A Fortnight of Fury

by David Culberson

  “I don’t want to fire him. But what choice do I have? He low-balled the project to get the job. My partners accepted the bid, and here we are. He’s broke and wants me to look the other way and allow him to receive construction draws from the bank for work he hasn’t completed. He’s offered me cash to turn my head. I could use the money, but I can’t do that.”

  Tommy was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “You’re r-right, but I’m used to seeing p-people take th-the money.”

  “Would you?”

  “N-no way.”

  “Right,” Arlan replied and smiled.

  “D-do you think he kn-knows he’s going to be fired?”

  “He might suspect it.”

  “M-maybe he’ll be a n-no show—again.”

  They both laughed at that.

  Frank was a likable man. His New Yawk accent and quick smile were disarming. It didn’t hurt that he looked like the pope. The reason he’d last missed an important meeting was as funny as Frank was charming. Frank lived on Puerto Rico, kept an office on St. Thomas and commuted three or four days a week to St. John to check on his construction supervisor. A month earlier, Frank was a no-show for a meeting at the project site. He’d eventually entered Arlan’s office, sat in a chair, wiped sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief and apologized. A commuter flight from San Juan to St. Thomas had crash landed just feet off a beach of a resort on Puerto Rico’s northeast coast shortly after takeoff early that morning. Frank was a passenger. Nobody had been hurt, and the passengers and crew waded to the beach resort where they were kept comfortable while waiting for authorities to show up. Frank didn’t wait. He’d walked, sopping wet, through the lobby of the resort and out to the parking lot where he handed a taxi driver a wet fifty-dollar bill and asked to be driven back to his San Juan apartment. Frank changed into dry clothes and took the next flight to St. Thomas, then taxied across the island and took the ferry to St. John. Arlan had heard radio reports throughout the day about the downed plane with one passenger missing and the subsequent coast guard search for the missing passenger. Arlan smiled as Frank told his story. When Frank had finished and apologized again for being so late, Arlan handed him the office phone and told him he should call the coast guard so they could call off the search. Frank had looked shocked while Arlan told him of the radio reports and that he was the missing passenger. Frank made the call.

  A little after noon Arlan walked out to the parking lot to meet Tommy. They’d decided to pick Frank up at the ferry dock. Tommy shouted at a worker to slow down as he drove his truck out of the parking lot. The worker slowed and smiled back at Tommy. They were about to step into the vehicle when Sherry, a friend who worked at Caneel Bay full-time and helped Arlan with his accounting part-time, drove her Mini Moke into the parking lot and stopped within inches of them. The little British-made vehicle had wheels with independent suspension and could easily climb the island’s steep, rocky roads. It was more a Flintstone-type dune buggy than car, and there weren’t many left on the island. Larger and faster vehicles like Jeeps and Land Rovers were more in favor, particularly since more roads were being paved, making what used to be inaccessible parts of the island accessible.

  “Wh-why don’t you let me take th-the floor b-boards out of this car so you can drive it with y-your feet?” Tommy asked Sherry with a laugh.

  “Tommy, you don’t understand a piece of art when you see it,” Sherry said as she sat in the driver’s seat, her ass inches off the ground. “This is a collector’s item.”

  “Yeah. A j-junk collector.”

  Sherry smiled and asked, “Have either of you heard from Captain Jay?”

  “No. He’s due back in any day. I know they left Florida about eight days ago and planned to stop in the Turks and Caicos and the Dominican Republic. If they spent time at the Hooker Bar in Puerto Plata they might be laid up for a few days,” Arlan said with a smile.

  “Y-you’re no f-fan of Captain Jay,” Tommy said to Sherry and then smiled and asked, “You n-need to kick his ass or something?”

  Sherry didn’t answer Tommy’s question. Instead, she said, “Willie’s been wandering around town mumbling that Maynard pulled his knife on him last night and that Boiled Bob gave him a new dinghy to sleep under. He’s also saying that he heard Boiled Bob and his crew start the engine on the Happy Hobo and leave the bay.”

  “H-he heard them? He d-didn’t see them?”

  “He was under the dinghy, evidently,” Sherry said.

