Cuban Death-Lift

by Striker, Randy

  And that this is what I was meant to do.

  Always.

  The anchorman wasn’t out. But he pretended to be when I bent over him and ripped his press credential tag off his blazer. I checked the big cameraman’s pulse, then took his credentials, too.

  I’d give them to Fizer and have them checked out.

  “Thanks for the interview,” I said as I opened the bathroom door. The anchorman was too scared to even pretend that he had not heard.

  Back on the cement wharf, in the shadow of Sniper, the lean shepherd had finished the stew and was lapping down water in great gulps.

  Feeling better?

  The shepherd wagged its tail and went on lapping water.

  I have a friend with a big house and fenced-in yard on Big Pine Key who says he needs a watchdog. Interested?

  The tail swung harder, the dog’s whole butt end moving. He stopped drinking and stared up at me, a new light in his eyes.

  I’d keep you myself, but there’s no place to crap on a stilthouse. Stay here while I go call the guy.

  The shepherd turned back to the water as I walked to the payphone by the old barracks.

  By the time I got back, Fizer was standing on the cement dock beside Sniper. He wore the obligatory business suit—this one an eggshell white.

  “Very tropical,” I said.

  “The suit? Yeah, all I need is a big porch and a mint julep. You about ready?”

  I nodded. “Where’s Santarun?”

  He checked his watch. “Should be here any minute.” He had a funny look on his face. “Dusky, there’s something I didn’t know about the lieutenant that I have to tell you. . . .”

  “Right,” I said. “But before he gets here, I have to tell you about a little run-in I just had with a couple of television newsmen who I think are plants.”

  That caught his attention. So I told him the whole story and gave him their credentials.

  He looked them over, then said, “I don’t recognize the names, but I’ll run them through the computers.” He smiled wryly. “And if they turn out to be real newsmen, I’ll come and visit when they jail you on assault charges.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Is that the dog?”

  The shepherd had curled up on Sniper’s aft deck. Its tail thumped lazily when Fizer motioned toward it.

  “Yeah, and I’d appreciate it if you see that it gets to Big Pine Key.”

  I told him the address, and explained why.

  Fizer eyed the shepherd. “Doesn’t look like much of a watchdog to me.”

  “All it needs is something to protect. I doubt if he’s ever had the chance.”

  At that moment, one of the Navy’s blue Chevy Nova staff cars came wheeling up and skidded to an abrupt halt. The driver got out, face aloof, somber.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not Santarun, is it?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you a moment ago. I didn’t know. . . .”

  The lieutenant lifted a sea bag and a suitcase from the car, slammed the trunk, then came walking toward Sniper: dark; long-legged walk; a haughty figure in jeans and black T-shirt that offered nothing but challenge.

  Lieutenant Santarun was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my life. . . .

  5

  She was one of the aloof ones. It’s all too common among the truly beautiful females. Maybe they have to be—I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of emotional fence to keep out the mass of adoring males. Or maybe it really is a form of conceit. Whatever it was, this Lieutenant Santarun had a ton of it. Norm made the introductions. He kept it businesslike, playing his part: he didn’t know me; I was just a charterboat bum hired to take this woman to Mariel Harbor.

  “Captain MacMorgan—Dusky, was it?”

  I nodded.

  He motioned toward Lieutenant Santarun. “This is Androsa Santarun, my client. As I told you, Ms. Santarun’s father is still living in Cuba. Your job is to see that she gets to Mariel Harbor safely and picks up her father, then see that they both make it back safely.”

  “No problem,” I said. “It shouldn’t take us more than—”

  “Mr. Fizer,” she interrupted. It was a flat, corporate voice with only the slightest trace of an accent. “Did you apprise Mr. MacMorgan of who will have the final decision-making responsibility in regard to anything which concerns this trip?”

  Norm almost stammered. “Well, I was just about to . . .”

