Bahamarama, page 16
part #1 of Zack Chasteen Series
“Relaxing. You need to relax, too.”
I picked up the dress and handed it to her.
“Put it back on.”
“Are you sure? Are you really, really sure?”
“Tiffani, this isn’t going anywhere. You should really, really leave.”
She slipped back into the black dress. She picked up her shoes and carried them with her as she walked to the door. I opened it for her and she stepped outside. She turned to me and said, “You’re no fun.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“And, yes, you really do look that goddam stupid.”
I’d heard that before, too.
33
I sat there awhile sipping the Beefeater’s and feeling virtuous. What other man, fresh sprung from nearly twenty-two months in jail, would turn down a pretty young woman who was standing buck naked in his bedroom? Just call me St. Zack, the Chaste. But the more I thought about it, the creepier the whole scene seemed, and the less virtuous I felt, and then I remembered I still hadn’t eaten dinner.
The dining room was closed when I got down to the main house and no one was sitting in the bar or the salon. The place was empty. It was 10 P.M. Yes, fast times in the tropics. I walked through the dining room and back to the kitchen. It was empty, too. But not as empty as my stomach. Surely Chrissie and Charlie wouldn’t mind if I went foraging.
I opened a big, double-door stainless-steel refrigerator. I found a leftover rack of the porcini-crusted lamb. I found some of the black pepper spaetzle. I found a jar of Dijon mustard. I hauled all my goodies to a counter and stood there eating with my hands—dipping lamb chops in the mustard, dipping spaetzle in the mustard, dipping both of them together, licking my fingers, and making contented swinelike sounds. I went back to the refrigerator. I found a shelf with several individual bowls of orange caramel flan. I only ate three of them. I used a spoon. Then I cleaned up after myself and went outside.
I wasn’t ready for bed and I didn’t feel like going back to the room. There was too much stuff knocking around in my head. The night was nice, the humidity low. And there was a halo around the moon. It was supposed to mean bad weather was on its way. Last I’d heard, Curt was still a tropical storm and still west and south of Grand Turk Island. Typically, that meant it would continue south of Florida and then maybe make a run up the Gulf of Mexico and slam into Pensacola or Mobile or Biloxi, or maybe head on west and hit Honduras or the Yucatán. But there’s nothing typical about tropical storms, even less so when they turn into hurricanes.
I took Chapel Street down the hill until it came to the foot of Government Dock. A water taxi was tying off and a few people began unloading. I went south on Bay Street and was walking past The Landing Hotel when I heard a voice call out, “Hey, Mr. Big Man.”
I turned to see Nixon Styles running off the dock to catch up with me. He was carrying a big grocery sack under each arm.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“Just out walking,” I said. “But I can always use a guide.”
Nixon beamed and fell in beside me.
“Been grocery shopping?” I asked him.
“No, I grew this.”
I looked down in the bags. I could see spinach and yams and okra in one of them. I couldn’t tell what was in the other one.
“You grew all that?”
“Yeah, I did. Grew it on my family land.”
“So you’re a guide and a farmer?”
He thought about it.
“Yeah, I am,” he said. “’Course, mostly I just pull the weeds. My momma and my daddy and my auntie and my uncle, they do the planting, and the farming.”
“Where do you farm?”
“Over on the mainland.”
“The mainland?”
“Yeah,” he said and pointed west, across the sound. “Over on Eleuthera. The mainland. That’s what Brilanders call it.”
“So your family has a farm over there?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Remember last night, remember when I was telling you about the fort in Nassau and how the Brilanders whipped hell out of them Americans?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, King George number three, he was the king of England then, see? And when he heard that the Brilanders had whipped hell out of the Americans and got his fort back he wanted to reward them for what they had done. The land on Harbour Island wasn’t any good for farming, so the king, he gave the Brilanders some land over on the mainland. And to this day, when a Brilander wants to farm the land, all they have to do is go over there to the mainland and they farm some of the land King George gave them. Every family got some land over there.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal.”
