We’d stayed in touch over the years since he’d returned home to the Keys to take care of his daughter. I’d visited from time to time, staying at his home in Marathon. Seven years ago last June, I retired from the Corps after twenty years of service and moved down here myself. I’d always loved the Keys, ever since I was a kid growing up in Fort Myers. I’d also stood as best man when Julie married Deuce. They were due back from their honeymoon today. The wedding was almost two months ago and had been marred by an explosion that took the life of a young man I’d grown to trust.
I first met Deuce when he was just a teen. His father was Rusty’s and my Platoon Sergeant when we were stationed together in Okinawa, Japan. Sergeant Russ Livingston, Senior, and I became friends, and when we both found ourselves stationed in North Carolina together, we took every opportunity we could to go diving. Many times we came to the Keys, and we’d sat right at this very bar on more than one occasion.
I met Russell “Deuce” Livingston, Junior, for the second time when he came here looking for me. His dad had been murdered and Deuce wanted to spread his ashes on a reef we’d both loved. By then Deuce was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy SEALs. Together, we’d found the man that killed his dad. His bleached bones can probably still be found on a tiny island just a few miles from mine.
Deuce and two of his best operatives had left the SEALs and gone to work for Homeland Security. The group of men that his dad’s killer belonged to also happened to be responsible for the death of my own wife. It didn’t take much for Deuce and his merry band of misfits to rope me into working with them. They now trained and lived part-time on my little island.
“Are you losing your hearing, man?” Rusty shouted, interrupting my thoughts.
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I asked what time was it that Deuce called you?”
“Probably about the same time Julie called you, numbnuts. As soon as they got in range of a cell tower. About zero six hundred.”
He looked at the clock on the wall over the bar and said, “Well, that was nine hours ago.”
Just then, Jimmy walked in. He used to be my First Mate until about a year ago, and now he worked part-time at the bar.
“Jimmy,” I said, “thank God you’re here. Take over so me and Rusty can go down to the boat ramp, will ya?”
“Take over what, dude? You two are the only ones in here.”
“Just watch the bar,” Rusty said as he came from behind the large slab of oak.
Rusty and I left the bar, with Pescador trotting ahead of us, and walked down the crushed-shell drive to the boat ramp at the back of the property. It was more like a pair of overgrown ruts through the backyard than a driveway. This land had been in his family for several generations. An old shack off to the east of the boat ramp was where Rusty’s grandfather had once made illegal rum during Prohibition. Now it was where Rufus, Rusty’s old Jamaican cook, lived and whiled away his retirement.
We got to the boat ramp and sat down at a small table under the shade of an old gumbo-limbo tree. Beyond was the Atlantic Ocean. More precisely, Hawk Channel and the Straits of Florida, a narrow funnel between the Florida coast and the islands of Cuba to the south and the Bahamas to the east. Through this funnel ran the greatest river on Earth, the Gulf Stream, moving warm water from the Gulf of Mexico through the Straits and up into the North Atlantic. It was this current that Britain owed its climate to.
“What time is it?” Rusty asked again.
“Ten minutes later than last time you asked,” I replied. “You’re acting like a worried dad whose daughter’s out on prom night with Alice Cooper.”
“Jesse, she’s my only kin. And these last two months has been the longest we’ve been apart since the day she was born.”
“What about when she went through basic?” I asked. Julie had enlisted in the Coast Guard nearly a year ago.
“I flew up every other weekend.”
“Really?” I said incredulously. “Bet that went over well with her CO.”
He stood up suddenly. “Hey! There they are!”
I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, I saw the distinctive red and white sails on Deuce and Julie’s blue Whitby ketch clearing the point at Key Colony Beach. Although the wind was light, I’d been wrong assuming they were under power. They had every inch of canvas up. Still, it took twenty minutes before they made the turn toward Rusty’s channel, started the little diesel engine and dropped the sails, then another ten minutes before they putted into the canal and were tied up at the docks.
