Red Tide (18 page)

He started whacking away at the keyboard again. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can call up the records from the Union rolls, and…” He trailed off, lost in trying to work the computer. “Bingo,” he said after a long moment of silence. “The 
Maria Chinea
, about six months ago. Been on shore since then.”

“Before that?”

Deacon frowned. “Little bit confused here. He’s down for a couple of them at the same time, and then it shows he didn’t take either one. Then before that, about two years on the 
Petit Fleur.”

“It’s one of those two, 
Maria
 something or 
Petit Fleur
. It has to be.”

“I’m with you on that, buddy. But which one?”

I shook my head. “Can’t say. It could have worked out that he worked the 
Fleur
, got fed up, and went through a couple of jobs fast. Or it could have been the 
Maria.
But one of them is the Black Freighter. It has to be.”

“Don’t want to jump on the 
Petit Fleur
, just ’cause it’s a Haitian name,” he said.

“Why not?” Nicky blurted. “Man’s a voodoo priest, stands to reason.”

Deacon shook his head. “These old freighters go back and forth all over the Caribbean. Might change hands a dozen times.”

“But the name,” Nicky insisted.

“It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name, Nicky,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Check ’em both,” I told Deacon.

“Uh-huh,” he said, and began pecking at the keyboard again. “Let’s us just see what we can find…”

Deacon hammered at the computer for about five minutes, muttering softly to himself and a couple of times to me, saying things like, “Hang on, buddy.”

Finally he slapped the keyboard and the printer started to whirr again. Deacon leaned back, looking satisfied. “Well,” he said.

“You found something?”

“Yes I did, Billy. I surely did find something.” He grabbed the paper from the printer. “Gervasio Lopez is the master of the 
Maria Chinea
. He has stayed at our fine hotel in Raiford on two occasions. Once for drug smuggling, once for manslaughter.” He looked up. “That one was a plea bargain down from Murder One. Apparently he’s in with the Cali syndicate. They can buy some pretty good legal help.”

“He sounds like a drug smuggler. We’re looking for a witch doctor,” I said.

Deacon held up a finger. “Now don’t go jumping to any conclusions, Billy. A lot of the Colombian syndicate guys do a kind of black magic version of 
santeria
. Human sacrifice and everything. Remember that thing in Mexico a few years back?”

“Matamoros,” I said. I remembered.

“That’s it. They thought eating human body parts would make ’em rich and keep them from being arrested. This Lopez could be another one.”

“What about the other ship?”

Deacon glanced at the printout. “Patrice du Sinueux. Known as Cappy.” Deacon frowned. “Funny. We got some detail on this guy but no arrest record. And so no picture.” He ran a finger down the page. “Okay. That explains it. He was a mid-level guy in the 
ton-ton macoute
. Guess that would be with Baby Doc Duvalier. Got in some trouble, tried to claim political asylum here in the U.S.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Deacon frowned. “Doesn’t say here, but it’s a good rule of thumb that if you’re running from that crowd you’re a good guy.”

What Deacon said made sense. All we had heard from Honore about the Black Freighter had said its captain was a voodoo 
houngan
. But Honore was Haitian. He would put things in those terms. And
palo mayombe
, the dark side of Santeria, was similar enough to voodoo that somebody who knew about one of them would recognize the other.

So although a small voice in the dark of my head was telling me the Haitian captain ran the Black Freighter, my head said it made more sense to go for the convicted felon, rather than a man who had apparently tried to escape from the 
ton-ton macoute
.

“All right,” I said to Deacon. “I vote for Lopez.”

Deacon nodded. “Me too. I just hope we’re right, Billy,” he said, reaching for the telephone. “Let me call my buddy in Customs.”

The 
Maria Chinea
 had probably been a nice ship once—maybe fifty years ago. Now it was a bucket of rust held together by the greasy cables around its deck cargo. There was a thick smell of old fish dipped in diesel clinging to the deck.

The mate was on deck when we got there, smoking a cigar that looked like it had been launched about the same time as the ship. He was a tanned, creased guy in his fifties, dirty and unshaved, with a face like a disappointed gorilla. As our car pulled up he stood, knocked the coal off the end of his cigar, and stuck the battered old thing in his shirt pocket.

