Just Add Salt (Hetta Coffey Mystery Series (Book 2))

by Jinx Schwartz

  In no time, Comacho and a crew were rowing ashore in search of fresh water. The pilot, who did not survive to see his last successful pilotage, had told them to look for date palms, but all day they searched in vain. That night they camped on a dune and, after chewing on barrel cactus pulp to soothe their parched throats, they roasted a raccoon whose curiosity proved his undoing. Eating meat again was such a luxury that they temporarily put their troubles aside to enjoy the moment.

  One of the men cocked his head. “Oye! Singing dogs.” The men stopped sucking marrow and chewing bones and listened to eerie coyote calls echoing through the cool clear air.

  “Are they dangerous?” asked a man who had heard of, but never seen, killer dingoes in the Philippines and wolves in China. “Not to full grown men, I hear. I also heard,” said the navigator, “they can sniff out water faster that any other animal in the desert.”

  “Not as fast as our rats, I’d venture,” another complained.

  An exultant Comacho jumped to his feet. “Rats. That’s it. Let us return to the ship, and quickly.” The others feared he had a fever of dementia, but he was in charge now, so they obeyed.

  After an intense and bloody roundup, a cage of thirst-frenzied rats were set free. They scattered, willy-nilly, dogged by the most able-bodied sailors. In only six hours, a tracked rat scampered through a break in a rock pile, into a cave harboring an underground pool.

  Ironically, as soon as the stranded voyagers discovered the cave pond, a thick fog moved in and they captured even more water by spreading mats designed to catch rain at sea. To warm his children against the misty chill, Comacho sacrificed a bolt of fine fabric, swaddling them in silk once destined for kings. Slave and seaman alike feasted on fish, clams and lobster seasoned with exotic spices foraged from the hold.

  Gold, silver, Chinese porcelain and jewels, the only things safe from rats, were left in the ship. Everyone but a skeleton crew moved ashore. The plan was to rid the vessel of every last rat before re-boarding the ship and resuming their journey to Acapulco.

  The rat slaughter aboard San Carlos went on for days, while the hunt for game onshore replenished their provisions. Isabel Comacho, and others like her beyond recovery, died in spite of renewed rations and water. Enough crew still survived, however, to sail San Carlos to San Lucas once the rats were eradicated, and their water jugs refilled with cave and caught water.

  It was on the morning of their third week ashore that they noticed San Carlos listing to starboard. Alarmed, Comacho and his sailors searched the ship high and low, finally discovering that a great store of silver coins, fashioned in the Far East for use in Mexico, had spilled and shifted to one side of the ship during the storm. With hands and spades, the men worked frantically to balance the load, but the ship continued to lean further as more water poured in from a breach in the hull. The bilges were filling and if nothing was done, the ship would roll on her side.

  In a Herculean effort to save their ship, every man, woman and child who could still stand, kedged, rowed, and maneuvered San Carlos into a position where, at high tide, she only had a fathom below her round bottom. Planning to start repairs at low tide when her keel settled to the bottom, their hopes were once again dashed. A fierce offshore wind howled down on them, the ship slipped anchor and floated toward the middle of the bay.

  The crew on board fought valiantly to re-anchor their ship, but as the waves topped her decks and she listed further and further, San Carlos’s hold flooded and she went down.

  From shore, Comacho watched helplessly as his fortune, and therefore his future, slid beneath several fathoms of seawater. For years the fifty survivors would occasionally snag, with very long lines, a piece of ship or even a small cache of coins, but for the most part San Carlos and her vast treasure, were out of reach.

  Two years after the sinking of the ship, as Comacho sat watching a huge pod of whales spouting inside the bay, he spotted the billowing sails of three ships outside the entrance. They were Spanish, he could tell, and they sailed northward. He briefly considered building a signal fire on a tall dune, but then he looked around his little village of San Carlos and counted his many blessings.