“It’s a great boat, Dad,” Julie said after we’d helped them tie up and were seated at the bar. “She sails really well, whether in light wind or heavy seas. We finally came up with a name—James Caird.”
Rusty smiled as he wiped down glasses behind the bar. He’d never been a fan of wind power, but seeing the boat under full sail in winds too light for most sailboats, he was starting to change his mind. A little.
“Shackleton’s lifeboat,” he said. “I never thought you paid much attention to those old sea stories I told you.”
“She told me about it,” Deuce said. “I remembered hearing about it in college, but she made the story come alive one night while sailing in the Leewards. When we made port the next day, we looked it up on the Web—,” The sound of a motorcycle outside interrupted the debate between power and sail. A moment later my First Mate, Bob Talbot, and his wife, Nikki, walked in. Bob had been a Navy Corpsman with 1st Battalion, 9th Marines when they met. Nikki had been a Marine clerk at 9th Marines’ regimental headquarters. In the Corps, we affectionately called all our Corpsmen ‘Doc’, even though they weren’t really doctors. Doc was carrying what looked like a treasure chest. Pescador rose from his spot next to my stool at the end of the bar and trotted over to them to welcome them by allowing each to give him an ear scratch.
“Hey, Doc,” I said as Pescador accepted the ear scratch from both of them. “How’d the move go, Nikki?”
They walked over and Doc placed the chest on the end of the bar as Rusty slid two cold Dos Equis in front of them. Rusty had a terrific memory for what people liked to drink.
“It was pretty emotional, Jesse,” Nikki said. “Their house has been in the family for almost a hundred years.”
“I can understand that,” Rusty said. “My great-grandpa built this place and the house. My grandpa rebuilt them after both were blown down in the Labor Day hurricane of thirty-five.”
“Where’d you get the chart chest?” Deuce asked.
“Chart chest?” Doc said.
“That’s what it looks like,” Deuce said, pointing at the chest on the bar. “A sixteenth-century chart chest. I’m guessing German.”
“German?” Doc said with a quizzical expression. “We were thinking it was Spanish.”
Deuce walked over to the end of the bar and examined it more closely. “No, not Spanish,” he said. “They used mostly brass fittings. These are iron. And in damned good shape, too. Is it real?”
“As far as we know,” Doc replied. “Nikki’s dad gave it to us.”
“Is it full of doubloons?” Rusty whispered with a grin.
“Nope, nothing in it but a coconut,” Doc said. Then with a half grin, he added, “And a riddle.”
“A coconut?” Julie asked.
Doc unclasped the chest and opened it, taking out an old, dried-out coconut that looked like it’d been baked and placing it on the bar. He turned to Deuce and asked, “So, what’s a chart chest?”
Deuce was still examining the chest. “Usually longer than a standard chest, like this. Also, like this one, it has a seal around the inside, making it watertight. They were carried by ship’s navigators and used to keep their nautical charts, logbooks, and diaries dry. I’m almost certain that’s what you have here. What made you think it was Spanish?”
“This right here,” Jimmy said. “The coconut has Spanish writing on it.”
“What’s it say, Jimmy?” I asked, knowing that he had a
pretty good knowledge of the language.
“I can only make out a few words,” he replied, studying it. “The date is definitely September twenty-third, 1566, even though part of it is rubbed away. First part says something about mist, then something about a woman.” Turning the nut, he pointed to two more words, adding, “This word here, ‘suprimio,’ means suppressed, and this one means trade. It’s not like any Spanish I’ve ever read, though.”
“Dad said it’s old Spanish,” Nikki said. “From the old country.”
“You should let Chyrel take a look at it,” Deuce said. “I can call her and ask her to come down.”
“No need,” I said. “She’s up on the island. She bought herself a little skiff and has been exploring for the last month.”
