by Alex Kava
While Wilson handed Creed his own “mustang”—the aircrew’s term of endearment for the orange flight suits they wore—he stared at Grace as though perhaps Creed might have brought the wrong dog. Even the rest of the crew—copilot Tommy Ellis, flight mechanic Pete Kesnick, and rescue swimmer Liz Bailey—looked at the terrier as if they weren’t sure what to do with her.
But it was actually Grace whom the Coast Guard had requested. Last week she’d made the national news when she managed to sniff out two kilos of cocaine at Hartsfield’s international terminal in Atlanta. A Colombian woman had creatively found a way to make chocolate bars with cocaine centers. She had made it through customs and was headed out of the area when Grace pulled Creed off the line they were working and raced after the woman.
Two weeks before, Grace had stopped a duffel bag filled with a case of peanut butter. It was coming down the conveyor belt out of the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight from Iquitos, Peru. They had already spent a morning going over checked luggage from incoming international flights when Grace alerted Creed to the red-and-black duffel that looked brand-new. Sure enough, in the gooey middle of each jar was a triple-bagged stash of cocaine. Each sixteen-ounce jar of extra-crunchy contained almost a kilo. Creed was told that the twelve-pack carton had a street value of nearly a million dollars.
Suddenly they were becoming celebrities. Just two days ago, Creed and Grace had traveled to prerecord an appearance on The View that was scheduled to air this week. Creed’s partner, Hannah, was fielding calls for more appearances, on Good Morning America and Fox & Friends. Grace, of course, was taking the attention the same way she reacted to everything else—as if it were just another part of her daily adventure.
Creed not so much.
He’d worked hard to carve out a mostly private life for himself despite building a nationally known K9 business. At first he bristled at the media attention, until Hannah convinced him it could be a way for his sister, Brodie, to find him.
“Rye,” Hannah told him when he groaned at another photo of him and Grace, this time on the front page of USA Today. “What if Brodie is still alive? She might see you. She’ll recognize the name, if not the face. Maybe all this is a blessing.”
That was Hannah, always finding a positive spin, seeing blessings where Creed saw only chaos. That’s how she had saved him in the first place. Seven years ago she’d seen promise in the drunk and belligerent marine who had taken on three guys in a bar fight. It happened at the end of her shift at Walter’s Canteen on Pensacola Beach.
In all his life, Creed had never had to deal with an angry black woman, especially one whose anger came in a calm and measured sermon that had sobered him more than any drill sergeant ever had. Somehow he ended up with a mop in his hands, cleaning up broken glass and sticky beer, instead of in an alley with a busted skull or broken ribs.
It was Hannah who’d convinced Creed to use the skills he’d learned as a K9 handler in his marine unit to start his own business. And since that night she’d managed to become his business partner, his confidante, his counselor, his family. She was usually right, even about the things he didn’t want to admit. And maybe she’d be right about this.
Fifteen years ago his sister, Brodie, had disappeared, taken from an interstate rest stop. She was only eleven. Creed was fourteen. Brodie’s body had never been found. It ripped apart his parents and forced Creed to grow up too soon, haunted and forever burdened by that autumn day when suddenly Brodie wasn’t in the restroom anymore. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.
His search for her inspired Creed to start K9 CrimeScents. The company had grown into a multimillion-dollar operation with a dozen employees, a training facility on fifty acres, with a waiting list for their services as well as for the dogs Creed trained.
Every cadaver search got his hopes up, because even though Brodie had disappeared as a little girl, there was always the possibility that she had lived on for any part of the fifteen years she’d been missing. So every time Creed’s searches discovered a body—whether it was that of a child, a teenager, or a young woman—there was always a chance, always the slightest possibility, that it could be Brodie. And each time the body was identified as someone else, Creed felt the same overwhelming mixture of relief and misery. Relief that maybe, just maybe, his sister could still be alive. And misery, because if she was, what kind of a life was it?
