by Mark Parragh
“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here!”
Tim waited in the lobby beside the statue of Einstein. He wore a suit that was well-tailored to his wedge-shaped torso but still hid the holster at his belt. His eyes swept the area as he walked Josh through the front doors to the Mercedes.
“How was your day, sir?” Tim asked as they drove out of the campus.
I’ll probably skip over it when I’m writing my memoirs.
“Fine. Yourself?”
“Very good, sir.”
“We know what Anna Louisa has on the menu tonight?”
Tim discreetly checked his phone. “Balsamic-porcini dry-rubbed chicken, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and charred Brussels sprouts with bacon.”
“Sweet.”
After a long silence, Josh said, “Plans this weekend?”
“Going up to Napa with my fiancée,” said Tim.
Megan? Karen? Emma?
“Emily? Well, have a good time.”
“We will, sir, thank you.”
So how’s that working out? Pretending he’s something other than a guy with a gun who gets paid to make sure nobody kidnaps you?
No reason we can’t be friendly.
Boss friendly. These people work for you. Are they supposed to pretend they’re your old college buddies, and they put their lives on hold to help you deal with your daily crap? Why would they do that?
Because I'm a billionaire.
That's right. Nothing gets around that. You're not normal. You don't get normal life stuff. People told you this would happen.
Fine, the hell with it.
Josh opened his bag and took out his tablet as the car made its way across Palo Alto. He opened Maggie's package and looked for the résumés tagged “forensic accounting.” If he couldn't have friends, at least he could have minions to sift through all those damn 10-Qs for him.
CHAPTER 4
Bahia Tortugas, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Crane had landed in San Diego that morning and taken a cab to the Cross-Border Terminal at Otay Mesa. He’d crossed into Mexico via a footbridge that deposited him in Tijuana International, where a charter was waiting. It was just after noon as the small plane descended toward an airstrip outside Bahia Tortugas.
Baja couldn’t be more different from the Oregon coast. Crane saw bright blue water, desert landscapes, and a small dusty town perched beside a natural harbor.
The plane touched down and taxied into a paved parking area. The airstrip had no tower, hangars, or refueling facilities. There was nothing but asphalt and dust except for an airplane and an aging Toyota pickup parked at opposite ends of the turnoff. The airplane was an Embraer Phenom 100 jet that Crane thought looked rather out of place. A lone figure leaned against the truck, waiting.
Crane retrieved his bags. The temperature was around ninety, and this was October. He slipped on his Ray-Bans, thanked the pilot, and walked toward the truck.
The figure leaning against the fender was a young woman wearing denim shorts, cowboy boots, and a plaid shirt tied off above her midriff. Chloe Stoppard had cut her black hair short. She was taut and tan, and she pushed off from the truck with a languid motion meant to entice. Crane gathered she hadn’t changed all that much.
She looked him over with approval. “Hey,” she said at last.
“How are you, Chloe?”
“Doing all right,” she said. “You’ve been taking care of yourself, I see. Toss your stuff in the back.”
Crane put his bags in the bed of the pickup and got in. The door bore a circular logo, an ocean wave wrapped around a dark-haired woman’s face, and the words “Namaka Foundation.” Chloe started the engine and ground the truck into gear. A hot breeze swept over them as she bounced off down the dusty, unpaved road.
“Namaka Foundation,” Crane said. “That the group your father said you’re with?”
“She’s a Hawaiian sea goddess,” said Chloe. “She sends tidal waves to punish the wicked.”
“Tidal waves? Sounds kind of indiscriminate.”
Chloe flexed a tan thigh as she hit the clutch. “Maybe she figures nobody’s really innocent.”
Crane decided Namaka made a good muse for Chloe.
“We collect data for different research projects,” she said. “Mapping water temp, salinity. It gets us some grant money. But mostly we’re about education and activism. That’s where you make a difference. We’re halfway between San Diego and Cabo, so all the asshole cruisers stop here to refuel, and they dump their sewage in the bay. We give them a hard time about that. Try to get them to take better care of the ocean.”