Ray Hall got out first. He was Deacon’s friend in Customs, an out-sized good ol’ boy who had played tackle for the Gators and come home to South Florida to fight crime.

Whatever else people may say about the Good Ol’ Boy Network, if you’re inside it, it works for you. And Deacon was definitely inside it. Ray had been happy to pull a couple of spot inspections for his ol’ buddy Deacon. Customs does them all the time anyhow, randomly picking ships from a master list of everything in the harbor. Having Deacon suggest a couple of ships was no problem.

Ray had looked a little dubious about bringing us along, but when Deacon explained why he had shrugged it off. “Just you all try to look the part,” he’d said.

“What part, mate?” Nicky asked him.

Ray looked thoughtful when he heard Nicky’s accent. “We take other law enforcement personnel along with us all the time? So nobody’s gonna give two tick’s off a dog’s ass if I got a couple more with me. Just you look serious, like you know a lot more than you’re saying, and maybe I can make them fools think you’re from Australian Customs, come to learn how to do it right.”

Ray led the way up the gangway and we followed, Nicky stretching his face into the grim look of a man who’s learning to stop beer smuggling.

The mate stood waiting for us at the top, blocking our way onto the ship, arms folded, a look of passive hostility on his face.

“Customs,” Ray told him, showing his ID. “We need to see your paperwork and check your holds.”

The mate didn’t budge. “
¿Qué?
” he said.

Ray switched to perfect Spanish, with no accent I could catch, and repeated himself. The mate stared at him for a minute, then shrugged and turned away to get the papers.

When he disappeared into the superstructure, Ray turned back to us. “I’ll keep him busy,” he said. “Y’all go ahead and poke around. Just don’t get too messy.” And he wandered after the mate.

We searched the ship. From the mate’s attitude of half-dead hostility I was already sure it was the wrong one but we searched anyway. We went through the holds, the moldy living area, the engine room. A small, ferret-like guy with no shirt sat on a folding chair in the engine room. He looked up at us when we came in, but he didn’t move and he didn’t say a word.

Other than that there was no trace of life on board, aside from a few rats, and some things that were growing on the walls in the galley.

No sign of Anna. No sign of anyplace where they might have tucked her away.

We met up with Ray in the wheelhouse. He was flipping through a large stack of papers, firing questions at the mate in rapid Spanish. Ray looked up when we came in; Deacon shook his head slightly, and Ray rifled once through the papers and then handed them back to the mate.

“All right,” Ray said. “Anything else?”

Deacon raised an eyebrow at me.

“Ask him if he remembers a guy named Otoniel Varela,” I said. “He worked on board a while back.”

The mate had lifted his head up when I said Oto’s name. As Ray asked him the question he was already nodding. Before he answered the mate spat out the wheelhouse door. Then he raced through a couple of minutes of furious talking mixed with hand signals, grunts and groans, and at one point a long, shrill scream.

He talked fast and without consonants and although I speak a little Spanish, I couldn’t follow it. My ears were used to the slower, more careful, Mexican Spanish and the Caribbean variety left me far behind.

But one word I could pick out, because he used it several times, and even moaned it once right after the scream, was “
sueño
.” Dream.

And right around the scream, the mate moaned something that sounded like, “las loooooozes,” which I puzzled over for a while and couldn’t get.

When the mate had finished, Ray nodded and handed back the papers. “
Bueno
,” he said, and then added something almost as fast as the mate’s speech. Then he turned for the door and we followed, down the stairs, across the deck and down the gangway. By the time we got to the car, the mate was already sitting again, staring at his cigar.

“Quite a story,” Ray said as we settled into the car. He was behind the wheel with Deacon beside him and Nicky and I were in the back.

“He remembered Oto,” I said.

“Be a job of work to forget that boy,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re interested in Oto, but Oto like to be some major shit for somebody pretty soon.”

“Too late,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Uh-huh. Well that ought to help the sleep problem.”

“The what?” Deacon asked.

Ray shook his head. “Your Oto worked the boat here maybe six months ago. The mate—his name’s Garcia, by the way. Providencio Garcia.”

“Old Providencio says Oto had a sleep problem,” Deacon said.