  She turned to me. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black, piled severely atop her head. It served only to accentuate the fine feminine lines of her face, the smooth, clear olive skin, and her piercing mahogany eyes. There was something tough about those eyes. Something tough and challenging—oddly incongruous with the lithe, ripe contours plainly outlined by jeans and black T-shirt. Her breasts were small but well formed. Her legs were long, tapering from thighs to hips with only a curved implication of pelvic hinge. There was a proper narrowing of waist, and the sensual impact of womanhood where jeans and plain brown belt converged. I had to force my eyes back to meet hers.

  “The boat is mine, ma’am,” I said, hating myself for having to show deference to anyone—male or female—who would presume to take control of Sniper. “I make the decisions when it comes to my boat.”

  Her eyes widened ever so slightly, and she moved a fraction of a step closer to me. “Mr. MacMorgan, it may be your boat but it’s my charter. I think it wise before we even get started to establish what your role will be. You are being paid and paid well for this trip. And I don’t think it unreasonable to demand that I have control over matters concerning it—”

  “As long as it doesn’t endanger the boat,” Norm added quickly. He looked at me in the level manner of a lawyer trying to protect his client. “I’m afraid that’s the deal, Captain MacMorgan. Are you still interested?”

  I thought about it for a moment, cursing myself silently for ever letting myself get involved. In the fishing guide business, you get a bellyful of unpleasant strangers aboard the boat you treasure. The good ones are a joy—but the ones like this Santarun, the haughty ones are nothing but a big pain in the ass. No, I wasn’t still interested. But I had committed myself. Was I such a ridiculous male chauvinist animal that I would balk at being under the command of a woman? Not normally. But aloofness and arrogance in men or women are nothing more than symptoms of some deeper character flaw—and that’s exactly why I liked to work alone. Goddammit, I have enough problems of my own to have to worry about the potentially deadly shortcomings of others.

  But I had no choice. Not if I didn’t want to let Norm down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m still interested.” I shot Norm a few private darts with my eyes, checked my watch and added, “Get your stuff aboard, ma’am. We can be in Mariel Harbor before midnight if we hurry.”

  I turned back to my boat and left them both standing there on the dock, feeling—imagining, at least—Lieutenant Androsa Santarun’s irritation because I hadn’t carried her bags.

  It’s funny how, when you are leaving for a strange land, even the well-known surroundings you travel seem to take on a quality of that strangeness. I steered from the flybridge, getting as far away from the woman as I could. Behind me, the piles of rock below old Fort Taylor, the green haze of Australian pine on the beach to the east, the squat, dun-colored fort itself, and the checkered water tower—all of which I knew so well—suddenly appeared eerily unfamiliar. It was a rolling, turquoise afternoon at sea when we left. Wind was out of the southeast, seven to ten knots, giving us a fine quartering sea. I picked up the range markers a few miles off, then the nun buoy at East Triangle reef, and headed out Mainship Channel, Cuba-bound.

  Cuba-bound.

  I sat back on the big pilot’s chair, seeing nothing but sea for miles around. The water changed from milky green to clear jade—the spoil area off East Triangle looking shallow, dark, and dangerous. And when we were finally clear of markers, and the water was purple-black with n
o bottom, I guessed the strength of the Gulf Stream at about four knots, and adjusted my course to 225 degrees, then switched her temporarily to automatic pilot.

  I climbed down the ladder and went through the hatch into the salon.

  Androsa Santarun was at the little booth, and when I entered she quickly covered up something she had been reading. I knew it wasn’t mine. The few things I had that I didn’t want anyone to see were hidden in the forward bilge compartment, under the indoor-outdoor carpet.

  “You could have knocked,” she said tersely.

  “Don’t see why.”

  “I might have been dressing!”

  “It’s okay, ma’am—I have a little sister,” I said, already sorry for having indulged myself in that kind of silly remark. Beautiful or not, the fact that her breasts were not large must have, at some point in her life, concerned her. It was a cheap shot, and I knew it, so I just knelt by the little refrigerator, put three beers in a paper sack to keep them cold, then headed back out the door without saying another word.