The airstrip wasn’t far outside of town, and soon they were driving past single-story homes of wood and cinder block. They were painted in bright colors that stood out against the tan landscape and looked like they’d been slowly settling into the earth ever since construction was complete. Crane saw scrawny dogs roaming the streets, and aging cars coated in dust. A pair of orange and white radio towers marked the center of town.
“Couple thousand people,” Chloe was saying. “It’s quiet. Nobody much comes here except the cruisers. You can fly in like you did, but not many do. Overland, it’s three and a half hours of bad road out to the highway at Vizcaino.”
They reached a paved and divided road strung with power cables, the median lined with small palm trees. She hung a right and headed through the middle of town. Homes, shops, and offices shared the streets, jumbled together at random. Suddenly Chloe veered left onto another dirt road. From here, Crane caught a glimpse of the bay dotted with the white hulls of sailboats. Chloe turned along the waterfront and pulled up before a row of cinder-block garages with numbers on their rusting metal doors.
“You mind?” she said, tossing him a key on a carabiner clip. “Number four.”
Crane got out and used the key to unlock a padlock and slid the door open. Chloe pulled the truck in alongside a couple rusting bicycles and a knobby-tired Yamaha dirt bike. They walked out and closed the door again.
“Dinghy’s tied up at the pier,” said Chloe. “Come on.”
Chloe led the way past cinder block walls, and parked pickup trucks. A man sat outside a small cafe, picking out the chords of House of the Rising Sun on a guitar.
“You want to fill me in?” Crane said as they walked.
“You see what it’s like here, right? People don’t have much, and they’re busy just getting by. It’s the cruiser types that cause all the trouble. Weekends when the weather isn’t too hot, it’s like a bad frat party,” she said. “On the boats, out at Punto Dorado, or here on the beach. They get wasted, hassle the locals, leave trash everywhere. One of the worst is a guy who goes by Boz. I don’t know his real name. He’s a major creep. Likes to invite you out to his boat. All the booze and drugs you want. Word’s out among the local girls; you don’t go out to the Gypsy.”
“He lives on this boat?”
“No, he just comes here to play. That’s his shiny jet you saw. I don’t know where he lives. He keeps an Escalade in town, and he’s got a couple of goons to keep an eye on the boat when he’s away.”
“So he’s a sleazeball. Why do you think he’s trafficking?”
“Sometimes the boat just sails off. It’ll be gone a few days, maybe a week. Thing is, he’s not even on it most of the time. His plane leaves. Then the boat takes off for a few days.”
They turned a corner, and the harbor lay spread out before them. Crane counted about a dozen pleasure boats. The locals used outboard-driven pangas. Crane saw several fishing at anchor, and a pair laden with fifty-five gallon drums heading toward a motor yacht. Across the bay, an automated light perched on an outcrop of rock.
“There’s home,” Chloe said, pointing to one of the boats. “That’s the Emma.”
The boat was a fifty-foot catamaran with a single mast, white with aqua trim, anchored well out from shore. Crane made out the Namaka Foundation logo on the bow.
They made their way down to the pier. The aging, weather-beaten planks sh
ifted and creaked beneath their feet. Chloe led Crane to a ladder with a rigid-hulled inflatable motorboat tied up at the bottom. She climbed down, and Crane followed.
“I’m not sure how that gets you to sex trafficking,” said Crane.
Chloe huffed at him. “The locals have all kinds of stories about girls who got lured out to the Gypsy and didn’t come back. But that was just stories. Then my friend disappeared.”
Chloe untied the boat, and Crane pushed away from the pier. Chloe sat by the outboard but didn’t start it yet.
“Her name’s Amy Carpenter. I knew her from college. We weren’t besties or anything, but she was vagabonding around Baja, and when she found out I was here, she came out. We hung out a few days. She dragged me to a party down on the beach, and Boz was there. Man, did he go for her. Laying it on thick about his private jet and his boat, all the famous people he knew, his uncut Molly. It just didn’t stop. I told her about his rep, but I think she figured she’d just have some fun and walk. Last I saw her, she was going down the beach with him.”
“When was this?” Crane asked.
