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

by Chris Poindexter

  “Hmm. What was he telling his wife…?” I checked the tablet, “Ana?”

  “Only that he was working on something big. They were living off savings the last two months and he was leaving early and getting home late, sometimes spending nights on the boat.”

  “Any idea where he might have been storing...whatever it was he might have salvaged?”

  “I know exactly where it was,” she said, listing the address of a warehouse not far from the regional airport on the south side of Miami. “He paid cash for three months and the owner said he came in a lot at night but never saw what he was bringing in.”

  “I’m sure you checked for surveillance cameras,” I said, already knowing the answer.

  She shook her head. “Only the office at the warehouse and only the parking lot at the marina. Whatever he was hauling, he kept the truck bed covered.”

  “The local PD must have given you some time as a courtesy,” I pointed out.

  “They were very nice but--”

  “But there was no evidence of foul play,” I finished for her, “so they couldn’t keep the investigation active.”

  She nodded.

  “You know it doesn’t look good for our buddy, Raphael,” I said bluntly.

  “He wouldn’t have left his kids,” she said flatly. “He and Ana were getting along okay; he had no motivation to leave her.” We had reached the same conclusion on that subject.

  “If it was anyone else, I might think we had a shot,” I admitted, still struggling to focus and really needing a nap, “but I’m going to guess you don’t miss much.”

  “I’ll give you everything I have and if you need something, just give me call,” she said, dropping a business card on the table.

  I held the card up over the tablet. There was a barely audible click and her contact information appeared on the screen a moment later. I handed the card back to her. “We’re going to need to talk to Ana and see the warehouse. Did you or the locals run any forensics?”

  “The lab did me a couple favors, the locals did what they could,” she admitted. “We got nothing.”

  “What about the boat?”

  “Clean. The only thing missing was the GPS.”

  “Of course,” I conceded.

  “Not much to go on,” Q finally spoke.

  I frowned. “We’ll give it a shot,” I said to Anita. “I gotta go back to the boat or I’m going to fall asleep right here,” I said apologetically. “We’ll be in touch in a couple days.”

  “I hope you can do something,” she said, standing to go. “Raphael was an okay guy.”

  We said our pleasantries and watched her head up Clematis toward the federal building.

  “By rights this whole day should have blown up in your face,” Q began. “Instead you end up high as kite and finding us a job.”

  We stood up to leave and I flipped the tablet closed.

  “You left out that I’m probably going to engage in some highly inappropriate activities with an employee,” I observed swatting Amber’s leather clad ass.

  “Highly likely,” Amber agreed with a smile, hooking her arm through mine.

  We started heading off toward the boat. Q grabbed his sunglasses and got up to follow us.

  “Don’t forget about the check,’ I called over my shoulder, just as our waitress came around the corner.

  “Goddamn it,” Q had to stop and fumble with his wallet. “I’m going to expense this!” he called out after us.

  Chapter 2

  I woke up with Amber nestled in the crook of my arm, the golden light coming through the portal signaled it was late in the day as The Swan plowed her way through 3-5 foot seas on the way to Miami. We rolled in and out of the troughs and I could have gone back to sleep except for the urgent need to pee, an unfortunate side effect of being a male in my 50s. I was also depressingly sober.

  I pulled my arm free as gently as I could and Amber rolled over and buried herself under the blankets. Ever since she got back from training, she’d been sleeping longer and later. Without the pace of hospital life to keep her on edge, old sleep habits gradually reasserted themselves. Since she got back she would stay up later, sometimes into the very early morning hours. When you don’t have a day job, boredom is the enemy of preparation. Consequently we filled our days with fitness training, intelligence briefings and keeping our skills sharp.

  This stateroom had a private head and I decided that going back to sleep would have to wait. I got dressed and made my way to the galley where Jennifer’s replacement, Ashley, always kept a pot of dark roast coffee available around the clock. She wasn’t around and I debated momentarily between another beer and coffee before finally settling on the latter.

  I made my way up to the salon to find Q flipping through the dispatches that Deek kept in a special message buffer. Much to his chagrin Q had started using reading glasses when doing a lot of computer work. At first he resented them until Amber convinced him they made him look distinguished.

  “It’s a-live,” he joked, looking over the top of his reading glasses as I sat across from him next to the big mahogany center table.

  “I really regret dropping those lortabs,” I said wearily. “Probably not going to shit for three days.” Constipation was a common side effect of opiates and it hit me harder than others.

  “T-M-I,” Q cautioned.

  “I thought we were sharing.”

