Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4)

by J. J. Henderson

  “Hey, I lived in New York City through the crack cocaine era. Poisonous snakes don’t really worry me, Larry.”

  “You is one tough chick, eh? Well. The Four Señors. When Ronnie Raygun was elected prez of the USA things got pretty weird up in Nicaragua and even weirder in El Salvador and Guatemala. Fucking crazy commies and fascist dictators running amok. Not that I gave a shit. Aside from a relatively small amount of the usual government corruption and stupidity Costa Rica had no army and pretty much no attitude other than live and let live. So I was just looking at maps, checking the shape of the coastline and trying to figure out where the waves might be rideable. I rented a boat at Coco Beach and headed up the coast looking for point breaks, whatever. I can’t say I discovered Witches Rock but there were maybe three guys that knew about it when I first went there. Anyways I surfed there a few times going in by boat, and then decided to check things out farther north. I had this detailed coastal map and I had an idea about this one little spot—looked like it might be a perfect right point break. Took a boat up there, came in late in the day, found a spot and camped on the beach. Surf was flat.”

  “So that night I’m lying there alone on this beach at the foot of a cliff, no fire ‘cause I didn’t know what the fuck to expect. Just before dawn I woke up to the sound of an airplane coming in really low, like barely off the water. Flies right over me, no lights, no nothing, and disappears behind the cliff. But I could hear it landing. So I sneaked up a trail and had a look around. Saw the plane, a couple trucks, some guys unloading shit by flashlight. I was sure I’d stumbled on some kind of drug operation and I’d be dead meat if they spotted me. So I hid in some bushes until it got lighter.”

  He grinned. “I could not fucking believe it. A couple of guys were unloading rocket launchers, mortars, machine guns, boxes of ammo, all kinds of shit from this black-painted plane. Big plastic packs of white dope going in the plane, guns and ordnance coming out. It was insane.”

  “Twenty minutes later they were all gone—plane full of coke, trucks full of guns. I figured out later that I’d stumbled on Ollie North’s Contra operation.”

  “Jesus,” Lucy said. “What did you do?”

  “Once they were gone I went down to the beach, got in my boat, and went around another bend in the shoreline. Found a perfect right point break. Ollie’s Point. Of course the name came later, when we all figured out what was up.”

  “But what about the guns and all?”

  “Alberta’s father is a pretty well-known journalist in San Jose. Good friends with Oscar Arias Sanchez, who was president at the time. So we told her dad, and he talked to Oscar, and next thing you know the airstrip was shut down, North got thrown out of the country and Oscar got the Nobel Peace Prize for his troubles. Not that it stopped the Contra war or anything. A few of those fuckers are still wandering around over in the jungle on the Caribbean side.”

  “Wow.”

  “And by way of thanks Oscar put the heat on the park service to get the Las Baulas Marine Preserve established. And we got our hotel.”

  “Amazing. Who’d a thunk you were a player on the world political stage, Larry.”

  “Well, not exactly. Hey, Oscar’s a cool guy. He still comes down once a year for a long weekend. Gets in the hot tub with me and Alberta and just hangs.”

  “That’s quite a tale, Larry. Speaking of Nicaragua, I’m supposed to add a chapter to this book on an excursion up there. Where should I go?”

  “San Juan del Sur is a nice little beach town, and a good surf base—there’s a couple of reef breaks not too far off. Granada is a beautiful Spanish colonial style town, Lake Nicaragua’s got some neat little islands and even a few man-eating bull sharks left. Forget about Managua. Between the Somozas and the Sandinistas and the earthquakes, it’s a shithole. The east coast has some cool spots—for diving and stuff—but it’s too hard to get to. You can get to San Juan del Sur from here in a couple of hours.”

  “Sounds good. Hey, you know what, Larry? You never explained how the Four Señors fit into the picture.”

  “Simple enough. Those guys I saw unloading guns and loading dope? The Americans were CIA, and the Ticos were a couple of local gung ho fucks who took the money they got from North—that would be your taxpayer dollars, and maybe some Saudi cash—and formed their own company.”

  “The Four Señors.”

