The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Harbour Island (shortened to “Briland” by locals) lies just a five-minute taxi-boat ride across a shallow bay from Eleuthera (likewise shortened to “ ’Lutra”). Kenny worked as head of security for Romora Bay, a marina resort on Briland’s harbor side.

  Over the previous couple of days, the police had been handing out flyers about Colt all over North Eleuthera. There’d been no recent sightings and there hadn’t been any at all on Harbour Island, but on Saturday, a power even higher than the Royal Bahamian Police Force sent a definitive heads-up to Kenny that today was the day.

  “When He told me the Bandit was comin’, I was axin’ the Lord what should I do when he gets here?” God wasn’t too specific with His answer, so just to cover his bases, Kenny also texted a message to RBPF detective Sergeant Hart at the Briland station: “When the Barefoot Bandit come, what should I do?”

  Hart didn’t answer right away, but as Kenny pulled on his black SECURITY T-shirt to start his twelve-hour night shift, he made a fateful decision. “I have three licensed guns and I usually carry a shotgun when I’m on duty.”

  Kenny packs a gun for its deterrent effect against what he calls the “little lootin’” that goes on. “This island is so calm and so lovely, people leave their doors open… and the looters look for that.”

  There wouldn’t be any looting on Briland, Kenny says, if only the Bahamians would stop using the “old England–style, the old Angelo-Saxon–style” of policing where they don’t offer rewards. “It’s a very small community,” he says. “People know who is the culprits, but they just hush hush. If there was a little reward, oh my God, the police start nabbing, back after back.”

  Kenny says the looters “look to see if you don’t have a camera or manpower security. And manpower is best to keep them away.”

  Strachan’s manpower strategy is ninja. “I wear a black hooded jacket and stay in the dark bush, low, like a cat, and you don’t see me.” The potential thieves never know where Kenny is, and he’s also let word spread around that he brings along his little friend when he patrols. “Like hogs in a pen, looters know where it’s safe to rub they skins. So when they hear you have guns, they stay away.”

  There hasn’t been a theft at Romora Bay since Kenny took on the job.

  Saturday evening, though, Kenny decided to leave the shotgun in his room. “After the Lord showed me His plan that this boy was comin’ to me, I said, ‘I ain’t gonna have no gun when he come.’”

  The Bahamian police and FBI were warning everyone that Colt was armed and dangerous, but that didn’t worry Kenny. “I wasn’t scared,” he says with a big gap-toothed smile. He had faith that the Barefoot Bandit was coming, and his plan was still to stop him, but he didn’t want to hurt him.

  An unmarried father of three (“That’s the way it is here in the Bahamas, with a lot of no-wedlock children”), Kenny keeps himself in great shape. Broad-shouldered, six-one, 212 pounds, he cuts an imposing figure in his tight black shirt. “I’m really strong, and if he didn’t stop when I asked him to, then my plan was I would toss him and wrassle him.”

  At 7:38 p.m., Kenny’s phone buzzed with an answer from Sergeant Hart: “Bust his ass and hold him until I come.”

  AT THE AIRPORT, I’D gotten the expected stew of rumors and wild speculation from the taxi drivers. The only concrete info was that the big party tonight was at the Bluff, a small North Eleutheran settlement that hosts a yearly homecoming that draws Bahamian diaspora living in Nassau, Miami, and even farther afield for a major fish fry and bashment. This was one of the years when it fell on Independence Day, which made it even bigger and better.

  A black SUV pulled up and out jumped a petite powerhouse, Petagay Hollinsed-Hartman. Born in Jamaica, Petagay came to the Bahamas via Key West when she and her former husband, Mike Hartman, created a ground-breaking eco resort named Tiamo on Andros Island. Petagay now lived on Eleuthera, raising her daughter, Bella, and running a small guesthouse, BellaMango, along with the Laughing Lizard Café. The Lizard (motto: “No Haters”) lies in Gregory Town, where Petagay serves fruit smoothies to surfers, pumpkin soup to locals like rocker Lenny Kravitz, and jerk chicken wraps to blow-ins such as Robert De Niro.

