The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  “When did you become a matchmaker?”

  “Hah! I jus’ want to see that muleheaded girl o’ mine light into you, that’s all.”

  I smacked Hervey on the shoulder. He was a good man, the descendant of sailing captains. Beneath his jovial exterior he was as tough and intelligent as they come.

  “Okay,” I said. “Friday night. What should I bring?”

  “A first-aid kit—that’s about all you’ll need!”

  He was still heaving with laughter when I walked up the dirt road, back toward Key West.

  Detective Rigaberto Herrera wasn’t in his office when I arrived at the sheriff’s office. A pleasant, matronly-looking receptionist dutifully logged my arrival and took a message for Rigaberto. He was one of the thousands of Cubans who had escaped Castro’s takeover of that beautiful island country ninety miles to the south and arrived in America totally committed to building a new and respectable life for himself. Rigaberto had worked nights to put himself through college, all the while studying and finally mastering the English language. He asked for no favors and accepted none, and had worked his way up steadily to the position of detective. He was a very good man, and I counted him as one of my best friends. I wanted to find out what he knew about Gifford Remus.

  “May I ask who’s inquiring?” the woman at the desk asked.

  I told her my name, and I watched her face change.

  “Captain MacMorgan,” she said, “I was very, very sorry to hear about your wife and your sons. I met her only once, but I liked her immediately.” She smiled momentarily. “She had . . . class.”

  I thanked her and meant it. The fine ones leave a trail in their passage through life; a legacy of honesty, lasting friendships, and strong ideals to the people around them and to the general human pool.

  The matronly receptionist was right. My wife had had class. On my last day on the boat with Lee, I could not keep my thoughts from the woman I had lost. Was I wrong to look to another for comfort so quickly? No, no, certainly not. It can never be wrong to exchange warmth and affection in the universal void. Yet, as Lee and I parted, the words she spoke for the first time jarred my long-ignored base of Protestant morality, and I could not reply.

  “Dusky . . . I want you to know that . . . that I love you, love you so, and I will never forget you . . .”

  So the words I wanted to voice were left unspoken; my role left unplayed. I had hugged her quickly and turned from her tearful exit, and did not look back. Love was an indulgence I could no longer afford. It was a question of the future, and my future no longer included a wife, a family, harbors on cold nights. I was now a freelance, a troubleshooter. It had turned out that the men who had murdered my loves were also being pursued by a federal agency. The federal agency wanted someone local, someone tough, someone with a military background, to walk the point for them. I was a natural. For them, my first mission was one of expedience. There was a Senator on a private island who maintained his own little army of drug runners. And they were making him rich—until I came along. For me, it was a mission of revenge. I was told to just shake them up; get them nervous enough to make mistakes so that when the federal boys came in with their warrants the next day, there would be evidence aplenty.

  Well, I shook them up all right. I went through those burned-out drugheads like a machete through a pumpkin. And with the evidence they wanted, the federal boys also found more than a few corpses.

  I had made them pay. But not nearly enough.

  I wanted another mission. Under the auspices of the United States government, I wanted to loose myself once more on the pirates that always have and always will feed off the weak in the Florida Keys.

  And that’s what I was thinking about as I walked the streets of Key West on that fine October day. October is one of the best months in Florida. The weather is clear and warm, and most of the tourists have gone home or haven’t arrived. Seas are calm, fishing good, and the rainy season has just ended. At my marina, the charterboats and pleasure yachts were lined across the basin in orderly white formation, and there were some kids fishing for snapper off the dock. A slow October day. Just the way I like it.