Initially, when the despair from searching for dead bodies almost did him in, Hannah insisted Creed start training some of their dogs for search and rescue, and then she added bombs and drugs to the list. That was why she had him doing drug searches these past several weeks. When she found him passed out in his loft apartment or saw too many women coming and going, she knew he needed a break from tracking dead bodies. Otherwise the stench of death and the false hopes would suck the life right out of him.
So Creed told Hannah that he’d tolerate the media attention as long as it didn’t bother Grace. And he would do a few more drug searches. But this helicopter ride was bringing back other memories that Creed had not expected, and now he wished he’d said no to Hannah and to this assignment.
Grace licked his hand. She was staring at him. An intense stare was supposed to be her cue to him that she had found what they were searching for. Grace was one of his few multitask dogs. All Creed had to do was put a different vest or harness on her and Grace knew what he wanted her to sniff out. But this stare was different. Dogs could detect their handlers’ emotions, too, and Grace knew that something was wrong. She was an amazing little dog. He had found her half-starved and hiding underneath one of the double-wide trailers he kept for hired help. Hard to believe that someone had discarded her like trash. But then that was how Creed had gotten most of his dogs.
Hannah shook her head at him when he brought in another stray.
“Folks just taking advantage of your soft heart,” she’d tell Creed.
What no one understood, not even Hannah, was that the dogs he rescued—those abandoned mutts that were worthless to someone else—had flourished into some of his best search dogs. There was a loyalty, a bond between Creed and the dogs. He’d given them a purpose, a second chance. In a sense it was exactly what they’d given him.
But now, for Grace’s sake, he needed to shove aside those memories that had jolted him with the simple smell of diesel and the sound of the rotors. It was Grace’s first helicopter ride, but it was hardly Creed’s. Almost as soon as he’d boarded, the vibration had drummed out a rhythm that threatened to swallow his heartbeat. Without warning, his chest felt as if it might explode. He craned his neck so he could look out and down at the emerald-green water below. He took deep breaths and calmed his nerves. He tried to remind himself that it was the Gulf of Mexico under his feet and not the suffocating dust and rock of Afghanistan.
Times like this, it surprised him how much he could still feel that place. And yet, he had no one to blame but himself.
His mistake.
He’d been looking for an escape from his life and thought the marines would take him far away from his troubles, but instead he discovered that there were worse versions of hell than the one inside you.
“We’re almost there.” Commander Wilson’s voice blasted through Creed’s helmet, startling him a bit.
Creed scratched behind Grace’s ears—their signal that everything was okay. Finally she put her head down on his leg, but her ears were still pitched forward, letting him know that he wasn’t fooling her.
3
ON BOARD THE COAST GUARD CUTTER
SCOUT WMEC-630
THE WATER CHURNED AROUND THEM and the winds had picked up. Creed was impressed with the smooth landing that Commander Wilson had managed onto the deck of the Coast Guard cutter. Its crew had already halted the boat in question. The commercial fishing vessel, named Blue Mist, was a beaut. A seventy-foot long-liner that Creed guessed could keep at least e
ighty thousand pounds of fish in its hold. But the Coast Guard had reason to believe there might be something extra under that day’s catch.
Commander Wilson had explained earlier to Creed that the Coast Guard had been watching the Blue Mist for a couple of weeks now. It usually long-lined for mahi-mahi in the Gulf, following the fish’s migratory path. But recently the boat had started going down into the Caribbean Sea as far as the coast of Colombia. That in itself wasn’t unusual, except that the Coast Guard tracker watched the fishing boat pass by several mile-long stretches of sargassum. The brownish seaweed floats on the ocean surface, and mahi-mahi traditionally feed on the creatures attracted to it.
Now on board the Blue Mist, Creed looked down into the hold. He was struck by how beautiful the fish were, even piled up on top of one another. Their sides glittered gold, blue, and iridescent green, their bellies white and yellow. They were bigger than he expected, three to four feet long. The heads varied in size and shape, and he suspected that the difference was linked to whether they were male or female. Most of them had rounded heads, a few protruding above the body line.
