by Chris Niles
The boy fell to the deck giggling, then jumped up and started to climb the rail himself.
Kate launched forward and grabbed him. “No, no, no… not yet, kiddo! You gotta pass the swim test before you can get in the water without a life jacket.”
“I can swim! I swim all the time at Miss Kelsey’s pool.”
“I believe you, but swimming out here in the open water is different. The water moves all by itself. Sometimes it moves that way, toward the land… see the bridge way over there in the distance? And sometimes it moves the other way. And when it’s moving, it’s really strong. Stronger than even I can swim against sometimes. So, it’s important to be extra careful. Cuz if you’re not, that tide can take you all the way up to Fort Meyers.”
The boy’s eyes widened.
“Whiskey would miss you like crazy. And we can’t let that happen. Arms up. Let’s get this vest on you. You can ride to the beach on the dinghy, then we can start in the cove where the water is more still, okay?”
Eddie stretched both his arms out to the side, his elbows locked and stiff. Kate was sure he was trying to be helpful, but after she looped one side of the jacket over his right arm, she had to bend the other to wrangle it through the left hole before she snapped all the buckles then pulled all the straps tight.
Fish swam back over to the inflatable, then dropped his feet to the hard bottom and bounced in the water, about as deep as his cheekbones. He helped Tony balance the cargo of towels, chairs, coolers, and umbrellas while still making room for Eddie and Babette. Kate pulled her fins from a deck box, and then another pair for Chuck. She offered a pair to Fish, but he just laughed and dolphin kicked for twenty yards against the current.
“Guess we know where he got his nickname.”
Tony laughed. “You think that’s a nickname?”
Chuck stepped out the sliding door. “Okay, I’ll bite.”
Fish had returned to the dinghy and hung off its side, his legs floating in the dense salt water. “My mom named me Fisher. Musta got my start because they couldn’t keep me outta the water from before I could walk. Joinin’ the Navy was just a natural career choice for me.”
Tony helped Babette into the little boat, then lifted Eddie down to her. Once they were all in, Chuck donned a mask and fins, slipped into the water, then swam down the rode to check the anchor. When he popped up on the surface and gave everyone the thumbs-up, they all started toward the cove, Fish and Tony towing the inflatable, their kicks in perfect synch.
“Looks like you’ve done this before,” Kate said, lying on her back in the shallow water and gently kicking her fins to propel her toward the beach.
Less than forty yards from Serenity’s bow, the water became shallow enough to wade, and the men pulled the little boat as they walked toward the beach. Once ashore, Babette and Chuck set up chairs and sunshades while Eddie ran up and down the beach collecting shells and dropping them at Fish’s feet.
“Hey, buddy. Maybe next week I’ll take you up in my helicopter and show you what this looks like from way up there?”
Eddie shrieked and then ran in a crazed circle, waving his arms and pumping his fists, screaming, “Yes!”
Babette peeked out from under her umbrella. “You fly?”
Fish shrugged.
“When William gets back from Texas, you two will have to compare notes.”
Fish pointed Eddie to a rocky spot at the end of the beach, then waved Tony and Kate over to a little break in the seagrapes. Kate pointed just beyond the thick bush. “There’s a trail through there that leads to the lagoon in the center of the island.”
Fish nodded. “Sounds like a nice little hike.”
The three pushed past the foliage onto the trail, then started toward the middle of the island. Once they were far enough from the beach, Fish stopped.
“I looked up your friend. Right now, there’s nothing to tie her to any particular cartel. She has no record. No apparent links to anyone in the trade, not even any small-time street dealers. No particularly unusual bank transactions. She’s passed the random security checks with both her airline and the TSA. By all rights, she’s clean, except for a couple old runners. And that’s why they’re having a hard time buying your story.
“But if she’s carrying drugs across the border for anyone, I gotta say, your friend from Marathon is probably right. Regardless of which cartel it is, this is not a bunch of guys you want to get tied up with. There’s a complicated web of players, and they’re always at war with each other. I recommend you stand down.”
