Backwater Key

by Steven Becker

  Backwater Key

  A Kurt Hunter Mystery

  Steven Becker

  The White Marlin Press

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  1

  I was going the wrong way. The big clue was when I looked up and saw a stream of air bubbles flowing toward the surface instead of the diver that had been there a second ago. In an effort to avoid the pink fins kicking at my head, I had pressed the discharge button on my buoyancy compensator and released too much air. It took a few seconds for my training to kick in and my finger moved to the inflator button. A fresh injection of air allowed me to continue my ascent and a minute later I relaxed when I saw the pink fins again.

  They belonged to my daughter, Allie, and though I was a novice, with only a handful of dives in my logbook, this was her first open-water experience. She had already aced the pool training and the two protected water dives on her path toward becoming a certified diver. I glanced down for one more look at the spectacular coral formations forty feet below and with a kick of my fins, raised my hand above my head and broke through the surface. I squinted in the brilliant sun looking for Allie, and had a quick moment of panic until I spun in a circle and found her. The smile on her face was one of those memories of raising her that I would never forget.

  I looked over at her and, not wanting to endanger her training, raised my right arm, formed a semi-circle, and touched the top of my head with my hand, giving the universal okay sign. She took my cue and did the same before kicking over to the buoy line drifting behind the boat. I followed and a minute later Justine helped us aboard.

  TJ gathered up the two other divers also working on their certifications and we were soon stripping off our gear in the shade of the flybridge of his boat.

  “That was amazing,” Allie said.

  Justine came down and joined us. She hadn’t done this dive, having scheduled a mixed-air dive with TJ’s wife, Alicia later. The ex-CIA analyst and her husband owned and operated Deep Down Divers in Key Largo.

  “What was your favorite part?” Justine asked.

  “We saw a turtle. That was really cool, but it was all great.”

  The two had become close over the last few weeks since I had been granted some visitation rights with Allie. Justine had been instrumental in the transition and it warmed me to see the two of them together and how well they got along. It was also a little scary how it seemed like the three of us had become a family. Allie had helped move our relationship to level seven on a scale of eight. I was almost ready to take that last step.

  “Did you see that school of snapper?” I had never dove Pennekamp Park before. My checkout dives had been closer to the shop. Today, the weather had been near perfect and with a full contingent of six paying customers, TJ had agreed to the extra fuel to run to the park.

  “They were really cool the way they moved together. I’ve seen it in videos, but it was so cool in person.”

  “I’ve never seen fish like that.”

  “It’s not like that everywhere?” Allie asked, her smile fading just a bit.

  “It’s like the fish know the boundaries of the protected area. There’re lots of fish outside the park, but this is special. Let’s switch over our gear and get ready for the next dive.” I didn’t want anything to mute her excitement.

  “Going to move out a bit deeper to the Hole in the Wall.” TJ explained as he climbed down the ladder from the bridge and went forward.

  We were tied to one of the mooring balls on Molasses Reef. The engines started and Alicia nosed the bow forward, placing enough slack for TJ to release the line. She idled through the field of scattered white balls, most with boats tied to them. Justine, Allie, and I all leaned over the gunwales and watched the water change from a clear top-to-bottom turquoise to a deeper indigo with a few darker spots only hinting at what lay below. As a special agent in Biscayne National Park, just to the north of Key Largo, I see this water everyday and it still takes my breath away.

  The procedure was reversed at the new spot and once TJ had secured the boat, we started to change over our BCs and regulators to fresh tanks.

  It was interesting how quickly setting up the gear had become routine, and I watched Allie after I had finished mine. I had started over to help but caught a look from TJ that told me to let her do it herself. As I watched her it amazed me how she had grown and aged more than I had thought possible in the year we had been separated. She was now fifteen, and every bit of a teenager; more grown up than the tween I remembered. Justine had been speculating, based on the amount of time she had her face buried in her phone that she had a boyfriend, but I was in denial—not ready for that step yet.

  Daniel J. Viscount, hopefully my ex-attorney, had performed the miracle that he promised only he could provide and gotten me every other weekend and holidays with Allie. At least for now, my ex and I were on good enough terms that hopefully his services would no longer be needed. It wasn’t the usual sex or money that had split us up, but rather my work and the angry cartel that had firebombed our house. Separately we had both made the move across country, Jane to her sister’s and me to Adams Key.

  The move had been what the park service had offered as their witness protection program. After discovering the largest pot grow ever found on public land out in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California, my family and I had incurred the wrath of the cartel.