  “What’s that have to do with Jay?” Arlan asked.

  Glancing toward the ground, Sherry said, “Lisa’s disappeared.”

  Neither Arlan nor Tommy said anything. It wasn’t unusual for people who lived on the islands to “disappear” now and then and show up a few days or weeks later. Sherry then explained what she knew of the robbery at the resort the night before.

  “Are you sure it was Boiled Bob?” Arlan asked.

  Sherry said, “He and his crew were definitely the ones who robbed the resort and kidnapped Lisa. Peter was one of the security guards and watched it from a bush outside the lobby.”`

  “He hid in the bushes?” Arlan asked with a smile.

  “I guess they were armed,” Sherry said.

  “Wh-what about Lisa?”

  “Nobody’s seen or heard from her?”

  “No. But the Happy Hobo’s dinghy was tied up to the resort dock, and another one was stolen but no one saw where it went,” Sherry said.

  “Maybe we can take Willie seriously, for once,” Arlan said.

  “S-so it looks like Boiled Bob and his mis-f-fits have taken the H-Happy Hobo too.”

  “Sounds like it was a pretty busy night for Boiled Bob and his troop of whackos,” Arlan said. He looked at Sherry and asked, “Is anybody searching for the boat?”

  “The police came out to the resort this morning, but I don’t think they’ve put two and two together and haven’t tied the Happy Hobo with Lisa’s disappearance yet.”

  “W-we have,” Tommy said. “I’ll c-call Forrest. H-he’ll be able to get a p-plane.”

  After a few moments of silence, Arlan looked into the bay and then to the east toward Puerto Rico and the direction from which Captain Jay would be returning. He took a deep breath and said, “So. Somebody took Captain Jay’s girlfriend. He’s going to be very pissed off.”

  Tommy looked at Sherry, who shrugged nervously. All three knew there would be island-wide, maybe region-wide, repercussions as soon as Captain Jay landed and learned about Lisa.

  * * *

  Boiled Bob sat in the galley of the Happy Hobo with his face resting on his knuckles and his elbows planted on either side of a white porcelain coffee cup that sat on a glossy wooden table, made glossier by the early morning sunlight that shone through the portholes. The Happy Hobo was tucked into a bay on the south side of Peter Island, where they’d been forced to anchor before sunrise, just a couple of hours from where they had started.

  Boiled Bob had planned to sail east during the night and then take a more direct southerly route to their destination, which would require fifty hours of open water navigation. Soon after departing Caneel Bay he’d discovered that the provisions they’d gathered the week before the heist sat in their beat-up truck parked next to the Cruz Bay beach. His crew had loaded a few small personal bags into the dinghy but had neglected to bring the boxes of provisions. Boiled Bob was livid. After questioning everybody, it became clear that the crew had been too excited about the heist and had forgotten to follow orders. The Happy Hobo had little fresh water onboard, no food and no rum. He knew they couldn’t make the passage without provisions, and they couldn’t sail through the popular BVI islands during daylight—not without disguising the boat. He’d decided they’d need to stop for provisions and then wiggle their way through the Leeward Islands, ducking into as many hidden bays as necessary before heading south. Their get
away would be slower and riskier than he’d planned.

  Boiled Bob knew that Peter Island would be the best place to buy supplies. There were no homes and only one resort on the island. They could hide out on the island’s south side and dinghy around the island to the resort and buy provisions. Once provisioned, they’d make the direct passage south.

  Boiled Bob stood, put the coffee cup in the sink and climbed to the deck. He and Long Bill took one of the dinghies through rough seas around the west side of the island to a bay from where they could hike to the island’s only resort. After pulling the dinghy onto the beach they hiked through low-lying island scrub until they reached the resort, which was shut down for hurricane season. They peeked through the palm trees and saw a skeleton maintenance crew working on the landscape and a security guard sleeping on a lounge chair in the shade of a palm tree near the beach. They walked through the lobby and found its only store closed and locked. The bar and restaurant were also locked up tight. Skirting the beach, they walked to the back of the resort and found an unlocked warehouse where they found no food or water but passed a storeroom with tools, paint and other supplies.

