Caribbean Rim

by Randy Wayne White

  Fried-fish sandwiches and a sociable lap around the docks hadn’t hurt either. Whatever the reason, the jittery hipster was showing signs of his laid-back old self. This included the sort of oddball remarks that had launched more than one of their drinking buddies toward the door.

  “Since your birthday party,” he told a woman who lived aboard an old cruiser, Tiger Lilly, “I’ve amended my précis on aging. The most beautiful women in the world are at least thirty-five because complexity takes time. But when it comes to dirty dancing, add a decade or two and save me a seat.” A big grin. “What do you think?”

  Oh, she loved it. Outrageous, what the hipster could say to women and get away with.

  Then to a little Cuban named Figgie, “Fidel’s dead, and your right to be a dumbass died with him. It’s time to strap on your spikes and apply for a credit card.”

  In Key West? Anyone but Zonk, pow, a broken nose.

  A true meth addict was incapable of insight or shifting gears. Fitz found the change reassuring. On the other hand, the hipster was known as a freaky clairvoyant to those who believed in such nonsense. Zonk had weathered many chemical storms and fooled many a cop. A test, Fitz decided, was in order. His financial future, maybe even his life, was on the line.

  He waited until they’d returned to Ford’s house. It was dark by then. The dog, a blockheaded retriever with yellow eyes, came and went without pausing to sniff a crotch or wag its tail. This provided an excuse to bring up medicine via a reference to veterinarians. Soon the door was open to all pharmaceuticals.

  “Speaking of drugs, the one you told me about, the synthetic crap? Key West started an all-night clinic for those pathetic flake heads. No offense. You know that area off Duval near the old shrimp docks? I’m surprised a counselor would tell you a beer or two is okay after rehab.”

  “I would’ve kissed him right on the mouth,” Tomlinson replied, getting up, another bottle of Hammerhead beer empty. “How about a couple more?”

  Fitz was flummoxed. He grumbled an affirmative, not pleased with the test results thus far.

  This time the hipster returned with glass mugs slick with ice and a nautical chart rolled under his arm. “To qualify for rehab, I would first have to be habilitated. Or is it habilitory? I’ll look it up. Anyway, that horse threw the jockey years ago. What I did was, I kicked the habit the old-fashioned way—eight days of the shits and sweats, offshore, alone, on my boat. It was tolerable because no one could hear me . . . Well, let’s just say truly savage noises are involved. The pathetic mewling that comes later is an embarrassment, so I stayed out two full weeks. The choice of music is important, of course. As you may remember, I’ve got quite the library aboard my boat. Vinyl, not that inferior iTunes shit.”

  “Cold turkey,” Fitz said. “What sort of music?” It was an amateur attempt to assess stability while he pretended to rearrange his briefcase.

  Tomlinson sweetened the set with Roy Orbison and waited. He was eager to return to the subject of the coins. Maybe the matter was more serious than Fitz had led them believe. If so, it was time to get the evening back on an even keel, but slowly. The old treasure hunter had been spooked by too many questions early on.

  The briefcase snapped closed. Fitzpatrick controlled the conversation while Tomlinson unrolled a chart of the Bahamas. “You don’t have anything more detailed? You’re pissed because I won’t show you my private honey holes, then give me half the Western Hemisphere to work with.”

  “Just the fun regions,” Tomlinson said, “Florida to the Caribbean Rim.” Glass beakers were used to anchor the chart before he made room. “Ever notice how beautifully the islands flow from Bimini to the Gulf of Venezuela? A thousand miles like petrified vertebrae, every bone awash in blue saline.”

  “Blue, sure. Who hasn’t?”

  “All too few people, I fear. There’s a mysterious pattern in this world, my man, and I’m starting to piece it together. A sort of repetition of form that suggests—”

  “Get out of my way,” Fitz said. “I’m going to need my glasses again.”

  “Ah, sarcasm. You doubt? Then explain this.” A skinny finger traced the sweep of islands. “A flying dragon. Its skeletal remains, if you let your eyes blur. See how the tail curves west toward Colombia? Grand Bahama forms the head, and Andros . . . I guess Andros would be the beard.”