  “That’s a big n-o-o-o-o-o.”

  “Anything interesting?” I gestured at the tablet with my coffee mug.

  “Deek’s been scanning the files Marshal Guerrero sent over. You were right, she’s depressingly thorough,” Q said with an edge of admiration. Q divided the world into two types of people: those who paid attention and those who didn’t. He had already classified Marshal Guerrero and she was in the club.

  “She wouldn’t have brought it to us if it was easy.”

  “I thought there’d be something...one little thing she missed.”

  “There always is,” I reminded him.

  “Not this time,” he sighed.

  This was a peculiar case because, in every other case we’d ever taken, we knew exactly what was missing. Knowing what’s missing provides many clues about how to find it. For years we became professionally adept at figuring out where people hid cash. Everyone thinks they’re the first ones to think of new hiding places but it was almost inevitably one that had been tried before. After a while the search became depressingly predictable. Whether it was cash, gold, jewelry, cars, or bodies once we knew what we were looking for it was only a matter of time. That’s what made this case so frustrating. It was amazing how many of our business processes revolved around that one key point of information.

  Before we left West Palm I sent a message to Fred to rig the Star for a salvage operation and recall the crew. Because we didn’t do as much of our own salvage work these days and because we didn’t want experienced divers sitting around on their thumbs, Fred divided them up into smaller crews and kept them busy with a string of projects that ran from simple pleasure boat salvages, to treasure hunting, to projects like the artificial reef we were developing off the coast of Jupiter. When we needed them, Fred would call them back to crew the Salvage Star. Even though it was supposed to be make-work, one of the treasure hunting projects yielded a score and, like so many other things we did, it turned a fat profit.

  It would take a day or two to provision The Star and that’s the time we’d spend retracing Anita Guerrero’s initial investigation. I also sent V a message asking her to join us when she could but we hadn’t gotten an acknowledgement. It wasn’t unusual for her to pack up some horses and disappear into the jungle for days at a time. All we could hope is she packed her satellite phone and would check messages.

  “It’s nice being able to come out of the shadows,” I observed. So many times we were trying to work around law enforcement it was always a nice change of pace being able to work with them.

  “Yeah, it is,” Q agreed.
“I kinda like it.”

  I used my cell phone to call Deek and put it on speakerphone.

  “Hey, boss,” he answered, sounding a little more jovial than usual. For the last couple months Deek had been able to keep something resembling a normal schedule with 10 hour work days and the change was doing him a world of good.

  “How’s it feel to be working with the cops for a change?”

  “It’s nice,” he agreed, “almost like normal people.”

  “Where we at?”

  “Still sorting through what we got from the Marshal’s office.” he began. “There are a crapload of notes to digitize and disks full of data from the phone company.”

  “Phone records?”

  “Better, phone data,” he corrected. “Pretty much everything I could’ve asked for.”

  “You going to be able to do anything with it?” Q asked.

  “Too early to tell,” he confessed. “It’s going to take a lot of sorting.”

  “Wouldn’t the cops have done that already?” I asked.

  “Maybe some of it,” he said, “but there’s a lot here. Just crunching the tower data would keep them busy for a week. I don’t think the locals have that kind of juice and don’t see how the Feds would have justified the resources. But I have some preliminary bad news, he left his phone off when he went out on the water.”

  “Why was he being so careful?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Maybe he thought someone was watching him?” Q speculated.

  “That would make sense,” I agreed and that was the first chink in this case we could start working on. We’d start chipping away at the edges of that tiny anomaly to see if we could find the beginning of a thread. Maybe it didn’t lead anywhere but it was a start. It was a little like playing that computer game where you uncover mines. You had to start blind with that first click. Maybe you got lucky and had somewhere to start, maybe it blows up in your face and you have to start over. Anita Guerrero would have thought of that too, but she didn’t have the resources to chase every lead.

  “What about satellite?” I asked, but already had a guess at the answer.

  “I can find pictures of him headed out, a lot of pictures of him at the dock, pictures of him headed somewhere on the ocean, and even one picture headed back in but there’s no continuous coverage.”

  People think that satellites are some magic window on the world and when you’re tracking a specific target and you know where to look, they can be amazing. But for trying to look back through images and pick out a single target it was hit and miss. The military had loitering technology with track-back capability but were hesitant to use it for domestic surveillance. The ocean is also a big place and a 32 foot target is really small. On top of that there aren’t many birds dedicated to taking pictures of open water. Shipping channels had better coverage but again, we weren’t tracking a freighter, we were looking for a 32 foot fishing boat and there were a lot of boats in the waters around Miami. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Delaware; only it was a hay stack full of needles that all looked alike from hundreds of miles out in space.

