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

by Jinx Schwartz

  Fabio, ever the peacemaker, gave Jan a show of gorgeous white teeth. “I will have café, por favor.”

  “You might not like her,” Jan quipped, then grabbed the percolator from the stove where it was being kept warm on a gas burner. She poured both men a cup, then decanted the rest into a carafe. Chino, after a few sips, became apologetic.

  “I am sorry, but I am Mexican. We do not like to deliver bad news. Perhaps because the conquistadors executed the messenger?” He gave us a small, weary smile.

  “Bad news?”

  “I fear so. My cousins checked out the situation around San Carlos last night. Lujàn’s men are actually checking pangas as they pass the entrance to Mag Bay. It is illegal, of course, but this man worries little for the law. We cannot escape in this boat.”

  “How about by land?” I asked the question, but it was rhetorical. There was no way in hell I was going to leave my boat unless it was a life or death situation. In that case, since cowardice runs right strong through my veins, I’d be the first to desert the ship.

  Chino shook his head. “Difficult. Lujàn has spies everywhere, and especially in Lopez Mateos. They are watching for us. I will know more this evening, after my cousins have figured out how many they are, and where. For now, we must stay right here.” He swatted at a gnat. “Damned bugs.”

  “Hey, I thought you were a naturalist,” I teased.

  He grinned. “I am a naturalist who hates bugs. I also dislike snakes. I am a selective naturalist.”

  We needed a laugh and Chino’s line got one.

  Fabio, after a good hearty chuckle, said, “I do have the good news.”

  “Thank God, we need it. Let me guess, you saved a bunch of pesos by insuring your car with the gecko.” Fabio looked puzzled. “Oh, never mind, give us your news.”

  “I think we will be able to use the teléfono for a brief period when the sun is directly overhead. The solar panels are large enough to replenish the batterias then.”

  “Who we gonna call? Cacique Busters?” I sang, to the tune of Ghost Busters.

  I’d baffled poor Fabio again, but got a good giggle from Jan.

  Chino became serious. “That is an excellent question, Hetta. We will be limited in time, so it is essential that we contact the right person. Someone who can actually do something to help us.”

  “Let’s make a list,” Jan said cheerfully, grabbing a pad and pen.

  I felt like I was living a scene from a forties musical. The one where someone exults, “I have an idea, let’s put on our own show!”

  “Thanks for the suggestion, Judy.” My clever one liners were falling short of amusing the Mexicans, but Jan got them. “I vote we call Wontrobski.”

  Three thumbs down. The Trob, though brilliant, was in San Francisco, which right now seemed a million miles away, on a far and distant planet, right next to Berkeley.

  We continued with the list, discarding the port captain, Mexican navy, American navy, American consulate in Cabo, and United States Coast Guard.

  “I know,” I said glumly, “let’s just call Mr. Lujàn, tell him where we are, and get this misery over with.”

  “Not funny, Hetta,” Jan snapped. Her lower lip trembled a bit, and I could see she was getting scared and upset. Not the time for my macabre sense of humor.

  “Sorry, Jan. I’m just frustrated. There’s gotta be someone out there who can get down to Lopez Mateos and come up with a plan. I’m fresh out of—Martinez! God, how stupid can I get?”

  Chino, too diplomatic to elaborate on how stupid I could get, instead wanted to know who Martinez was and how he could help us. I filled him in. “Anyhow, he’s in Ensenada. I have him staking out some kid who’s sending me crank e-mails.”

  Fabio, who looked like he’d been hit in the stomach, blurted, “You have that federale watching my son?”

  “He’s not a fed…your son? That little terrorist is your kid?” Jan’s face clouded dangerously. She hates dishonesty in anyone but me. Leaping to her feet a la Perry Mason, she demanded, “So it was you! You had him send those e-mails and phone calls? Why? To keep Hetta from coming here?”

  Fabio gave us a big old charming smile. “I failed. I did not know her then.”

  I took a step toward him, tempted to clock him on his handsome chin, but Jan stepped between us.

