Baja Florida (12 page)

Getting Delgado back to his room was a four-man job. Boggy and I each grabbed a leg. Charlie took one arm and the young man took the other.

We stopped once just outside the bar when Delgado started throwing up. We rolled him on his side and let him do what he had to do and then he was out again.

When we reached Room 221, I swiped Delgado's card key through the scanner/lock on the door. I'm no good with those things. I kept getting the red light.

“Here, let me,” the young man said.

First try—bingo.

We carried Delgado inside and lowered him onto the bed. The room was ice-cold, the thermostat probably turned as low as it would go. Rivulets of condensation streamed down the sliding-glass door that opened to a small patio overlooking the marina. I flipped on some lights to get a better look around.

Not much to see besides what came with the room. Empty Kalik bottles in the garbage can. Clothes on the floor. Wadded-up receipts and a yellow legal pad atop the dresser.

I gave the legal pad a look. The pages were empty. I started going through the dresser drawers.

Boggy nosed around in the bathroom. Charlie checked out the patio.

The young man leaned against a wall by the TV console, hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, watching my every move.

He said, “You sure took care of Mr. Delgado.”

“I had lots of help. Me and eight margaritas versus him.”

He laughed.

“Yeah, he was out of it by the time I got to the bar,” he said. “What did you do to piss him off anyway?”

“Came here to finish the job he was hired to do.”

The young man cocked his head, studied me closer.

“You a detective like him?”

“Nope.”

I felt around under Delgado's T-shirts and socks. Found nothing.

“But you're looking for Jen, too?”

I stopped riffling through the drawer. I looked at the young man.

“You say that as if you know her.”

“Yeah, I do. I was with her on the boat. That's why I was in the bar with Mr. Delgado. I saw a flyer he put up and gave him a call and he said to meet him here.”

I stepped away from the dresser.

“What's your name?”

“Will,” he said. “Will Moody.”

He gave me a smile and stuck out his hand. I shook it. His handshake was firm and he looked me straight in the eyes.

As I'd listened to Karen Breakell tell me about those on board the
Chasin' Molly
, I'd formed a mental image of Will Moody and his friend, Pete Crumrine. College boys. Fraternity buds probably. Crumrine headed for law school. Moody for med school. I'd imagined them as clean-cut, preppy types. Izod shirts and Duck Head pants and Topsiders on their feet. If there was anything scruffy about them it was the kind of scruffy that could be washed away in a hurry should they need to make a good impression on a dean or the parents of a girlfriend or Mom and Dad at the country club for dinner.

The young man standing before me didn't fit that picture. He looked a little older than I had imagined. He wasn't exactly unkempt. His hair was clean enough. His T-shirt and shorts, though faded, appeared recently washed. He looked like lots of young guys who spend time on boats. With them, there is the tendency to let things go, to keep grooming time at a minimum. Not to the point of slovenliness, but just short of it.

Then again, you can take an investment banker in a Barney's suit, put him on a sailboat in the islands, and witness the transformation. Within a day or two he's throwing away the Gillette disposables, wearing a bandanna, and wondering how he'd look in dreadlocks.

“So where's Jen? Does she know people are looking for her up and down the Bahamas?”

Moody grinned and shook his head.

“You guys are so blowing this out of proportion. Like I was telling him…” He nodded at Delgado again. “There's nothing to worry about. Jen's fine. She should be arriving at her dad's place any day now.”

“Where is she right now?”

“I couldn't tell you exactly. Last I saw her…”

“When was that?”

“Day before yesterday,” he said. “They were heading for Nassau. Then they were maybe stopping at Eleuthera or somewhere before going wherever it is her dad's place is at.”

“They?”

“Jen, Torrey, Pete, and Justin.”

“Why aren't you with them?”

He shrugged.

“I don't know. I'd had enough, I guess. I just wanted to get off the boat and do my own thing.”

“Like Karen Breakell.”

“Yeah, like that. Wonder if she ever made it off that little island we stopped at.”

“She did,” I said. “I saw her just a couple of hours ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Over on Green Turtle Cay. She landed a crew job on a charter boat. It'll be docking here in Marsh Harbour this evening.”