Tony’s lips pulled into a flat line. “Not an option. You met that kid. We can’t let him grow up without his mama.”
Fish met his gaze with a flat silence.
“Or at least without knowing what happened to her.”
“Well, if you won’t stay out of it, then you better know a few things. First, there are more ways than you can imagine to smuggle drugs into the country, and these guys are nothing if not creative.” Fish swatted a mosquito on his neck, then continued. “Second, there are more organizations and factions than you can count. But they all mark their product, even if the marks are subtle. If you can get me that bundle, I can probably tell you who you’re looking for. And when you find it, the Feds might actually take you seriously.”
“Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem.” Tony brushed a bit of sand from the top of his foot. “We’re pretty sure it’s hidden in this stuffed animal the kid had, but—”
“We can’t find the sloth.” Kate finished.
Fish’s eyebrows shot up. “You had it and now it’s missing?”
Tony’s fingers drummed against his thigh. “He had it when we left for Miami yesterday, but now, the thing is nowhere to be found.”
“Chuck can’t find it anywhere. Says he checked the security cameras at the entrance — no one he doesn’t know has been on the island, so it’s gotta be here. But when he asked Eddie about it, he just started crying.”
“So yeah. We’re pretty much nowhere.”
Fish rocked back on his heels, staring at the sand. Finally, he leveled his gaze on Kate. “Drugs are pretty hard to hide coming through the airports. A stuffed animal might seem clever, but the dogs are trained to sniff that stuff out, and they pretty much never miss. If she got a package through somehow, it had to have been something new the dogs haven’t been trained on.
“You’re looking for a needle in a haystack here. If you just start asking around at random, you’re bound to find yourself tied up right next to the kid’s mom, with nobody to help get you out of it. So, one last time, I have to advise you to stay out of it. But if you won’t, just… watch your backs, okay?” Fish swatted a branch away then started down the trail. “Now where is this lagoon filled with hidden treasure?”
Chapter Nineteen
Serenity idled up the channel. To her port, she passed a series of slips. Knot Dead Yet, the Jenkins’ forty-five-foot catamaran, bobbed in her slip, all buttoned up. A couple of other boats lay tied to the dock, and about half the slips were empty.
Kate spotted her slip at the end of the row. She gripped the wheel, her knuckles white. Chuck loomed behind her. She could feel him leaning forward, ready to take over. But she needed to do this herself.
When Kate bought her houseboat nearly three years ago, it hadn’t run in years. She’d had it towed to Shark Key, then Chuck and Steve had wrestled it into the too-shallow slip at the end of the sunset dock, where it lay rising and falling on the tide for two more years. But after Kate was instrumental in finding a cache of stolen gold and gems that had belonged to Chuck’s grandfather, Chuck had insisted on putting a new motor in Kate’s home.
That had been six months ago. But every time they took the boat out, Kate had asked Chuck to dock her. Today, Chuck had refused.
“Kate, you gotta learn. You can read all the books you want, and look at tide charts and study the currents, but you ain’t gonna learn to pilot a boat without piloting the boat. Today’s all yours. And you’
re gonna back in.”
She watched as a stick flew past to starboard on the strong falling tide. She’d need to shoot well past the dock to allow for the craft to drift as she dropped it into reverse and carefully nudged the stern around against the dock without grounding her in the shallows to the south. She’d watched Chuck do it. She’d watched Steve do it. She could do it.
Her slip fell off to the stern and she counted as Serenity motored farther south in the channel. Ten lengths. Twenty. When she felt far enough to compensate for the current, she nudged the boat just a little farther, then dropped the throttle into neutral and then back into reverse. Deep in the hull, the new engine purred, the prop dug in, and the boat began to move backward, first slowly, then quicker as it built up momentum in the fast-moving water.
She spun around to look behind her, and Chuck stood frozen, holding his breath. She eased the wheel to the right, and the stern of the boat turned to starboard. But the dock loomed far faster than she’d expected.
“BACK OFF, KATE! You’re gonna hit—” Steve shouted from the stern.
