The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series

by Chris Poindexter

  The Blue Tango Salvage

  by

  Chris Poindexter

  Book 2 of the

  Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series

  Text copyright © 2015 Chris Poindexter

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Aaron Rosen www.pixel-mesh.com

  To my wonderful wife who never stopped believing in me

  And to Aaron whose enthusiasm is constant inspiration.

  For more about Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc.

  Go to

  http://www.recoveryandmarinesalvage.com

  There you’ll find character bios, background, classified briefings and RAMS swag

  See also

  Book 1

  The Rogue Horse Recovery

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 1

  The conversation was not going well.

  “Mrs. Flores,” I begged, “we already explained why your medicine keeps disappearing.”

  The lady in front of us, a Hispanic woman in her early 50s, was having none of it. Originally from Santa Barbara, California, Mrs. Flores moved to Florida to raise her kids after a messy divorce. A lifetime of running a night office cleaning service while raising two kids had finally caught up with her back a few months ago and a local doctor had put her on some very potent pain medication. About six weeks ago she started coming up short on her prescriptions and her doctor was threatening to cut her off. Her son, 17, was just finishing up his third year in high school and her daughter, who was 20, was in junior college. With two young adults in the house you didn’t have to be psychic to figure where her pain meds were going.

  She’d obviously done well in her business as her hands, rough and wrinkled from years of cleaning solutions, dishwashing and cooking were adorned with rings that looked real to my eyes and she was dressed in colorful top, designer slacks and brand name sunglasses that would be a week’s salary for someone at the bottom of the wage scale.

  “No, senor,” she countered stubbornly, “my children are not…” she struggled to find the English word, “ladrones.” She finally had to revert back to the Spanish word.

  “Thieves,” I translated for Q, who patiently endured our fourth client interview of the day. We both knew this one wasn’t going to end in a salvage and we were looking for a polite way to give a very kind lady with a blind spot for her grown kids the brush off.

  I sighed and pulled out my prescription pad and wrote for a minute. “Okay, Mrs. Flores, here’s what I want you to do,” I began slowly so she could follow. “I want you to take this prescription to this pharmacy,” I pointed to the address I had written on the prescription. “Don’t take it anywhere else, entender?”

  “Si,” she agreed nodding. “Only that pharmacy.”

  “Right. Good.” The pharmacy was a compounding pharmacy we owned, which made getting the good stuff for our own medical stash so much easier.

  “This is muy importante,” I stressed. “The pharmacist is going to give you a bottle of pills that look like your usual medicine. I want you to take those pills and put them in one of your old medicine bottles,” I explained. “Don’t get them mixed up and don’t take any because they will make you have…” I struggled with the word “...evacuación grande,” was the best I could come up with.

  She blushed but got the idea.

  “Keep your real pills somewhere else and leave these in the medicine cabinet where you usually keep them,” I said, tapping the prescription. I slid the paper over to her.

  “You will see,” she brandished the prescription at me, “they are buenos hijos.”

  She offered to pay us, which we politely declined. “Good luck, Mrs. Flores,” Q and stood to see her off.

  “Which one do you think it is?” Q asked when she was out of earshot.

  “Donno. If it’s the 17 year old, he’s taking them,” I guessed, retaking my seat. “If it’s the daughter she’s selling them or giving them to her boyfriend.”

  “One of them is going to have a bad day,” Q observed. “If they’re selling them someone’s going to get a major ass beating.”

  “She didn’t want the answer, she wanted evidence” I pointed out. “She won’t believe it’s one of them until they wind up on the toilet for two days or in the hospital. That’s the price for evidence.”

  We were holding court at one of the many burger pubs along Clematis in West Palm Beach, just up the street from the marina where the MP, recently renamed Platinum Swan, was docked. We took over an outdoor table and were chewing our way through messy burgers and beer. In between there was a slow but steady parade of people who had lost things. Surprisingly, we were able to recover two of the lost items while the seekers were at the table. An elderly resident of the senior apartments just down the street lost his dog. The dog had an ID chip but the gentleman had not kept his contact information up to date with the chip registry. Deek was able to find it with the help of Q’s friend, Evelyn, a vet in Delray. She traced the dog’s id chip and found a hit at a pet shelter in Riviera Beach. A couple phone calls later and the motor pool was whisking him away to be reunited with his beloved pet.