“Yeah, it’s real good. I was over there today, helping my auntie, and I brought home all this.”
He stopped and put the bags down on the ground.
“You ever eat Eleuthera pineapple?” he asked.
“Nope, I haven’t.”
“Best pineapple in the world. Sweeter than any other pineapple there is. Makes Hawaii pineapple taste like dog turd.” He pulled two pineapples out of the bag and gave them to me. They were small for pineapples, just barely the size of big Idaho potatoes. Their skin was almost garnet.
“Thanks, Nixon. How much I owe you for them?”
“Nothing. Part of my guiding fee. You decided where you going yet?”
“Probably just head on up here to Valentine’s, see if there’s anything going on.”
“Most always something going on there.”
We rounded a curve and just ahead of us we saw the lights of Valentine’s Resort. Valentine’s caters mostly to divers and fishermen and people with boats—a crowd that tends to ramble later into the evening than the genteel folk who favor the Albury. It has a tiki bar that sits between Bay Street and the resort’s marina. There was a goodly crowd holding down stools, and music was playing, and it seemed as good a place as any to urge the night onward, possibly into oblivion. Frankly, I was a little weary of the things knocking around in my head.
I told Nixon I thought I’d stop awhile and thanked him for guiding me. I reached in my pocket, found a five-dollar bill, and gave it to him.
“You need guiding tomorrow, I’ll be around,” he said. “I’ll be looking for you.”
He took off running down the road. Kid probably had a savings account bigger than mine. Come to mink of it, I didn’t have a savings account. Or a checking account. Just the dwindling chunk of cash in my pocket.
I could make out the music coming from Valentine’s—UB40’s version of “Red, Red Wine,” reggae lite—and I saw a likely spot where I could squeeze in at the bar. I was heading for it when I cast a glance at the boats at berth in the marina, just a waterman’s quickie survey of the inventory at hand. There were maybe forty slips strung out along two short docks. They were all full. And tied off at the end of the first dock, in a space for the overflow and latecomers, sat Miz Blitz.
Even in the dark, I had no doubt it was her. And, as I stepped closer, the dock lights made it easier to make out her profile—the haughty bowsprit, the smooth swoop of her gunwales, the forthrightness of her flying bridge. Far be it from me to overanthropomorphize an inanimate object, but she was one fine-looking babe of a boat.
I walked to the end of the dock and checked her out from stem to stern. Whoever owned her now hadn’t scrimped on the upkeep. She shone where she was supposed to shine and every bit of her looked as good as I’d ever seen her. That made seeing her hurt all the worse.
I looked at the transom. It still read:
Miz Blitz
LaDonna, Florida
I hoped the new owner would keep the name. I hoped he knew it was bad luck to change it.
A light shone in the cabin. Maybe someone was awake inside. I wouldn’t go rapping on the hatch this late at night, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t at least steal a peek and size up the new owner. Maybe I’d drop by in the morning, introduce myself, congratulate him on his purchase and his upkeep.
The cabin curtains were partly drawn and I crouched on the dock to look inside. A man sat at the little table in the galley, his back to me. He was shirtless, his hair long and black and falling below his shoulders. There was a mortar and pestle on the table, and he was grinding up something, some kind of leaves and roots. I leaned out and grabbed hold of one of Miz Blitz’s stanchions to get a better look, and as I did, the boat rocked, ever so slightly. The man whipped around. He looked out the window right at me.
It was Boggy.
34
“So, you’re saying Miz Blitz still belongs to me?”
“By law, no,” said Boggy. “But for all intense porpoises . . .”
“Intents and purposes . . .”
“Yes, for all that, yes, she is yours, Zachary.”
