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

by Chris Poindexter

  At that moment Miss Charlotte came around the corner in her golf cart.

  “I’m taking off,” she said to Q. “You gonna be here tonight?”

  He looked at me and I gave him a barely perceptible nod.

  “Looks like it,” he answered.

  “Alright,” she smiled. “We’ll see you around later then.”

  He raised his coffee cup in salute and Miss Charlotte wheeled away on the golf cart ride of shame. Only there wasn’t much shame in either Miss Charlotte’s attitude or demeanor.

  “So how do you deal with that?” he asked after she was on her way.

  “By not overthinking it. You deal fine with V,” I reminded him.

  “We’re not sleeping together.”

  “Tell the alpha female types they can’t do something and they’ll do it just to spite you,” I pointed out, “but you can’t be a bitch, either.”

  “$1,500 an hour suddenly looks pretty good.”

  “Definitely less complicated.”

  “You always make it seem so easy,” he pointed out.

  “Look who I learned from,” I reminded him. “At least Charlotte isn’t going to cut you in half if she gets annoyed.”

  Q shuddered. “That was one scary bitch.” Q was only afraid of a very small number of people and she was definitely on the short list.

  “She wasn’t born that way, she was made that way.” It didn’t excuse what she did but it explained a lot.

  “I’d be content to not see her ever again.”

  “Kinda with you on that.” All the same I had a feeling we would be seeing Angel again and, as usual, it would be at the most inopportune time. Fortunately we had work in front of us.

  “So we got one in the ark,” Q said, changing the subject.

  “Let’s see who else we got.”

  We paged through the Missed Connections ads and Q spotted this gem:

  The party was just getting started at B’s. I can’t waltz but I can boogie.

  ThePervert1933

  That was good news. Deek was telling us that he could work from the beta site. It was expensive to maintain separate facilities and Deek insisted that there be absolutely no overlap between the two. Today I was grateful for that paranoia. Sergei had somehow compromised our main network but, because the companies were completely separate, they hadn’t picked up on the beta site. Sergei’s people were good but they weren’t deep.

  A little further down I found the Queen of Sparkling Conversation:

  What? Let’s lambada already

  WildJungleSlut45

  I sent Amber a string of numbers, which she’d eventually figure out were GPS coordinates. The other two I sent this message:

  Let’s do The Twist. Friday. 19:30.

  FM1473

  “I like the Twist,” Q agreed.

  The Twist was one of our favorite restaurants in West Palm. It was located a long way from town out on Okeechobee, not far from the toll way. It was always crowded, noisy and one wall was completely glass, so we had good visuals on the parking lot. Plus I liked the food and figured if we were going to drive three hours, we might as well make it worth the trip.

  The protocol for contacting the ships was a little different. Until they spend time out there, most people don’t get how incredibly large the ocean really is. Fred and Mack would run over to the islands for a couple days, then standoff 20 or 30 miles until we called. The two boats would have been working together to check each other for tails and expand their radar coverage area. Normally Fred would run training dives but, without a medic, he would probably suspend everything but sonar and ROV surveys.

  Sergei would be watching the marinas but he couldn’t watch all of them. There are a lot of places to hide boats along the Florida coast and Fred knew that territory better than anyone. At this stage we weren’t even sure if Sergei knew we had a marina but Fred wouldn’t risk going back there either way. Once Deek got the beta site up and running he could start the forensic analysis of how they got into our system and what they got. Deek had an interesting approach to hacking. Since no system could be hack proof, he set ours up to be compartmentalized. I didn’t understand all the tech, but the idea was to minimize the amount of information a hacker could get if they made it into our system.

  The other trick Deek used was listing the office across the street as the address for deliveries and having an IP camera setup to watch it. By the time the bad guys had figured out there were no servers in that office, Deek had punched the big red button and gotten clear. If you were going to lead a paranoid lifestyle, might as well be good at it.

  The good news, in meager portion, was that Sergei was in the same bind with the cops but he didn’t live a mobile lifestyle. At least one of his guys ended up in the morgue and two for sure in the hospital. Even if they didn’t talk, the arrow of suspicion would be pointed directly at Sergei. They could guess at who we were, but they knew exactly who he was and he’d have to stay away longer. We knew where his facilities were located and had an approximation of his resources. Large parts of his organization were nailed to the ground and that’s how we were going to kick his ass. I guessed he pressured Pierson Brothers to hide him and his crew on their survey ship safely out at sea. All we needed to do was beat him back to Miami by a day.

  Miss Flower wheeled up next to the porch on her golf cart. “You boys had breakfast yet?”