  I went into the marina office to check my schedule and to say my hellos and announce my return. Stevie Wise, who lives on a houseboat and works behind the cash register when he is not regaling a pretty tourist, was the only one around. Stevie is a popular guy around the docks—especially with the other live-aboards. For the married men, he’s the epitome of their dreams of bachelorhood. He had left some dreary teaching job in Ohio to follow the free and easy life. He had purchased a clunker houseboat and grown a mustache. People say he looks a little like Paul McCartney, the singer. He flirts with wives, but does not touch. He throws cheap but enthusiastic parties and seems to get along with everyone. At spring break there always seemed to be between four and a dozen pretty northern coeds sleeping, dancing, or sunbathing on his floating home. And at the height of the tourist season, the wealthy kept beauties seemed to find his abode—which he’d named Fred Astaire for no good reason that I know of—both quaint and entertaining.

  Stevie Wise seemed to be one happy guy.

  But on this day he wasn’t looking particularly happy. He sat on a folding chair looking bored and miserable. This slow time of year was obviously driving him crazy.

  “Looks like I could have been busy—if I’d been around. How many of my cancellations rebooked with Captain Nels?”

  “Fourteen or fifteen, I guess. He told me to thank you.”

  “Fishing been any good?”

  “Sure, sure. It’s always rotten for the tourists and always great if they charter a boat.”

  “We earn our money, we do.”

  Stevie put down the magazine he had been reading. “Dusky, do you realize there hasn’t been a pretty woman down here on the docks since you came back more than a week ago?”

  “You poor devil,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m going to have a party Saturday night—invite everybody in town and see what turns up.” He hesitated for a moment, unsure whether or not to invite me. And he asked, finally, “Want to come?”

  “Maybe, Stevie. I just might.”

  The Sniper stood out dark blue among the white formation of charterboats. I stopped on the dock and straightened my sign: CAPTAIN DUSKY MACMORGAN

  BILLFISH, DOLPHIN, SHARKS, GROUPER

  FULL DAYS, HALF DAYS—INQUIRE AT MARINA

  Chartering isn’t a bad business if you don’t mind not making much money and putting up with an occasional asshole. It demands long days in the hot sun, acting pleasant when you feel anything but pleasant, and learning to control your temper when a party misses fish after fish because of inexperience, and then tries to blame you for a day that ends with nothing in the fishbox.

  But that rarely happens. Most of the people you take out are friendly and anxious to learn, and often end up becoming friends. Chartering is less a business than it is a way of life, and I’ll never give it up.

  So I straightened my sign. I planned to spend an hour or two securing that loose forward railing, then take a shower up at the marina. The afternoon was reserved for cold beer and a good book.

  But as I started to board, I noticed there was something different about my boat. It took me a moment to figure it out. The cabin door was ajar. And it had been locked when I left that morning.

  I don’t like surprises.

  I took my folding Gerber knife from the sheath on my belt and stepped carefully onto the deck. I knelt by the door and listened. Voices. Two men. Nice people don’t board a boat without an invitation. And they don’t pick the locks of cabin doors. I know how to deal with people who aren’t nice. They taught me in the SEALs and gave me on-the-job experience in Nam.

  5

  In one swift motion, I jerked open the cabin door and swung down into the galley, landing in a crouch, my knife poised and ready.

  I had planned on taking them by surprise. I had planned on setting them down and making th
em tell me exactly what they were doing on my boat without my permission.

  But sometimes things don’t work out as you’ve planned. When I swung into the darkened cabin, my eyes finally adjusted enough for me to realize that I was looking down the stubby barrel of a .38 caliber Police Special.

  “What the hell?”

  “Dusky!”

  And then we were all laughing; laughing, pointing at each other, and laughing some more. My two visitors turned out to be two friends. Rigaberto, my Cuban friend from the Sheriff’s Department, and Norm Fizer, my connection with the federal agency, and a friend from long, long ago; a guy I had worked with and learned to trust on one hush-hush mission in Cambodia.

  “I must say, you know how to make an entrance, MacMorgan,” Fizer said, still holding the pistol.

  “I practice whenever someone breaks into my boat. What the hell are you two up to?”

  Rigaberto not only looked confused, he looked resigned to his confusion. “Let him talk first,” he said. “I’m still mixed up.”

