Wreckers' Key

by Christine Kling

  I was about three blocks from home when the engine stalled and I drifted off the road onto the swale to allow the vehicle behind me to pass. I sat still, eyes on the mirror, watching the lights that did not move. I unzipped the side window and stuck out my arm, waving him past. Still the lights did not move. I couldn’t see anything behind the glare, but judging from the height of those lights, it was a big, high vehicle, like a truck. The idling engine rumbled softly as the driver tapped lightly on the accelerator, and I reminded myself to breathe as my heartbeat doubled its rate.

  Moving slowly, I took the strap of my shoulder bag and slung the bag diagonally across my chest, shoulder-to-hip. I gauged the distance between my Jeep and the cul-de-sac ahead where I could cut out to the seawall and follow it through the two lawns that would eventually lead me to the Larsens’ place. I figured I could cover the distance in less than thirty seconds at a dead run. My hand closed around the door handle lever.

  I hit the street running and heard the squeal of the tires spinning on the pavement behind me as the driver failed to release the brake before the engine’s RPMs had climbed the dial. When the tires caught, I was halfway there, watching the familiar homes on either side of me pass in a watery-eyed blur. My breath felt like sandpaper in my throat as I pumped my arms and heard the big engine growing louder, eating up the few hundred feet that separated us like a crazed Pac-Man.

  I hurdled the hedge that rimmed the Martinez property and threw my body at the wooden fence surrounding their backyard. It’s amazing what adrenaline can do. These arms of mine, which usually struggled to do a single pull-up, grabbed the top of the fence and pulled my body up with them. I got one leg over the top, rolled over the edge, and fell to the ground on the other side, crushing a bed of impatiens. Dusting the dirt and flower petals off my hands, I put my eye to the gap between the boards. The vehicle was gone.

  I made my way out to the seawall and walked across the backyards of the Larsens’ neighbors. The houses were dark, and other than landscape lighting, they looked abandoned. When I got to the Larsens’ yard, I whistled softly for my dog. She came running, surprised and delighted to find me arriving from the wrong direction.

  I squatted in the bushes, scanning the yard, looking for anything out of the ordinary. What had that been about? I hadn’t actually been trying to look at the vehicle—I’d been intent on getting over the fence—but from the periphery of my vision, I had the impression that it had been a dark-colored SUV. A vehicle very much like the one that had tried to run Cat down in Key West.

  Relieved as I was to make it home, I was reluctant to enter my cottage alone. Did the owner of that vehicle out there know where I lived? Had he followed me from the Sparkses’ house? I hadn’t seen a tail, but then it would be easy for someone who knew where I was going to follow on parallel side streets.

  Someone had already been inside my home, and I didn’t know who. How’d they get in? Like lots of people, I hid a spare key to the place not far from the front door. It was a bad habit I’d picked up from my parents—they so rarely locked the house at all that when they did, we kids often didn’t have our keys. They hid a spare key under a flowerpot. I wasn’t quite that bad. At least I’d graduated to one of those plastic fake rocks and I kept it hidden under a bougainvillea bush. When I’d checked it this morning, the key had been there, but there was no way to tell if someone had used it the night before.

  Nothing looked disturbed as I crossed the yard, Abaco trotting at my side, nosing my hand and asking me to pet her. My cottage looked unchanged. I squatted down and saw that my fake rock was resting there, looking as real as ever. After unlocking the front door, I sent the dog inside first. She disappeared and didn’t make any noise, no barking, no sound of running doggy nails on the Dade County pine floors.

  I pushed open the door and reached in for the light switch. The lamp on the end table switched on. The place was so small, I could see it all from the doorway, since the bedroom door was standing open. Unless he was hiding in the bedroom closet, there was no bogeyman in my place. The living room, kitchen, bedroom— all looked just as I had left them that morning. Abaco was sitting on the couch smiling her doggy smile, her tongue hanging out one corner of her mouth.