“You know where?”

“Blue Sky Marina,” I said. “Name of the boat is
Trifecta.
”

“Cool,” he said. “Maybe I'll look her up. I like Karen. She's got her shit straight.”

There were plenty of other things I wanted to ask him, but a cell phone started ringing. It was coming from one of Delgado's pockets. I got it just before the fourth ring.

“Is this Mr. Delgado?”

A man's voice. Bahamian accent.

“I'm an associate,” I said.

There was hesitation on the other end. And then the man said, “I am calling back as we agreed.”

“Is this about the boat?”

“Yah, mon. He said he would have the money for me and…”

The call started breaking up.

“Hold on, hold on,” I said.

I hurried from the room and onto the patio. I closed the sliding door behind me. Didn't want to let the cold out. Will Moody had started after me, but stopped on the other side of the glass.

“You there?”

“Yah, mon. Right here.”

“Tell me about the boat.”

“First I need to see that money.”

We went back and forth for a while. After we agreed on how to handle it, I stepped back inside.

Boggy and Charlie occupied the room's two chairs. Will Moody had turned on the TV and was flipping through channels. Delgado was still snoring on the bed.

I told them about my conversation with the man on the phone.

Will Moody said, “You going there now?”

“Might as well. Night's still young,” I said. “But I'd like to sit down with you in the morning. Maybe we can catch an early breakfast.”

“Sure, that would be great,” Moody said.

“Where you staying?”

“Oh, this little place just up the road. I forget the name of it.”

There aren't that many choices in Marsh Harbour. I knew most of them.

“Abaco Beach Resort? The Lofty Fig? Dunning's Cottages?”

“That last one,” Moody said. “But why don't I just meet you here at the restaurant, if that's alright.”

“Fine by me. Say seven o'clock?”

“That
is
early,” Moody said. “How about nine?”

“Eight.”

He grinned.

“OK,” he said. “I'll try.”

I gave the room another quick once-over while Boggy pulled a blanket over Delgado. He wasn't going anywhere. I'd check in with him first thing in the morning, maybe drag him along with me to breakfast. We could kiss and make up over coffee.

Charlie turned off the lights. The four of us stepped outside, and I pulled the door shut behind us.

“He tol' me five hunritt dollars. And dat's what I want to see.”

The man said his name was Williamson and we'd met him, as instructed, at a place called Lita's Take-A-Way.

It was on the road going south out of Marsh Harbour. Typical Bahamian fish-fry joint. Weathered shack glorified with turquoise paint and white trim. Wooden shutters propped open above a walk-up window. Old woman in a hairnet taking the orders. A couple of not-quite-so-old women working behind her in the kitchen. Fried fish. Cracked conch. Fried chicken. Conch fritters. You could elevate your cholesterol count just by breathing the air.

Picnic tables sat on a concrete slab illuminated by yellow bug lights that dangled from bamboo poles. A dozen or so men played dominoes at the tables. Each and every one of them casting an eye our way.

Williamson walked out to meet us the moment Charlie swung his rental car into the parking lot. A tall, slender, loose-limbed man with a close-cropped white beard that matched his hair. Might have been forty, might have been seventy. Hard to tell. He had more than half his teeth, but the ones he had were gnarly and stained and there were sizable gaps between them. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt tucked into long brown pants. Black sandals on calloused feet.

We had gotten straight to business.

“I'll pay you two hundred now,” I said. “And the rest if it pans out.”

“Three hundred now,” Williamson said.

“Tell me once more what you saw,” I said.

He told the story again, the same way he told it the first time. He was a lobster fisherman and a few days earlier he had been out on his boat along the west side of Great Abaco. Lobster season was over and Williamson had been pulling his traps, taking them ashore a boatload at a time to clean and repair and get ready for when the season reopened in August.

“I seen da boat, big and bare-masted, come puttering along in the still of morning,” he said. “Took notice of it, too, because dat kind of boat, it don't come near da Marls too often.”

At mention of The Marls, I looked at Charlie and he looked at me.

