town of Marathon. The driver smelled the crack Byers was smoking in the bus’s lavatory and pulled over to the shoulder, waiting outside the lavatory when Byers came out. Byers was ejected from the bus in front of a small strip mall on the north side of the highway. Seeing a couple of sports bars, he started that way. Suddenly, he caught a whiff of something on the breeze coming off the ocean to the south. It smelled good. Looking up and down the highway, he didn’t see any restaurants, only a crushed-shell driveway that disappeared through the trees.
Sweating heavily only minutes after getting off the bus, Byers crossed the busy highway. He figured that if someone was grilling, he might be able to sneak through the woods to the backyard and grab something off the grill when the homeowner went inside for something. Barring that, he could always go to one of the sports bars and use the dealer’s credit card.
Staying close to th
e edge of the brush that lined the driveway, just in case he was spotted, Byers quickly reached the end and realized it wasn’t someone’s home. There was a parking lot with a few old pickups ahead. To the right was a long canal where nearly a dozen boats were tied up. Byers shrugged and walked toward the door of what looked like a hole-in-the-wall type bar. The smell was surely coming from there and he was hungry.
Byers sat near an open window, wondering why they didn’t have them closed and the air conditioning cranked up. The heat and humidity was stifling. A big fat man with a bald head and reddish beard asked what he wanted and he ordered his usual cheeseburger, fries, and two cold beers.
Byers was low on cash, but he had a pretty good stash of crack and half the eight ball of coke left. He could probably sell a rock or two, just to have a little more walking around cash. He started watching the other patrons as he ate. There weren’t many people in the place. One old man at the end of the bar was nursing a beer, and a couple of stools down, a long-haired guy was talking to the fat bartender while drinking water.
Neither looked like a crack smoker. The old guy was obviously not into anything other than his beer and the long-haired guy looked like one of those health types. Byers had met a few of them before. They drank nothing but water and smoked nothing but weed.
About to leave, Byers heard a sound outside the window. The throaty exhaust from an old wooden boat burbled as it approached. He watched as several people went outside to meet the boat. There were two men and a woman with two kids on it, along with a shaggy brown dog. One guy he dismissed immediately, an obvious jock type, tall with broad shoulders and hair barely over his ears. The other guy was a possible customer, but he felt pretty sure about the woman. With two kids, she probably needed something to calm her down and he had just the thing.
GT Bradley leaned menacingly on the ticket counter in the Miami Greyhound station. The guy on the other side hadn’t touched the twenty-dollar bill he’d placed on the fake wood between them.
One of GT’s employees in Pittsburgh was a computer gamer that had some serious hacking skills. Give the guy a name and address and within an hour he’d give you all the guy’s credit card activity. Staying in touch with his guy for the last two days, GT had followed Michal Grabowski’s card all the way to the Florida Keys.
Grabowski had used it mostly to buy bus tickets, always headed south, but only to the next stop. The kid’s careful, GT thought. Erik had driven fast from one Greyhound station to another, all the way from Pittsburgh. Now he was out of road.
The ticket agents were usually eager to pull up the ticket sale on their computer after GT passed them a folded twenty. He fully intended to take the additional expense money out of Grabowski’s hide when he caught up to him.
GT growled in a low and menacing voice, “Pick up the bill, numbnuts. Then give me the destination and what time the bus left. Your options here are limited, man. A free lunch or a trip to the ER and eat through a straw for a few months.”
The ticket agent glanced around and quickly palmed the twenty. “I’m really not supposed to do this.”
“Just give me the information.”
The man typed in the card number GT had given him on a piece of paper and then punched a few keys. “The card number you gave me was used to buy a one-way ticket, Miami to Key West, left yesterday evening and arrived at midnight. That’s really all I can tell ya, mister.”
GT turned away from the counter and strode quickly to the exit. Erik Lowery waited in the idling Escalade next to the curb in front of the station. Climbing in the passenger side, GT said, “He bought a ticket to Key West last night. Arrived at midnight.”
“Key West? What’s after that?” Erik asked, pulling the big SUV away from the curb and joining the traffic headed south on Highway 953, then merging onto US-1.
“Ain’t nothing after that but the ocean. We’ll find him in Key West. It ain’t that big a town.”
An hour later, GT’s cell phone rang as they were leaving Tavernier on the Overseas Highway. He answered it and listened for a minute, jotting something on a small notepad. “We’re less’n an hour from there now,” he said before ending the call. Riding in silence for the next forty miles, GT thought about all the ways he was going to hurt Grabowski.
Finally, as they entered the town of Marathon, GT read Erik the address and said, “It should be coming up pretty quick now. That last sign said this is the town.” The Escalade slowed as the numbers got smaller, nearing the destination GT had jotted on the notepad.
