“Can I help you?” she asked, half-hiding behind the door.
“We’re here to see Steve,” I informed her.
“Is he expecting you?”
“You know what it’s about,” I said flatly, “don’t waste our time.”
“Unless you want to work some of it off,” Q added. “I’m sure we could arrange something.”
Judging by the deer in the headlights look on her face that wasn’t the first time that deal had been suggested.
She stepped back, opened the door and point down the hallway. “He’s in the back and I don’t know anything about his...business.”
“You got something to do?” I asked.
“I’ll be out back, no bother,” she said over her shoulder, heading toward the sliding glass door that connected to a backyard with a hot tub and boat dock.
Like a lot of two bedroom homes in Florida the garage had been converted into an office, though this one looked like it was done long before the Klinefelters took over. The garage door had been plastered over and painted to match the rest of the house. There was a door at the end of the hall, we stepped through without knocking.
“Stevie! Stevie! Stevie!” I beamed him my best buddy-buddy smile. Q followed me in off to one side and slightly in front.
He was mid-drink with one of those giant plastic convenience store cups with a lid, only this one wasn’t full of some syrupy carbonated drink. An empty whiskey bottle in the trash can and half-empty 2 liter of cola indicated he was drinking whiskey and coke, heavy on the whiskey. As we closed the gap I could make out a slight yellowing of the eyes and spider web like lines on his hands called angiomas, telltale signs his liver was losing the battle against the constant onslaught of ethanol. By the time cirrhosis gets so bad there are outward signs that obvious, it’s usually just a matter of time. No one who drank as much as our buddy Steve obviously did was going to get on the transplant list, so he was dead man walking; no longer a matter of if, but when.
He sputtered and coughed as some of the whiskey went down his windpipe. Some of the drink slopped down his chin, over two days of beard and onto his shirt which rode over a soft and ample middle. Had we more time I would want to ask how such a dumpy, unshaven slob of a human had managed such a nice house and hot looking wife who pranced around scantily clad and largely unattended but we were on a mission and I already had a good guess anyway.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked in a gravelly voice, still coughing out the last of the whiskey.
“We just want to talk about cleaning a boat,” I said defensively.
Surprise quickly transitioned to anger. “You ever heard of a telephone?”
“Stevie,” I said with a mock hurt tone, “we don’t need you to clean a boat, we want to talk about one you cleaned at Dinner Key a couple weeks ago.”
“Who the hell are you?” he growled. “Get the hell out of here,” he added without waiting for an answer.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” I informed him.
He reached for his right hand desk drawer and Q shifted around and jammed the drawer closed with his boot on poor Stevie’s hand. He let out a howl and Q caught him around the throat with his left arm while letting his foot off the desk so Klinefelter could get his hand out of the drawer. Q grabbed that arm and bent it around behind. Klinefelter used his left hand to try and push back from the desk and I decided to try my new Tac Force rescue knife that I took to carrying after Amber took my previous tactical knife and wouldn’t give it back. The Tac Force had a pointy tip on a blade with open assist and, with one smooth motion, I flipped it open and used it to pin Klinefelter’s hand to the desk.
The human hand is an intricate mechanism loaded with muscles, tendons, blood vessels and nerves all packed tightly together. It’s actually muscles in the arms that work the fingers, with long tendons sliding nearly effortlessly through small joints in the wrist. There are only a small number of places you can pound a knife into one without doing permanent damage. The spot I picked was between the first and second fingers, just behind the dorsal metacarpal vein. The sharp tip of the Tac Force would keep the wound from being too deep, but it was enough to get Steve’s attention.
His eyes went wide and he was about to howl out in pain when Q shifted his hand over his mouth to muffle the scream. I had to grab Klinefelter’s left arm to keep him from yanking it back and cutting through any of the tendons in his hand. For an old drunk on the downslope of liver cirrhosis he was surprisingly strong.
“Steve! Steve!” I began. “Settle down or you’re going to do some real damage to your hand.”
After a few seconds he got past the shock of the pain and gradually quit pulling on his left arm. His breaths were at first coming in sharp puffs, which gradually got longer and less panicked.
“My associate is going to move his hand,” I informed him. “If you scream or cry out, I’ll stick this where it will really do some real damage. All we want to do is talk. You reading me?”
His breathing returned to something resembling labored normal and some of purple color drained out of his face. He nodded as best he could under the circumstances and Q removed his hand.
“Jesus fuck, who are you guys?” he puffed.
“That’s not important and not what we’re here to talk about,” I informed him. “Just answer our questions and we’ll be right on our way. We want to know about a boat you cleaned at Dinner Key a couple weeks ago on a Friday.”
“Yeah, the Burk...something...some foreign name.”
“That’s the one,” I said with a smile.