It was twenty minutes later. Boggy was nursing a hot cup of what he called “blue spirit,” a wretched, sulfurous brew made from roots and leaves and things I’d just as soon not know about. It was some kind of Taino concoction, something Boggy had been brought up drinking in the Dominican Republic. He said it promoted “lucid dreaming.” Over the past two and a half days, my wide-awake hours had been all too lucid, so I passed when Boggy offered to share his batch. I was drinking ice water and feeling like a shitheel. A happy shitheel, but a shitheel nonetheless. Boggy, it turned out, hadn’t betrayed me. And I had my boat back. Well, I kinda had my boat back.
Six months earlier, the government, true to its word, had put Miz Blitz up for auction at the Coast Guard station in Minorca Beach.
“But you have friends, many friends, Zachary,” said Boggy. “Is like, I don’t know, is like the Mafia, these friends.”
Robby Greig, at Minorca Beach Marina, had played the don, making the calls, hatching the plan, spreading the word. No doubt he’d felt bad about pulling the string on the counterfeiting charges against me. It hadn’t been his fault. After I had paid Robby in funny money for the work the marina had done on Miz Blitz, he had deposited it, the bank had caught it, and the Secret Service was soon hot on the case. Still, Robby had nurtured a deep sense of guilt and wanted to make up for my fall from grace. He contacted marinas up and down the coast, other charter captains, friends around Minorca Beach. He even got in touch with several of my old teammates and coaches from the Dolphins and UF. Most everyone kicked in a little money. And some of them showed up on auction day just to give Robby moral support.
The feds had set a minimum opening bid of seventy-five thousand dollars in what was to be an absolute auction. Top money walked away with everything, no matter what. That included the rods and reels, plus all the scuba diving gear. Robby Greig was the opening bidder.
“My friends anted up seventy-five thousand dollars?” I asked Boggy.
“Not exactly, but we come to that.”
The plan was that Robby Greig would be the only bidder on Miz Blitz. But not everyone at the auction was in on the plan. Several people had seen the legal ads and driven great distances to put in their bids. A retired businessman from Atlanta had bumped Robby’s bid by ten thousand dollars. And then two brothers from Jacksonville had jumped in, taking it to an even hundred thousand dollars.
“But the great defensive end, Mr. Lawrence Meyer . . .”
“Larry-Bud was there?”
“Oh yes, and the great offensive guard, Mr. Mac Steen . . .”
“Steenboat was there, too?”
“Yes, yes. Both of them. They are very . . . they are very considerable men, no?”
“They’re fucking monsters. But I mean that in a good way.”
“Yes, well, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Steen, they convinced the other bidders that they did not really want your boat.”
“How did they do that?”
“They went and stood by them and said things like, ‘How you going to enjoy that boat if you gotta breathe through tubes?’ Things like that. I think maybe I saw Mr. Steen squeezing one of the brothers where he should not be squeezed. Anyway, after a while, the other people, they stopped bidding, and Robby, he got the boat.”
“What was the final bid?” I asked.
“It went for $127,500.”
A steal. Miz Blitz was worth five or six times that, easy.
“So how much did Robby and the gang pitch in for it?”
“About fifty-three thousand dollars, more or less,” said Boggy.
“Who paid for the rest?”
“You did.”
And that’s when I felt like a shitheel for ever having doubted Boggy. That’s when I learned that I had sold him short, way short, and that he had stuck with me all the way. Yes, Boggy had indeed been conducting a booming business in specimen palms—cash on the barrelhead for premium quality trees. But aside from living expenses and upkeep on the property, all the money had gone toward getting Miz Blitz back. The palm tree business had been so good that Boggy had even begun repaying those who had chipped in to help out at the auction.
The feds weren’t dumb to what had gone down. But there wasn’t anything they could do to nullify the results of the auction. Legally, the title to Miz Blitz belonged to Robby Greig.
“Robby, he say he can loan the boat to whoever he wants to loan it to. And that is you, Zachary.”
“What about Barbara? She knew about all this?”
“Oh yes. She put in twenty thousand dollars. She say she can be the last one for us to pay back.”
“And it was her idea for you to make the run over here in Miz Blitz?”