  Another lady was adamant that the CIA was following her and had stolen her life force. Deek was able to find her bed at a local dual diagnosis center. We kept her engaged in conversation until the center was able to send a van to pick her up. It came as a surprise to absolutely no one that she and the driver knew one another and she went with him without resistance. Q and I argued about how we were going to split the life force we recovered.

  One interesting case was a local businessman losing inventory out the back door of his electrical supply company. He had tried hidden cameras and lie detector tests but merchandise kept disappearing. Deek was able to determine that his assistant manager had recently paid cash for new bass boat when he pulled the registration. That also explained how he always seemed to know where the cameras would be and he had time to plan how to beat the lie detector. We closed that one in exchange for a future favor. We went back to our argument about dividing life force.

  Our good natured argument was interrupted by Amber joining us. She was definitely overdressed for the weather in leather pants and tight leather motorcycle jacket with pink trim, carrying a black full-face helmet with Death Dealer scrolled in light pink script. Back from training she had what I called the lethal edge. We sent our training partners young people with potential and a lot of rough edges, they sent us back razors. According to her instructors Amber was one of the sharper instruments they’d gotten from us in a while. She came back from training a harder person than I expected.

  Her hair hadn’t quite grown back from the near buzz cut she acquired before survival training, giving her a boyish look that
was not at all flattering. I’m an old school long hair kinda guy and when she started talking about leaving it short, I kept my opinion to myself. It was a big mistake to try to run a girl like Amber, especially now. She came back to us sharp, fit, confident and lethal. The newly capable and confident Amber was, in many ways, still struggling with the rebellious teen fucking her dad’s friends for money. I wasn’t about to start shit over a hairstyle.

  I read the notes and incident reports on Amber from the various schools and instructors. Most were glowing, though there were a couple unusual entries. In hand to hand combat training she failed to heed a call to end a practice exercise against an assailant in a protective suit. Instead of backing off she straddled the attacker when he was down and kept trying to plunge the practice knife into his chest until it broke. Two other students had to pull her off leading the instructor to make the wry observation “occasional loss of strategic focus.” Not wanting to let her file be defined by a sour note he scrawled “admirable commitment to exercise objectives” at the bottom. At the end of survival training students had to slaughter a sheep and cook it for their first meal back at camp. Amber not only slaughtered the animal but painted tribal symbols on her face and arms with the blood. Needless to say that left an impression with the instructors and her fellow students. Even that hardened group gave her plenty of space.

  She got the best marks in driving school and asked for permission to go back for another week to repeat the course for motorcycles, which we granted. She celebrated by charging a brand new Honda CBR1000RR on her expense account. I was going to make her pay it back out of her personal funds but decided to just add it to the motor pool as the only motorcycles we had were the baggers Q and I rode. I did have to admit her ass looked awesome wrapped in leather as she pulled a chair over and parked that leather clad ass at the end of the table.

  “Anything interesting?” she asked, kicking back and burying her nose in her phone.

  “Oh, they’ve all been interesting,” Q panned.

  “That lady was from Santa Barbara,” I said out of the blue. “Why would they name a city after a guy who killed David Bowie and Jiminy Cricket?”

  Q had to think about that for a minute. “I think you mean Santa Ana and that would be Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett,” he corrected.

  “He killed Davy Crockett? That bastard.”

  Amber giggled, never looking up from her phone.

  “Are you high?” Q asked.

  “High as fuck,” I confirmed. “I dropped a couple lortab just before that lady got here.” Mixed with a couple beers I was feeling really good.

  Q shook his head. “How are all these people finding us anyway?” he asked.

  “I put an ad in Craigslist,” I said honestly.

  Amber bust out laughing at that revelation.

  “That explains a lot,” Q said tiredly. “You really think that was the best place to prospect for jobs?”

  “I liked Davy Crockett.”

  Amber was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes.

  “This is your fault,” Q accused, half-jokingly.

  “Me?!” Amber laughed. “I can’t control him.”

  We were about to pack it in and head back to the boat when we had one last visitor. She was lean and muscular with a U.S. Marshal’s badge clipped to her belt forward of a Kimber .45. A big gun for a lady but with rough hands and solid, muscular build, she looked like she could handle it.

  “I know you!” I said brightly. It was the woman with the FBI agents who came to visit us a few months earlier. “I never caught your name.”