Chyrel Koshinski is our resident tech guru. She handles all of the communications and computer wizardry for Deuce’s Homeland Security team. Just over a year ago, while serving as a SEAL Team Commander, Deuce was recruited by the Department of Homeland Security to create and head up a team of the best operators from military, civilian, and investigative services. Their mission at the time was to monitor and, if need be, intervene in the ever-growing terrorist threat in the Caribbean and south Florida. I serve as a transporter, occasionally moving field operators and equipment around on my boat, Gaspar’s Revenge. She’s a forty-five-foot Rampage fishing boat, perfect for moving small groups around undetected. Chyrel joined the team out of the CIA and proved extremely valuable this past year in the takedown of some high-level terrorists, drug smugglers and murderers.
“What can she do with it?” Nikki asked.
“For one thing,” Deuce replied, “she can enter the writing into her computer’s translator. She probably has some forensics tools to bring the words into sharper focus, too. Any idea what it all means?”
Doc grinned and said, “Better open a few more beers for everyone, Rusty. I’ll tell you the story that was told to me.” In fifteen minutes, Doc had spun a tale of Spanish treasure, shipwrecks and early American history.
“So this chest,” Rusty said, “was found inside a busted-up mangrove tree?”
“That’s the story,” Doc replied. “I asked the Judge if he could give me any more information on what his ancestors might have found out about it, but he said it would be better to start from scratch.”
“I know a little bit about the early Spaniards in the West Indies, man” Jimmy said. “They were brutal, dude. They believed what they had to offer the natives of the islands was worth all the gold and silver they could carry off. The islanders didn’t have much need of what the Spaniards offered, namely the Roman Catholic religion and civilization. For over two hundred years, anyone that wouldn’t accept those gifts were usually put to death in a lot of nasty ways, including Protestants. From when Columbus first landed in 1492 to 1530, less than forty years later, all but a handful of the native people of the Caribbean were murdered or enslaved. By the date on this nut, the Spaniards controlled all of the Caribbean, with forts in Cuba, Florida, and South America, and they’d begun moving cargo and treasure from the Orient across the Pacific to southern Mexico and Panama. From there, they took it overland to El Caribe and eventually to Spain. The age of the Conquistadors, man.”
“So, why would someone put the coconut in a chest meant to keep charts dry?” Julie asked.
“That’s easy,” Rusty said. “To protect the nut.”
“Okay, so why hide it inside a tree, instead of burying it?”
“Ever see how a tree can grow around a rope or chain-link fence?” I asked. “If whoever put that nut in the chest, did it over four hundred years ago, he might have simply put the chest in the crook of a tree for safe keeping, and the tree grew around it.”
“Exactly what I told the Judge,” Doc said with a crooked grin.
“Still begs the question, why did he want to protect the nut?” Julie asked.
“Seems to me,” Doc said with that half grin of his, “there’s really only one answer to that. He didn’t have anything else to draw a treasure map on.”
Looking at the others, I thought it over. Many years ago, me and Deuce’s dad found a little treasure up in Fort Pierce. Last year, Deuce’s dad was killed looking for another treasure, when he found part of it. Earlier this year, me, Deuce, and Rusty went up there and found the rest. It was enough that Deuce and Julie’s kids wouldn’t have to worry about college, Rusty could do some renovations on the bar and his house, and I was able to spread a little around the tiny community that had grown up on my island.
Besides myself, I had a caretaker who had his own little house and looked after things for me. We’d started a fledgling business growing vegetables and crawfish in an aquaculture system. The sale of the crawfish was becoming pretty lucrative for him, his wife, and their two small children.
At any given time, there might be a few others living in two small bunkhouses, and the vegetable garden had quickly become a part-time hobby for many of them during their downtime. These were members of Deuce’s team and they ranged from a former female Olympic swimmer turned Miami cop to a number of SpecOps-type guys from the SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Rangers, CIA, and the Coast Guard’s elite Maritime Enforcement.
“You guys in a hurry to get home?” I asked. “We can head up to the island and see what Chyrel can do right now.”
“I have to work in the morning,” Nikki said. “You go ahead, Bob. Call me when you get there.”
“Let me know what you find out,” Deuce said. “We’ll come up in the morning. We have a lot of things to do on the boat this evening.”