  “Somebody knows something,” I said more out of frustration than any enlightened insight. “Let’s think about it another way and start with a basic set of assumptions. Let’s assume he wasn’t being followed from day one and that he stumbled on his find by accident.”

  “He maybe wasn’t as careful the first couple days,” Deek observed.

  “And no one was watching him,” Q added.

  “Right,” I confirmed. “Day one he was out fishing. So let’s go down to the market and find out what he was fishing for.”

  Knowing what he was fishing for would be tremendously valuable. Then we’d know what he was using for gear, his line strength and the depth he was operating. It would also help knowing what time of day those fish tend to feed. Some fish you can catch all day long, some only come up from the depths at certain times. Tell me the type of fish and give me a tide table and I can tell you the best time to go out. Plus, not all fish are found everywhere in the ocean and commercial fishing was confined to specific areas. At least we could start whittling down the search area. It’s a lot easier to find someone you know is in Atlanta, opposed to looking for someone in the entire state of Georgia. It wasn’t much but it was a start.

  Amber made her way into the salon stifling a yawn, also carrying a cup of coffee.

  “How far to Miami?” she asked, joining us at the table.

  “About three hours,” Q guessed.

  “We going to get started tonight?”

  “Probably not,” I informed her. “Q and I are going to need to talk to some people and you’ll need to arrange dockage for The Star. We can’t do any of that at night.”

  Because we could get it through the gate and roll it down the dock, we were able to use the Swan’s small boat crane to load Amber’s motorcycle on the fan deck. It was a type of motorcycle I called a “crotch rocket” and she’d be the most mobile of us. It was one of those low-profile bikes where the rider was practically laying down on the gas tank; it made my back hurt just looking at it.

  “A night off?” she asked hopefully.

  I crushed that dream. “Not exactly. Deek’s digitizing the case file we got from the Marshal’s office and we should all read through it for background.”

  “Hey there, Sunshine,” Deek said over the speakerphone.

  “Hey, pervert,” Amber joked. She liked Deek and it showed. She was also a quick study on the tech shit. Since we were one deep with Deek the thought of working Amber into a support role for him had already crossed my mind.

  “I have the notes from the Marshal’s office sort of divided up,” Deek informed us. “When you’re going through them you can help me do the sorting.”

  Ashley made an appearance to ask if anyone wanted anything before she went below and we indicated we were fine. She told us there were sandwich trays in the galley and a pantry full of snack foods. While not as good looking or personable as Jennifer, she was every bit as efficient.

  We decided to turn the salon into mission central until we got to Miami and then transfer our flag to the Star. We spent the next two hours going over the case file. Q and I on our tablets while Amber used her phone to display documents on the Swan’s big screen TV.

  “I want to do that,” I complained as she overlapped documents and then quickly sorted through then with a flick of her finger. She would skim through them quickly, and then sort them into different folders by sliding them left, right, up or down.

  “Talk to Deek,” she suggested, “he’s the one who showed me.”

  “You been holding out on me?” I asked the phone, still on the conference table.

  “Who was it that told me tech shit makes their eyes bleed?” he asked in response.

  “That’s not fair using my own words against me,” I warned.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s completely fair,” he argued.

  “Kinda is,” Q agreed over the top of his reading glasses.

  “Ye-up,” Amber chimed in.

  I was outvoted.

  “He’s going to sulk now,” Amber pointed out. “He doesn’t like losing.”

  “Not one bit,” Q agreed.

  “Alright, alright,” I interrupted, “We learn anything useful from the file?”

  “Not much,” Q observed. “Family and friends knew he was working on something big but not the details.”

  I had a sudden thought. “Hey, were his fuel receipts in there?” We could take a guess at the mileage if we knew how often he had to tank up and at least have a rough estimate of the range.

  “Not here,” Amber said after a minute.

  “He charged a couple of them,” Deek observed, “but they’re two weeks apart at different stations.”

  “Crap,” I breathed. Another dead end. “Wait, which stations?”

  “One in Key Largo and another at Paradise Point.”

  “I need a map,”
which Deek popped up on the salon big screen. It was a nautical map with shipping lanes, depth readings in fathoms and navigation beacons.

  Anyone who spends time on the water knows that fuel is a big concern. In your car you can play chicken with the gas gauge but if you run out of gas on the ocean you drift away and die. Consequently, boat captains will tank up if there’s even the slightest doubt they’ll be able to make their destination.