Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (4 page)

“Shouldn’t they be here already?” Rusty asked. I rolled my eyes at my old friend. He’d asked the same question about every fifteen minutes since I got here. Deuce had called me at 0600 to say they were passing Alligator Reef, and I’d come down to the
Rusty Anchor
in my skiff from my island in the Content Keys.

“Dammit, Rusty!” I said a bit too excitedly, causing Pescador to lift his shaggy black head from the floor. “They’ll be here when they get here. It’s a sailboat, not a Donzi. The wind’s light, so they’re probably under power.” Pescador is my dog. I found him a year ago, stranded on a sandbar after a hurricane, catching fish. He was catching the fish, not me. Turns out that even though I’m a licensed offshore fishing charter boat Captain, my dog was the better fisherman—hence his name, Spanish for fisherman. He’s been living with me ever since.

My relationship with the short, three-hundred-pound, bald, bearded man on the other side of the bar went back much further, nearly three decades. We first met on a Greyhound bus headed to Parris Island in the early summer of 1979. We were in the same platoon in Boot Camp and were stationed together a couple of times before he left the Marine Corps. I was his best man when he married his high school sweetheart in 1981 and sat next to him at her funeral, just two years later. She died giving birth to their only child, Julie, named for her mother, Juliet.

We’d stayed in touch over the years since he’d returned home to the Keys to take care of his daughter. I’d visited from time to time, staying at his home in Marathon. Seven years ago last June, I retired from the Corps after twenty years of service and moved down here myself. I’d always loved the Keys, ever since I was a kid growing up in Fort Myers. I’d also stood as best man when Julie married Deuce. They were due back from their honeymoon today. The wedding was almost two months ago and had been marred by an explosion that took the life of a young man I’d grown to trust.

I first met Deuce when he was just a teen. His father was Rusty’s and my Platoon Sergeant when we were stationed together in Okinawa, Japan. Sergeant Russ Livingston, Senior, and I became friends, and when we both found ourselves stationed in North Carolina together, we took every opportunity we could to go diving. Many times we came to the Keys, and we’d sat right at this very bar on more than one occasion.

I met Russell “Deuce” Livingston, Junior, for the second time when he came here looking for me. His dad had been murdered and Deuce wanted to spread his ashes on a reef we’d both loved. By then Deuce was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy SEALs. Together, we’d found the man that killed his dad. His bleached bones can probably still be found on a tiny island just a few miles from mine.

Deuce and two of his best operatives had left the SEALs and gone to work for Homeland Security. The group of men that his dad’s killer belonged to also happened to be responsible for the death of my own wife. It didn’t take much for Deuce and his merry band of misfits to rope me into working with them. They now trained and lived part-time on my little island.

“Are you losing your hearing, man?” Rusty shouted, interrupting my thoughts.

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I asked what time was it that Deuce called you?”

“Probably about the same time Julie called you, numbnuts. As soon as they got in range of a cell tower. About zero six hundred.”

He looked at the clock on the wall over the bar and said, “Well, that was nine hours ago.”

Just then, Jimmy walked in. He used to be my First Mate until about a year ago, and now he worked part-time at the bar.

“Jimmy,” I said, “thank God you’re here. Take over so me and Rusty can go down to the boat ramp, will ya?”

“Take over what, dude? You two are the only ones in here.”

“Just watch the bar,” Rusty said as he came from behind the large slab of oak.

Rusty and I left the bar, with Pescador trotting ahead of us, and walked down the crushed-shell drive to the boat ramp at the back of the property. It was more like a pair of overgrown ruts through the backyard than a driveway. This land had been in his family for several generations. An old shack off to the east of the boat ramp was where Rusty’s grandfather had once made illegal rum during Prohibition. Now it was where Rufus, Rusty’s old Jamaican cook, lived and whiled away his retirement.