Kate shoved the throttle forward. With a heavy thunk, the transmission shifted. The engine strained, the water beneath them churned, then Serenity pushed forward.
“Did I…”
Chuck slumped. “No, you missed the dock. Don’t worry, the water’s rushing today. It’s tricky but you’ve got this. Let’s go again.”
Kate guided the boat out into the channel again, and attempted the maneuver, with similar results. Then she repeated it a third time.
Finally, on the fourth effort, she guided the boat out into the channel, spun it in a wide circle, then goosed the throttles. From the deck Tony and Fish shouted “Wait, what the hell…” then scrambled to the port rails. Kate raced the boat into the slip bow first, hitting it hard reverse as the bow approached the first piling.
The heavy steel hull bumped hard against the new pilings, then Tony and Fish caught the boat and wrangled a couple of temporary dock lines to hold her in place while Chuck tied more secure lines to the port cleats.
When they had the boat secured, Chuck stormed back to the helm, but Tony grabbed his shoulder and held him back. Tony whispered in Chuck’s ear, and Kate watched as her friend relaxed. A little.
Kate flopped into a deck chair as Chuck carried a sleeping Eddie back up to his house and Babette followed them, her shoulders slung with bags and wet towels. The sun and the water can tire out even the toughest of soldiers, so the poor kid didn’t have a chance.
Fish thanked Kate, clapped Tony on the shoulder, then made his way up to the parking lot, too.
Finally alone, Tony sat in the long shadow on the bow beside Kate and waited.
Finally, Kate couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“I just got frustrated.”
Tony smiled. Which pissed Kate off even more.
“I’ve watched Chuck do it more times than I have fingers. Every time, the boat just drifts right up to the dock like there were magnets pulling it in.”
“Cher, Chuck’s been doin’ this since he could see over the helm. Next time, back her in against the current.”
Kate dropped her head into her hands. “Next time, we’ll take Chuck’s skiff.”
Tony laughed. He slipped inside, then returned to the foredeck with two ice-cold beers. The two sipped in silence.
“I just feel like an idiot.” Kate counted the weathered boards of the section of wooden dock. Over the past several months, Chuck had replaced all the old wood with new aluminum, but Kate loved the weathered wood so much, Chuck had left the original material on just the one small section at the end of the west dock.
“You can’t expect to be perfect on your first try. You learned something, and now you know what not to do next time. Chuck’s a better teacher than you give him credit for, Kate.”
Kate pushed up from her chair. “We need to find that sloth.” She dropped her bottle into a blue bucket.
As its glass clanked against more lining the bottom of the bucket, Eddie came running down the dock and leaped over the little chain draped across the break in the rail.
“Whiskey!”
The dog scrambled to his feet, and Eddie tossed a knotted hunk of thick rope up toward the hedge. Whiskey leaped onto the dock and grabbed it in his teeth.
“Eddie, we need to talk a minute, okay?” Tony’s tone was gentle. He patted a chair, and Eddie climbed up and leaned forward in it.
Tony squatted beside the chair. “We really need to find Slothie. Mister Chuck told us you lost him, but this is really important.”
At the sound of the name, Eddie’s face contorted and grew red.
“Can you tell me the last place you had him?”
Eddie scrunched his eyes closed and shook his head wildly.
“So, he was here when you were at Mister Chuck’s yesterday morning. Did you show Slothie to anyone yesterday? Did you meet anyone new?”
The little boy burst into tears.
Kate sat down on the deck and pulled Eddie down into her lap. He buried his tear-streaked face in her tee shirt and sobbed himself back to sleep.
“None of this makes sense, Tony.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the glass door, slowly shifting back and forth, the coarse grains of outdoor carpet scratching the backs of her bare thighs, Eddie’s sleeping form weighing her into the deck. “She seemed like a good mom. Why would she dump him and run?”
Tony leaned back in his deck chair, fingers interlaced behind his head.
“All she had to do was hand the sloth over. Why keep it?”
“Maybe she thought she could make more if she sold the drugs herself?” Chuck’s gravelly voice startled Kate.
