Baja Florida (16 page)

I didn't sleep that night. Boggy and I stood two-hour watches at the helm, but instead of bunking down, I walked the deck of
Radiance.

Part of me was keeping an eye out for the Royal Bahamian Police patrol boat that I was certain would intercept us at any moment. I didn't think Lynfield Pederson would give me up. No, he would stall his colleagues as long as he possibly could. But the police were casting a wide net. They could easily dredge up something that would lead them my way.

The
Nassau Guardian
would probably have a story about Delgado's murder, if not in the next day's edition, then surely the day after. It would mention that the police were searching for a suspect, namely me. The paper would run my mug shot. Someone at Dilly's Marina would see it.  And that would be that.

The other part of me was trying to get a handle on The Person Who Was Not Really Will Moody and why he would kill Abel Delgado.

Money? No, because Delgado didn't have any.

The fake Moody, whoever he was, had told me he had seen the posters Delgado put up around Marsh Harbour. That's what led him to the Mariner's Inn. He wanted to give Delgado information about Jen Ryser's whereabouts and tell the detective the same thing he told me: Call off the search. There was nothing to worry about. Jen Ryser was safe and sound and on her way to visit her father. Which turned out to be true. So why tell Delgado that and then turn around and kill him?

And if someone who lied about his identity told me there was nothing to worry about, should I be worried? Absolutely.

And why would this same guy go after Karen Breakell, assuming it was him who attacked her?

That didn't add up either.

The equation fell apart completely when I tried factoring in the fire at the Dailey brothers' boatyard.

I tried attacking it from another direction. Maybe none of the three events were related. Maybe one person killed Abel Delgado, another attacked Karen Breakell, and yet another burned down the Daileys' hangar.

That fell apart, too. Marsh Harbour is not without its share of violence, but all three of those things happening on one night represented a random crime spree of unprecedented proportion in those parts.

That left only one other direction to go: Whoever was behind this had done it with every intention of laying the blame on me. They had done a smart job of it. And I had pitched right in and given them all the help they needed, leaving behind a messy trail and providing witnesses every step of the way.

But why?

Who the hell were Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing?

And how did they fit in with everything?

First light found us at the top of the Exuma chain and moving past Norman's Cay, yet another Bahamian island with a colorful (translation: notorious) past.

Back in the late 1970s, Carlos Lehder decided to set up shop on Norman's, using it as a distribution center for his cocaine cartel. Lehder didn't buy the entire island, but he claimed it as his own, bringing in a small army of gun-toting Colombians and attack dogs, and making it clear he didn't like visitors or neighbors. Before long most of the locals packed up and moved away.

What's truly interesting to note is that Lehder ran his operation out of Norman's—in plain sight, with a new airstrip, lots of construction, and plenty of comings and goings—for almost five years. Which speaks volumes about the Royal Bahamian Police.

If I wanted to empty my Bermudan bank account, I could probably buy my way out of the Bahamas with a guarantee that the cops wouldn't pursue charges against me.

But just the thought of that pissed me off.

 

And so the morning unfolded, cay after cay after cay—Warderick Wells, Over Yonder, Big Farmer's, and Musha—until we zeroed in on Lady Cut Cay.

Compared to its closest neighbors, the nearest one maybe two miles away, Lady Cut Cay had decent elevation. A rocky bluff rose on the windward side, tabled out at the middle of the island, and sloped down to a cove and a sandy beach on its lee. Apart from a landing strip at the south tip, thick vegetation covered most of the terrain. At the island's summit, brush had been cleared in a wide swath around a three-story, slant-roofed house. It added to the house's prominence and gave it a stark, commanding presence.

We hadn't called ahead, mainly because I wasn't getting a cell-phone signal. I didn't want to use the radio on
Radiance
because the call would go out on public frequency and there was no telling who might be listening.

But I'd left the radio on so I could monitor it. I heard a squawk of static and then a voice, Mickey's voice.

“Lady Cut Cay calling the good ship
Radiance. Radiance,
are you there?”

Boggy was at the wheel.

“Answer him?”

I shook my head.

“We'll be there soon enough.”

The radio squawked again.

“Lady Cut Cay calling
Radiance.
Come in,
Radiance.
”

A few moments of silence, then: “Yo, Chasteen, how about you answer me? You got your ears on or not?”

So much for anonymity on the airwaves.

“Spotted you heading for us, Zack-o,” Mickey said. “We'll come down and meet you on the dock.”

The depth finder showed only seven feet of water leading up to the dock.
Radiance
drew six feet. She could probably make it, but rather than embarrassing ourselves by running aground, Boggy and I anchored her fifty yards out and took the dinghy in.

A made-in-the-Bahamas sportfisherman, an Albury Brothers 27, with twin Suzuki outboards, was tied off at the dock. Behind it, Mickey Ryser stood ready to greet us.

Mickey leaned on a cane, but otherwise appeared remarkably improved from when I had seen him just four days earlier. Barefoot, his skinny legs sticking out of baggy khaki shorts. Another splendidly tacky shirt—pink hula girls and purple palm trees. A broad-brimmed straw hat shaded his face but not so much that it hid a wide grin.