Doc and I walked out to the docks behind the bar, where he kissed his wife goodbye and we shoved off after I promised her I’d have him home before she got off work. Pescador took his usual spot on the casting deck. We’d just cleared the jetty when we heard Doc’s motorcycle start up and I brought my little skiff up on plane.
We turned toward the Seven Mile Bridge and skimmed across the skinny water between East Sister Rock and Boot Key. Rounding the tip of Boot Key and turning north, I pushed the throttle a little more. Crossing under the bridge, we heard a horn behind us. We both looked back and saw Nikki waving as she headed up the long span on Doc’s motorcycle. We waved back.
I turned more westerly and wound my way through the small islands of Cocoanut, Teakettle, and Sandfly Keys. Looking over at Doc, I could tell he was happy to be back on the water. Being cooped up sixty miles inland doesn’t sit well with a waterman.
It was only twenty miles in the skiff, and it took only thirty minutes to get to my island. I’d bought it and the Revenge a month after I retired from the Corps in ’99, pretty much on a whim. I did some work on it off and on for a couple of years and camped out there when the weather was cool, until I met a woman named Alex. We became friends, but after a little more than a year, she’d had to go back to Oregon to take care of a sick brother. I really went to work on it then. In less than a year, I’d built my little house on stilts, mostly from scrap lumber I’d picked up at the Miami shipping docks and fallen hardwood trees that I’d cut up and had milled in Homestead. The pilings were concrete and went down into the limestone and coral base quite a few feet. All in all, it was a simple, sturdy little house. The first I’d ever owned.
When Alex had returned to the Keys a year ago, we’d both realized our friendship had changed to a lot more than that while she’d been gone. She loved the little house and we’d both realized we wanted to live out our lives there. In a week, we were married. She was murdered the next day.
That was when I fell in with Deuce and his team on a more permanent basis. Together we’d found those responsible and dealt with them in our own way. Not really vigilantism, as Deuce’s team had the full backing of the federal government, but none of those guys will ever hurt anyone again.
Since then, I’d added the two bunkhouses, the aquaculture system, a battery shack, a generator system, and a water maker. With the addition of my caretaker Carl Trent’s little house, we had
five permanent structures. Together, they didn’t add up to the square footage of a decent-sized house on the mainland, but it was home for us.
I keep my boats under the house to avoid prying eyes. When I’d first built the house, the channel I’d dug by hand was barely deep enough for the skiff and the underside of the house was open. After Alex died, I redoubled my efforts and dredged the channel eight feet deep and twenty wide, building a pier on top of the spoils and enclosing the area under the house, adding large doors to the south side.
Using the fob on my keychain, I released the latch and the east door slowly began to swing open on its spring-loaded hinges as a light came on inside. The main house was still completely on its own solar and wind system that charged a bank of deep-cycle marine batteries. All of the electric in the house was twelve volt. The doors had an electric motor that pulled them closed.
When I’d originally built the place, I’d had it in mind to dock the Revenge under there, so I’d built it with the floor beams fourteen feet above the high tide. There are two bays, with a narrow dock all the way around three sides and another narrow dock in the center, and large hanging closets for gear at the front of each of the three docks.
The Revenge was tied up on the far western side. Over the last year, I’d acquired a few other boats. As a wedding gift, Deuce and Julie had given us Russ’s twenty-foot Grady-White. It now belonged to the Trents. I’d given it to them so Carl’s wife, Charlie, could get back and forth to go shopping on Big Pine Key and take their kids to school. It was tied off against the far eastern dock, along with my late wife’s red Maverick Mirage skiff. Tied up to the center pier on the east side was a thirty-two-foot Winter center console named El Cazador, the Hunter. It fell into our possession last winter, having been confiscated during a drug bust. On the opposite side of the center dock was a Cigarette 42x, one of the fastest boats on the water. It came to us from the terrorist smuggler who was ultimately responsible for my wife’s death. The previous owner didn’t have any more use for it now that he was vacationing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guest of the federal government.
Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) Page 4