  “I suppose you’ll go up there and get drunk now.” She had recovered her composure, but her face was still flushed. “Isn’t that what fishing guides do?”

  “Ma’am, if I wanted to get drunk, I’d carry the refrigerator above and leave this sack of beer below—to cure the hangover.”

  “Mr. MacMorgan, if we are to get along on this trip, I suggest you curb your wisecracks.” Her face was strained, deadly serious.

  I took a breath, exhaled, then caught her mahogany eyes with mine. Within them, for the briefest of moments, I saw the gray light of some undecipherable desperation—then nothing else. They turned flat again . . . wooden. It was concession time—and I had the feeling it would be the first of many. For me.

  “You’re right, Miss Santarun. I’m sorry.”

  Back above on the flybridge, it felt good to be away from the intensity of her. It was more than just the intensity of a woman compelled to dominate. And it was more than sexuality—although sexuality was like an aura of dark heat which surrounded her. She was one of the ageless ones, anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-eight; one of the eternal female animals who, in eons past, would have had men in bearskins traveling from miles around to fight for her with clubs and teeth. But the intensity originated from something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  So I decided not to waste my time.

  It was a mission. Nothing more. Nothing less. I would take her to Mariel, and if Castro’s goons swiped her, fine. It was a chance that was hers to take. And if they didn’t take her, and we ended up hauling back General Halcón—who I assumed would pose as Santarun’s father—then that would be fine too.

  I would go into it with my eyes open. But I would follow orders, goddammit.

  Just like in Nam.

  It was a good day for the crossing. Just enough sea to lift, roll, then drop the boat back into the turquoise troughs. It was a quartering port breeze that carried Sniper’s diesel exhaust fumes on back to Key West, and golden sargassum weed lay before me in the black iridescence of deep sea.

  Cuba-bound.

  Sitting on the flybridge, wind in my face, I tried to remember the way it had been on my first trip to Havana.

  What had I been? Fourteen? Maybe.

  Papa had set it up. Arranged to have me and the Italian trapeze family that had adopted me brought over on the ferry which left Key West from where the Pier House is today. We did one show outside the Hotel Nacional and another at the Tropicana Club, where the girls wore gaudy costumes of imitation satin and fruit-basket hats, and where, outside, the ficus trees draped over and kept the sidewalks so slippery that Papa’s only advice to us was, “Take care you don’t fall on your asses going in.”

  It was good advice.

  The Cubans loved Papa, for his books had already been translated into Spanish. We were circus stars accompanied by a star of greater magnitude—but no one cared. Least of all me. Because the Cubans treated us better for his sponsorship. And in the ’50s, there was no place better to have fun than Havana—even for a kid.

  So I wondered about Cuba; wondered how it had changed. I had been back twice since that first trip. Once I went for the fishing off the Isla de Pinos—and it was great. The most recent trip wasn’t so terrific. Strictly business. And we were never given opportunity enough to make it anything other than a failure.

  So that’s what I thought about as I steered Sniper over the green wash of sea, toward the empty horizon. I cracked open the second cold beer, retrieved the circular tin of Copenhagen from my blue saltbleached shirt, and felt the pleasant burn of tobacco against my lip.

  The woman could stay below for the entire trip as far as I was concerned.

  To hell with her. The sea spread out jadelike, swollen and singular beneath May sky, and that was enough. I wasn’t going to allow her the high price of concern.

  To hell with all the narrow, self-obsessed jerks, male and female, who spoil the scenery with their flatulent personalities. I raised the bottle of beer in a half-mast toast—and that’s when I noticed it.

  A partially submerged cruiser well off to port, locked in place by the conflict of foul wind and foul Stream current.

  The reflection of sunlight on glass had caught my attention. I banked east, opened throttles to three-quarters, and bore down on the boat.