  “Look at all those supplies, Boss,” Long Bill said.

  “Fuck that. We need food and water.”

  Dejected, Boiled Bob led Long Bill back toward the dinghy.

  Long Bill ran into a four-foot-wide century plant on the edge of the trail. One of the barbs at the tip of one of the long agave leaves stabbed his thigh and stuck.

  “Ouch. Damn that hurt. I didn’t even see that damn century plant. It was hidden behind that sea grape,” Long Bill said as he wiped the blood from his leg and pointed back at the jumbled beach vegetation.

  That’s when Boiled Bob had an epiphany.

  “Come on,” Boiled Bob said. “We’re going back to the storeroom.”

  After three short hikes from the warehouse to the beach, Boiled Bob and Long Bill lumbered their overloaded dinghy back to the Happy Hobo.

  Chapter 3

  DAY 3: OCTOBER 16

  The news about Lisa sufficiently distracted Arlan enough to lose interest in firing Frank until he knew what the next few days would bring. He and Tommy might be too busy dealing with Captain Jay and the Black Ops to handle organizing a new crew to take over construction. When they’d met later in the morning Arlan had told Frank he was on thin ice and either needed to bring the construction progress up to the value of the draw requests he’d made or he wasn’t going to get paid. Frank argued but eventually smiled and promised Arlan that he’d make more progress. Arlan accepted Frank’s plea but knew it was a promise he couldn’t make. Arlan would need to deal with that problem later.

  In the afternoon Tommy spotted Captain Jay’s three-boat flotilla from the top of one of the roofs of the new buildings at Gallows Point. He was showing a construction crew how to cut nineteen-gauge, corrugated galvanized metal roofing by loading a Skilsaw blade backwards and more or less melting it with friction. Modern electric metal snips hadn’t made it to the island yet, and this archaic method was mind-jarring work, exacerbated by the Caribbean sun. After a few minutes the person holding the Skilsaw would experience severe headaches. Even from a distance Arlan and nearby workers winced at the metal-on-metal screeching.

  Tommy shut the Skilsaw off, shouted to anybody who could hear that Captain Jay had arrived and pointed to the east to Pillsbury Sound. About a mile out were three, forty-foot-plus fiberglass boats running at full speed toward the bay, their wakes washing over the buoy that marked a shallow reef on the north side of Stevens Cay, a half-acre island between St. John and St. Thomas. Arlan squinted from ground level toward the cay and saw the unusual sight of three similar dive boats in formation. It could only be Captain Jay.

  Arlan took the Jeep down to the dock to meet Captain Jay so he could be the first to give him the news about Lisa, though he didn’t know much more than she’d been kidnapped by Boiled Bob and was likely on the Happy Hobo, wherever it might be. It would be better that Arlan told Jay before he heard it from somebody on the dock, who would inevitably tell a version of the story that had circulated through the island’s rumor mill, embellished or changed each time it was regurgitated.

  By the time Captain Jay returned, most island residents had heard of the thefts, the robbery and the kidnapping. Most shrugged off the thefts and robbery with a smile, assuming that things would end well, and the events would be something to laugh about for the foreseeable future. Only those closest to Lisa or her father gave the news of her kidnapping serious consideration. Unfortunately for Boiled Bob, this group included some of the island’s most dangerous characters—a half dozen ex-mercenaries and retired paramilitary from all over the world who happened to have moved to St. John in search of a more tranquil environment. Tranquility, though, didn’t fit well into a warrior’s personality, and it didn’t take long for them to find each other and form a loose covert group that would occasionally hire out for clandestine operations, mostly hostage rescue missions around the Caribbean and Central America. They had plenty of physical talent but lacked literary creativity, calling themselves the Black Ops, and their informal headquarters was the missing Happy Hobo. Stu, the owner of the boat and father-in-law of a South African mercenary who’d married his oldest daughter, was too old to be an active member of the group but was happy to let them use the Happy Hobo as their headquarters when needed. They sometimes used the sailboat as cover to get to and from their destinations. Few on the island knew the Black Ops existed. Most paid no attention or assumed it was just another rumor.