“Little over a week now. I went to the cops. They’re useless. They claim she took the bus to Vizcaino a couple days later. She wouldn’t do that without saying goodbye.”
“Has the boat moved since she went missing?”
“No,” said Chloe. “I think she’s still out there. That’s why I wanted you here. To get her off that boat and burn it to the waterline.”
She yanked the starter, and the boat’s outboard roared to life. Chloe steered away from the pier.
Crane considered her story as they crossed the bay. It was far from convincing. Unless Chloe had more to tell him, he didn’t see much to go on. Chloe wouldn’t be happy about that.
When they reached the Emma, Chloe guided the boat to the stern, to a swim deck between the catamaran’s twin hulls. She cut the engine and glided in. A black woman wearing a bikini top and an orange wrap around her hips tossed them a rope. They pulled in beside a second dinghy and tied off.
The woman looked Crane over as they climbed out onto the swim deck. “Who’s your friend, Chloe?” she asked.
“This is John,” said Chloe. “We used to date in college. John Crane, Carolyn Yates.”
“Careful,” said Carolyn. “You’ll make Scott jealous. He’s back, you know.”
Chloe squealed with delight and ran forward, shouting, “Scotty!”
A figure stepped out of the main cabin, and Chloe launched herself at him, wrapping her arms and legs around him.
Carolyn traded a look with Crane. “Guess she’s the one who got away, huh?” she said.
Crane smiled at her. “Chloe usually does.”
“We won’t see them for a while,” she said. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”
Within a few minutes, Crane had gotten a tour of the Emma, met the crew, and managed to put together a reasonable picture of how the group worked and who was sleeping with whom.
Carolyn Yates was the daughter of successful Chicago attorneys. She was here to work on a doctoral thesis about grassroots organization and environmental policy. Chloe’s boyfriend was Scott McCall, a radio engineer earning his keep by overhauling the Emma’s navigation and communications systems.
The ship’s cook was a German named Max Brandt, and he definitely had eyes for Carolyn. Crane wasn’t sure whether it was mutual.
Fleur Garraghty was the child of Hollywood royalty. Her father was a producer, and her mother had starred in a hit medical drama that Crane remembered hearing of but had never seen. He suspected Fleur’s parents were the Emma’s major source of funding.
The last one Crane met was the captain. Allen Burch was in his late thirties, easily the oldest member of the crew. Crane gathered he was something of a legend in environmental activism circles. Carolyn mentioned he’d been the target of FBI harassment for years back in the States.
With the possible exception of Burch, who seemed to take his responsibilities seriously, they didn’t strike Crane as a particularly effective crew. They seemed more like college students trying to avoid the real world. But at least they were friendly, and they seemed happy to have someone new to talk with.
Carolyn explained that Scott had left for Vizcaino several days ago to pick up some electronic parts he’d ordered, there being no secure package drop-off in Bahia Tortugas. The shipment had been delayed, and he’d just returned.
“He thinks he can get the satellite link working,” she said with a hint of excitement in her voice. “Be nice to have phone service again.”
Carolyn and Fleur both confirmed the reputation of the man they knew only as “Boz.” They’d kept their distance, but they’d both been warned by local girls to watch out for him. They didn’t seem to think he was especially dangerous, though. Fleur’s impression of Amy Carpenter was that she was “kind of a flake.” She didn’t think it unlikely that Amy might have skipped town as quickly as she’d come, without saying goodbye to her friend Chloe.
As the sun began to graze the surface of the Pacific, Crane sat at the bow of the starboard hull with a pair of binoculars. Allen Burch stood nearby, nursing a bottle of beer.
“There’s the Gypsy,” said Burch, pointing out a long, boxy motor yacht. “Sixty-five-foot Hatteras. Twin diesels. She’ll make about ten knots. You could outrun her on a bicycle. But she’s got range. Twenty-five hundred miles on full tanks.”
“So if you were trafficking women, she’d be well-suited to it.”
“I suppose.”
“You think he is?”
“I don’t know the guy,” said Burch. “We don’t travel in the same circles. I know he’s a jackass. But beyond that …” He shrugged.
Crane scanned the boat with the binoculars. On the rear deck was a davit for launching and recovering a boat, but the deck itself was empty.