  The Lizard offers wireless Internet, and I’d warned Petagay (who shares a heaping helping of that islanders’ antiauthoritarian streak) that Colt might stop by to get online. “If he does, I’ll make him a panini,” she said.

  ELEUTHERA IS A GANGLY, 110-mile-long island shaped like a marlin’s skeleton picked clean by sharks. Its bill, severed at Current Cut, points toward Nassau, thirty miles away. The island is so narrow that you can stand on its limestone spine in many spots and see both the indigo Atlantic and the aquamarine waters of the shallow Great Bahama Bank.

  Gregory Town served as the pineapple capital back when Eleuthera exported boatloads of the sweet fruit. The village is now the island’s laid-back surf city during the winter swell season when board riders fill up the guesthouses, spend long days on the break at Surfer’s Beach, and then gather at Elvina’s for twice-weekly music sessions where anyone can walk in and just jam. South of Gregory, Eleuthera is all about quaint towns like Tarpum Bay and Governor’s Harbour, weekly fish fries and sociable bars, world-class bonefishing, and beach after beach of precious pink and white sand. There was a lot of Eleuthera for Colt to roam, but the highest concentration of boats was up in the north and it made sense he’d still be near the top of the island.

  I climbed into Petagay’s truck and we drove straight out to Preacher’s Cave, a nine-mile run from the airport. It seemed too obvious that Colt might be sheltering in the cave where he came ashore, but there’d been a lot of obvious going on lately. It fit the Eleutheran Adventurers’ deliverance story and the Huck Finn archetype, and using the cave wouldn’t be a bad idea as long as he’d already gathered a cache of food and water. There’d be the chance of a tourist stopping by during daylight, but Colt could hide in the surrounding woods and move back in at night. The way Preacher’s entrance faces the open ocean, he’d even be able to build a fire inside to cook and keep bugs away without worrying someone might see the glow.

  After leaving the paved highway, we bounced down a sandy, rutted track carved through dense coppice. There wasn’t another soul on the road. The last quarter mile was a narrow, winding path leading into what Bahamians call the backabush. Rainwater filled every pothole and gully. Tropical rule of thumb says that rain one day brings a bloom of biters in three. According to Petagay, they’d had occasional drenching showers all week, which meant the mozzies and nippers would be insatiable. I wondered if Colt had picked up bug juice somewhere along the way.

  We parked in a deserted little clearing just as the sun was setting. As we started walking up the sand trail toward the cave, I suddenly thought of something. “Do you have your keys?” I asked Petagay. She looked at me like I was a little crazy, but I convinced her to lock the truck and bring the key while I grabbed my backpack, which held all my gear and notes. It was too easy—and fitting to the story—to imagine us coming out of the cave and finding the truck gone.

  Petagay got her Nancy Drew on, checking out footprints. One set leading to the cave was especially large. I noticed a hum that grew louder as we walked. At first I thought it was the sound of waves, but that didn’t make any sense since we were heading away from the shore. By the time we could feel the cave’s cool exhale, the noise had swelled to the buzz of an electrical power station. I stopped and looked at Petagay.

  “Bees,” she said.

  A huge hive grew on the upper lip of the cave’s mouth. Hundreds of bees swarmed about twenty feet above us, their drone magnified and emanating from the entrance as a single ominous note. The twilight penetrated only a few feet past the cave opening, where two rocks poked like fangs from the ground. Beyond that, a patch of luminous sand pooled beneath a natural skylight. Beyond that was black.

  Petagay pulled a small flashlight out of her shorts and clicked it on. We stood together at the edge of the darkness, o
ur eyes intently following her light’s sickly yellow glow as it seeped across the rock walls. The weak beam reached only a short distance, so I slowly moved ahead while Petagay held the light above my shoulder to show the way.

  Bats that cling upside down inside pockmarks in the cave ceiling were just beginning to stir. We’d gone about sixty feet, past several ancient Lucayan graves, when Petagay’s flashlight died. Ruh-roh.

  “Colt?” I called out into the blackness. “Don’t shoot… ” No answer.

  Bees, bats, Lucayan and Puritan spirits, yes, but there was none of that Coltish energy inside Preacher’s Cave.