  His eyes fell on his new wife, Delores. She had been a sailmaker on her way to a galleon maintenance facility in Mexico when San Carlos went down. The two survivors had forged a new life. Watching her bathe their baby boy while his daughters played nearby with a couple of little Yees, he daydreamed of the two families uniting some day. As his friendship with Yee grew, they soon forgot that one was a former employee. What did it matter anymore? The lost fortune was all that had kept Comacho from being just another peasant in Acapulco and Manila, and Yee’s skills as a jewelry maker were no longer of any importance. They were just two men who had survived a terrible ordeal to find unexpected contentment.

  “Manila Man,” Yee said as they watched the sails disappear to the north, “should we try a signal next time?” He spoke in Spanish, their common language.

  “Pienso no, Chino. I think not.”

  “I agree. Look at what we have attained. Not riches, but then, where would we spend them? Here we are safe and healthy. Our children do not know the stigma of class. We have fat babies and young wives and we never have to worry about our next meal.”

  They sat in silence for a moment and then Comacho chuckled. “And to think, Yee, we owe it all to rats.”

  Chapter 1

  “Rats, rats, rats!”

  Jan squinted at me over our laptop screens and tilted her blonde head to one side, giving her a curious cocker spaniel look. “Rats? What’s wrong, Hetta?”

  “E-mail from that rat, Jenks Jenkins. Your boyfriend is stealing my boyfriend.”

  Jan giggled. “Well, you know, we do live near San Francisco.”

  “Very damned funny. Did you know about this?”

  “This what?” Her baby blues didn’t blink, but I wasn’t sold on her innocence. After twenty years as my friend she had learned subterfuge from the maestro of deceit.

  “Kuwait. As if you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, that this. I know that Lars and Jenks are working on a bid package for a project over there, but you knew that.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Okay, so perhaps it was mentioned, but I didn’t know they were going there.”

  “Well, then, neither did Jenks. You know Jenks never lies. So, they’re going to Kuwait? Let me see that e-mail.”

  Jan unfolded—others stand, she unfolds—to her full five nine and sauntered around behind me. I slid out of my chair at the dining table I use as an office, left her to read Jenks’s annoying e-mail while I went outside to watch the sun settling over San Francisco Bay. A tug chugged by, creating a wake that rocked Raymond Johnson enough so that I had to steady myself on the rail.

  As I fumed, silently wishing plague and pestilence upon the tug’s captain and Jenks alike, I heard Jan slide open the aft cabin door. Zigzagging slightly to compensate for the undulating deck, she carried a bottle of Shiraz in one hand and two oversized balloon wine glasses in the other.

  “Here,” she said, handing off the crystal. I held onto the not-very-practical-for-a-boat-but-I-bought-’em-anyhow glasses while she grabbed a corkscrew from the outdoor bar and deftly popped the cork. The two delicate goblets readily handled an entire bottle of wine.

  I took a long drink. “Ah, that’s good. But that Jenks! Damn him, you’d think he’d have the courtesy to call instead of dropping a like this via e-mail.”

  “A man with keen preservation skills, I’d say. Knows how to avoid verbal shrapnel. I didn’t even get an e-mail from that lily-livered brother of his, who, by the way, is quickly climbing to the very top of my shit list, so consider yourself lucky. I don’t know why we’re surprised. I mean, we know Lars and Jenks do oilfield fire protection work and all the big money’s in the Middle East right now.”

  “Yeah, but we have plans,” I said with a pout.

  “Yabbut, plans change.
And you know damned well if we got an offer to make the big bucks we’d jump on it. Right?”

  I grudgingly agreed. We’re both self-employed consultants, Jan in accounting software, myself in construction and engineering materials management. We both our own corporations, so we do understand that you have to make hay while the sun shines, but dammit, we had made plans with those Jenkins brothers.

  My name is Hetta Coffey: CEO, CFO, president and sole employee of Hetta Coffey, SI, LLC. The SI is my little phonetic prank on the pronunciation of Civil Engineer. An engineer by degree, I specialize in material management and, like ole Ben Franklin, leave nothing to chance. As he wrote, “For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail.” My job is to ensure no project nail is late, or lost.

  But right now I had more than work on my mind. If Jenks Jenkins, my alleged boyfriend, didn’t return in time for a timely departure on our planned trip to Mexico, I’d have a cash flow crunch in my future. We had to leave and return as scheduled or by mid-January I’d be scrounging for my dock fee and boat payment. By February I’d be sunk, not a word one who lives on a boat uses lightly. What to do? What to do?