  Norm Fizer chuckled. He has an easy laugh, one that complements his all-American-boy countenance. He looks like Jack Armstrong come of age. He has short dark hair, thick and well styled, and a wide rack of shoulders that the obligatory threepiece suit does a poor job of hiding. Everything is right out of Norman Rockwell: square jaw, wide, friendly eyes. And his diction tells you he went a lot farther than high school. He looks very proper, very businesslike—but I knew the other side of him. I had worked with him in Asia and I knew that he was as tough as he was dependable. In fact, I still can’t figure out who in that bureaucratic wasteland called Washington, D.C., had the good sense to hire him.

  “Your friend Rigaberto and I were just sitting here getting acquainted,” Fizer chuckled.

  “I tried to arrest him,” Rigaberto said flatly. “I saw him prowling around your boat.”

  “And I thought he was one of the drug runners who got away and had come back to take one last shot at you.”

  I started laughing again. I couldn’t help it. I could picture those two stalking each other—something right out of Abbott and Costello. “Well, it looks like I’m the only one not on duty here, so I think I’ll have a beer. Anybody interested?”

  They weren’t. The good ones don’t drink on the job. And they were two good ones. I sat back down at the little galley booth. “So,” I said, “are you two friends now? No scars? No hurt feelings?”

  Norm Fizer pressed a careful hand against his ribs. “I think I’m okay—but I think I’ll have some X-rays taken just for my own peace of mind.” He winked at Rigaberto. “If you ever get tired of Key West, I’m sure we could find a place in Washington for a guy who can handle himself the way you do. God, what a punch!”

  Rigaberto rubbed a spot on his cheek that was already starting to swell. “You federal guys ought to wear badges or something. I’m telling you, there ought to be a law!”

  Fizer cleared his throat, done with joking now. “Dusky, Detective Herrera wants to talk with you—is that right?”

  Rigaberto nodded. “But it’s nothing you can’t sit in on. From the credentials you showed me, I’d say you’ve been cleared to sit in on anything and everything—right up to the White House.”

  Norm gave one of his rare shy smiles. “Let’s just say that you can trust me.”

  Rigaberto turned to me. He’s a rugged little guy with classic Hispanic features: dark eyes, dustcolored complexion, and a squatty, muscular build. “Well, what I stopped down here for, Dusky, is that I heard you’d been doing some cruising around the Marquesas.”

  “That seems to be one of the worst-kept secrets of my life.”

  “Key West is a small island, amigo,”he said, flushing a little. “Anyway, I was just wondering if you happened to come across a guy named Gifford Remus—that odd little guy you always see—”

  “Sure I know him, Rigaberto. I read in the paper today that he had disappeared, and I went by your office to tell you about it. I not only saw him, I talked with him. And it might have been the night before his boat went down.”

  Rigaberto took a pen and pad from his coat pocket and began to make notes. So I told him the whole story, everything. And I noticed how Norm’s attention slowly homed in.

  “Why did he think someone was following him? Do you know?” Rigaberto asked.

  I shook my head. “Like you said, he was an odd little guy. Apparently he believed some Spanish ghost was trying to help him locate the treasure. The way he talked, the ghost had warned him.”

  Rigaberto grimaced. “Ghost, huh? Now I’ve heard everything. And some of you gringos think we Cubans are crazy.”

  I got up, went forward, and fished the gold chain out of the bilge. I saw Rigaberto’s eyes widen when I brought it back. “He was crazy—but not too crazy to find this. He wanted me to keep it for him. He was going to pick it up when he got back to Key West.”

  “And you say he had found some coins too, huh?”

  “Yeah. I found them at his camp the next day. They were hidden in some kind of pine tar or something. But I couldn’t find Giff. If he got into trouble that same day, his tent and the coins still should be there on the beach.”

  Rigaberto made a final note and stood up. “We’ll have the Coast Guard take a look.” He and Norm shook hands, and he parted without trying to pry into what business a federal agent had with me. He was sharp enough not to ask.