  “Exactly. So now you know. I guess they’ve gotten more legit since but I’m not sure I’d bank on it. Or with them.” He stood. “Well, I need to do some more meet and greet with my guests. See you in the waves tomorrow?”

  “I doubt it. I’m doing the turtles tonight.”

  “Right. Well, if you want to surf when you do get up, you’ve got the log, right?”

  “Right. Hey, thanks, Larry.”

  “No problem.” He grinned. “Now I’ve just gotta track down Deedee and Yvonne and—”

  “Don’t say it,” Lucy interrupted. She stood. “I think I’ll try to catch a little shut-eye before the turtle tour. See you tomorrow maybe.”

  “Right.” He smiled, and put on a sincere face, one that suggested, behind all the bullshit and lechery there’s a guy here you might be interested in, Lucy, were you to give it a chance.

  “Good night, Larry,” she said, and walked away.

  Four hours later, having seen three turtles squirt several hundred eggs into holes in the sand and then bury them, Lucy trekked back to the hotel and crawled in. She had not been moved especially by the turtle events. As she lay in bed thinking of turtles laying eggs what came to mind was the one time she’d photographed someone giving birth—her friend June—and how that had not so much moved as intimidated her with its primal intensity. The camera had protected her from June’s endless labor—eleven hours of howling, hellish bliss. The turtle’s egg-laying cycle, on the other hand, was too cool, too remote in its ancient, instinctively programmed action to impact her emotionally. How could she react to an animal that scarcely recognized her existence?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LUCY HURTS, LUCY WRITES

  Four days later, or was it five?—she was losing track—Lucy sat at a sidewalk table outside a pleasantly scruffy San Jose dive called the Beatle Bar, festooned with wall-to-wall Fab Four pics and memorabilia. She’d chosen it in spite of its red light location because she’d always loved John Lennon even though she’d been just a kid when he died, and here he was in all the phases of his smart-ass glory. The abrupt fall of tropical night approached, and lights flickered on up and down the street. She had her second Imperial draft on the table and two notebooks open. One contained notes on all the things she had to tend to in the Grunwald Guide, and at the moment she ignored it in favor of the other. The other she called Stuff That Got Left Out. Driven by sheer frustration and a dawning revelation about the shallowness of the Grunwald guide, she’d started this other volume on the bus ride back from Nicaragua to Guanacaste.

  STUFF THAT GOT LEFT OUT

  NORTH OF THE BORDER: NICARAGUA

  Bus from Liberia up through the far northwest of CR to the dreary hot border town of Penas Blancas. The usual border-crossing rigmarole, complicated by surprisingly bad vibes between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Central America’s a single third world entity to most gringos but sharply differentiated when you’re here. There’s no love lost between these two countries, but dollars talk and so being the norteamericano dame with dollars I went to Nicaragua to write what the guidebook calls an “excursion” from CR. Went knowing little of Nica but names—Somocista, Sandinista, Contra—and their wars. Wars that no one won. The Pan Am highway north in perfect shape, as were most of the main roads. Another legacy, rumor had it, of Ollie North, whose contra dealings supposedly financed these smooth arteries for one or another planned invasion.

  San Juan del Sur a sweet little lost beach town on a half-moon bay, with a random scattering of Euros moping about; a place where it seemed like nothing happened but you could probably get away with anything. And some did, judging b
y the few fat yachts bobbing offshore, and the occasional sinister oversized black SUV that looked like it oughta have Kalashnikovs poking out the windows. Granada, farther up the highway, my fave: built in the old Spanish colonial fashion, prettier than any city in Costa Rica. The entire town a historical monument so you won’t see it torn down or desecrated with Starbucks or Big Mac. Graceful old churches, colorful houses behind high walls…and little or nothing in the markets, starving, spavined horses drawing carts, teeming crowds of skinny kids wearing New York Yankee caps. How they can love America still I don’t know but they do, far more than the Costa Ricans. A grim blocky monument to the war dead: hundreds of names, and now only their families and friends know who died a contra, a somocista, a sandinista. Heading south again, visited Ometepe Island in the vast, warm, and murky Lago Nicaragua, where nothing seems to happen, but once upon a time man-eating bull sharks roamed up the San Juan River from the Caribbean, living half the time in salt water, half in fresh, and scarfed down the occasional hapless fisherman, the child swimming while mother did the laundry on the sandy lakeshore. Perfect volcanoes rise out of the Nicaraguan plains and lake islands.