  “Dragons don’t have beards,” Fitz countered. “My daughter and grandkids live near Disney World, so don’t tell me. I’ve seen dragons. Here’s what we should be talking about.”

  The briefcase snapped open. A manila envelope was produced. “I put together a file on Nickelby and the girl. If you’re going to find them, you need to know what they look like. There’s a bunch on him. Next to nothing on her. She blends in like those paintings people buy to cover a hole in the wall.”

  Fitz paraphrased what the envelope contained. “High school, she graduated with honors, then did a year and a half of college where Nickelby taught. That’s it. Nothing after that on social media, except—get this—she was a member of her high school metal detector club. That’s where I found the picture. Isn’t that a kick? A pot hunter and Nick the Prick. Lydia Johnson, twenty-six years old.” He spun the envelope onto the table. “Leaf through it and I’ll fill in the blanks.”

  Tomlinson relegated the envelope to an outboard area of the desk. “Show me where you found the coins or we can spend the evening comparing shark scars.”

  More grumbling, but a nautical chart—any chart—turns a treasure hunter into a hapless moth near a flame. The older man locked onto familiar shapes and clusters. “A thousand miles of coral,” he mused. “Almost every one of those islands I’ve either been ashore or close enough to piss on the trees. Some too salty for trees to grow. Like this area right here.”

  Fitz indicated Cay Sal Bank east of Cuba and a massive shoal to the north. Three no-name Spanish galleons had gone down there in the 1500s, he said. It wasn’t unusual for clerks in Seville to reference ships only by type because the names were repetitive, always saints or kings, so were sometimes changed for the duration of a voyage.

  “This is Hogsty Reef,” he said, “twelve square miles of coral atoll. In ’ninety-six, we lost two of our three boats there to Hurricane Lili. Broke my arm and my nose, too, but that’s okay. I’m still good-looking.” A grin formed while his memory reached back. “The next day we rescued a dozen Haitians who were adrift. Yep, they would’ve died if it wasn’t for our shitty luck. Now that you mention it, I guess things in this world do have a way of working out.”

  A good man, Tomlinson thought, and let him talk. Fitz’s stories were always footnoted with details acquired over decades. Lots of personal asides and jargon familiar only to treasure hunters. Cartagena Bay, Port-au-Prince, Salinas Reef, the Berry Islands. Hunting treasure was an obsession, with many landfalls and close calls that blended history with hydraulics and mechanical expertise. The man truly knew his shit.

  Finally, Fitz got around to saying, “Nickelby and the girl probably flew to Nassau first—most tourists, it’s the easiest way—then worked their way here.” His finger moved to Andros, one hundred and twenty miles off Florida, then east to the Exumas. “There are several shallow-water sites I didn’t bother to disguise in my logbook. Nickelby might’ve found a couple already. But the spot I’m worried about most is—” Reluctantly, his finger stopped south of Eleuthera. “It’s an unnamed island close to here. I’m talking about a multimillion-dollar glory hole if he figures out my code. Your base of operations would have to be out of here.”

  The man was referring to Cat Island, a long, narrow spine of land with a boot at the end like Italy.

  Tomlinson had to restrain himself. Fitzpatrick had found something big. “Perfect. I’m tight with a woman who was born there. It’s like God’s stamp of approval, you know? Way, way back, as I wrote in my book—apparently—a waterfall doesn’t mean a river has no destination.
”

  The treasure hunter didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Goddamn it, speak English. You can’t tell anybody about this, especially some woman you slept with. I don’t care if she’s your best friend’s sister and her father’s a priest. Not one word, understand?”

  This, in Tomlinson’s view, was another green light. Not only had he slept with the woman, there was a family connection. Sorta. She was the daughter of a man who had conned his way through the Caribbean and sown a lot of wild seed. At least one seed had rooted on Cat Island and produced the woman in question.

  “You ever meet Tucker Gatrell?” Tomlinson asked.

  “What’s that tricky old bastard have to do with the price of bait? He’s dead, so who cares?”

  “He was Doc’s uncle.”