  A freshening breeze made me thankful for the protection of my aft sundeck, or verandah, as I call it. Side curtains cut the wind, allowing us to drink our wine in cozy comfort. Furnished in fake rattan Brown Jordan with fashionably faded blue-and-white striped cushions, the deck sports a small table for outdoor dining, a gas barbeque, an ice maker and a wet bar stocked with blue and white plastic stemware for those times when we were underway and had the crystal battened down.

  Even an unusually warm late August day in the Bay Area doesn’t count for much in the temperature department after four o’clock, when the wind whips over water. Jan and I grabbed blue and white Raymond Johnson windbreakers, two of a set of six given to me as a boatwarming gift, and blended into the deck decor. Tourists, shivering in their optimistic summer shorts, wandered around taking in the sights of Jack London Square, one of which seemed to be Jan and me. We smiled and acknowledged those who spoke.

  “Wonder when they’ll leave and for how long,” Jan said.

  “These tourists?”

  “No silly, Jenks and Lars. I mean, they could be back in time for our trip to Mexico.”

  “We’ll soon know. I imagine Jenks will give me a few hours to calm down, then he’ll call from Houston.”

  “Smart man, that Jenks Jenkins.”

  “You already said that. And besides, I’m not that bad.”

  “Are too.”

  “Am not.”

  Jan took a swig of wine and rolled her eyes. “How about the time you dumped what’s-his-name’s car in the estuary?”

  I looked at the spot where Garrison’s Morgan took its swan dive and shrugged. “He deserved it and you know it.”

  “And how about when you emptied your .38 into that Brit’s rubber dingy?”

  “Jan, that Brit was trying to kill me. And it wasn't my .38, it was my shotgun.”

  “Well, that’s true, but how about—”

  “Okay, okay, I get your point. However, I’m a reformed woman.”

  “Sure you are. So, what are you gonna do to Jenks? Inquiring minds wanna know. I’d like to sell tickets.”

  I ignored her impertinent question. I hadn’t had time to come up with a suitable revenge for Jenks. Yet. “Jan, aren’t you just a lit-tle pissed off at Lars? We’ve had this trip planned for months. You and I, at great trouble and expense to ourselves, put our careers on hold. Turned down a couple of lucrative projects. Now the brothers Jenkins up and decide to leave us in the lurch. Take off for some godforsaken part of the world.”

  “I’m not thrilled, of course, but we still have a month until we’re scheduled to leave. Maybe they just have to run over there and come right back. Don’t be so negative.”

  “Perhaps you forget that I’ve been in this engineering game for a very long time. If they say you’re going to be stuck somewhere for a month, it’s six. If they say a year, it’s two. Remember when Baxter Brothers sent me to Japan for nine months? I got back two years later, practically in a body bag. Trust me, once our alleged boyfriends leave for the Middle East, we’re screwed.”

  Jan giggled. “Or not, as it were. Don’t jump to conc—phone’s ringing, Hetta.”

  “I hear it.”

  “Aren’t you gonna answer it?”

  “Nope. It’s yours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I turned mine off.”

  “Oh. Maybe it’s Jenks and Lars.”

  “I am not here.”

  Jan rushed into the main saloon and came back on deck with her cell phone stuck to her ear. “So,” she was saying in a honeyed voice, “how’s Houston, besides hot and wet?”

  Lars must have had a properly lewd comeback for her unfortunate choice of words, for her cheeks flared. She quickly swung away from me and whispered several somethings into the phone. When she turned back, I rolled my eyes and gave her a gag me finger down my throat. She stuck out her tongue, shot me an evil grin and purred, “Oh please, Lars baby, put Jenks on. There’s a chunky little red head dying to talk with him.”

  I considered pushing her overboard, especially for that chunky remark, but snatched the phone instead. “Who is it?”

  “You know it’s me, Hetta.” Jenks’s deep voice set off a little twitch where it counts. He is a difficult man to stay pissed off at, but I was giving it my best. I clammed up and let him talk.