  Ultimately it felt like a poor, sad country. I barely got out in time, left in a monsoon downpour that flooded the Pan-American Highway for three days.

  THE SOUTHERN NICOYA

  Back in CR. Three buses and five hours got me from Penas Blancas to Santa Cruz, in the middle of nowhere, Nicoya. I ran into some gringos and hitched a ride south to Montezuma. They were headed down the hot dusty length of the Nicoya to Malpais, just above the Cabo Blanco Wildlife Refuge at the southwestern tip of the peninsula. We drove through scrub-covered hills dotted with majestic trees, occasional orange groves, herds of cattle grazing, all the way to the remote, isolated, boomtown settlement of Malpais. I rented a boogieboard at a surf camp, and went out and bellyboarded the biggest waves I’d ever surfed.

  A day there and then a ride hitched in a beer delivery truck from Malpais to Montezuma, sheltered from the ocean waves on the southern shore of the Nicoya. For non-surfers, Montezuma is the main Pacific Coast event for partying, with hundreds of raggedy-ass sun-crazed hipsters gathered to get wrecked, burned, sexed-up and stoned. In the evening it took me less than ten minutes to track down the “kidnap” victims from the east coast—the ones Manny had said were hanging in Montezuma—perhaps because one of them was doing a strip tease on a table top to the appreciative hollers of a lot of Germanic-looking hippie boys. After she got down to her undie thong and ring-pierced nipples she climbed off the table and got dressed and a few minutes later I had a chance to chat with her and her fellow victim about their time in the jungle with the bad guys. They laughed about it. They insinuated but never said that they’d gotten some of the ransom money. They called their fathers “stupid fucks” in harsh, German-accented English, and swore they would never go back to Dusseldorf. Later the bar underneath my crummy little room never seemed to close, blasting bad techno music until it competed with the parrots screaming in the dawn. I nabbed a bus to Paquera and from there took a ferry across the Nicoya strait to the mosquito-plagued port of Puntarenas, where I caught another bus heading south to Costa Rica’s other Pacific party town, Jaco Beach.

  JACO BEACH

  By the time I reached Jaco, darkness was falling and the first thing that happened was three drunk Costa Rican guys in their fifties propositioned me like I was a hungry hooker and they were giving me a chance I hardly deserved. I wanted to kick them each in the balls con mucho gusto but instead let fly some good old American “fuck you, and you, and you, and all your relations down through eternity,” then shouldered my pack and huffed down the road in a quiet rage. Said road lined with cheesy looking motels, restaurants, and other tourist town shit. Found the motel I’d booked in advance, went to the office, saw a sign by the desk that said “prostitutes not allowed,” and though the place was a lot dingier than advertised in my very own guidebook, the swimming pool a mossy green and loud hordes of large bugs hovering around sputtering security lights, I checked into my free room, comped because I was a big important guidebook writer. Got out the notebook and trod the town, brushing away vicious mosquitoes and doing my work. Went to bed quietly, got up at dawn, checked out the muddy and blown-out surf, the waves full of driftwood and seawrack. I headed out of town on the first bus south.

  Loud voices intruded. Lucy looked up from her notebook. A crusty-looking forty-something gringo, shaggy-haired surfer type, sun-baked skin, big greasy mustache, eyes of a drunken pig crossed with a stoned iguana, had paused outside the Beatle Bar to accost the bartender, a pleasant-faced American man of around fifty. This passing guy’s arm encircled the shoulders of a girl, clearly a prostitute if the sad wanton eyes and make-up and cheap high heels and micro-mini-skirt meant what they said. But this girl could not have been more than 14 years old. Lucy stared at her, outraged, while the piguana yammered at the bartender. His words were incomprehensible at first, some rubbish about a truck, but then he finished that part of his riff and got on to what he clearly considered a more important announcement. “But right now,” he grinned at the bartender, who acknowledged him noncommitally as he continued washing glasses, “I’m heading home to take me a nice, long shower. This little bitch gonna scrub my back. Right, bitch?” he said to her. She smiled and nodded uncomprehendingly, completely lost in English. “And then she’s gonna lick my balls. Right bitch?” She nodded, a little uncertain. He glanced at Lucy, kept talking to the bartender. “Then she gonna open her mouth wide and do what she’s paid for. Right, bitch?” He laughed as she nodded again, smiling tentatively. “She’s a good one, I can tell by her…”

  “Hey mister, you ever heard of the terciopelo snake?” Lucy said, interrupting. He stopped, looked at her.