  We told her we had not and she said to follow her over to the house, which we did. Teddy and Charlotte were there and we all had a pleasant breakfast out on the big back porch.

  “You hear from your people?” Teddy asked me privately while Q helped Charlotte set the table.

  “We did,” I assured him, “and we came out in better shape than we had a right to expect.”

  “Clean livin’,” Teddy joked.

  “Paranoid living,” I corrected.

  “You got a plan then?”

  “Sure, I’m going to sit down with Sergei over a couple drinks and have a calm, rational discussion.”

  “Is that before or after you burn his shit down?” Teddy chuckled.

  “Well, we tried the ‘before’ option and it almost got us killed,” I reminded him. “So I think this time we may want to try negotiating from a position of strength.”

  “So you’re going to burn his shit down.”

  “To the ground.”

  “Alright.”

  I’m not sure which army Flower was planning on feeding but she piled on the food: Pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausage, waffles and a huge bowl of fruit salad.

  “I felt like cooking this morning,” she explained.

  Q put it down like he hadn’t eaten in days, scrupulously careful not to eat his pancakes by cutting a hole in the middle of them.

  “I got some business in town this morning but later on this afternoon you and Mr. Q come on up to the shop,” Teddy said.

  We told him we would do that when we were interrupted by my phone. I held up a finger and put her on speaker.

  “Hi, daddy!” she said brightly, in a fake southern drawl.

  “Hey, baby girl,” I said in return. Obviously there was someone listening otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered with the accent, so I played my part. “Where are you, sweetie?”

  “I’m in Nashville,” she informed us. “Just getting ready to start work.”

  Q and I exchanged a glance. “Where you working, darlin?”

  “Oh, I got a job at the defense expo with these nice boys from Locke-Holland,” she explained. “I’m a...what did you call it?” there was some indistinct conversation in the background. “A booth babe!”

  Aside from my personal annoyance at the thought of a bunch of horny defense contractors hitting on my girl it was a brilliant place to hide. Amber found a way to surround herself with security and get paid for it.

  “I miss you, sweetie. Hope you can come home for a visit soon.” I had to keep the patter noncommittal because I didn’t know what cover story she was using.

 
“We’ll be done here in two days,” she said. “They want me to come with them to the next show in Maryland. They say I attract customers like flowers attract bees!”

  Q grinned. “Did you get the message I left you?” I asked.

  “Sure did and that sounds like a fine idea,” she cooed. “I think a weekend at the cabin would be awesome. I need to get some work done on the car before I come down.”

  “Alright, baby, that sounds fine. Your big brother and I miss you.”

  “I love you, daddy.”

  “I love you too, sweetie.”

  And I clicked it off. Everyone was staring.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You said the L-word,” Q grinned.

  “They both did,” Flower pointed out.

  “We were acting!”

  “Still said it,” Charlotte observed.

  “You could’ve said something else,” Teddy chimed in. “A lot of other things.”

  “It was a cover story,” I sighed, realizing there was no digging myself out of this hole. The whole table burst out laughing.

  “He’s blushing,” Charlotte said between giggles.

  “Not blush-”

  “I believe you’re right,” Flower agreed, which sent them into another round of giggles.

  “So she’s not leaving for two days?” Teddy asked once the laughter subsided.

  “No, that’s what the group she was with wanted to hear,” I informed them. “She’s leaving at two this afternoon. Probably stop somewhere on the way down.” I did some quick mental math. “She’ll be here tomorrow around lunch, depending on construction.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “She mentioned a car,” I pointed out. “She’s driving.”

  That was also a smart move. She could pay cash and take zigzag routes. That was straight out of the training book. We didn’t have a safe house with a car in Nashville but there was one in Memphis and she could have stopped by there on the way.

  “Resourceful girl,” Teddy said with a touch of admiration. “Goes on the run and ends up with a job and a car...in what? Two days?”

  “If I left her there six months she’d be running the company,” I observed. “As you say, the girl’s got spirit.” And now she had the training to go with it.

  “Well, I can’t wait to meet her,” Flower chimed in with a genuine southern accent. “She sounds wonderful.”

  “Not the word I’d use,” Q deadpanned.

  “Don’t be a poop, Mr. Q.,” Flower warned with feigned seriousness. “You’re still on probation.”

  Now it was Teddy and my turn to laugh.

  “You’re not turning this back on me, Mr. L-word,” Q grinned.

  It took me a minute to realize we were having fun. It was such a foreign concept that it took a while to sink in. It was almost like having a family, another concept that was foreign, not just to Q and I, but to everyone on the operations side. Mobility is a competitive advantage but it came with its own price tag.