  The Black Ops had its heyday the decade before Arlan moved to the island, but the aging group still carried out operations not too far from home. Charlie Kline, a CIA operative who had started the first dive shop on the island as a front for his real life, was the founder of the Black Ops. Charlie would frequently disappear for months at a time with no word that he was going or that he’d return. When asked about his absence, the large, quiet man would respond with a smile and a gruff, “As the wind blows.”

  Arlan had no doubt that all or some Black Ops members would take action to find Boiled Bob and punish him appropriately—unless Captain Jay got there first. Captain Jay’s level of punishment would go far beyond appropriate.

  Arlan parked near the ferryboat ticket kiosk. Two ferryboats were tied to the dock. One was empty. The other was loading tourists and locals and would leave at the top of the hour for a twenty-minute run to Red Hook, on the east end of St. Thomas, where it would load passengers and return to St. John at the top of the next hour, passing its sister ship that would be on the same route at the same times, but in reverse.

  Arlan walked onto the dock and looked toward the entrance of the bay. He saw that Captain Jay’s flotilla had reached the buoy that marked the entrance to the bay where most boats pulled their engines back to just beyond idle so they could politely navigate the bay and the many liveaboard boats. Two of the boats slowed and proceeded at a crawl. One didn’t. Arlan smiled as he recognized who captained the still speeding boat. Six feet two with short blond hair and Hollywood good looks, Captain Jay wore red Speedo bikini swim trunks, aviator sunglasses and a giant grin. He was probably wearing flip flops but Arlan couldn’t see his feet. The boat sped toward the dock, pushing its large wake into the anchored boats behind it. Passengers on the ferry took notice, as did most people on the dock and in the park across from the dock. Knowing what was coming, Arlan smiled. Nobody else did. Arlan saw the chiseled black shape of Gizmo, Captain Jay’s right-hand man from the island of Jost Van Dyke, step onto the bow with a coiled rope in his hand as Captain Jay’s boat headed toward the dock at ramming speed. The captain of the ferry looked over and saw Arlan, who was still smiling, then looked back to the speeding boat and began to laugh.

  “Dat be Captain Jay and his new boat?” the captain shouted down from the wheelhouse.

  Arlan nodded.

  “I guess der will be a s
how for da passengers today,” the captain said.

  “You know Captain Jay, Ashley.”

  “Tis fo true,” the captain said as he surveyed the dock and the gathering crowd of onlookers.

  Several people on the liveaboard boats had come onto their decks looking for somebody to yell at. Those who recognized Captain Jay smiled and checked their dinghy lines as their boats bounced in Captain Jay’s wake. The few who didn’t know Captain Jay shook their fists at the boat and shouted obscenities.

  Arlan heard a tourist on the top deck of the ferry shriek, “He’s going to hit the dock. Oh, my God.”

  Captain Jay’s shoulders heaved up and down as he laughed. Gizmo saw Arlan and smiled as he balanced on the bow. Gizmo was a superb athlete, which was critical for what he was expected to do next. Captain Jay brought his new fiberglass, twin-diesel-engine boat alongside the opposite side of the dock where the ferryboats were tied, still moving forward at a very fast pace. Thirty feet from where the end of the dock met the beach Captain Jay threw both diesel engines into reverse, immediately stopping the boat and churning up a mass of seawater and bubbles. Gizmo kept his balance during the maneuver and, with a pause in the boat’s forward momentum, jumped to the dock with the coiled bow line, wrapped it once around the large steel cleat and held tight while Captain Jay shifted the throttles to neutral. The boat settled in its bubbly wake inches from the dock, and Gizmo finished tying off the bow.

  Everybody on the dock and ferry stared in fascination. Arlan had already placed himself near where he thought the stern would end up. Captain Jay shut the engines down, walked to the stern with a large grin and tossed the stern line to Arlan. Arlan tied it off, securing the boat to the dock. Captain Jay, whose chiseled body sported a dozen or so scars from knives and bullets, stepped onto the dock with a big Elvis-like grin and gave Arlan a crushing hug.

  “Hey, Rookie. You should’ve come along. We had a great time. What do you think of my new boat?” Captain Jay asked and swept his palm toward his newest asset.