“Yep. Says he didn’t like Oto’s looks when he showed up. Sort of wild looking, one side of his face unshaved, big rings under his eyes. Smelled like a bordello floor on Sunday morning. Providencio says he would have turned Oto away if he could, but his papers were all right and with the Unions and all he had to take him on.

“Anyhow, first week out Oto kept the other hands awake all night with his moaning and kicking all night long. And he was drinking, screwing up on the job. Not a real popular guy. And one night he wakes up screaming.”

“What was he screaming?” I asked.

Ray smiled. “Las luces!”

I suddenly got it. 
Luces
, not 
loozes
. “The lights?”

“Yeah. That’s what Providencio says.”

“Did he say what that means?”

Ray shrugged. “Says that Oto woke up in a real bad sweat and grabbed for his bottle. Swigged about half of it down. One of the other hands said something to him and Oto just kept drinking. Tried to take the bottle away and Oto broke the guy’s arm. Two other guys jumped in. Oto puts ’em both down, one with a concussion, the other a busted up kneecap. He goes crazy, starts breaking things up.

“So they fetched Providencio. He talks Oto down a bit, Oto sits back down with the bottle. Takes a big slug, most of the rest of the bottle. Providencio tries to get the bottle away from Oto. Oto won’t let go. Starts babbling, 
saltan en el agua, todo el mundo saltan en el agua
.”

“What’s that?” Nicky demanded.

Ray gave him a half shrug and a small smile. “They all jump in the water,” he said.

“Oh,” said Nicky, frowning like he could make sense of it.

Ray went on. “Anyway, Providencio tells him that don’t make any sense, they’re all on the ship, they’re gonna be okay, and everybody’d like to get some sleep. Oto says yes, he can make you sleep, too, he’s a 
bocor
, he has the powder.”

“Bingo,” Deacon said softly.

“Providencio says maybe old Oto ought to take some of that powder, because he’s keeping everybody up,” Ray went on. “And Oto gets even more worked up, says they don’t even need the powder ’cause they got the lights. He starts laughing, shoutin’ out, ‘
¡Crean que estan en Miami! ¡Pero es solamente las luces! ¡Todo el mundo saltan en el agua!
’ And after a couple of minutes of that, he falls over, dead drunk asleep.

“Short-handed like that, three guys too busted up to work, and one too drunk-crazy to find his ass with both hands, it was all they could do to get in to port. Old Providencio couldn’t wait to get Oto on shore and off his ship.”

I ran over it in my mind. Oto had taken out three sailors at once, guys who tended to be pretty tough. Oto was tougher. But not tough enough for whatever it was he’d gotten into—like murdering refugees, maybe? But how?

Saltan en el agua. ¡Crean que estan en Miami! ¡Pero es solamente las luces!
 It didn’t make much sense; most likely it was just drunken ravings. 
They think they are in Miami. But it’s only the lights. Everybody jumps in the water
.

It meant nothing to me. But that last sentence, the one he had repeated. 
Everybody jumps in the water
. Why would they jump in the water? Because of the lights? What lights? What kind of lights made everybody jump in the water?

I shook it off. None of this mattered. All that mattered right now was finding Anna. “Let’s get to the next one,” I said.

Deacon looked at me with sympathy. That made me feel even worse. “Sure thing, buddy,” he said. “That would be the 
Petit Fleur
,” he said to Ray.

Ray picked a clipboard off the dashboard and flipped through a sheaf of papers. “Okay. Just up the way a piece,” he said, and started the car.

We drove in silence for a couple of minutes until Ray pulled the car over beside an empty slip.

“Let me check on this,” he said, lifting his cell phone and calling. “Probably got the slip number wrong.”

Ray turned away and spoke rapidly. But even before he clicked off I knew. This was the right slip. The right ship had been in it. Anna had been on board.

And now it was gone.

Ray looked tired, beat. “Guess we should have checked this one first,” he said. “
Petit Fleur
 cleared Customs and left for Haiti about ninety minutes ago.”

I’m not sure how long we sat there. It probably wasn’t very long, but it felt like a couple of hours. My mind was far away, out over the ocean, trying to get to a small freighter. It couldn’t be that far out. Not more than ten miles. If it was on land, I could run it down in an hour or two.