Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “Well, who the hell are they?”

  Mambo grinned, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. “White boy, you just met your first real live Caribbean pirates!”

  5

  After the waiter left, Lito Porto looked around the table at the crew of the Steel Runner. Most of them had been in his employ for better than five years, but their stupidity still amazed him at times. He took a moment to center his inner chi before demanding, “How many times? How many times I ask you not to start shit in port?”

  “Oh c’mon Cap’n, the little wanker had it comin.” Marcus ‘Rabid’ Jackson raised his leg and slid the folded switchblade back into his boot. “’Sides, you gotta admit that was funny.”

  “Yeah, man!” This from Jorge Lopez-Esperanza, the skinny Cubano sitting next to him. He gave a nasally guffaw and said, “Dude looked like his pants were wet too, but it wadn’t from no beer!”

  “We’ll see how funny it is when he calls the cops, idiotas. Like we don’t have enough heat on us right now.”

  Rabid shrugged and looked away. His pecs twitched with irritation, making the animals tattooed there look like they were moving and fighting.

  “And you.” Lito elbowed his fellow Puerto Rican with the ponytail beside him. “Control that ugly mutt or leave him on the boat.”

  Raymundo Vargas, his second-in-command, reached under the table to stroke the pitbull’s misshapen head. “You know Cheech, Lito. He got a mind of his own.”

  “He ain’t even got half a mind of his own.” Lito lashed out with a foot under the table and hit the dog in the side. This did nothing except cause the flies nesting on him to rise in a little cloud before resettling. “Which is more’n I can say for the rest of you.”

  They got quiet. From the bar next door, where the little gringo had been yelling at them, the last strains of “Margaritaville” drifted out. Lito hated that song; when you lived anywhere near a beach that American tourists frequented—as he had his whole life—you heard Jimmy Buffet’s contribution to seaside culture at least twenty times a day. So instead he looked back over the railing at the boat far down the docks, which the two white brats had just boarded. He realized the rest of his crew was doing likewise, their greedy gazes drawn as surely as compass needles swinging north.

  Jericho Trellis, his native mechanic, produced a pair of binoculars from his satchel under the table. He studied the boat through them for a long minute until Lito asked, “So what is it?”

  “Looks like…a Halverson. Fifty-footer, mon. Luxury cabin, twin V10 hemi engines. Prob’ly do 60 or 70 miles per hour out in de open. Fuckin t’ing looks brand new, too.”

  Ray whistled. “That’s a five hundred thousand dollar boat.”

  “Bet we could squeeze Dully for three, easy,” Rabid added. “Plus any other goodies on board.”

  “I tell you what, man,” Jorge said, his thick accent putting a ‘g’ at the end of the last word. “I wouldn’t mind takin my cut outta those two putas of theirs, know what I’m sayin?”

  Rabid gave him a high five. “I’d have that sweet piece in the bikini ridin my dick like it’s a fuckin pogo stick! After I slap some manners into her brainless boyfriend!”

  “You see de way he yelled at us?” Jericho lowered the binoculars. “Dude is seriously overcompensatin.”

  “We’ll see how fulla piss he is with a semi-automatic to his bloody forehead.”

  Lito let them jaw on for a few minutes, while a new waiter brought them a fresh pitcher of beer. Then Ray asked, “So whatcha think, Lito? This the one?”

  All conversation stopped as they awaited his answer.

  “What do I think?” Lito set his glass on the table and pulled sunglasses from his pocket. “I think we got four rich bastardos that’ll fold quicker than a sack of laundry under a little pressure, in a luxury boat worth more than what all of us together made the last two years, and, based on their yappin, it sounds like they’re gonna voluntarily drop anchor in the middle of the Sargasso tonight, miles away from civilization. I think, boys…that life just got very, very good.”

  Laughter broke out all around, Rabid pounding the tabletop like a barbarian. Lito’s confirmation had lifted a tension that had only been growing the last few weeks. Probably because they were almost out of money. And supplies. And fuel. And it probably didn’t help that the Dominican had his entire force keeping an eye out for them after the incident in January. Lito had heard the bounty on his head alone was hovering at the hundred grand mark.