  “I’ve been trying to call you, but I keep getting your voice mail. How’s my little sea wench?”

  “Don’t you sweet talk me, you rat. What’s this about you deserting my ship?”

  “Now Hetta, don’t be that way. Lars and I just have to go over for a sales meeting in Kuwait City, dazzle them with our software, and we’re out of there. They’re subbing out the hardware to someone else, so we should be back in Oakland in no time.”

  “We leave for Cabo in a month,” I said, sounding petulant. I hate sounding petulant.

  “I’ll do my level best to be there.”

  “Go ahead, break my cardinal rule and lie to me. Tell me you will definitely be here.”

  “Can’t do that, but I’ll try. Meanwhile, you’ll have to get Raymond Johnson ready to go. You can do it. You know your boat inside out. I’ll send you lists of provisions and spare parts I think we’ll need, you add to it, and together we can get a good deal of work taken care of before I get back. I’ll send you a schedule of what needs to be done, maintenance wise. That, you’ll have to hire out.”

  “You mean you’re not even coming here before you leave for Kuwait?”

  “Sorry, no can do. Lars and I take off tomorrow morning on a Halliburton jet. I’ll call you when we get to Kuwait City. And then from Baghdad.”

  “Baghdad! Why are you going there?”

  “Just for a quick meeting, then back to Kuwait. Don’t worry, I’ll call every day.”

  “Gosh, can’t you work in three days and four nights in beautiful downtown Damascus? Jenks, I don’t like this. Forget the contract, forget the money. We’ll cancel the trip to Mexico. I’ll get a new job of my own and we’ll take our cruise later. You can get another contract here, where it’s safe. Please.” I was starting to sound needy and it did not sit well with my own independent self-image.

  “Wish I could, but we’re committed. Can’t let the company down.”

  “You are the company.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “Very funny, Jenks. I have to go now, I have a date with some stranger in a smoky bar.”

  “Very funny, yourself. Bye now. Love you.”

  “Yeah? Well prove it. Come home.”

  I hung up and opened another bottle of wine. Jan gave me a wary look as I poured half of it into my glass. “Oh, relax,” I sneered, “I’ve decided
not to throw your devious, albeit skinny, ass into the estuary.”

  “Gimme some of that wine. See, I told you they’d be back in time. You worry too much.”

  “What’s with you? I thought Lars was topping your shit list.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just think, that, well, maybe we aren’t right for each other. Just a nigglin’ I can’t put my finger on. Don’t mind me. And quit being so negative about them making it back for our trip.”

  “I’m negative because I just know they won’t. And what about this Baghdad thing? No telling what will happen to them, traipsing around over there.”

  “Come on, Hetta, you’ve traipsed around all your life.”

  “Yeah, and look what it got me. It’s taken thirty some-odd years to find a man who didn’t disappear on me and look what happens. He disappears. I can outdo David friggin’ Copperfield when it comes to making men vanish.”

  “You are such a drama queen. Jenks has not vanished. He is coming back. Hell, even Hudson Williams came back. Sort of.”

  “I’d hardly classify my ex-fiancé turning up floating face down in my hot tub as ‘coming back.’”

  “Well,” she giggled, “he did surface.”

  I almost spit out my wine as her extremely tasteless joke struck my funny bone. After a good laugh we clinked glasses and watched the tourists watch us for a few minutes. I fought an urge to slap my fins together and bark for fish.

  “Wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  “What?”

  “That Hudson got mixed up with those Singapore mobsters and then crossed swords with that Brit, Alex, who murdered him. It was all Hudson’s own fault. He jilted you, stole from you, broke your heart and then got himself killed. And for once, you were totally blameless.”

  She was right, I knew, but it still rankled that I had been so gullible. The passing years had not completely erased the deep hurt I’d felt when Hudson suddenly disappeared one week before our planned wedding in Tokyo, and then turned up years later, at my house in Oakland. Parboiled.

  I sighed. “Hudson was indeed a victim of his own avarice, I suppose. It was one thing to double cross me, but quite another to take on the likes of Alex and his scum bag cronies. I wonder what became of Alex?”