  I dialed the nonemergency number of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and was greeted with the robotic voice telling me that if I knew my party’s extension I could dial it at any time. If I wanted the detective bureau, please press one, if I wanted robbery, press two, homicide, press three. I tried several numbers, hoping to get a human being. Finally, I did.

  I told her I wanted to speak to a Detective Collazo. She told me there were no detectives there.

  “But you’re the police department,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s almost midnight.”

  “Okay, but isn’t that when the bad guys usually come out?”

  She sighed. “If this is not an emergency, you’ll need to call back during regular business hours.”

  “But someone followed me home.”

  “Are they still there?”

  “No.”

  “And you are inside your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like me to send a patrol car out to your residence?”

  I was beginning to feel like some weenie whiner. I had no proof that anything had happened, and I didn’t know how I would explain to a police officer the fear I had felt running in the street earlier. Somebody came into my home and washed the dishes. Someone entered my friend’s room and left her a necklace. Everything I had to report went against what the cops would see as a usual crime. They didn’t vandalize, they cleaned. They didn’t steal, they brought jewelry. None of it made any sense. “No, I guess not. I’ll call back during regular hours tomorrow. Thanks.”

  After I’d double-locked the front door, checked the closet and windows, and got ready for bed, I couldn’t get over a general creepy feeling. Was it just my memory of the fact that someone had been inside here, or had it happened again? When I climbed into bed, I patted the covers and let Abaco jump up on the bedspread, an unusual treat for her. Her warm body resting against mine, I turned out the light and lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling, scratching the scruff of her neck, my eyes wide open. I was tired, but I knew that sleep would not come. It was going to be another very long night.

  XX

  Abaco reminded me, as I was drinking my coffee out on the bench in front of my cottage on Tuesday morning, that I had promised her a dinghy ride and swim, and I had not yet lived up to my word. There are those who would call me crazy for thinking that my dog was giving me some kind of message, but anyone who was watching her run over to the dinghy davits, stick her rump up in the air and whine for my attention, then return and paw at my hands would have gotten the message as clearly as I did.

  The rain and wind from the previous day had cleared out. Though there was a light five-knot breeze out of the west and the temperature was down in the fifties, this morning had cast off Florida’s notorious humidity and the air was so clear and freshly washed, even the blue roof of the Larsens’ new pagoda sparkled. Thoughts of random night visitors and dark threatening vehicles seemed to lose their weight in the bright sunlight.

  After the dog had made her third hopeful trip over to the davits, I decided I could accomplish two things at once by taking her along on a dinghy trip to see the NautiBoy at Hillsboro Inlet.

  I stood up and stretched. “Okay, girl, you talked me into it.”

  She began leaping and gyrating and wagging her tail so violently, she made a truth out of that saying about the tail wagging the dog.

  Inside the cottage, I heard my phone ringing, and I began the usual search to find the portable. This time it was under my sweatshirt on the couch.

  “Hello. Sullivan Towing.”

  “Miss Sullivan, this is Detective Lassiter from Key West.”

  “Hey. I’m surprised to hear from you. What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this, bu
t I thought you’d want to know. I kept thinking about what she said, you know, Ms. Frias, and I decided to make a phone call or two. I learned something, and maybe you can pass the word on to her.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you, Detective.”

  “The last time we talked, Ms. Frias told me to ask an expert. About the windsurfing thing. That kept bugging me. So I did it. I called a guy I used to do some off-duty work for, back when I was still on patrol. The guy’s got a place, a guest house, here on the island, but he used to do that windsurfing shit.”

  “Okay. What did he tell you?”

  “I’m getting to that. I called you. It’s my dime. He told me what he thought and he gave me the name of another guy who’s still doing it. Both of them said the same thing. Said it couldn’t happen that way. Said that if that rope was wrapped around his wrist that way, there’s no way he was flung into the mast. I even showed my buddy the pictures. He laughed.”