“You passed it!” GT shouted at Erik. “It’s on the other side of the road, back there.”
Erik turned the Escalade into the next storefront parking lot, a marine electronics store called Sea Wiz. “Sorry, boss. I didn’t see no sign for a bar.”
Going slower now, GT pointed to a leaning mailbox next to a crushed-shell driveway. “There. That’s the address.”
“Don’t look like no bar to me, boss.” The big tires crunched on the driveway as Erik turned off the main road and they were enveloped by the tropical foliage.
Parking the big Escalade next to a couple of rusty pickups, the two men strode toward what looked like a run-down old bar from some past era. There were no signs saying it was a bar, but the hacker had called GT just an hour earlier, saying that Grabowski had bought lunch and a couple beers at a place called the Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill twenty minutes before that and giving GT this address. Even though there weren’t any signs, not even beer signs in the windows, GT recognized a dive when he saw one.
As the two approached, GT noted very little activity outside. The quiet hum of a few air conditioners drifted up from several boats tied up in the canal. A small, sporty brown one at the end of the canal caught GT’s eye. It was different from the other small boats. It was wood and looked faster.
Opening the door, GT let his eyes adjust for a moment before entering the dimly lit bar.
After lunch, Rusty and I sat at a table and caught up on what was going on around the islands. Lately, I didn’t even come into town on Friday, as I had before Linda went up north, preferring to stay on the island. It’d been over two weeks since I was last here.
Sometimes, I’d take the Revenge out and anchor in a secluded cove for a day or two. Just swim in the gin-clear water, fish and explore the shallows in the kayak. I hadn’t had a charter in over a month, preferring to just enjoy life and the solitude for a while.
Two fishing guides came in from the deck, one of them taking the second man’s empty bottle, along with his own, and going behind the bar. The second man nodded at me and said to Rusty, “Add a coupla more and two fish sandwich baskets to my tab, Rusty?”
My old friend nodded. “Sure, Dink. How’s the fishin’?”
Brian “Dink” Wilcox had been a fishing guide in Marathon since arriving here ten years ago as a high school dropout. Tall, gangly, and stumbling, he was accident-prone most of the time. He seemed to have perpetual sea legs. On a boat, he was fine. More than fine, in fact. Able to pole his skiff and maneuver into and out of some of the skinniest patches in the backcountry, Dink was well known for his ability to find fish.
“Tarpon migration was great, but they’re about gone. Just gettin’ by till snook season opens, now.”
The other guide, a man I’d seen around a few times but had never met, brought two beers from the cooler and joined Dink two tables down from Rusty and me. The Rusty Anchor is that kind of place. Off the beaten path, not in any tourist brochures, a place that still had an old Florida style, like a few places I remembered visiting down here as a kid. Pap may even have brought me here way back when. Rusty pulled a small notepad from his shirt pocket and noted the men’s orders, without bothering to ask if they’d told Rufus.
“I’m telling ya,” Rusty said, putting the pad and pencil back in his pocket and turning to me, “there’s no way Deuce would be involved in that kind of thing.”
Rusty’s son-in-law had pulled a fast one, just before taking his new position
in DC. At least it looked that way to me. One of his team members was Charity Styles, a young woman that had been through a lot in her short life. She could fly a chopper like nobody’s business, but a few years back, while she’d been an Army medivac pilot in Afghanistan, she’d been shot down and captured, then tortured, raped and sodomized repeatedly at the hands of the Taliban.
Charity had accompanied me on a manhunt last year. The former head of the CCC turned out to be dirty. Real dirty. Jason Smith had murdered his wife for her inheritance years before and tried to kill both Deuce and myself when we got too close. The bomb he’d meant for us had killed a young Marine we’d been trying to help. He and Charity had formed some kind of connection, or bond. When we finally found Smith down in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Charity killed him with her bare hands.
During the trip, which covered half the western Caribbean, she opened up to me a little, especially on the return trip. Killing Smith seemed to give her some closure, but left her feeling cold and empty. She told me that Jared was the only one she’d felt close to since her days in Afghanistan. I never did think she was all there emotionally, but I never would have thought she’d do what everyone believed she did.
“At worst he let it happen,” I said. “I don’t buy for one minute that she stole the chopper and disappeared.”
Leaning in closer, Rusty dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And what do you base that on? Running all over the Caribbean with Charity stashed in the cabin, till you caught Smith last year?”
“Neither story rings true, Rusty. Think about it. If I’m right, then Deuce is covering for her and she’s on some sort of secret assignment for the DHS. If I’m wrong, why hasn’t he found her? Stealing a government chopper isn’t something the DHS secretary would allow to happen without a full investigation. He knows and he’s keeping it under his hat.”
Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) Page 4