“Zack-o, Boggy…I want you to meet my daughter.”

The young woman beside Mickey was almost as tall as him. Blond hair pulled back from a face that held high cheekbones and full lips. But it was the eyes that got you. They were big and brown with a hint of green, hazel I guess you'd call it. They were like shattered glass, refracting light so you couldn't quite find their center. She wore a short white T-shirt over low-slung red Capri pants and the gap between them showed off a flat, brown tummy with a small gold hoop in her navel.

Mickey patted her back and eased her our way.

“Jen,” he said, “these are two of the fellows who have been running around, looking for you.”

She offered me her hand, then Boggy, and flashed a shy smile that didn't go with her face.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” she said. “I had no idea my father would go to all that trouble.”

“Just anxious for my little girl to get here,” Mickey said.

He pulled her to him and put an arm around her shoulder. She snuggled against him and patted his chest.

“So how you like that little boat of mine, Zack-o?”

“Some boat,” I said.

“You need to get yourself one.”

“Outta my league,” I said. “Beside, I've got three other boats already.”

“Not like this one.”

“No, it's a classic, Mickey. They don't make them like this anymore. But the upkeep,” I said, “I bet it's a bitch.”

“Ah, it's not bad. A little paint here, some teak oil there. Nothing to it.”

“You're lying,” I said.

Mickey laughed.

I said, “Any word from Charlie Callahan? I was halfway expecting he might beat us here. And halfway not.”

“He radioed a couple of hours ago. Said he'd be here early afternoon.”

“Must have gotten tangled up,” Boggy said.

A big golf cart, a three-seater, rolled onto the dock. An older man, Bahamian, in his sixties, got out and grabbed our bags. Mickey introduced us to him—Curtis, his name was—and told him to put our bags in the second-floor guest rooms.

“What's Miss Rose got going for lunch, Curtis?”

“Got some stew snapper on the stove,” Curtis said.

“Some guava duff for dessert maybe?”

“Thought I saw some of that, too.”

“I hope so,” Mickey said. “Zack, you have not had dessert until you've eaten Miss Rose's guava duff.”

We watched as Curtis left in the golf cart.

“Curtis and Miss Rose, that's his wife, they kinda came with the island. Worked for the people who owned it before me,” Mickey said. “Curtis takes care of the boats and fixes anything needs fixing. Miss Rose, she handles the cooking and the cleaning. Their grandson, Edwin, lives here, too, and helps them out. Curtis has him raking the beach today. He's as good with a boat as his grandfather. It was both of them who ran the Albury and picked up Jen when she flew into George Town yesterday. You'll bump into Edwin sooner or later.”

We loaded into Mickey's golf cart. Boggy and I settled into the back-seat. Mickey took the passenger's side.

“You drive, honey,” he told Jen. “I'll play tour guide and tell you which way to go.”

We followed a rutted road that circled Lady Cut Cay as Mickey showed off this and that—a desalinization plant, big generators, an incinerator system for getting rid of trash. Even had a good-sized green house, more a shade house really, for growing plants to help landscape the place. Living on your own private tropical island is not a proposition for those without sizable resources.

We made a swing by the beach. Its open-air pavilion held a big dining table and some comfy-looking lounge chairs. A catamaran sat under the coconut palms. We passed a small brackish pond surrounded by mangroves before reaching the grass airstrip. The road continued on the other side of the airstrip to the rocky bluff I'd spotted from
Radiance.

At the top of the bluff we got out to soak in the view. Cat Island lay a hundred miles to our east, but it was easy enough to imagine that we were looking out on the wide-open Atlantic. Compared to the flat, glassy water on the lee side of the island, the windward side presented big, frothy breakers that crashed on the rocks below. The wind blew hard and Mickey had to speak loudly to be heard above it.

“Makes you glad to be alive, doesn't it, Zack-o?”

He slapped me on the back and kept a hand on my shoulder.

“I can see why you like it here.” I draped an arm around him.

“Just glad you could enjoy it with me. Means a lot, man.”

I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I gave his shoulder a squeeze and we stood like that for a moment, taking it all in. As we pulled apart, I caught Jen watching us from the other side of the golf cart, alongside Boggy. Her look was dark, as if she didn't know quite what to make of me, but brightened instantly as her eyes met mine.

“Ready to roll?” she chirped, hopping behind the wheel again.

I was anxious to ask her questions—Where was her boat? Where were her friends? Where had she been all this time?—but I figured it best to feel my way and ease into it. Mickey was so clearly enjoying himself that I didn't want to do anything that might spoil the moment.

The house was even more spectacular up close than it had been at a distance. The design was modern, the Sarasota School of Architecture transplanted to the tropics, with wide overhangs, ceiling-to-floor windows and doors, balconies and private niches everywhere you looked. A broad wooden deck off the living room that opened east to the rocky windward side of the island.

Mickey's nurse, Octavia, hurried out of the house as we pulled up. She stood at the end of a walkway, fists planted at her waist, a scowl on her face.