  The emergency custody hearing had lasted all of five minutes and it had taken a year and all the wiles and experience of Daniel J. Viscount to level the playing field. This was our second full weekend together after the half-dozen visits it had taken to get her this far toward her certification. Again, I had to hand it to Justine for the ingenuity in getting father and daughter together.

  After securing the boat to the buoy, TJ came back from the bow and called the four divers over for the dive briefing. We were going to sixty feet this time and he explained the terrain, bottom time, and ascent. On the way up we would practice a ten-minute safety stop. The hour-long surface interval had passed quickly and we were soon back in the water.

  I could tell that Allie was more relaxed on this dive. On the first, she had been required to perform several techniques for her certification. This time, with the exception of the safety
stop, it was all for fun. I followed happily behind as Allie glided through the coral heads and slots between the reefs. Fish were schooled under every overhang, with barracudas lurking around the corner waiting to pick off an unsuspecting specimen. With TJ leading us we found the large hole that the dive was named for and when he positioned Allie and I for a picture, I thought that Justine should be there too.

  We passed the next thirty minutes blissfully blowing bubbles until TJ got our attention and we headed back to the line anchoring the mooring ball. Once we were together, we ascended to ten feet and started the safety stop. I was excited for Allie, knowing in ten minutes she would be a certified diver.

  TJ signaled that the time had elapsed and I looked over at Allie. I smiled seeing the look of pure joy on her face. Together we swam under the boat and surfaced at the ladder. Allie’s confidence was evident as she removed her fins, placed them in her left hand and climbed aboard unassisted. I envied her youth; the minute my thirty-eight-year-old body left the water, gravity took over and I felt the pains of my years.

  “Congratulations,” TJ announced to the newly certified divers. They high-fived each other and while TJ and Alicia released the line and moved the boat to deeper water for Justine’s dive, we stripped our gear and placed it in our mesh bags which we stashed beneath the bench.

  Looking over the side as we crossed the reef, we could see the water become darker—soon the bottom was completely obscured. Justine’s dive was scheduled for one-hundred-ten feet, just twenty feet shy of the limit for recreational divers. There were no buoys this deep and I watched TJ and Alicia work together using the GPS and depth finder to locate the dive spot.

  “Drop it,” Alicia called out.

  TJ threw a large orange Styrofoam buoy over the side and I watched the line pay off of it as the weight sank to the bottom. Once it had settled, Alicia moved the boat up-current while TJ went to the bow to release the anchor. When the boat was about a hundred feet from the buoy she called for him to drop it. The anchor splashed into the sea and the chain rattled through the guides. The boat finally settled about ten feet from the buoy.

  Justine was getting ready and Allie had disappeared. I found her sitting in the sun on the deck in front of the cabin frantically working her phone. Though I wanted to go up and be with her, I also knew she needed her time alone. As much as it hurt, I sat down by myself.

  A few minutes later Justine and Alicia were in the water. Allie was still on the foredeck and the other couple was taking selfies off the starboard side.

  “Why don’t you bring a couple of beers up,” TJ called from the bridge.

  I reached into the cooler and grabbed two cans, then a coke that I brought to Allie. I received only a grunt for thanks, but I ignored the teenage mood swing, and took the beer up to the bridge.

  “She did really well. A lot of the kids her age have panic attacks. Lot of drama going on in those teen years.”

  I nodded and opened the beers. Handing one to him, I took a sip of mine. TJ and I had a formed a bond stronger than your basic friendship. Just after I relocated here we had ended up working, together with Mac Travis and Trufante, to bring down a human smuggling ring. When you are under fire with someone, you look at them differently. “She’s a good kid.”

  “How’re you going to make out if those idiots in Washington shut down the government?” he asked.

  If there had been a black cloud hanging over the day, that was it. The opposing parties in D.C. agreed on little, which was generally okay with me even if they didn’t get much done, but their political posturing was now about to affect my paycheck. I didn’t have much in terms of expenses, except the alimony and child support I paid to Jane. But with no paycheck and little savings, I knew defaulting on those payments would be something even Daniel J. Viscount would not be able to do anything about, especially since there was no way I could pay him.

  “I’ll get by. They’re talking about keeping us on this time.” The last shutdown had closed the National Parks. I wasn’t sure how that would work with Biscayne, as it was mostly water. There was no way to put barricades around it.

  “Sure hope so. Seen a big uptick in suspicious activity lately. Did you see that piece in the paper about heroin getting popular again?”

  Just as he spoke we heard a sound that could only be made by multiple outboards. Both of us instinctively panned the horizon for the source, and a few minutes later we saw the forty-foot-plus, narrow-beamed go-fast boat cruise by. I looked over at the two men at the helm, and then the boat, noticing there were no fishing poles aboard.