We got to the boat ramp and sat down at a small table under the shade of an old gumbo-limbo tree. Beyond was the Atlantic Ocean. More precisely, Hawk Channel and the Straits of Florida, a narrow funnel between the Florida coast and the islands of Cuba to the south and the Bahamas to the east. Through this funnel ran the greatest river on Earth, the Gulf Stream, moving warm water from the Gulf of Mexico through the Straits and up into the North Atlantic. It was this current that Britain owed its climate to.

“What time is it?” Rusty asked again.

“Ten minutes later than last time you asked,” I replied. “You’re acting like a worried dad whose daughter’s out on prom night with Alice Cooper.”

“Jesse, she’s my only kin. And these last two months has been the longest we’ve been apart since the day she was born.”

“What about when she went through basic?” I asked. Julie had enlisted in the Coast Guard nearly a year ago.

“I flew up every other weekend.”

“Really?” I said incredulously. “Bet that went over well with her CO.”

He stood up suddenly. “Hey! There they are!”

I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, I saw the distinctive red and white sails on Deuce and Julie’s blue Whitby ketch clearing the point at Key Colony Beach. Although the wind was light, I’d been wrong assuming they were under power. They had every inch of canvas up. Still, it took twenty minutes before they made the turn toward Rusty’s channel, started the little diesel engine and dropped the sails, then another ten minutes before they putted into the canal and were tied up at the docks.

“It’s a great boat, Dad,” Julie said after we’d helped them tie up and were seated at the bar. “She sails really well, whether in light wind or heavy seas. We finally came up with a name—
James Caird
.”

Rusty smiled as he wiped down glasses behind the bar. He’d never been a fan of wind power, but seeing the boat under full sail in winds too light for most sailboats, he was starting to change his mind. A little.

“Shackleton’s lifeboat,” he said. “I never thought you paid much attention to those old sea stories I told you.”

“She told me about it,” Deuce said. “I remembered hearing about it in college, but she made the story come alive one night while sailing in the Leewards. When we made port the next day, we looked it up on the Web—,” The sound of a motorcycle outside interrupted the debate between power and sail. A moment later my First Mate, Bob Talbot, and his wife, Nikki, walked in. Bob had been a Navy Corpsman with 1st Battalion, 9th Marines when they met. Nikki had been a Marine clerk at 9th Marines’ regimental headquarters. In the Corps, we affectionately called all our Corpsmen ‘Doc’, even though they weren’t really doctors. Doc was carrying what looked like a treasure chest. Pescador rose from his spot next to my stool at the end of the bar and trotted over to them to welcome them by allowing each to give him an ear scratch.

“Hey, Doc,” I said as Pescador accepted the ear scratch from both of them. “How’d the move go, Nikki?”

They walked over and Doc placed the chest on the end of the bar as Rusty slid two cold Dos Equis in front of them. Rusty had a terrific memory for what people liked to drink.

“It was pretty emotional, Jesse,” Nikki said. “Their house has been in the family for almost a hundred years.”

“I can understand that,” Rusty said. “My great-grandpa built this place and the house. My grandpa rebuilt them after both were blown down in the Labor Day hurricane of thirty-five.”

“Where’d you get the chart chest?” Deuce asked.

“Chart chest?” Doc said.

“That’s what it looks like,” Deuce said, pointing at the chest on the bar. “A sixteenth-century chart chest. I’m guessing German.”

“German?” Doc said with a quizzical expression. “We were thinking it was Spanish.”

Deuce walked over to the end of the bar and examined it more closely. “No, not Spanish,” he said. “They used mostly brass fittings. These are iron. And in damned good shape, too. Is it real?”

“As far as we know,” Doc replied. “Nikki’s dad gave it to us.”

“Is it full of doubloons?” Rusty whispered with a grin.

“Nope, nothing in it but a coconut,” Doc said. Then with a half grin, he added, “And a riddle.”

“A coconut?” Julie asked.

Doc unclasped the chest and opened it, taking out an old, dried-out coconut that looked like it’d been baked and placing it on the bar. He turned to Deuce and asked, “So, what’s a chart chest?”