  Three days ago, when they’d docked in Havana, a coked-up street peddler wanting to make a name for himself had stowed away aboard the Steel Runner with a machine gun big enough to shoot Mars, and attempted to take them all hostage as gifts for the man who ran the biggest drug cartel in Caribbean waters.

  There was barely enough of him left to feed the sharks after Rabid went to work.

  Still, it sent a clear message: the Dominican wasn’t going to forget, and the sooner they had some coin in their pockets, the sooner they would have options. Like finding someplace to lie low for a year until the heat was off. That’s why they’d come to the one place the man would never think to look for them while they sought another big job.

  The very island where his base of operations was located.

  “So what’s de orders, Cap’n?” Jericho asked.

  “We move, and move now. Jericho, get one of your trackers on board their ship. Rabid, Jorge, get the Steel Runner ready to leave port. And make sure Carlos and Mondo finished emptyin out the holds. I wanna transfer as much cargo from their yacht as possible after we take it tonight, just in case.”

  They all suddenly had somewhere else to look.

  “What?”

  Ray told them, “Get goin guys.” The other three pushed away from the table and started down the staircase from the sundeck to the beach. Ray waited until they reached the pier before saying, in Spanish, “Carlos bugged out this morning, right before you left. Said he had somethin to take care of in the city.”

  “Shit.” Lito sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Because we had more important things to do.”

  “You try to stop him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ray, Jesus Christo! If someone recognizes him and it gets back to the Dominican—”

  “Then some poor sucker’s gonna have ground Degas in their tacos tomorrow afternoon. Knowing that kid, he’ll probably give ‘em wicked shits, too.” Then, when Lito didn’t laugh, “He knows all that, and he went anyway. I ain’t his father. Neither are you, last I checked.”

  Lito’s fist curled up on the table, but he forced it to open again. “Goddamn it. I told him…”

  “Don’t matter what you told him. Boy don’t wanna listen. He’s nineteen, mad at the whole world in general, and you in particular. Sooner or later, you gonna have to cut him loose.”

  Lito closed his eyes and said, “It’s gonna be sooner if he’s not back by the time we go after those rich kids. I’m not missin this opportunity.”

  “All for the best,” Ray said. “Mark my words: the longer that kid’s with us…the worse things are gonna get.”

  6

  Carlos Degas gripped the steering wheel of the little Toyota in frustration. The vehicle cost him twenty-eight bucks to rent for the day, all the money he had left in the world—plus a baggie of weed to convince the clerk to let him have it without a valid driver’s license—but you couldn’t exactly take a cab where he was going. Now he was caught in a traffic jam from an overturned fish truck, and the cars in front of him hadn’t moved in ten minutes.

  Time crunched down like a vice with teeth. Life felt like a giant conspiracy sometimes, had ever since his mother died choking on her own blood in a county hospital in Daytona Beach nearly four years ago. He flipped stations on the radio, trying not to look at the time.

  No good. One o’clock already. Not only was he late for his appointment, he’d been gone from the Steel Runner for almost three hours now. He’d tried
to slip out before the rest of the crew roused from their drunken slumbers, but Vargas caught him going out the door and stuck his nose in, as usual. Fucker was always hassling him, tattling to Lito anytime he stepped out of line. Carlos mumbled something about having business in town, which was technically true. It took him a half hour to get the car, another hour to get out of New Providence and take Carmichael down to South West Bay, and now here he was, sitting in muggy island traffic with no air conditioning and sweat soaking the back of his Tampa Bay Rays jersey. He had to get back before suspicions were raised too high for him to lie his way out.

  Then again, if things went well this afternoon, maybe he wouldn’t be going back at all.

  And if they didn’t go well…shit, then he still wouldn’t be going back, but only because he’d be dead.

  Ahead of him, the driver of the fish truck argued with a pedestrian. Carlos pounded the steering wheel and honked the horn. When the car in front of him moved up another foot, he squeezed into the mouth of a nearby alley and jetted away.