  “I know, and it’s still hard to believe they were related . . . Hold on, here.” A long look of suspicion followed. “The answer is no—especially if the woman is connected with Tucker in some way. What don’t you understand about you can’t tell a damn soul?”

  “Just a thought.” Tomlinson returned his attention to the chart. “Maybe Cat Island is where I should start. Is there a big-money marina there where Nickelby might try to sell your coins?”

  Fitzpatrick said nope, it was all farmers and fishermen because the cruise ship casino monsters hadn’t discovered the place yet. Then he finally took the bait.

  “Know what galls me more than anything?”

  “Trusting people?”

  “For Christ’s sake, pay attention. What galls me is, I’m paying for that suit’s vacation. For all I know, he’s already gambled my money away, him and his new squeeze. That little prick shacking up in some thousand-bucks-a-night resort.”

  “I don’t remember you saying he swiped your credit cards.”

  “I’m talking about my damn coins. You’re right. If he hasn’t sold them, he will. I was a fool to fall for his story. But a guy as straight as him? You know? I never saw it coming. Way too shrewd for an academic stiff.”

  “Could’ve been the girl,” Tomlinson suggested. He opened the envelope and let the man talk.

  Nickelby had finalized the con by calling Fitz with what he claimed was last-minute insider information. State cops, he said, had been assigned to raid the houses of three suspected nighthawks. Nighthawk was trade jargon for divers who scavenged wrecks illegally. Maybe Fitz was on the list, maybe not, but Nickelby insisted he had less than an hour to move anything shady to a safe haven. Afterward, Fitzpatrick was supposed go back to bed and pretend to be surprised when the cops showed up.

  “That was around seven on a Sunday morning,” Fitz said. “He could’ve been watching my house with the phone to his ear, for all I know. If he was, he got quite a show. Less than an hour, Jesus—I went banging into walls, throwing shit in a duffel bag. Then I slammed the goddamn safe on my hand. Look at this mess.” His fist sprouted five bruised fingers. “Damn door has to weigh two hundred pounds easy. Why’d I buy his bullshit? Because I figured his ass was on the line, too. Thank god, my wife was spending the week with her sister.”

  If Nickelby wasn’t viewing it all from a window, he was somewhere close enough to watch Fitz stagger around his backyard looking for a hiding place. The high foliage of a poinciana tree was a good spot for the duffel bag. He’d used rope and a ladder. His best items, though, the logbook and three prized coins, were worthy of extra effort. Those went into a waterproof bag, double-layered, then into a crab trap attached to a Styrofoam buoy.

  “I love soft-shelled crab,” he said. “I sunk the trap in the canal behind my house with some other traps. Figured it was the safest spot in the world.”

  The cops didn’t show. Fitz had checked his hidey-holes visually but didn’t retrieve his goods until after dark the next day.

  “I’d locked the ladder in my van—that’s why Nickelby didn’t get the duffel bag. The little priss probably never climbed a tree in his life. But the crab trap, I almost vomited when I saw my bag was gone. Him and the girl had probably already left on their island vacation, all expenses paid, by then. You know the rest.”

  “What are the coins worth?”

  “A lot.”

  “Have it your way.” Tomlinson began rolling up the chart.

  “Okay. But you can’t write any of this down. Just listen.”

  The most valuable was a gold Tricentennial Royal doubloon struck in 1714. The others were silver, off the Atocha, from back when Fitz was working with Mel Fisher. A pair of eight-ounce Spanish reales with near-perfect die marks. Ree-AL, he pronounced the word.

  Doubloons were gold. Reales were silver. A simple demarcation.

  Fitz said, “At auction, those would go for—”

  “Auction doesn’t matter,” Tomlinson cut in. “How much on the street? A state narc like Nickelby will have a list of black market buyers.”

  “Oh . . . minimum, twelve, maybe thirteen grand apiece. They’d retail for three times as much. That doesn’t include the Tricentennial, of course. Only four of those are thought to exist.” After a pause for effect, he added, “But I guarantee there are at least five, and he stole one of them. A year ago, a Tricentennial sold at Sotheby’s for half a million. Four hundred and eighty-five thousand, to be exact. Look it up.”

  How the hell had Fitzpatrick gotten his hands on that?