  I dug out a headlamp and its cold-blue LEDs blasted any remaining chills out of the cave. Petagay went back to the entrance looking for signs anyone had built a fire. I took the light and searched all the way to the back of the cave, where I found a small opening that looked like it might be a passageway. I got down on all fours and crawled inside. It didn’t go far before it turned vertical like a chimney. I shined my light up. The cave had saved one last tingle: a giant spider sprawled across its web a foot above my head. I thought of young Colton befriending the spider in his Camano backyard. He could have put a leash on this one and walked it.

  Petagay found some wood burned to charcoal, but it looked more than a couple days old. We left the cave and walked through the lush seagrapes that enveloped a dune. Over the rise, the trail led to one of the island’s most beautiful reveals: a long coral-sand beach bordering baby blanket–blue water. We slipped out of our shoes and the sand felt silky cool underfoot. The light was failing rapidly as it does in the tropics once the sun sets, but I could still make out the color change that marked the Devil’s Backbone where Colt had grounded the Sea Ray. He’d misjudged the tide. There hadn’t been enough water atop the coral to get the boat across without wrecking its running gear so badly that it would eventually have to be towed all the way to Fort Lauderdale for repairs.

  Like the Eluetheran Adventurers, though, Colt had managed to wade ashore. Of course the colonists didn’t have to worry about keeping their laptops and iPods out of the salt water.

  We walked back inland, losing the hint of cool ocean breeze and wading back into the humidity. Mosquitoes found us and the sudden screaming trills of cicadas tore through the still air. We had the SUV as a refuge, but Colt left Preacher’s on foot. He’d presumably Google Earthed the island and knew he could follow the roads to the North Eleuthera Airport and the pockets of civilization where he could forage for food. His only other options were to stick to the coast and slog along the edge of a mangrove swamp or to try to pick his way through the backabush.

  The forest here is a labyrinth of ram’s horn, thatch palm, wild dilly, granny bush, and gumbo limbo—nicknamed the “tourist tree” because its peeling bark mimics sunburned skin. Within this confusion of green, brown, and gray sprout shrubs valued by bush medicine practitioners, local alchemists who muddle and mash the leaves of explicitly named plants like “strong back” and “stiff cock” to make therapeutic potions. Radiant tiger lily blooms perch amid the dusty scrub like exotic birds, providing the only splashes of color. If Colt wanted to scout the area by climbing a tree, the tallest were leafy evergreens of the genus Metopium. Petagay’s husband, Mike, shimmied up one of these to survey their Andros property when he, too, was a Bahamas tenderfoot. They had to airlift him to a Nassau hospital. The tree’s common name—which is helpful, but not until you know how to identify it—is poisonwood, and its toxic sap can leave the unwary covered in agonizingly itchy blisters.

  We climbed back in the truck. On the road, a car coming the opposite way suddenly zigzagged and then stopped in our lane, its driver hanging out the window shining a flashlight along the shoulder.

  “Land crab season,” said Petagay. During the summer, these beefy crustaceans climb out of their deep burrows in the sandy forest floor and scuttle en masse to meet and mate in the sea. The next person we saw was a successful hunter pedaling his bike home with a huge crab on the handlebars. With its arms spread wide and claws held high, the crab looked like a roller-coaster rider enjoying a downhill rush. Its amusement would end with a couple days in a pen being fed coconut to purge its system and sweeten its meat before a short visit to a hot kettle.

  Petagay suggested we check the area’s Haitian settlement, so we bumped along a sad excuse for a dirt road that wound through the bush. A large number of refugees have settled illegally in the Bahamas, many squatting in tin shacks or simple concrete-block homes.

  A stereo balanced on the sill of a screenless window poured music into a brown grass yard where five children danced in the dusky light. They waved. Everyone we saw waved. We passed six guys carrying a refrigerator along the road, laughing and joking in Creole. We stopped to ask if they’d seen Colt, but they spoke very little English. We whittled our question down to “Tall white boy?” which got the point across, but they said no.