“I don’t know nothing,” he complained, “I just get paid to clean.”
“Come on, Steve, you know how this goes.” I wiggled the knife and Q had to clamp down on his mouth to keep him from yelling.
“Okay! Okay!” he mumbled through Q’s hand, which he then removed.
“I don’t know who they are,” he blurted. “No names, they pay cash, three times what I normally charge. They just give me the address and I do the cleaning. I swear that’s all I do.”
“How do they contact you?”
“By phone,” he puffed. “God that fucking hurts.”
“Just focus, Steve. How do you get paid?”
“When the job’s done the money just shows up on the seat of my van in an envelope.”
“You must have talked to someone the first time.”
“I don’t know his name,” Klinefelter insisted. “He has blond hair, nearly white. He talks with an accent and was all lean and hard, like him,” he nodded at Q.
“What kind of accent, Steve?”
“How the fuck do I know?” he spat. “Foreign...they all sound alike to me.”
“Anything else you remember?”
“I don’t know...he had a tattoo on his arm, a rat or a mouse...like a cartoon.”
Q and I exchanged a look. I tore a piece of paper off a pad on the messy desk and made a quick sketch, once again reminded that art was not one of my skill sets.
“It look like this?” I asked, holding the paper so he could see it.
His eyebrows went up a notch. “Yeah, how did you know?”
I knew because I’d seen one before, but not for a long time and not in this country and it was very bad news. The sketch was a tattoo of one worn by some Russian Special Forces, the Spetsnaz.
“He drive a black Jeep Grand Cherokee?” I asked.
“You know him?” Klinefelter looked genuinely surprised, which was more bad news.
“Tell me about the cleaning job.”
“Pretty much like the others, except it was a boat,” he said, relaxing a bit. “They called and told me to clean the boat and pull the GPS.”
“And what were you supposed to do with the GPS?”
“They said to junk it,” he began, “but it was one of those really nice ones with the computer screen and everything, so I started thinking--”
“Started thinking you could maybe sell it,” I finished for him. “So you sti
ll have it?”
“It’s in the back,” he nodded toward a set of shelves and piles of boxes half-filled with cleaning supplies.
Q opened the desk drawer and removed a nickel plated .357 magnum that, like its owner, had seen better days. Q ejected the cartridges into the drawer and tossed the heavy gun into the waste basket where it made a heavy crack when it hit the whiskey bottle. He then went over to find the GPS.
“Okay, Steve, on the count of three I’m going to pull the knife out of your hand. You ready?” He nodded and braced himself. “One!” I pulled the knife free.
“Ah, fuck!” he barked.
“The anticipation is worse than the pain,” I reminded him. “Here, give me your hand,” I instructed, pulling out my slim black portable medical kit. Being a doctor is so handy sometimes.
I fitted a needle on a small disposable syringe and pulled a cc of lidocaine. “You know what the biggest lie in medicine is, Steve?”
“What?”
“You’re going to feel a little pinch.” I braced his arm and stabbed the needle into the side of the wound.
“Fuck!” he barked.
“Told you it was lie,” I reminded him. But lidocaine works fast and after the first couple sticks it got less painful. I told him to turn his hand over and did the same thing on the palm side of his hand where the sharp tip had only left a small cut.
I waited a minute and probed the wound with the needle. “Feel that?”
He shook his head.
“Good. Now hold still while I stitch this up.” I selected a small, curved needle and dissolving suture. Q was still banging around in the back, dumping the cleaning supplies out of a box. About half-way through the stitches on the back of his hand Q rejoined us carrying a Raymarine 500 GPS in a box.
“Why are you doing that?” Klinefelter asked, watching me stitch up his hand.
“So you don’t have to go to the ER and explain a knife wound to the cops,” I informed him. “We got what we were after,” I nodded at the box.
“That’s what you guys came for?” he asked. “Look tell Sergei I didn’t mean anything, I was really going to get rid of it.”
It was something I’d seen over and over in field hospitals. Pain clouds the mind and, in the sudden relief of pain, people start happy babbling. Between that and the alcohol Klinefelter had just giving us our first real break. It wasn’t much but we had the GPS and a name to go on. I decided to play along.
“Sergei already knows that,” I assured him, “otherwise you’d already be dead.”
I gave Klinefelter a whack of morphine out of my personal stash and his eyes rolled back in his head almost immediately. You weren’t supposed to mix it with alcohol but his liver was already hanging by a thread and it would keep him quiet for a few hours.
“Holy fuck this is awesome,” he said dreamily.
“Let this be a warning, buddy. We don’t want to have to come back here,” I informed him.
“Yeah,” he said, obviously already reaching for another plane of existence. I didn’t bother to tell him there would be a rather unpleasant crash landing when the morphine wore off. Of course, with his liver in the shape it was in, it might not wear off for a long time.