  “But why?” she asked. “Why did you want to stop us? And why are we still getting messages? We’re already here.”

  Fabio raised his eyebrows and hands. “He is…a voluntad.”

  Chino translated. “Ad-libbing.”

  Yeah, ad-libbing on my dime. I had to remember to tell Martinez to cut the scamming little bastard’s bribery off.

  Jan chewed her bottom lip and pouted. “Well, dammit, he scared us.”

  Mexican shrug. Guilty Mexican shrug, at that. He sat heavily onto the settee. “Not enough. I thought to discourage you from this voyage. As I told you before, I do not trust Tanuki.”

  “Well, well. ‘We have seen the enemy, and it is us’,” I quoted.

  “You know, Fabio, that boy of yours has all the makings of a master criminal. He snookered one of the sharpest detectives I know. Okay, so he’s the only detective I really know, but Martinez is sharp.”

  “What did Juanito do?”

  “He convinced Martinez that he was paid by some mystery woman to send those messages. Your wife is no slouch, either.”

  “My Juanito and my wife, they are very clever,” he preened.

  “Any chance they have relatives who own a funeral home in Oakland?”

  “¿Que?”

  “Never mind. Okay, I’ll call Martinez when the batteries are up. Maybe he can get us out of this mess.”

  Chapter 29

  The men napped sporadically throughout the morning, while Jan and I read and kept our ears cocked for trouble. Birds, fish, even an occasional airplane drone in the distance broke the silence, but no more pangas. No breeze stirred the warm, damp air, forcing us to stay indoors to avoid the swarms of insects beating themselves against my screens. I sent a thousand silent thank-you’s in the direction of Kuwait, or at least in the direction I thought it was. It was Jenks who had insisted we install no-see-um screens on all doors and hatches.

  Stretched out on the settee, I recalled that skirmish. I rebelled against the screens, claiming they blocked too much airflow. “But Jenks,” I’d whined, “it’ll block all the air.”

  He’d shaken his head at my exaggeration. “I’ll install DC fans all over the boat. Trust me, you’ll thank me for these screens one day.”

  Boy, was he right. Only problem now, we couldn’t turn on the fans, drain the batteries. It was downright sultry by mid-morning. No cooling showers permitted, either, for we couldn’t run the watermaker without starting the generator or engines. And there was no way I was going for a swim. I’d seen “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

  Unable to snooze, I selected a book, Troubled Sea, set in the Sea of Cortez, and was soon engrossed in someone else’s fictional problems instead of my own real ones.

  Jan found a steamy but badly written novel, which she threw across the room in annoyance after an hour of reading. “Good grief. I’m on page forty-two and I’ve counted at least thirty characters and no plot. Talk about superfluous sex scenarios. I swear she’s covered every position and perversion. Who reads this crap?”

  I looked at her over my reading glasses. It rankled that I now needed glasses to read, but at least they were only drugstore plus ones. My long distance vision, on the other hand, was still very sharp. For what good that did me in a mangrove swamp. “You, Jan. You read that crap.”

  “Not anymore. I’ve learned my lesson in less than half a book. This author and I have parted company forever. I thought we were perverted, but next to these characters, you and I, we’re vestal virgins. I wonder who really reads this stuff.”

  “I read somewhere that her buyers were frustrated, bored housewives. And sexually stunted men.”

  “It figures.�
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  I went back to reading while she found another book, Clive Cussler this time.

  “Jan,” I said, resting my book in my lap, “do you really think we’re perverted?”

  “Not really. We have, however, boogied to a different drummer. I suppose, to our Bible thumping schoolmates back in Texas, we must seem like debauchers of the worst sort.”

  “I wonder sometimes if I’m a sociopath.”

  “You, Hetta? What on earth are you talking about? Sociopath?”

  “Well, maybe not completely sociopathic, but I am somewhat anti-social. And there’s this thing that worries me. In movies and such, people talk about the guilt they feel when they’ve offed someone. Even if that someone was evil. I feel some folks just need killing. I guess that would make me without conscience, and therefore, a sociopath. And then, there’s this other thing.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Okay, take Hudson, for instance. I found him doing the dead man float in my hot tub and I didn’t care. Actually, I did care, but mostly that my hot tub was contaminated.”