  The buildings that made up this industrial dock were riddled with interconnected backstreets. Carlos drove past warehouses and dank alleyways, looking for the place his contact had instructed him to go. Import boats and fishing vessels unloaded cargo all around him, some of them with cranes. One of the many places that kept the islands functioning, but few tourists ever saw. Finally, he spotted the place.

  A shabby building in need of a paint job sat at the end of a small, private alley, with a large overhead door in front standing open. Two fishermen-types stood on the loading dock out front, one black and one white, in rubber gloves and waders, moving empty wooden crates. Beyond them, the interior of the warehouse appeared to house a wall of duplicate crates, but again, nothing in them. The longer he watched the two men, the more their actions seemed robotic, perfunctory.

  He stopped out front and sat in the car, trying to calm his nerves. He’d brought a pistol with him—a little Grand Power semi-auto he’d picked up at a pawn shop the last time they docked in Florida—but he didn’t dare bring it inside. Carlos pulled the gun from his pocket and tossed it in the rental’s glovebox.

  When he got out and headed toward the front of the building, the fishermen dropped the act and turned toward him on the loading dock. The white one lifted a flap on his wader to show the submachine pistol shoved in his waistband.

  “Hol’ up right dere,” the black one said, his Jamaican accent thicker than the local dialect. This had to be Vishon the Vicious, the Dominican’s local enforcer. His head was shaved high on the sides, with a thick hunk of greasy dreads tied in a ponytail that hung down his back. “You Degas?”

  “That’s me.” He started to tack on an apology for being late, but decided against it.

  “You packin?”

  Carlos lifted his shirttail and spun around. “Naw man, I’m clean.”

  Vishon laughed. Most of his front teeth on the top were capped in glittering gold. “Bomba claat, you must be sky high you t’ink dat’s good enou’. Get up ‘ere and lemme search you.”

  A pulse of anger beat at Carlos’s temple, but he held his tongue as he climbed up onto the loading dock. Vishon stripped off his thick rubber gloves and set about the most thorough pat-down the world had ever known, one that ended with him giving each of Carlos’s pecs a healthy squeeze just south of painful. His partner watched with one hand on the uzi.

  “Goddamn homey,” Carlos said. “This ain’t the strip club. I feel like we fixin to get engaged or some shit, you feelin on my titties like that.”

  Vishon slapped him across the back of the head.

  “Ow! What the fuck, man?”

  “Lesson numbah one: always show some respect for de bredda who just ‘ad yo’ balls in ‘is hand.”

  “Yo, you done picked the wrong profession if you want respect for holdin another guy’s junk, muhfuckah.”

  The other man grinned, displaying more gold in his mouth than enamel. “Gotta make sure dere ain’t no uddah ears listenin in, batty. Follow I.”

  The two of them led the way into the warehouse. Past the open bay door was nothing but more of those empty crates stacked around an open concrete floor. This couldn’t be the right place. The door trundled closed behind them, leaving the illumination to flickering fluorescents high above. Carlos’s heart started to pound until the man with the gun pulled a chain against the wall, and a section of the floor dropped down, revealing a staircase.

  “Aftah you,” Vishon offered.

  Carlos hesitated. He could probably still make it out at this point, as long as he went for the one with the gun first. If he went down those stairs…and things went sour…he had no one to blame but himself.

  But once he thought about the alternative—another few months at sea on that stinking ship with the collection of retards that ran it—his choice was clear.

  Carlos descended and entered a bustling chamber that made him see the abandoned warehouse floor above for the façade that it was. A long, rectangular room held rows upon rows of tables with men and women in their underwear standing in front of them, cutting cocaine and weed into street bags, while still others sorted pills and gallon baggies of crystal meth into affordable—and concealable—packets. Along the wall, others pulled in bales of coke as big as engine blocks through an assembly line that ran up through a hole in the wall, from a ship outside, he figured. They handled the heavy packages as delicately as packed dynamite.

  All told, the product in this room must’ve been worth over two hundred million dollars, easy.

  “Is this it?” Carlos asked in amazement.