“He’s got to have a tender, right?”
“Sure,” said Burch, “thirteen-foot Boston Whaler.”
“Well, it’s not there, so I guess he’s not aboard. Any idea where he spends his time?”
“Punto Dorado, most likely,” said Burch. “Private resort across the bay. Look left of the light.”
Crane did and made out a dock and a seawall with some kind of building beyond it.
“Run by an old drug runner named Orly Wilde,” said Burch. “Some of the yacht crowd hang out there, but mostly it’s friends of the owner, guys with no visible means of support. You’re taking this seriously, aren’t you? I mean, if you used to date, you ought to know Chloe can go pretty far out on a limb before she stops and looks down.”
Crane put down the binoculars and laughed. “Yeah, but she’ll usually take you along with her, whether you want to go or not.”
It is probably nothing, he thought. Chloe being Chloe. Still, while he was here, he might as well check the guy out.
CHAPTER 5
“Ah, come on, Orly, not this Creedence shit again! You’re not that old!”
Across the courtyard, the woman looked up. Boz caught her eye, and she grinned.
Orly Wilde shook his head and tapped a button on the player, and Born on the Bayou cut out abruptly.
“All right, Boz,” said Orly with a tired sigh. “What do you want to listen to?”
Boz glanced up at her again. Mid-thirties, but she’d taken care of herself. She was with a doughy, balding guy who looked like an insurance salesman and had to be pushing fifty. He’d be no trouble. And I can go for a woman my own age once in a while.
Yeah, he could definitely go for a slice of that.
“Something smooth,” he said. “Bebel Gilberto?”
“Fine,” said Orly, “fine.” A few moments later, a samba began, slow and sensuous, and Gilberto’s breathy voice flowed across the flagstones like honey. Oh yeah. That would work.
He closed his eyes and let himself feel the music. He was thirty-six years old, though he knew he looked younger. He was fit and tanned, with sun-bleached hair. Women liked him. They liked
his cheekbones and the inguinal crease at the bottom of his torso. The guy she was with looked like someone who’d scrabbled and hustled all his life for his money. So now he finally had a boat, but he was so old and worn out, it was wasted on him.
Not him. His father had done that shit and then married a model, so he’d gotten a little genetic head start to go with the trust fund. He stood up, one arm clinching an invisible partner as he swayed. He could feel her eyes on him. He stepped around the table. Dancing was sex. And he was a good dancer; that was another thing women liked about him.
“That’s better, Orly. Seriously, man, Creedence? On a day like this?” He opened his eyes and looked over to the couple. “Am I right?”
She smiled and nodded. The insurance salesman took notice of him now.
“You two came in with that Oceanis 38 yesterday afternoon, right?”
The man nodded. “Second Wind, yeah. You know your boats.”
He called his boat Second Wind. Well, of course he did.
“Mine’s Gypsy, the Hatteras 65.”
The woman spoke for the first time. “Oh! I saw that! That’s a nice boat.”
Yeah, compared to insurance man’s little hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar sailboat, it was a pretty nice boat.
“Thank you. I’m Brad, but folks call me Boz. Is this song sexy as hell or what?”
Then someone came in from the breezeway. The newcomer was young, tall and lean, black hair. He wore blue chinos, boat shoes, and a white linen shirt. Boz didn’t recognize him; still, he thought he noticed a flash of recognition when the stranger’s eyes fell on him. Then Orly showed the new guy to his table, and he returned his attention to the blonde.
At the end of the pier, Crane found an entrepreneur named Luis who ran a jitney cab. Luis drove him out on an unpaved road that hugged the coastline for a couple miles to a parking lot with a sign that read “The Beach Club at Punto Dorado.”
It looked like Boz was here. Chloe had said he drove a black Escalade, and there it was. But it wasn’t the stock model; this one had been heavily armored. Crane spotted a bulkhead behind the rear gate, run-flat tires, and heavy ballistic glass. Across the lot, two very large men lounged on the seawall. They eyed him with suspicion until he’d walked past the Escalade. Crane assumed they were part of the security package.