  As I drew closer, I could see that it was more trawler than cruiser. And the trawler was not alone. A Mako center-console, twenty to twenty-five feet long, with its sweep of gunwales tapering toward the stern, had rafted up beside it.

  From behind me, I heard the woman’s voice. She had, apparently, felt the sudden change of course and had come topside to see what was going on.

  “I think there’s a boat in trouble up there, Miss Santarun. I’m going to have a look.”

  “But isn’t that another boat with it? Aren’t they already helping?”

  She stood beside me, wind pulling at the pile of black hair as we powered on to thirty knots. I could smell the closeness of her: a frail odor of soap and some kind of body powder.

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

  “But why else would another boat—”

  “It won’t take long, ma’am. Besides, it’s against the law for me not to offer assistance.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then climbed back down the ladder. I wasn’t exactly unhappy to see her leave.

  I was downwind of them, so I was within fifty yards of the boats before I throttled down. The trawler had listed to starboard, bow high, aft deck partially submerged. It rolled in the weak wave crest like a disabled animal. The trawler was white fiberglass with red trim, and a good bit larger than my own Sniper, which is a little smaller—but a hell of a lot faster—than most sportfishermen. The skiff lashed up beside it was a Mako 23 with twin Johnson 200s. The name on the side of the Mako was factory-painted, blue letters two feet high: Talon. I could see only one man aboard the Mako. He seemed preoccupied with something on the deck.

  “Do you need any assistance?”

  The man looked up, startled. He was a black man, thin and angular in a loose white shirt. He rode with the roll of waves momentarily, staring at me.

  “I said, ‘Do you need some assistance?’ ”

  He shook his head and yelled back at me, “Naw, man. Just called the Coast Guard. Best stay back—this boat here’s about to go down!”

  There was something about him I didn’t like. He seemed nervous, uncommunicative. At open sea the vastness, the loneliness, normally affects people just the opposite—they become talkative, unfailingly polite.

  But not this guy.

  “I’ve been listening to VHF all afternoon, and I didn’t hear any call—maybe your radio’s busted.”

  It was a lie. I hadn’t listened to VHF after the first hour. The steady chain of distress calls, and the endless question from Key West Coast Guard—“Do you have any refugees aboard?”—had caused me to switch it off in minor protest.

  But I
wanted to test him. I wanted to see his reaction.

  He thought for a moment, shrugged.

  “I’ll call them for you right now!”

  He fidgeted now, uneasiness intensifying. And I had him figured.

  There was probably another guy with him—belowdeck in the disabled trawler. And they hadn’t stopped to give aid.

  They were pirates.

  That simple.

  In three hundred years, nothing has really changed off the Florida Keys. People come and go, but the pirates—generation after generation—stay. The trawler had probably been a victim of the deadly squall. And this guy had come out looking for floaters: boats to strip, unattended vessels to plunder.

  And after that storm, there would be plenty to find.

  I edged Sniper closer, wishing to hell I’d brought a weapon. I could have thrown it overboard before reaching Mariel Harbor. But I hadn’t, so I kept my eye on the guy as I approached, never wavering.

  “Boat’s ’bout to go down, man! Better stay back!”

  Sure.

  Had he really believed the trawler was about to sink, he’d have dumped the line to which the Mako was connected.

  And as I got closer, I could see what had preoccupied him. On the deck of the skiff was a mound of ship’s stores and supplies, only partially covered by a red tarp. He saw my look, the contempt on my face.

  It was a stupid move on my part. No doubt about it. You can end up very dead when you let emotion reign over good sense. I should have backed off then and there and radioed the Coast Guard. But when you work around boats you come to despise those who leech their living from the misfortunes of others. Maybe the people who had been on the trawler were struggling in a life raft close by. But you could bet that bastard hadn’t—and wouldn’t—notify anybody about finding a disabled vessel.

  So I moved on in.

  “Did you have to kill anybody to get that crap—or did you just find ’em dead and throw them overboard?”