  “Hey, Dad, did you see that boat? Way cool!” Allie called up from the foredeck.

  I looked behind us now and saw the other couple trying to get a selfie with the boat in the background. It was quickly fading over the horizon. I turned back to Allie, trying to think of a nice way to tell her that it wasn’t all that cool.

  2

  Back at the dock we said our good-byes and made plans for our next visit in two weeks. It had been a great day until the black cloud of the inevitable government shutdown had blown our way. I tried to put it behind me as I took Allie’s picture with her Open Water Certification card. The minute we hit the truck, her head was buried in her phone, posting it on Facebook and Instagram. The speed limit drive back to headquarters surprised me; this might have been the only time I would have preferred some traffic to prolong the day. Justine was heading back to Miami and I had to go back to Adams Key. We had already agreed that she would drive Allie to meet her mom. After hugging them both, I watched Justine’s car pull out of the parking lot.

  Suddenly I felt out of sorts, and turned to the dock where my boat was tied off in its usual slip next to Susan McLeash’s. I jumped aboard my twenty-two-foot center-console park service boat and started the engine. After untying the bowlines I went to the stern, surprised to see that one of Susan’s lines was over mine. I glanced over at her boat and saw footprints in the green dusting of pollen. It surprised me that the boat appeared to have been recently used. My sometimes partner and often nemesis had been reassigned to guiding tours pending a review of some of her actions. As I understood it, the boat was supposedly off limits.

  Filing away the incident in my memory, I decided to temporarily let her off the hook. She had caught me icing down some snapper across the way at Bayfront Park a few weeks ago, and I was still surprised she hadn’t shown the pictures to our boss, at least not yet. Hopefully now I had something on her. I put it from my mind as I pulled into the channel, where I had to concentrate on the long line of boats coming toward the public ramp. After a day on the water, some boaters were quiet; others loud and partying. It was spring break season, which always added to the usual traffic of a beautiful Sunday on the water. If I had been on duty, several boats might have been of interest. I let that thought go when I saw the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission boat off to the side, randomly pulling boaters over to check their licenses and catch. I nodded to the officers as I passed, thinking to myself that they’d chosen a pretty lazy way to police the waters.

  Before I could start an internal rant about the FWC, my phone vibrated and I picked it up. There was a text from Allie thanking me for everything. Instead of a “love you”, there was a big heart emoji at the end. I texted back the old school “love you too” and smiled to myself. Life was good.

  Even the impending shutdown wasn’t going to ruin my day. Maybe it should have, but I didn’t think it would matter. Guessing at unintended consequences had been my undoing before, but I couldn’t see how the looming shutdown would affect me. The furlough orders had come through, but I didn’t believe they actually intended to shut down the park. Ninety percent of the park’s 275 square miles was water. Between the string of barrier islands and the shoreline on the mainland, there were hundreds of miles, and many smugglers’ havens.

  The last go ’round, the government had made a show of blockading off park entrances. That wasn’t going to work here. The boat ramps were operated
by either the cities or Dade County who charged for their use. I expected they’d be unaffected by the political machinations in Washington, but this news had put my boss, Martinez, at his breaking point for the last few weeks. He was a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, who thought he controlled the park from the three computer monitors sitting on his desk. If the government shutdown and the screens went dark, in his mind, so would the park. It was, as always, his budget he was concerned with, and he knew another sequester was likely and the park’s funding would be automatically reduced. To a desk jockey who rode those numbers day in and day out, that could be devastating.

  My official capacity as special agent in the park would be on hold, but my park service house out on Adams Key, my park service boat, and my truck were safe—at least for the short term. I would still be out on the water every day, and if problems arose, I would take care of them, shutdown or not. The worst that could happen was that my park service credit card would be refused and I would have to buy my own gas.

  Some employees felt differently. Susan McLeash, for one, was bitter and vowed to stay home and ride out the shutdown in front of her makeup mirror. Without a paycheck, she might have to pick and choose her happy hours. Martinez would be forced to downgrade his golf game and play the public courses. He had called a staff meeting for the next morning, to tell us all his master plan if the apocalyptic scenario occurred. It wouldn’t be his best moment; those were reserved for the podium.

  The boat was up on plane now, skipping over the small waves as I passed the last marker for the shared channel leading from Bayfront Park and the headquarters building to the open bay. I accelerated, vowing that the smile on my face was not going away, no matter what happened. It was all good, I thought, as I cruised across the pristine flats of the bay. Winter was a memory and the cold fronts were fewer and less severe, allowing for weeks of beautiful weather between them. We were in one of these periods now.