She opened her eyes as Whiskey stretched then ambled over to the rail for a scratch. She pointed at the sleeping child in her lap.
Chuck dropped to a whisper. “Permission to come aboard?”
Kate nodded, and as Chuck gently stepped onto the deck, the boat dipped to port, then softly swayed as he settled into a chair in the shade near the starboard rail.
“I can only see a couple scenarios here.” Tony pushed forward, elbows on his knees. “One, Chuck’s idea — she wanted to make more by selling the stuff herself. Two problems there… first, where would she sell it, and second, she’d have to know her employers would come after her. It’d be suicide, and she didn’t strike me as the self-defeating type.
“Second scenario, she got scared. I mean, these guys are terrifying on their best day. So maybe something happened that spooked her and she wanted to lay low for a while and figure it out?”
“What if it was him?” Kate stroked Eddie’s wild hair. “He said Slothie was supposed to be a surprise. Remember how proud of himself he was that he’d found it early? What if she couldn’t bring herself to take it away from him?”
“But couldn’t she just cut it open, pull out the drugs, then sew it back up when he didn’t have it? Like when he was asleep?”
“You saw him with that thing. He never let it out of his sight.”
“Which is why it’s super-weird that he can’t find it now.”
“You think he knows where it is?”
“Maybe not where it is, but he knows more than he’s telling us, for sure.”
“Fish said we were looking for a needle in a haystack. But what if instead of looking for the needle, we look for the empty haystack?” Kate lifted Eddie up and gently lay him in Chuck’s lap.
“I need to make a phone call.”
Chapter Twenty
“The Russian Mob? That sounds like a terrible idea, Kate.”
Kate chuckled. The quintessential New Yorker, her old friend never held back an opinion. “Of course you think it’s a bad idea, Bernard. You’d rather I stay tucked into a nice loft in the Upper West Side and write fluff pieces about society parties that I let you escort me to while Nathan is off chasing war criminals and oligarchs around the Ukrainian countryside.”
From the couch, Tony pointed at Kate�
�s phone on the counter and nodded his own agreement.
“For the record,” Bernard cleared his throat, then continued, “I think that’s a terrible idea, too, and I tell him so every time he climbs on a plane.”
“Truth.” Nathan’s baritone crackled through the speaker.
Kate lit her little gas burner and put a kettle of water over the heat. “Bern, who saved you from that mugger after Nick’s funeral last spring?”
A heavy sigh pushed through the speaker ahead of Bern’s reluctant admission. “You did, Kate.”
“And who won a Pulitzer for—”
Fifteen hundred miles apart, Kate and Bernard cut Nathan off in unison. “You did, Nathan.”
Kate continued. “Bern, I just called to get a contact and some temporary credentials from your husband. Can you please go bake a chocolate lava cake or something and let the grownups talk shop?”
“It’s far too late, but I suppose I do need some candied pecans for the top—”
“Just go cook something, Bernard!”
Kate heard a whispered “I love you,” then Bernard’s voice hollered from across the room, “I still think it’s a terrible idea!”
The phone clicked, then Nathan’s voice returned, sounding much closer. “Okay, you’re off speaker now. Tell me what’s got you writing again?”
Kate sighed. “Well, writing might be a bit of a stretch.”
“Okay, snooping, then?”
“I wish. No, it’s more serious than that. I need to find out who’s missing a shipment of drugs. And who would know better than our friends who ship drugs?”
“Kate, you covered Brighton Beach when you were still writing for Verity. You know these guys aren’t Boris and Natasha, right? They’re serious. True believers.”
“I know about the connections to Rahsvyets. I know they fund more than mansions and Lamborghinis. But I also know how to talk to them, if you can get me in there under some credible media outlet.” She paused, her eyes flitting toward the ceiling, exploring possible angles. “Honestly, the True Believer thing helps. I’ll tell them I’m writing a long-form piece about their cause. About how their ‘business’ is just a way for them to finance their message. How if they had access to media and could get their message out, they wouldn’t have to turn to crime. Or violence for that matter. They’re not terrorists, they’re evangelists who’ve been voiceless for too long.”