The Marls is a vast estuarial reserve that gets its name from the gray muck—a combination of clay and dolomite and shell—that is the region's most notable topographical feature. Where there's enough muck to form an islet, mangroves take root, flourish, and create dense broad canopies of green. A spiderweb network of tidal channels, miles and miles of it, cuts among the islets, flooding the estuary with baitfish and the larvae of shrimp, lobster, and conch.

Imagine a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle where every piece looks like every other piece and that pretty much describes The Marls. And it's home to some of the best bonefishing on the planet.

Charlie said, “Brings back fond memories, doesn't it, Zack-o?”

“Don't know if fond is the exact word I'd use to describe those memories.”

A few years back, Charlie and I had chartered a guide for a day of fishing in The Marls. We must have caught and released two dozen bonefish. A splendid excursion.

The next day, feeling cocky about our navigational skills and looking to save a few hundred dollars, we rented a little skiff and set out into The Marls on our own. We caught some fish. We did ourselves proud. But it wasn't until the sun was a few fingers above the horizon that either one of us would admit we were lost. And not just lost but complete head-up-our-butts-without-a-clue in the wilderness.

We would follow a channel that looked like it might lead to open water only to run aground. We would follow another promising channel only to hit the dead end of a mangrove cul-de-sac. We would let the boat drift, hoping it would take us somewhere, but we wound up floating in circles.

The boat didn't have a radio. It got dark. The mosquitoes came out.

These weren't the kind of mosquitoes that could be warded off by mere slapping. These were vicious little saltwater mosquitoes unaccustomed to having large mammals in their presence, and sensing the feast of their brief lives, they were by-God relentless.

After we parted with all the blood we could afford to part with, Charlie and I hit upon the only available solution to our predicament. We dug up muck from the flats and covered ourselves in it from head to toe. It didn't totally thwart the mosquitoes, but at least the little bastards had to work for their meals.

Come morning, some local fishermen found us. And after assuring themselves we weren't lunatic exiles from the Lost Tribe of Mudmen, they led us back toward relative civilization.

Charlie caught me scratching my arms and legs.

“Yeah,” he said, “just thinking about The Marls does me that way, too.”

Williamson told us he had kept an eye on the sailboat as it moved past. At one point, when the boat appeared to have run aground, Williamson cranked up his skiff and headed for it, thinking he might make a few bucks by throwing the captain a line and pulling the sailboat to deeper water. But the sailboat worked free on its own.

“Dat's when I saw it, her name written right across da transom,” he said.

“
Chasin' Molly
?”

“Yah, dat what it say, for true.”

Late that afternoon, heading home, Williamson came across the boat again.

“Only dis time she was out of da water on skids,” he said. “Had the gantry out and they was hauling her in.”

“Who's they?”

Williamson looked around, as if someone might have sneaked up behind him.

“Dem Dailey brothers,” he said. “They stay out the other side of Crossing Place off the road to Hole in the Wall. They got a boatyard. Do that and other things.”

He told me how to get there. I got out the money and handed it to him through the car window. He looked over each bill carefully, then smoothed them out, folded them over, and stuffed them away.

He said, “I'll be sitting right here, waiting 'til you come back.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to the Dailey brothers' boatyard, the last ten minutes of it down a crater-chocked, semisubmerged stretch of limestone that only under the most generous terms could be called a road. The Hyundai that Charlie had picked up at the airport offered exactly nothing in the way of shock absorption. Each jarring bounce threatened to splay it open.

“Perfect car for these conditions,” Charlie said.

“It's a piece of crap,” I said.

“Yes, my friend, but it's a rental piece of crap. That's what makes it perfect.”

The going wasn't made any easier without headlights. We decided to douse them just in case the Daileys weren't in the mood for visitors. Mangrove branches clawed the windshield and scraped the side panels. Fallen limbs pounded against the undercarriage.

It was almost midnight. We could have waited until morning, but I was anxious to get a peek at where
Chasin' Molly
might or might not be. If I could just put my eyes on the boat and confirm that it was here, then that would give me all I needed to contact the police and let them step in to help with the search for Jen Ryser.