  “He done you wrong, girl. Practically left you at the alter. You was jilted.”

  “Yeah, but at one time I loved him, or so I thought. How can you go from madly in love to not caring whether a person is dead or alive.”

  “Happens all the time. Called divorce court.” That gave us a good titter. “You know what Proust said? ‘Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.’ And speaking of Proust, why such deep thoughts?”

  “Yeah, well, Ingrid Bergman said, ‘Happiness is good health and a bad memory.’ I guess I have both. I’m probably so introspective because, quite frankly, if this Lujàn seriously comes after us again, I plan to kill him. I truly believe he’s evil, and if he isn’t making our lives miserable, he’ll be doing something bad to someone else.”

  “That’s called vigilantism. And you have my complete blessing. In fact, I’ll help you do the bastard in. I won’t miss him and neither will anyone else, probably not even missus Lujàn, if there is one. Like you say, some folks just need killin’. Hey, what time is it?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Almost noon. I’ll check the batteries.” I walked to the console and saw the solar panels were still pumping juice into the batteries, so we had to wait a while to make our call.

  Since the only thing we were running was the VHF radio on SCAN mode in order to monitor calls in Mag Bay that might pertain to us, the solar panels could easily keep us fully charged. A phone call or two was okay, but we had to conserve. My call to Martinez would have to be brief, so to save time, we penned a message for me to read, outlining the problem and asking the ex-cop to come up with a solution. We’d let him mull it over, then we’d call him back in an hour. Fabio didn’t want to leave our phone on, because he knew I couldn’t resist answering if it rang. I hate it when men get to know me.

  We went back to our books, then Jan put hers down. “You know what worries me?”

  “That we are about to have our heads chopped off by Dickless?”

  “Well, there is that. No, I mean, about life.”

  Seems like we were to have a soulful afternoon. “What worries you?”

  “That when I die, no one will remember I was here.”

  “I can fix that, Jan. You give it up to someone famous, preferably a president, and I’ll rat you out to the press. Then we’ll write a book and we’ll both go down in history. Uh, so to speak.”

  “That was a really bad pun. I’m serious. We don’t have children, so who will remember us?”

  “Okay, we’ll write really crappy wills, leaving everything to our nieces, but only if they meet some ridiculous standard. That way we can rule from the grave. Trust me, they won’t forget us. We’ll be talked about, albeit badly, for generations to come.”

  “Mean spirited and base. I like it. If we live through this, let’s do it.”

  That, in a nutshell, is why Jan Sims and I have remained friends all these years. I think up depraved deeds and she helps me execute them.

  By two that afternoon, the batteries were topped off and Fabio reluctantly gave me the go ahead to call Martinez. No luck, he was probably at the pool, slurping Margaritas on my tab. I hung up before the front desk could pick up the call. “I’m gonna try his cell. His service is sketchy, but maybe we’ll get through.”

  I got a burst of Spanish, handed the phone off to Chino, who said we’d reached a message center. Crap. I explained the mess we were in and told him I’d call back in an hour. Out of ideas, I asked for some.

  Jan held up her hand like a first grader. “How about e-mail, Hetta? Shouldn’t we send out a bunch of e-mails to just about everyone we know, telling where we are and what’s happening?” Fabio and Chino agreed to that brainstorm, so I turned on my computer and composed a really pathetic, wheedling e-mail. It was one of my most whining moments.

  I wanted to copy my entire address list, but power conservation prevailed, so I only sent it to those who might possibly come to our aid. Like my stockbroker, who had a vested interest in me living. Then we sat down to do some serious wattage calculations.

  Jenks, bless his little heart, had installed an auxiliary inverter on Raymond Johnson. The four hundred watt unit, wired directly into the house batteries, drew little current, but had enough juice to keep my computer charged. It wasn’t powerful enough to run the sat system, but at least I was able to compose messages without running the larger inverter.