Deuce was still examining the chest. “Usually longer than a standard chest, like this. Also, like this one, it has a seal around the inside, making it watertight. They were carried by ship’s navigators and used to keep their nautical charts, logbooks, and diaries dry. I’m almost certain that’s what you have here. What made you think it was Spanish?”

“This right here,” Jimmy said. “The coconut has Spanish writing on it.”

“What’s it say, Jimmy?” I asked, knowing that he had a pretty good knowledge of the language.

“I can only make out a few words,” he replied, studying it. “The date is definitely September twenty-third, 1566, even though part of it is rubbed away. First part says something about mist, then something about a woman.” Turning the nut, he pointed to two more words, adding, “This word here, ‘suprimio,’ means suppressed, and this one means trade. It’s not like any Spanish I’ve ever read, though.”

“Dad said it’s old Spanish,” Nikki said. “From the old country.”

“You should let Chyrel take a look at it,” Deuce said. “I can call her and ask her to come down.”

“No need,” I said. “She’s up on the island. She bought herself a little skiff and has been exploring for the last month.”

Chyrel Koshinski is our resident tech guru. She handles all of the communications and computer wizardry for Deuce’s Homeland Security team. Just over a year ago, while serving as a SEAL Team Commander, Deuce was recruited by the Department of Homeland Security to create and head up a team of the best operators from military, civilian, and investigative services. Their mission at the time was to monitor and, if need be, intervene in the ever-growing terrorist threat in the Caribbean and south Florida. I serve as a transporter, occasionally moving field operators and equipment around on my boat,
Gaspar’s Revenge.
She’s a forty-five-foot Rampage fishing boat, perfect for moving small groups around undetected. Chyrel joined the team out of the CIA and proved extremely valuable this past year in the takedown of some high-level terrorists, drug smugglers and murderers.

“What can she do with it?” Nikki asked.

“For one thing,” Deuce replied, “she can enter the writing into her computer’s translator. She probably has some forensics tools to bring the words into sharper focus, too. Any idea what it all means?”

Doc grinned and said, “Better open a few more beers for everyone, Rusty. I’ll tell you the story that was told to me.” In fifteen minutes, Doc had spun a tale of Spanish treasure, shipwrecks and early American history.

“So this chest,” Rusty said, “was found
inside
a busted-up mangrove tree?”

“That’s the story,” Doc replied. “I asked the Judge if he could give me any more information on what his ancestors might have found out about it, but he said it would be better to start from scratch.”

“I know a little bit about the early Spaniards in the West Indies, man” Jimmy said. “They were brutal, dude. They believed what they had to offer the natives of the islands was worth all the gold and silver they could carry off. The islanders didn’t have much need of what the Spaniards offered, namely the Roman Catholic religion and civilization. For over two hundred years, anyone that wouldn’t accept those gifts were usually put to death in a lot of nasty ways, including Protestants. From when Columbus first landed in 1492 to 1530, less than forty years later, all but a handful of the native people of the Caribbean were murdered or enslaved. By the date on this nut, the Spaniards controlled all of the Caribbean, with forts in Cuba, Florida, and South America, and they’d begun moving cargo and treasure from the Orient across the Pacific to southern Mexico and Panama. From there, they took it overland to El Caribe and eventually to Spain. The age of the Conquistadors, man.”

“So, why would someone put the coconut in a chest meant to keep charts dry?” Julie asked.

“That’s easy,” Rusty said. “To protect the nut.”

“Okay, so why hide it inside a tree, instead of burying it?”

“Ever see how a tree can grow around a rope or chain-link fence?” I asked. “If whoever put that nut in the chest, did it over four hundred years ago, he might have simply put the chest in the crook of a tree for safe keeping, and the tree grew around it.”

“Exactly what I told the Judge,” Doc said with a crooked grin.

“Still begs the question, why did he want to protect the nut?” Julie asked.

“Seems to me,” Doc said with that half grin of his, “there’s really only one answer to that. He didn’t have anything else to draw a treasure map on.”