  “That’s really interesting, Detective Lassiter, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

  “Yeah, but see, now I know it, too.”

  “Is it enough to get you to really investigate Nestor’s death as a homicide?”

  “Officially? No. On the side? Yeah, I’m gonna be looking into it. I thought Ms. Frias would like to know.”

  “Thanks, Detective. I’ll tell her. We’ll take whatever we can get at this point.”

  After I hung up, I just sat on the couch. I supposed the thing I should have done was tell him some of the things I had learned, and some of what I was guessing. The problem was there was lots more guesswork than solid knowledge at this point. Maybe if I asked around, found a little more evidence to support what I thought Pinder was doing, I’d be able to take it all to Lassiter, turn it over to him, and go back to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  Slipping on boat shoes and zipping up my sweatshirt, I grabbed my handheld VHF radio and then headed for the door. It wasn’t even eight a.m. yet, but I’d been up for a couple of hours after finally abandoning the tossing and turning that had plagued me through the night. As soon as the sky had shown a light gray through my window, I’d been up and trying to read, then trying to paint, successful at neither. I’d needed to do something, and now that I’d decided on a course, I quickly lowered the dinghy into the water and set off downriver.

  Early as it was, I wondered if my grandmother, Faith, would be peering out from behind the blinds when I passed her house. As I rounded the corner, I saw the heart-shaped stern of the yawl Annie docked in front of her house, but there was no sign that anyone was up and about at that hour of the morning.

  Hillsboro was about ten miles north on the Intracoastal waterway, and other than a small section of woods near the historic Bonnet House, the banks of the waterway were crowded over their entire distance with high-rise condos, a few older low-rise apartment buildings, restaurants, and private homes. Mile after mile I saw evidence of the older homes and buildings being torn down and gigantic replacements going up in their places. When a three-bedroom ranch-style home with generous yard sold, it was replaced with a three-story, six-bedroom, eight-thousand-square-foot home built right out to the property line. A small boutique hotel with shuffleboard court would get bulldozed in favor of a thirty-plus-story condo tower with parking and retail on the first several floors. At one point, I was able to see seven construction cranes at the same time. The new joke was they’d become the state bird of Florida.

  The worst part of it all wasn’t that twenty years from now an airplane passenger looking down at this town wouldn’t see any grass or trees, only shoulder-to-shoulder red-tile roofs. The part that made me really sad was that they all looked so similar, and they were never going to be anyone’s home. The condo complexes, the McMansions, were all being built in a pseudo-Spanish style with arches and towers that made them all look alike so they could appeal to investors hoping to turn over the property to other investors. The old retiree apartment buildings with their slapping dominoes and leathery pool ladies or the quirky, individual homes with their pink lawn flamingos that once lined the streets and waterways of my hometown would all soon be gone in favor of these monstrosities that will sit empty most of the year as their owners jet off to Newport or Nice. Lauderdale would become a hollow town with empty stores and vacant schools. These developers think they’re just making money, but really they’re gutting the heart right out of my hometown.

  I stopped briefly in Lake Santa Barbara after the sun had climbed higher and the air had warmed into the upper sixties. Retrieving an old ratty tennis ball out of the Whaler’s forward compartment, I cut the engine, let the dinghy drift, and threw the ball as far as I could for my quivering companion. She launched herself off the bow of the boat and happily swam off in search of her treasure. Each time she retrieved it, I pitched it back out across the blue water again until finally, I started to see her slow. I lifted her forepaws onto the bow and heaved at her collar. Then, once she was aboard, I tried to put at least five feet between us before she started her shaking.

  “Now are you happy?” I asked out loud, watching her rub her wet face against the sweatshirt I’d discarded in the sun.