On our way out the Mrs. met us in the living room, a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and her most of the way through a big glass still in her hand.
“You get everything you need?” she asked, slightly tipsy and backing up until she bumped into the back of the couch. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid we’d want more or was hoping for it.
Q and I exchanged a glance. In a different time and place...
“Maybe next time,” I said evenly, turning to go. I held the door for Q and closed it behind us.
Chapter 6
We made for the commercial dock at the Port of Miami, a bustling facility playing home to cargo and cruise ships from around the world. The Salvage Star is a big ship but, in the midst of her industrial cousins, she looked like a rowboat. The best part about commercial docks is we could drive out to this one and we parked next to Amber’s motorcycle. Because of the height difference the gang rail to the Star actually sloped slightly downward.
It was strange seeing the Star crewed again and Ziggy stored in its deck cradle. About the size of two yellow refrigerators laid flat and stacked, Ziggy was our all-purpose deep sea ROV. A team of technicians had a ruggedized tablet plugged into one of Ziggy’s access ports and were running range of motion tests on one of its multifunction arms that could be fitted with a variety of clamps, cutters, vacuums and attachments for working salvage operations. Ziggy was an integral part of the crew and certainly everyone’s favorite. Ziggy was the first one down and last one up on a salvage dive and, if the shit hit the fan, it was the lifeline. It could also operate at incredible depths and return a variety of loads, large and small, to the surface.
If Ziggy had a fault it was in the looks department. There was nothing sexy about its boxy, utilitarian design. It had three forward facing cameras, including two with infrared capability, two cameras to the side and one rear facing. Its exterior was decorated with strategically placed thrusters and along the bottom was the buoyancy sled which allowed Ziggy to make itself heavier or lighter, depending on the direction it was going in the three dimensional world of the deep. The sled also contained Ziggy’s active sonar along with millimeter band forward and side scan radars. In an emergency the sled could be jettisoned to make Ziggy light enough to float. The umbilical cable that connected Ziggy to the Star carried power down and video back to the surface. The cable was specially designed to be buoyancy neutral so the weight of it didn’t drag Ziggy to the bottom or provide so much lift to pull it back toward the surface. We could launch Ziggy off the rear of the Star or remove some transom panels and launch it over the side. The Star had a sophisticated thruster system that would all but anchor it at a specific point in the ocean and could maintain that position even in 15 knot winds. In stronger winds it would be too dangerous to launch in the first place.
A three man crew in the very bottom of the Star controlled Ziggy and, when they weren’t working actual salvage jobs, we had a contract from a private foundation to remove fishing nets from wrecks and underwater obstacles; a dangerous, methodical, white-knuckle job that claimed Ziggy’s predecessor that we called Geek. Ziggy’s optics and robotic arms were so good the crew actually used them to thread a needle during a demonstration. Given enough time and budget, Ziggy’s cutters could dismantle an entire wreck and find whatever pieces we were looking for inside. I don’t want to say whether Ziggy was once used to remove a warhead from the wrecked sail of a soviet missile submarine because that mission would be very much still classified, if that had ever actually happened.
Amber came up to meet us and, like everyone else when the Star was in mission configuration, she wore blue dungarees with the Recovery and Marine Salvage logo. When the Star was underway anyone working on deck also had to wear a self-inflating life vest that was yellow and orange with reflective material and a water activated beacon that flashed both visible and infrared light. Instead of name tag our uniforms had initials. Because Amber was also part of the ops team, her name tag simply read A. She stopped to tell one of the other crewmen, I think his name was Scott, that Fred wanted to see him.
It was odd to see Amber so at home in the industrial flow of the Star and her easy camaraderie with her coworkers provoked a sudden and unexpected pang of jealousy. She was an accepted part of the crew and Fred was brutal about enforcing a gender neutral workplace. The female crew worked side by side with the men and anything remotely resembling sexual harassment was met with swift punishment or immediate termination. Approximately a third of the Star’s crew was female and they did the same jobs, under the same conditions, as the men and got paid the same. For an old school guy growing up in the 1970s, Fred ran a pretty progressive workplace.
Surprisingly it was the older crewmen who had trouble adjusting to life with women crew. The younger men
, like Scott, seemed to take to it naturally. Like all members of Fred’s crew, physical fitness was part of the program and in his tight fitting t-shirt with the top of his dungarees tied around his waist, showed his well-muscled shoulders and arms. His demeanor toward Amber was easy and friendly, like they’d been friends for years. He said something that made her laugh, which was when she caught sight of us and excused herself. When the Star was working was one time when our relationship was a no go and that also came from Fred. His boat, his rules and they applied to me as well.
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 6