  Tomlinson played it cool. “You’re luckier than you realize.”

  “Luck like that I can live without.”

  “The short-term picture, amigo. Think about it. You might be financing Nickelby’s trip, but not for more than what he gets for the silver coins. A buyer with thirteen thousand in cash wouldn’t be too hard to find. But half a million? That could take months, even years—as you probably found out when you tried to sell the thing.”

  Dead serious, Fitzpatrick shook his head. “I’m not that stupid. If word got out I had a gold Tricentennial, finding me would’ve been worth the price of a plane ticket from anywhere in the world. You think about it. They’d beat the information out of me, then kill me. You don’t know as much about treasure hunters as I thought.”

  “Because it was stolen?”

  “Because I found it.”

  “Found the coin or—”

  “Both. A wreck people have been looking for three hundred years. I think it hit the same reef that sunk the El Cazador’s sister ship in 1784.”

  Fitz was satisfied with Tomlinson’s reaction, which was Holy shit. But the hipster was also confused. “Then why only one gold Tricentennial? No, wait, you said four were known to exist.”

  “The others can be traced back to Vera Cruz, a mountain area where they were minted—stolen, most likely, by some poor bastard who worked there. Where the ship went down—” Again, his finger tapped an area near Cat Island. “Well, there’s a reason I only did one quick dive.”

  “Too deep?” Tomlinson was thinking about Nickelby, an amateur diver.

  “No. Thirty feet, max, on a ledge that drops down damn near a mile. Sharks were the problem. I’ve never seen so many in my life. And it lies off an island where the people aren’t exactly friendly. But if Nickelby flashes that coin around, sharks are the least of his worries—and even a lying thief doesn’t deserve to be murdered just for being dumb. I planned to fill you in after we got to the Bahamas. That’s why you’ve got to—”

  Tomlinson, preoccupied, motioned for silence. “Hang on a sec,” he said. “I’ve got to check on the dog.”

  He went outside and texted Ford.

  6

  Ford read the message and was pleased on a perverse level by the content. The search for Leonard Nickelby had been a pleasant diversion. Now that he knew the girl’s name—Lydia Johnson—the task had an unexpected edge.

  He replied, Tell Fitz no more surprises. Bring my mail.

  The phone, ringer off, went into a tactical bag suspended from a hook. He’d f
ound a comfortable hammock with a starlit view of the docks. The trawler Sandman was there, stern to the seawall, between a derelict boat and the quay. Dark windows framed the wheelhouse and the helm, electronics dark within.

  Turn his head, the view changed. The road to Mars Bay was limestone, a single lane along the beach. A distant strand of party lights marked a shed-sized restaurant—plywood, propane stove, beer buried in ice. Reggae music was amplified by a massive speaker in the middle of the road. Volume had increased in proportion to beer sales. No car traffic. Only people, animated silhouettes, fewer and fewer as time passed, until only drunks and those with something to celebrate remained.

  Hubert Purcell, owner of the trawler, was among them. His partner—deckhand, more likely—had walked the same direction after rigging sloppy spring lines and pretending to mop the deck. Last call was midnight, probably later. Tamara had said the same was true at the Turtle Kraals Café.

  This gave Ford almost two hours. He believed himself to be a patient man, which was true if he had something to occupy his time. An article on brain corals, “Meandroid Tissue Integration,” and a flashlight, provided a diversion until the music was loud enough.

  He crossed the road, stepped aboard, and went up the ladder as if he owned the boat. He could have. The cabin wasn’t locked, keys dangled from twin ignitions. His weight activated a bilge pump below. A watery three-second discharge sounded like a cow pissing—no need to locate the main battery switch after that. The Sandman was powered up, ready to go.

  Wearing gloves, he closed the curtains and used the same flashlight. A red lens preserved night vision. Above the helm was an electronics cabinet—old equipment jury-rigged, tangled wires, and tape. The Garmin GPS chart plotter was the size of a small TV and new enough to contain a mini SD memory card. The SD card, in a converter sleeve, slipped easily into Ford’s laptop. A default Garmin firewall was breached by software created by an agency Ford had worked for—and sometimes still did.