  Teddy had business but that left Q and I with our morning clear and Flower suggested an airboat ride down the Kissimmee River and that Charlotte go with us. So the three of us piled in the truck and headed for the fish camp. The sprawling camp had airboats run by several tour guides, most of whom were fronts for Teddy. We climbed aboard a large airboat and took the first three seats in a model that had room for six. The driver sat in a seat that was above and behind all of us.

  “We usually don’t allow drinking on board,” our guide explained, “but Miss Flower called ahead.” He kicked open the top of a 40 gallon cooler loaded with enough beer for a frat house party.

  “The lady does know how to treat a fella,” Q said appreciatively, pulling three beers.

  We donned headphones for the trip, the only way we could talk over the noise of the engine. The airboat was powered by an opposing six cylinder aircraft engine in front of a heavy three-bladed prop.

  It wasn’t five minutes into the trip when Q got on the intercom. “We have got to get one of these!”

  Even I had to admit it was noisy, windy fun. We flew along the river which is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the country. Flocks of water birds of every description scattered in front us as we sailed past other tourists and fishing guides poling their flat-bottomed fishing boats through the shallows. It was amazing.

  “I want to show you something,” our guide said over the intercom, slowing near a low-lying marshy section. Suddenly he veered to the left, hit the gas and we blasted through a wall of reeds into a small tributary off the main body of the river.

  “Watch yourself,” he said over the intercom. “Right up around the bend.”

  He slowed the boat to just over idle and then killed the engine so we could drift around the corner and come face to face with the biggest gator I’d ever seen.

  When you live in Florida you get used to seeing gators. The tourists flip out over any size and show them a 10 or 12 footer and they act like they’ve seen a dinosaur. But the old girl in front of us was the real deal when it came to alligators. She was 14 feet if she was an inch and nearly as wide as the boat, laying on a small island with her mouth slightly open. She didn’t move when we came around the corner. Humans were no threat to this leviathan.

  “Holy shit.” Q said, giving voice to what we were all thinking.

  “That there is Big Molly,” the guide explained, “and that island is where she nests.”

  Even at 14 feet Big Molly would still only be the third biggest gator on record for Florida. The only other place I’d seen one anywhere near that size was the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge north of the NASA complex. All in all it was a great way to spend the morning.

  When we got back we had time to clean up and catch a brief nap before Teddy called and said we should come up to the shop. When we got there a new face at the front desk buzzed us back and we found Teddy, Bobby, Jesse and two other guys I didn’t know waiting for us.

  “You know these two jokers,” Teddy said with a nod toward Jesse and Bobby. The two you don’t know are Mateo and Dugger, whose real name is Francis--”

  “Nobody calls me Francis,” he interrupted.

  “Everyone calls Mateo Mat for short,” Teddy finished. “Just so you know, these gentlemen are all volunteers.”

  “I’m the token beaner,” Mateo clarified, which got a chuckle from the rest of the guys.

  “It’s great to meet you gentlemen,” I acknowledged. “I’m sure Teddy explained that this gig could get a little dicey.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, sir,” Bobby said easily, “but we’re pretty comfortable in a world where our fellow man doesn’t always have the purest motives.”

  I smiled at that. “I can appreciate that, Bobby. But...I don’t know about you two,” I said with a gesture toward Dugger and Mateo, ”but some of you have families,” I said, looking at Jesse.

  “You ever been stuck in a box for six months with a pregnant woman?” Jesse asked me.

  “Fair point,” I agreed. “In that case how would you boys like to bust up a strip club?”

  Bobby looked around the table with a big grin. “Might not be the first time for some of us.”

  Chapter 16

  We went around the room and got a roundup of the skills each of Teddy’s guys brought to the table. Mateo had been an actual phone tech and helped design the park’s phone system. Bobby and Jesse were both former military and both had combat experience. Besides being a combat vet Bobby was the architect of their custom vehicle modifications and ran the shop.

  That left Dugger Don’t Call Me Francis. He had neither combat nor military experience and his primary skill seemed to be an uncanny ability to talk anyone into almost anything.

  “You gotta watch him,” Teddy warned me. “He could charm the scales off a snake. I came close to firing him before we found something he was good at.”

  “That skill might be useful where we’re going,” I observed.

  A great shadow
came over us as Bobby came over to ask if we wanted to see the van. “It’s not done yet,” he warned.

  The four of us and Q went out back where they were running some tests on the lift bucket, sometimes called a cherry picker. They managed to modify the van to accept one and added the fold down legs in back for stability.

  “There are two cameras in the lift bucket itself. One is regular low lux, the other is thermal and there’s a directional microphone,” Bobby pointed out. “They show up on these monitors.”