“Mahi-mahi used to be bycatch fish,” Wilson said, and only then did Creed realize that the commander had followed and come up beside him. On the deck across from them, two guardsmen were getting an earful from a barrel-chested man in a ball cap, baggy trousers, and a white T-shirt, most likely the Blue Mist’s captain.
“Fishermen thought they were a pain because they’d end up on their longlines when they were trying to catch tuna and swordfish,” Commander Wilson continued without any encouragement from Creed. “Now restaurants are going crazy over mahi-mahi—including the European market.”
“Could be their hold was already full when they passed by the sargassum,” Creed said while he took out the items he needed from his backpack.
“True. But if that were the case, why continue south?” Wilson asked.
Thankfully, it wasn’t Creed’s job to have an answer. He pulled rubber waders up over his hiking boots and slipped a mesh pouch with a nylon strap over his head and shoulder. He had no idea why people did half the things they did. One of the reasons he preferred the company of dogs.
He did know, without Wilson giving him any more details, that there was a new Colombian drug cartel trying to establish itself. Choque Azul—“Blue Shock”—had been busy in the last six to eight months reclaiming old drug routes up through the Gulf. The routes had been abandoned in the 1990s, when it became easier to cross the Mexican border into Texas and Arizona than it was to chance bringing their product up the Gulf.
But these days the brutal wars among the Mexican cartels—the Zetas and the Sinaloas—had sent the Colombians looking for new and creative ways to do business. Chocolate bars and peanut butter jars were small snatches, innovative and quirky tests. But homemade submersibles and commercial fishing boats were for the serious hauls. If the Coast Guard was correct about this vessel, then it was possible there was cocaine somewhere on board. Most likely underneath the piles of mahi-mahi.
Creed had never done a search of a fishing vessel before, and now, as he adjusted Grace’s vest, he realized this wouldn’t be easy. Wilson must have seen Creed’s indecision.
“Bet you’re wishing you’d brought a bigger dog,” Wilson said as he watched.
Grace was wagging and panting and anxious for Creed’s command so she could dive down into the hold and get to work.
“Bigger isn’t always better,” Creed told him.
Then, with Grace’s eyes focused on him, Creed patted his right palm to his chest. Grace jumped up into his arms. He tucked her under his elbow and into the mesh pouch that hung from his shoulder. He attached her harness to clasps inside the pouch and let it drop to his side. This way Grace would travel comfortably above the fray while Creed waded through the piles of slippery fish. All she had to do was sniff, when he cued her to what she was to search for. Ironically, the cue word he used for drugs was “fish.”
“Go find fish,” he told the dog as he felt her getting excited and wiggling in the carrier. But as Creed headed down into the pungent smell, he wondered if this might be too overwhelming a task for any air-scent dog.
They worked a grid for almost thirty minutes. The fishing vessel’s captain was still yelling at the guardsmen about his “dorados spoiling in the sun.” Grace’s nose moved back and forth. Twice she went into rapid breathing, but still no alerts. Not even for secondary residue. Creed tried to shove aside the glittering fish to see the bottom of the hold, but he was knee-deep and it was like trying to dig a hole in sand. The fish slipped quickly back into the hole he tried to create. He never saw the bottom.
Without warning, Grace started squirming. Her nose lifted higher and began twitching. Her breaths came fast, with hardly a break in between. Creed slowed his pace, listening and watching, treating the small dog as if she were a live Geiger counter.
Suddenly he felt Grace’s body go rigid. He stopped. Her eyes came up to his and she stared at him. It was their signal, her alert. But then she did something she’d never done before: she started whining, a low, soft cry that made the hair at the back of Creed’s neck stand up.
“We’ve got something here,” he yelled to the guardsmen above.
They stared down at him. Even the Blue Mist’s captain had gone silent.