  “Anita Guerrero,” she answered, taking the single chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “U.S. Marshal’s office,” I filled in for her. “Interagency task force,” I put together despite the narcotics. “These are my associates Q and Amber,” I said making the introductions. “Agent Guerrero here was one of the feds tailing us last year.” The whole team had heard the story but only Deek and I had seen the faces.

  She noted my slightly glassy-eyed look. “Having a good day?” she asked with a wry grin, still with that one crooked tooth that somehow bothered my sense of order.

  “Having a great day!” I corrected. “Hey, whatever happened to your friend? The FBI guy?”

  “Special projects,” she informed us.

  “Ouch,” Q sympathized.

  “What’s that?” Amber asked.

  “Where once promising government careers go to die,” I explained. “Also known as special projects hell. Sorry to hear that.”

  She shrugged. “You warned him,” she noted.

  “You warned him,” I added. “Ignoring me is why he got in trouble. Ignoring you is why he’s sucking his own dick today.”

  Amber bit back a laugh, Q gave me the what-the-fuck look and our guest smiled; one might have imagined the slightest hint of a blush but that quickly faded. She was here for business.

  “We’ll take the job,” I offered.

  “We haven’t even heard it,” Q cut in.

  “Details,” I said with a dismissive wave. “She’s obviously not here to arrest us. If the police could handle it, she wouldn’t be here. If it wasn’t worth our while, she wouldn’t be here. If the client objected to our fee, she wouldn’t be here. But here you are,” I smiled.

  “Here I am,” she agreed.

  We didn’t usually use our earpieces unless we were on a job and today Deek was listening in via the chat program on my tablet. I had the speakers muted so Deek was reduced to using the chat window to send me messages.

  “How’d you know where we’d be?” Q asked.

  “You put an ad in Craigslist,” she reminded him.

  Q shook his head. “Jesus Christ, I thought you were kidding,” he said to me.

  “Land or sea?” I asked our guest.

  “Likely both.”

  “Another good reason to pick us,” I agreed, probably a little more happy than the situation may have warranted but opiates are just so much fun. “Family member?”

  She nodded. “My cousin’s husband.”

  “And what did he lose?”

  “No idea,” she said directly. “But it was something he dragged out of the water and there was a lot of it.”

  “Huh,” I began, slightly slurry. “A mystery wrapped in a recovery. That means he’s missing along with whatever he pulled out of the ocean.”

  “Hasn’t been seen for two weeks,” she confirmed. “Walked away from a wife and two kids.”

  “His phone records were a dead end and they found his truck somewhere wiped clean,” I concluded.

  “I really like talking to you,” she said. “It’s such a pleasure not to deal with idiots.” She was probably talking about both her usual clientele plus a few of her coworkers.

  “Did you know Santa Ana killed Davy Crockett?”

  “Boss,” Q cautioned.

  “I did know that,” our guest confirmed, flashing me another wolfish crooked tooth smile.

  “I liked Davy Crockett,” I informed her.

  Our waitress stopped by and asked if our guest needed anything, which she did not. I ordered another beer, which Q intercepted and changed to coffee. I discovered our waitress was also well aware that Santa Ana killed Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

  “He’s annoyed I’m high,” I informed our guest in an exaggerated whisper.

  “I got that,” she whispered back.

  Q frowned at me. “What’s your cousin’s name?” he asked our guest.

  “Raphael Valle,” she replied with a glance at my tablet. “His boat is named--”

  “Bruja del Mar,” I finished for her. “The Sea Witch,” I translated for Q and Amber.

  “Pretty handy tablet you got there,” our guest observed.

  “He docks his boat at Dinner Key Marina and has a house in Olympia Heights.”

  She nodded. “He usually sold his catch downtown near Bayside, but he stopped doing that nearly two months ago.”

  Deek found a p
icture of the Sea Witch, a type of small fishing boat called a troller. She was listed as the 32 foot Modutech. It could be rigged for several different types of fishing, including trolling, netting or pulling a bottom drag.

  “So, five weeks to haul shit out of the water, five days figuring out where to sell it and then...poof. Surely you’ve been working this case for the last two weeks, so you’ve talked to the people at the marina, his friends, phone records, credit cards…” I let the list trail off.

  “All of that,” she confirmed.

  “And you got nothing and you burned all your leave time.”

  “It’s not much,” she frowned. Like all cops she hated the cases she couldn’t solve and this one was worse because of the family angle. “A couple days before he disappeared the people at the marina said he was unusually animated and was talking about selling the Burja.”