“Yes, that is why I was not in LaDonna when you stopped by. Barbara, she call me the day she was leaving. She said she thought it would make a big surprise if I was to bring the boat here. She say we can all ride back on Miz Blitz together. Only now . . .”
We sat there awhile, not talking, just thinking about the “only now” part. Only now I didn’t know exactly where Barbara was. Only now I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get her back. Only now, only now . . .
“I know you want badly to see her, Zachary,” Boggy said. “I know your patients, they are running thin.”
“Yes, Boggy, my patients are running very thin.”
“The blue spirit,” he said. “It is good for an anxious mind.”
I told him, what the hell, I might as well try a cup of it. He smiled and told me that was a wise idea. He poured it. I drank it all in one big gulp. And I slept that night on Miz Blitz.
35
I slept late on Monday morning. It was almost eight o’clock when I woke up to the sound of a hose running on deck. I walked out topside to find Boggy washing down a cleaning board where he had just finished filleting what had been a fairly sizeable black grouper. He’d gone out early in the skiff to free-dive in the bight and had taken along a Hawaiian sling. Like always, he came back with something to eat. There would be grits and grouper for breakfast.
“You oughta sell that blue spirit stuff,” I said. “I haven’t slept that well in I don’t know when.”
“What did you dream?”
“Not a thing, thank God. I’ve got enough on my mind without worrying about dreams.”
Boggy considered it, concern etched in his face.
“Tonight, I give you something else. It is always good to know your dreams,” he said. “And for today? What do we do?”
So I laid out the plan, which consisted mostly of hooking up with Lynfield Pederson, then checking in with Burma Downey and Zoe Applequist. Maybe they’d received another phone call.
I told Boggy I’d be back in time for breakfast. Then I walked back to the Albury to slip into clean shorts and one of my new Tarponwear shirts. When I dropped by the main house there was a message to call Steffie Plank. She was in her office at Orb Media when I caught up with her. She had spoken to Barbara’s attorney, and the news was about what I had expected. Barbara’s assets were considerable, but not exactly liquid. And even if they were, it would be difficult for anyone besides Barbara to touch them.
“Did he ask you why you wanted to know all this?”
“It was a she,” said Steffie. “And of course she did. At first, she didn’t even want to talk to me about Barbara’s affairs. Then, after I convinced her who I was—turns out we had met at a fund-raiser for Rollins College a couple of months ago—she loosened up. But she was suspicious.”
“So what did you tell her?”
“I lied my butt off. I told her that Barbara had hired a corporate trainer for Orb Media who was working with various interdepartmental groups to develop team-building and strategize for worst-case scenarios. And the scenario our group had to work on was, What if the owner of the company goes on a foreign business trip only to get kidnapped and held for ransom?”
“So she thought she was discussing a hypothetical situation. Very clever.”
“She got a big laugh out of it, actually. She said Barbara was such a hard-ass negotiator that she would probably charm the kidnappers and get them to pay her the money. She said that in such a situation it might be possible to make loans against assets without the presence of the owner. But it would require, in her words, ‘significant legal standing’ in order to get it moving. Like the intervention of a government agency.”
“Like the F.B.I.”
“More than that. Since it’s in a foreign country and involves the potential transfer of a large amount of cash, then it has to move through diplomatic channels. It would have to go through the State Department. And even then it would take time, lots of time. She said that’s why more big companies are starting to take out kidnapping insurance.”
“There’s actually such a thing?”
“Apparently. And I already checked. Barbara wasn’t covered by anything like that in the company policy. Then while I was waiting for you to call, I got on the Internet and just looked around some. Kidnapping has become a growth industry—up something like three hundred percent over the last five years. These are political kidnappings, or kidnappings where the kidnappers target executives from big corporations. Lots of Fortune Five Hundred companies, when their people have to travel to kidnapping hotspots—like Colombia or Mexico or the Philippines—they take out policies that can run in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars a month.”