In minutes four men in rubber waders made their way down to the hold. They carried what looked like snow shovels, the blades three feet tall and just as wide. The shovels were able to push aside the fish and keep them from slipping back into the space the men cleared.
Creed kept his eyes on Grace. He’d pulled her close to him and stuck his hand into the mesh pouch so he could pet her. She’d quieted her whine but she was trembling now. Creed had sweat running down his back and forehead from the sun and heat, but Grace was shivering.
He didn’t like this. He’d never seen her do this before.
The men cleared a ten-by-ten space all the way down to the bottom of the hold, hitting wood. And although Grace stared at the empty spot, she didn’t stop shaking.
“There’s nothing here,” one of the men said, and looked at Creed. Then the man craned his neck to look up at Commander Wilson, who had stayed on deck above them. “We’ve got nothing.”
“Maybe your dog isn’t so lucky this time,” Wilson called down.
“Under the floorboards,” Creed said without having a clue as to whether Grace had been thrown off by the overpowering smell of fish. There might be nothing at all under the boards either.
The men looked to Wilson, but before he could respond, one of them yelled, “There’s a plank loose!”
And suddenly the others were pulling crowbars from a canvas bag that Creed hadn’t even noticed until now.
“Careful,” the one in charge told the men.
The wood creaked and snapped. Grace began to whine again, and it seemed to make the men go slower, but with a new sense of urgency. Nails screeched loose. Two boards popped away. Only then did Creed realize that Grace had stopped whining, but he still heard a low hum, almost a cry, that wasn’t coming from Grace. It was coming from under the floorboards.
He heard more wood crack, and then suddenly one of the men said, “Holy crap. There’s someone down here.”
4
THEY WERE KIDS. Creed guessed the oldest was maybe thirteen, fourteen at the most. Three girls. Two boys. One boy looked younger than ten. Each of them crawled slowly out of the hold like a timid animal, needing assistance, then jerking and blinking at the sunlight. Wild eyes darted all around, looking for permission as much as trying to anticipate what came next in this terrifying journey.
They were filthy. Hair matted and tangled in clumps. Faces dirty and feet bare and bruised. Despite the stink of fish, Creed could smell the sweat and urine and feces that soiled their clothes. But through the smears of dirt and grime, one thing
was obvious. These weren’t Colombian kids. They weren’t being trafficked from their South American homes to the United States.
Now, in the sunlight, even the dirt and grime couldn’t hide the obvious. Smears revealed blond hair and streaks of white skin as pale as the fish bellies that surrounded them.
These kids looked like they were from the United States.
Creed remembered what Commander Wilson had said about this vessel bypassing feeding grounds for mahi-mahi, its hold filled but continuing south, out of the Gulf of Mexico and closer to the coast of Colombia. Usually traffickers smuggled people into the United States. When did it start to go both ways? Were they delivering this cargo to South America?
Everyone on board had gone silent, even the guardsmen as they helped the kids up. They’d been looking for smuggled cocaine. Not human cargo. And certainly not kids.
The wind had calmed, almost as if it, also, were gasping at their revelation. In the silence Creed could hear the lapping of waves against the boat. A few gulls dared to hover closer to inspect the load of fish. But there was still a faint humming, a sad whimper like that of a scared or wounded animal. The same sound Creed had heard before the floorboards were yanked away. Grace had heard it first, and she still cocked her head, listening. Creed saw that her eyes were staring at the source, and he followed her gaze.
The sound was coming from the littlest boy.
He was small, with bony shoulders and stick legs. Creed caught a glimpse of his eyes. Fear had been replaced with the vacant look that often accompanies an overload of shock. His skinny arms were wrapped tight across his body. His chin tucked into his chest. He didn’t look scared or upset. He simply didn’t look like he was there anymore, an empty shell. Except for the whimper that came from inside him. It came without him opening his mouth or even moving his lips.
The other kids didn’t seem to notice. Their own eyes were just as vacant.