The road that wasn't really a road stopped at a makeshift gate that was little more than knobby pine poles and chicken wire. A hand-painted sign said “Private.” The fence that stretched out on either side was not built for high-security purposes, but the brambles and brush that had overgrown it were almost as effective as concertina wire.

Charlie managed to turn the car around and park it pointing it out, the way we'd come in.

“Not that we could haul ass out of here on that road,” he said. “Still, it's a comforting thought.”

We got out and walked up to the gate. No lock and chain holding it shut, just a loop of rope over a post. I unlooped it and we walked in.

It was like entering a boat cemetery. Vessels of every kind on either side of us, big ones and small ones, from trawlers to skiffs. Some were toppled on their sides, wheel houses ripped asunder, flying bridges torn apart. Others were flipped over completely, hulls to the heavens. None would ever touch water again. They had been cannibalized for their parts, picked to the bone like carrion in the desert.

As we moved deeper into the place, we got a feel for its layout. It wasn't particularly well lit, just one flickering light outside a squat block building that appeared to be an office of sorts. Behind it, lined up with barely an arm's length between them—three wooden cottages, each with a sagging porch and in various stages of disrepair. I was expecting dogs to come lunging out from under the porches, but none appeared. A nice piece of luck there. Nothing can put a damper on an evening stroll like dogs coming for you in the dark.

Another hundred feet ahead of us a small cove opened onto the lee of Great Abaco—dull gray water under a dark sky. A long concrete dock stuck out from a concrete seawall, a couple of small boats tied up at it. Alongside the dock sat a broad concrete boat ramp. And towering above the ramp, its wheels in tracks on either side, stood the steel gantry that Williamson had told us about.

The gantry was sturdy and substantial, capable of lifting some very big boats. Its tracks wound away from the ramp and led to a massive Quonset hut hangar. In contrast to the surrounding dereliction, the hangar stood out in the night, a gleaming white, prefabricated building easily fifty yards long and three stories tall. It looked fairly new.

The boatyard was bigger than two Kmart parking lots and we had already decided that the only way to cover it all and get out of there in a hurry would be to split up. I pointed Boggy toward the rows of boats sitting atop cradles at the far end of the property. Charlie would head to the other side and work his way along the waterfront. I would check out the hangar.

“Ten minutes,” I said. “Back here.”

They split off and I continued straight ahead. The hangar loomed larger and larger the closer I got to it. A forklift was parked outside the hangar. A broad garage-style door made of corrugated aluminum was the only entrance I could see. I pulled up on the handle, but it was locked tight.

I walked down one side of the hangar and found no windows that would offer a glimpse inside. There were probably skylights up top. And the hangar's thin vinyl skin, stretched tight on a skeleton of metal ribs, would let in enough ambient light during daytime to illuminate the building without much need for artificial light. Boxy compressors stationed every thirty feet or so fed huge, snakelike ducts that blew cool air into the hangar. All in all, a high-tech and no doubt costly piece of work.

I walked all the way around the hangar and returned to the entrance. I was giving the handle another pull when I heard the last sound anyone wants to hear when you're snooping around someplace where you really shouldn't be: The kachuck-kachuck of a shell being chambered in a shotgun.

Whoever was holding the shotgun didn't have to tell me to freeze. The instinct was automatic. Same with lifting my hands over my head.

A high-beam lantern flipped on and lit up the scene. My silhouette against the hangar made me look gigantic, but I felt damn puny with a gun at my back.

“Turn around real slow.”

I turned and squinted against the light. I saw three faces but couldn't tell much about the men who belonged to them. The bright beam made it impossible to pick up any details.

The one holding the lantern said, “Who the hell are you?”

I told them my name.

“What do you think you're doing out here?”

I told them I was looking for a boat.

“So you just come sneaking around in the middle of the night? You planning on stealing this boat or something? That what you planning to do?”

“No. I just wanted to see if it was here.”

“We got lots of boats. Exactly what kind of boat are you looking for?”

“A Beneteau 54. New one. It's called
Chasin' Molly.
”

I heard them mumbling among themselves. Then the one with the lantern nodded toward the block building.

“Start walking,” he said.