  Next we drove to Jean’s Bay dock, where taxi boats connect North Eleuthera with the island of Spanish Wells, a white-Bahamian enclave that’s home to the best commercial lobster fishermen in the country. They don’t allow alcohol sales on Spanish Wells, so the spot where its residents step ashore on Eleuthera is dominated by a large liquor store painted like a giant Kalik label that’s visible from a mile at sea. Wooden garages line the road leading from the dock, most housing vehicles used by Spanish Wells residents during their visits to “mainland” Eleuthera. It’d be the perfect place to commandeer a car, as it might take a week or more before anyone noticed it was missing. All of the padlocks looked intact, though.

  We tried calling around the island to see if anyone had heard anything new. Petagay got momentary cell service, then lost it. The islands were having more than their usual hefty share of phone and electrical issues. A pleasure boat off Briland had snagged an underwater cable with its anchor and unplugged almost all the islands’ communications for three days. Additional power grid problems also kept cutting electrical as well as cell phone service. Colt, once again, was catching some lucky breaks.

  Petagay and I then drove to Three Island Dock—or as most tourists hear the Bahamian pronunciation, “Tree Island Dock.” Here, a small limestone peninsula forms a protected lagoon that’s home port for a fleet of small taxi boats that connect North Eleuthera to Harbour Island via a $5 two-mile ride. As usual, a couple of boat drivers sat on the cement seawall talking sip-sip (gossip) with the van drivers who link the dock to the rest of Eleuthera.

  “Yeah, he messed with my boat Wednesday night,” said a burly driver with the sitcom name of Ricky Ricardo. “The tools he used is still in there.” Ricky said three boats had been messed with over the course of two nights. “He really tear up that Bertram there, cut up the wires, fool with the ignition, do something to the engine and the gas… The guy couldn’t run it for the whole day, had to call out a mechanic.”

  The Bertram, a twenty-eight-foot classic sportfisher, had a complicated ignition that required both a key and a safety switch, which Colt wasn’t able to figure out. Ricky’s boat was a twenty-four-foot cuddy cabin set up to ferry a dozen people back and forth to Briland. None of the boats was Colt’s preferred style.

  “He took one of the key switches and he try to take my batteries. I had the terminals on real tight and he couldn’t get them off so he tried to cut the wires. Why he try to take my battery?” Ricardo asked.

  I shook my head. Unlike the Abacos, where there are as many boats as cars, Eleuthera has only a couple of marinas and they both lay south, miles away. There were boats around the north end that fit Colt’s predilection for speed and style, but they were across the bay at Harbour Island. He’d need a boat just to get over to the better selection. That explained the attempts on the taxi boats. Why, though, try to take a battery?

  Ricky Ricardo said he’d actually seen Colton on Wednesday night. “He was walking to the dock, tall guy, short brown hair, no shoes—and that’s what I noticed because I only ever know two white guys who walk on the road baref
oot.”

  Ricardo said other boat drivers had also seen the Bandit. “He was sea bathing in the evening, floating in the cove around the corner… just seem like a young man, just a tourist.” They took notice because the cove is lined with ironshore—limestone bank eroded into chisel-sharp points easily capable of slicing through skin. Only the toughest leather-bottomed bare feet could make it across even a short patch of ironshore without being shredded.

  The police eventually showed up with a flyer featuring Colt’s picture, and the boat drivers ID’d him.

  ACROSS THE PIER FROM the taxi boats lies the tropically painted and grandly named Coakley’s International Sporting Lounge. Coakley’s consists of a small rum shop with a large covered patio and a pool table that provides the sport. Petagay and I pulled out two of the half dozen bar stools and ordered Kaliks. The name of the local beer comes from the sound of a cowbell, one of the most important instruments, along with whistles and goatskin drums, that create the Bahamas’ frenetically loud Junkanoo music.

  Denaldo Bain pulled a couple of cold ones from a glass-front fridge that provided the brightest light in the nice, dark bar. Behind Denaldo, shelves held maybe a hundred liquor bottles, mainly rums. A TV suspended in the corner played a Schwarzenegger movie. Jamaican reggae pumping out of the stereo mercifully drowned the one-liners.

  I asked Denaldo, who lays down rap songs when he’s not tending bar at Coakley’s, whether anything strange had happened on his side of the dock in the last few days. He said there’d been a break-in Wednesday night.