  What we needed to figure out was how much power was being generated into the batteries by solar panels alone, and what we needed to operate the telephone and Internet without running out of juice. I had never dreamed that Raymond Johnson would be in a situation where we were operating on solar alone, but here we were and, thanks to Jenks the Genius, it was working.

  Until the fog moved in.

  Chapter 30

  After more calls to Martinez got the same lousy results as the others, I didn’t bother leaving another message. Fabio figured we could make a call once an hour during peak charging hours, but after those attempts to contact Martinez, a thick fog bank blanked out Mother Nature’s charger. Incommunicado once again, we were becoming downright despondent and needed a lift.

  “Fabio,” I crooned, “there’s no wind when there’s fog. Can’t we cook something? No one can smell it but us.” I hopefully cuddled a box of Velveeta Shells and Cheese and tried to look pitiful.

  “What do you think, Chino?” he asked.

  Chino shrugged. “I am weary of tuna fish and peanut butter. Let’s do it.”

  Who knew macaroni and cheese could taste so good? Or that a salad made from the last of our rusty lettuce, mushy tomatoes and a suspiciously soft cucumber would be delectable. I just hoped it wasn’t our last supper.

  Once again the guys left us at sundown, this time disappearing into that dastardly fogbank. Better than a bug bank, like the night before, but more eerie. Sounds, clearly audible the night before, were now muffled and their direction unclear. We were, if possible, even more discomfited. The good news, if any could be gleaned, was we didn’t have to worry about being spotted. Holed up like rabbits gone to ground, Jan and I played dominoes by tea candle to keep our minds off our dubious futures.

  I maliciously blocked Jan’s play, forcing her to draw six dominoes. “You stink, Hetta.”

  “Hey, all’s fair in love and dominoes.”

  “No, I mean you stink. We both need a bath.”

  “Fabio won’t let us use the water. No generator, no watermaker and therefore no water can be used except for drinking and cooking. Captain’s orders.”

  “We are surrounded by water.”

  “Salt water, Jan. With critters in it.”

  “I read somewhere if you use Joy dish detergent it’ll suds up in salt water. We could take a dip, lather up, rinse with salt water, and then use just a teeny tiny bit of fresh water to rinse off. What do you think?”

  “Uh, what’s that Joy gonna do to our hair?�
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  “My hair, probably nothing. Yours? I don’t think the red will hold up. You’ll love life as a blonde.”

  “Will my IQ take a dive?”

  Jan chose to ignore that comment and began gathering what we needed for a dip. Caught up in the moment, I helped her get the Joy, some towels and a bucket of fresh water. It was only when we went out on deck and I peered over the side, into the dark bay, that I remembered a couple of things: I can’t swim worth a damn and I am afraid of the water. Jan must have read my mind.

  “Hetta,” she whispered, “you know the water is shallow here. Hell, at low tide the boat is almost sitting on the bottom. And, even though I hate to even mention the word, it is for certain sharks do not hang out in mangroves.”

  “You had to say it, didn’t you? You had to say the S-word. That’s it. No way, no how, am I going into that water.”

  “Well, then stand and watch, ‘cause I’m going in.” She stripped off her clothes and started down the swim ladder into the dark waters of the Black Lagoon. I held my breath and waited for a giant finned hand to grab her.

  Jan dunked herself and came up spluttering. “See, I touched bottom, so if you start to sink you can just push back up. Oh, this is heaven. The water isn’t cold. As a matter of fact, it’s downright warm. Come on, you chicken.”

  “I’m skeered.”

  “Get over it.”

  I did. Thirty minutes later, with my hair a few shades lighter, we lounged on the aft deck. It was amazing what a midnight dip, a little Joy, and a few cups of fresh water can do for a gal. We were feeling downright frisky until we heard a motor approaching. We quickly dressed, just in case it was time to die. I hate dying naked.

  Chino and Fabio had been gone only three hours, but they were back, and this time in a panga, my dinghy in tow.

  “She is,” Chino explained proudly while gesturing towards Se Vende, “the panga of my uncle’s cousin’s son.”