  “Whatchoo t’ink, it’s Willy Wonka’s fact’ry? Keep movin.”

  He kept moving. The people working with the drugs watched him wearily, their eyes little more than haunted hollows. Carlos spotted closed circuit cameras behind each of the workstations, the lenses glaring.

  Another door waited at the far end of the room, locked with a heavy hydraulic system, like a bank vault. The Jamaican rang the buzzer on an intercom next to it.

  “It be I, boss. Got de gennleman callah wit me.”

  No response, but a hiss from the hydraulics signaled the door opening. They had to move back to allow the thick metal slab to swing freely. Beyond was darkness.

  Carlos stepped inside.

  7

  The room beyond looked like it had once been a large storage area, back when this place was an import warehouse or fish packing plant. Now it had been transformed into a lavishly decorated bedroom suite. The only thing separating it from a high class New York hotel room was the absence of a view. Or windows of any kind, for that matter.

  Carlos stood looking around as the escorts came in behind him and the door swung shut. Lush shag carpeting swallowed his sneakers. The only light came from torchiere-style lamps in the corners, turned low, and the illumination they gave off was absorbed by dark blue velvet draperies that covered the walls. The effect reminded Carlos of the sitting room of some British royalty. A home entertainment center stood against the far wall, next to a bank of monitors that displayed the workers outside from every conceivable angle. The muted television displayed a violent porno where a dark-skinned male barbarian screwed the ass of a white woman bound and hung upside down.

  To the left of the door was a four-poster bed with gauzy, see-through curtains hanging down. On the blood-red coverlet sat the man Carlos had come to see, snorting a line of coke as thick and long as an index finger off a shaving mirror. Three naked, sleeping Latino women surrounded him on the bed.

  “Well…fucking hell.” Romero Felix Santiago—known all over the Caribbean as ‘the Dominican,’—rubbed the last of the coke on his gums and set the mirror aside. Carlos didn’t know if the guy was actually from the Republic or not; rumor placed his origin anywhere from a tribe deep in the Amazon to the dark side of the fucking moon. He was dressed in red silk pajamas that actually matched the bedspread. Dude must’ve been in his fifties, but extensive plastic surgery let his dark f
ace pass for around thirty. His hair was a mess of tight, gray curls perched on his scalp. “You’re Carlos Degas?”

  Carlos couldn’t stop looking at the women long enough to respond. Shit, now ain’t the time to get a fuckin stiffy. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans and nodded.

  As he slid off the bed, throwing toned legs out of his way, Santiago said, in a refined, well-spoken voice that Carlos never would’ve expected, “You’re a lot younger than I imagined. Just a boy, really. I wish I could say that’s going to make this harder…but I didn’t get where I am today with sentimentality.”

  Before Carlos could react, Vishon and his silent partner tackled him, wrenching one arm behind his back and sending him to his knees in that luxurious carpet. The silent one held him where he was by standing on his calves and keeping his left hand pulled tight between his shoulder blades, while Vishon stretched his right arm above his head and then bent it at the wrist in such a way that the fingers were forced to uncurl, like he was preparing Carlos for a manicure.

  “Oh! Oh, shit, that hurt! Leggo man, whatchoo doin?”

  “Lesson numbah two,” Vishon purred above him, his gold teeth flashing in the dim light. “Nevah walk into de home of de man who ‘as a bounty on yo’ ‘ead, and expect to walk back out again.”

  “Mr. Santiago, please, you gotta listen to me, you don’t understand—!”

  “Understand?” Santiago padded across the room to a full wet bar and set about pouring himself a slug of rum. “What I understand is that you are a crew member of the Steel Runner, that rustbucket pirate vessel captained by Lito Porto. Now, please do not misunderstand: I have nothing against a pirate. Here in the Caribbean, you all still sail under the romantic notion that you’re Blackbeard on the high seas, when you’re really just a bunch of petty thugs mugging wayward tourists, but you do occasionally serve a purpose. What I don’t like…what I cannot tolerate…” He knocked the rum back and then threw the glass into the basin, where it shattered. “Is when a group of pirates boards one of my smuggling ships.”