“Where you been, Mr. Mickey? Thirty minutes late for your medicine.”

“Calm down, woman,” Mickey said. “Thirty minutes isn't going to kill me.”

“Yeah, but I just might. You get inside this house right now,” Octavia said, hustling him away.

Jen smiled as we followed them along the walkway, under a sea grape arbor, to the front door.

“The two of them act like an old married couple,” she said. “But he sure listens to her.”

“Your father looks a lot better than when I saw him a few days ago,” I said.

“That's the same thing Octavia said.” She shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I really don't have anything to compare it to.”

“How was it to see him after all these years?”

She spoke to me over a shoulder.

“Strange,” she said. “For both of us, I guess.”

We stepped inside and before I could ask her anything else, she pointed us toward a set of spiral stairs.

“Your rooms are up there,” she said. “I'll find out from Miss Rose when lunch will be ready and ask her to call you then.”

Jen Ryser didn't join us for lunch.

“I'm afraid she's all done in,” Mickey said. “I told her to get some rest and be ready to go later this afternoon. I'm planning for all of us to get out on
Radiance,
maybe turn it into a sunset-dinner cruise.”

We sat at a free-form cypress table on a patio off the kitchen. Our view was of the tranquil bay and the cays that stretched south to George Town, on Great Exuma.

Miss Rose, a slender woman in a flowered dress, an apron tied off at her waist, served the stew snapper over rice, sliced tomatoes on the side. She brought out a bottle of pepper sauce.

“Goes nice if you can take it,” she said. “Curtis grows the peppers.”

I doused the snapper with pepper sauce and my mouth was still on fire when the guava duff came around. Its sweetness helped calm down the burn. So much so that I asked for seconds, which delighted Miss Rose to no end. She positively beamed when Boggy asked for thirds and followed her into the kitchen, probably to lick the pan.

“You boys are welcome to stay here as long as you like. Charlie, too,” Mickey said. “I've got plenty of room. And I'd enjoy the company.”

“Thanks, but I don't want to get in the way of your reunion, Mickey. We'll be heading out first thing in the morning.”

He didn't press the point. I didn't blame him.

“So what do you think, Zack?”

“About what? The house?”

“Screw the house. It's just a house. I'm talking about Jen. She's something, isn't she?”

“Oh, she's something,” I said.

“Every time I look at her, I see someone different. Sometimes it's Molly—the way Jen holds herself, her eyes. Sometimes I see me. She's got a lot of me in her, too, don't you think, Zack?”

“A beautiful young lady.”

“Fashion-model beautiful, if you ask me. But she's not all ditsy like that. She's smart, too. Smart as a damn whip. Got a good head on those pretty shoulders. I laid it all out for her.”

“Laid out all what?”

“Laid it all out about me and how I don't have that long and how all this is going to be hers. I had my lawyer do up the papers. Some of it goes to some charities. A little something for Curtis and Miss Rose, a few others. But mostly it goes to her. We cried some, the both of us. And then we had some laughs, too. Me telling her about all the things I remember from when she was a little girl. She used to call me Doo-Dah. I don't know why, she just did. We both got a kick out of that. And there was this little red wagon I used to pull her around in and I would sing to her and she would giggle. You know what she told me, Zack?”

“What's that?”

“She never got rid of that little red wagon. A couple of times, Molly wanted to pitch it out, but Jen never would let her. She still has it to this day. She told me she always had it to remind her of me. Isn't that something?”

“Yeah, it is. It really is.”

Mickey shook his head. He was tearing up. He grabbed a napkin and dabbed at his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No need to be.”

“I screwed up, Zack.”

“How's that?”

“Letting it go so long like this, between me and her. I should have reached out before now.”

“I'm sure you had your reasons, Mickey.”

“Yeah, I thought I did, too. But looking back on it now, those reasons really didn't amount to anything. It was all just pride and hurt feelings and getting so wrapped up in myself that I couldn't look beyond and see the big picture. It was selfish, Zack. It was goddam selfish, that's all it was. And now look at me. I'm swimming like hell trying to make up for lost time, but knowing I'm bound to drown. It's a hell of a thing.”

I didn't say anything. Mickey looked at me.

“Wish I'd had a chance to meet that daughter of yours when I was at your place,” he said.

“She's a humdinger,” I said.

“I bet she is. You don't ever let go of her, you hear?”

“I don't intend to.”

“No matter what happens between you and Barbara…”

“Nothing's happening between us.”

“I'm just saying, no matter what, you can't let anything come between you and your daughter. You gotta promise me that.”

“Promise,” I said.

He stuck his hand across the table and I held on to it.

I still hadn't told him about the call from Lynfield Pederson. Right then might not have been the most appropriate time, Mickey being all torn up like he was. But I didn't know what purpose could be served by not letting him know he was harboring a fugitive from justice. It wasn't fair.

Before I could start in on the story, Octavia stepped out on the porch. She tapped her watch.

“Time for your shot,” she said.

“Thank you, Dr. Mengele,” Mickey said. He got up from the table. “Sorry, Zack, but these damn shots knock me out. I'll catch up with you in a couple of hours.”