  Out beyond the dog, I recognized the familiar yellow-green of an Ocean Towing boat that had been making its way southbound down the waterway, but had now diverted into Lake Santa Barbara and was heading directly at me. It looked like a boat of about thirty feet, and its semi-displacement hull was throwing up quite a wake at the speed it was traveling. I could see the outline of two men at the console, but I couldn’t make out anything more about them. There were a couple of seconds there when I started to get a little nervous with them heading straight for me, thinking about the dark vehicle of the night before and getting that Oh shit, here we go again feeling in my gut. I was about to turn the key in the Whaler and move the hell out of the way, but at the last minute he turned aside, his wash rocking and splashing into my boat.

  I was just trying to ride out the wake without putting the gunnels under when I recognized the dreadlocks and realized that one of the men was none other than Quentin Hazell. The other man was the guy he had referred to as Brian at the symposium the day before, and they were both wearing matching neon green shirts.

  “Thanks, guys.”

  “Sorry about that,” Quentin said.

  “Yeah, you look really sorry.” They were both looking at me in my soaked jeans, and then turning their heads away and laughing. “This should be a no-wake zone. It’s manatee season.”

  “We just wanted to say hello when I recognized you over here in your dinghy. I wanted to tell you my news,” Quentin said.

  “It’s not exactly a secret considering you’re wearing one of their shirts. I take it you talked to Pinder and got the job?”

  “Yes. Brian is going to be training me.”

  “I’m happy for you,” I said. I looked at Brian watching us from his seat at the helm. I got the feeling—from the way he looked away and pretended he hadn’t been watching—that Brian wasn’t thrilled about Quentin being friendly with the competition. “Just remember that even though towing work might look easy, people do get hurt in this business. I want you to be careful, you hear?” I knew I sounded like his mother, but I hoped he was reading between the lines.

  Quentin smiled and nodded, bouncing his dreads. “I hear you.”

  “Hey, man,” Brian said. “We’ve got to get going. Boss doesn’t like us wasting time.”

  Quentin handed me a slip of paper. “They gave me a cell phone so they can stay in touch with me. This is the number.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you soon?” I said, hoping to remind him of his commitment to work for me the next day.

  Quentin winked at me, nodded once, and let go of my dinghy.

  I pushed off and floated free of the blindingly green hull. “See ya,” I shouted again, but my words were drowned out by the roar of the engines as they took off across Lake Santa Barbara.

 
It wasn’t difficult to find the NautiBoy along the Intracoastal close to Hillsboro Inlet. There were no large marinas in the area, and knowing that the vessel was about seventy-five feet long narrowed the possibilities even further. As it turned out, she was on a side tie with her stern pointing south, and I recognized the name before I could assess the size of her. Just for politeness’ sake, I tried calling him on the handheld VHF first, but I wasn’t surprised when no one answered. They probably had cell phones, landlines, and satellite phones on board, so the VHF wouldn’t be on at the dock. I tied the Whaler off on the dock just astern of the yacht, told Abaco to stay in the dinghy, and walked down to their gangplank.

  “Hello, anybody aboard?” I shouted.

  A young man wearing the usual khakis and white Polo shirt appeared on the aft deck. “Can I help you?” he asked. He looked like he was barely out of his teens.

  “I hope so. Are you the captain?” I expected him to say no and to offer to take me to the captain, but he surprised me.

  “Yeah, that’s me. What can I do for you?”

  If the captains in this industry got any younger, I thought, they would be boat drivers before they got their driver’s permits for cars.

  I told him who I was, adding that I was in the towing and salvage business and wanted to talk to him. He replied that he had grown up in town and knew Gorda by sight. He invited me aboard. I was glad to get inside the boat and out of the wind with my wet pants. We settled on vinyl chairs in the galley after I told him that I didn’t want to get salt water on the fancy upholstery in the main salon.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or water or anything?”

  “No thanks. I just want to ask you a few questions about the incident last month when you went aground. I hope you won’t think I’m prying,” I said, “but I’m trying to do some research into yacht groundings.”