  “What you say, lady?”

  “I said you know about the terciopelo snake?”

  “Fuck you talking about?”

  “Female snake loves to bite guys in the crotch, and they have got killer venom.”

  “Like I said the fuck you talking about?”

  “This. I’ve got my pet terciopelo in this bag here, and if you don’t close your mouth and go away, mister, I’m gonna let her out and sic her on your sorry ass.”

  He stared at her, then smiled malevolently. “Yeah, right, lady, you got a snake in your bag. You betcha. What’s a matter, lady, don’t like what you’re seein’ here? Hey, this is Costa Rica, lady. A man can do what he wants here, you know.” He squeezed the girl’s shoulders, reached down and rubbed her butt. “You don’t like it, why don’t you go back to Omaha or wherever the fuck you’re from.”

  “You asked for it, mister,” she said, and reached for her bag. As she began to open it he looked worried.

  “Fuck off, lady,” he said. “See ya, Ronnie,” he called out to the bartender, then walked off in a bit of a hurry. Snake-bit.

  A moment later the bartender approached Lucy. “Hey sorry about that. That guy’s notorious for chasing the youngest street girls. Really a major creep.”

  “I’ll say. That kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen.”

  “I know.” He hesitated. “ Hey, you really got a snake in there?”

  “What do you think?” Lucy said. “Of course not. I was just, you know—”

  “Yeah. He be ugly, make him go away. Can’t say I blame you. These days you see girls like twelve out here. Gets worse every year. And guys like him—” He shook his head. “Not like there’s a lot of opportunity around here, you know, for the locals. And since the country doesn’t condemn it—prostitution I mean—some of these poor kids figure why not get an early start. Or their older boyfriends do anyway. Put ‘em out there.” He looked at Lucy. “Hey, get you another beer, chill out after that unpleasantness?”

  “Nah, two’s enough. But I like your Lennon stuff.”

  “Thanks. I saw the Beatles play four times, back in the sixties. Changed my life.”

  “Changed your life?”

  “Hell yeah. Be
came a pacifist hippie, dropped out, took a lot of acid, dodged the draft, ended up here. Beatle bartender. Gotta sweet little house in the hills and a beautiful Tica wife and a pair of daughters that rule my world.”

  “So you like it here.”

  “Yeah, it’s all right. I like that there’s no army, I like the weather and I like the people. Then dudes like him come down here and take advantage. Fucking creep.”

  A couple of guys walked into the bar. The bartender followed. Lucy went back to her notebook, skimmed what else she’d written for a moment— She’d done Manuel Antonio, tooled down the coast to the distant surf and jungle reaches of the Osa Peninsula, meandered back on an endless busride up the Interamerican, and then after creeping over the Cerro de la Muerte, the mountain pass known as the hill of death, she’d re-entered shabby, nondescript San Jose. Now what? After a moment she stopped, completely distracted.

  Not by her own work; not by the guidebook work. Not even by the creep she’d just encountered.

  It was the money again, getting all bound up in her head with these women—girls!—selling themselves cheap, and the crappy hotels being thrown up on the beaches, and the rotted corpse of a guy who died because of somebody else’s money. The Four Señors intrigued her, pissed her off, worried her because they offered redemption. Temptation. Give them the money, get out of town, damn the consequences!

  But she knew she couldn’t do that. What she could do was dig a little deeper into their game, see if there was a way to use them without getting her hands too dirty. That was her next move, she decided as she headed back in the direction of her new digs at the Britannia Hotel, a much finer hangout than the Grand. And pricier, but this was a freebie, thanks to the almighty Grunwald.

  Lucy holed up in her room and read Four Señors brochures for a while, seeking a clue. Then she called her friend Mickey in New York.