  “Seems like a good man,” Norm said after Rigaberto had left.

  “They don’t come any better. And that was a good idea you had about offering him a job. From what I’ve seen and read, our dear government is having a hard time coming up with competent people.”

  “Now, Dusky, you aren’t going to go into one of your tirades about the government, are you? I remember meeting you in the jungle for the first time, and for a week I thought you were strictly a ‘yes sir, no sir’ guy until that night when we were both off duty and I happened to mention the Republican party.”

  “And you didn’t mention it kindly, as I remember.”

  “That’s true! And, after that, I thought I had you figured out—until I mentioned the Democratic party. And then I realized you were just a goddam independent who doesn’t like the idea of anybody controlling anybody else.”

  “You got it. Sure you don’t want a beer, Norm?”

  He thought for a moment. “No, let’s wait until we’ve finished talking. And then I’ll be off duty. Officially.”

  “So you are here on business?”

  He glared at me. “You’re one sly bastard, you know that? Trap an old friend like that.”

  “Take it easy, take it easy. So what’s up?”

  Norm paused for a moment, thinking. “Well, I’m not really sure, Dusky.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with the old man who disappeared, does it? I noticed the way you suddenly started paying attention.”

  Norm motioned with his hand reflectively. “I don’t think so. Probably just a coincidence. But we do need someone out in the Marquesas–Dry Tortugas area. Not much to it, really. You know that the shrimping industry is big business these days.”

  I nodded. It certainly was. After a minimum initial investment of $100,000 for boat, nets, supplies, and crew, a working man could go out and make a decent living—if he knew how to work the drags and where to work the drags, and if the weather didn’t blow him into financial ruin. For the small businessman it had become a winner-take-all gamble. For the corporations that had plenty of capital for a slow-return investment, it was a surefire moneymaker. Big business all the way.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Well, we’re seeing more and more foreign vessels in our waters. That’s not that unusual, really. Our shrimpers work around the Florida coast, up around Texas, and then down into Mexico and South America. Their shrimpers do the same, and so do the Cubans. There have been some minor boundary squabbles—they arrest some of our people, and we arrest some of theirs—all depending on the polit
ical atmosphere at that particular time. But mostly, everyone just turns his head and ignores the minor infringements.”

  “That much I already know.”

  “Well, it’s probably nothing at all, but lately there’s been one particular Cuban shrimp boat hanging around on the Marquesas. They’ve been fishing, but they seem to keep working the same area over and over again.”

  “Maybe they’re after the treasure Gifford Remus was after?”

  “That would make things nice and neat—but it just doesn’t figure. They’ve been working a couple of miles offshore where the water’s too deep for a scuba diver—especially a fifty-some-odd-year-old scuba diver. Another thing is, salvaging Spanish treasure is a little too flashy and chancy for a communist-controlled government. When they make an investment, they want a profit in return, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I’m not saying they wouldn’t go after treasure if they thought it was a sure thing.”

  “This is no sure thing, Norm. People have been hunting the Gaspar for years. And even if they did find it, it would take them months, maybe a whole year, to do a proper salvage job.”

  “Right. And there’s no way they could try it in our waters without us catching on.”

  “So what do you figure they’re doing?”

  He shifted in his booth seat. “We’re not sure, obviously. That’s why I’m here talking to you. But the only thing that makes sense to me is that they’re working some kind of drug scam. Maybe the shrimp boat is home base for a big delivery and exchange system. Believe me, the Cuban government would be interested in that. They export home-grown grass or cocaine—maybe even heroin—and rake in big American bucks through a stateside connection.”

  “Why don’t you just close in and search them?”

  “We did. Once. Found nothing but crates of iced shrimp. We could have made a federal case out of it—Cuban shrimp boat in American waters. But that would have just made it tough on our American shrimpers when they happened to get a little too close to Castro’s little island in the sun. So we need someone with a cover to go out there and keep an eye on them. Nothing obvious. Just watch and let us know if you see anything unusual.”