Salty Sky (7 page)

Lesson over
, Ashley thought. She grabbed the magazine Tony had been reading.

JOE KNEW THE
trainers’ plan didn’t include the girls staying in their own stateroom. Who could resist the primate grunts that passed for their discourse? He grinned at their disappointment from the first night.

Joe reflected on a good day. During the ride to North Carolina, he spent a lot of time with the nurses, and the trainers kept to themselves. As they headed to port, the sky was sunny, but the waves grew larger. The captain said the first hurricane of the season was six hundred miles to the east. Joe kept wondering what about being around a beautiful woman made the air a little clearer and the sun a little brighter.

THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN
the boat had docked, the girls changed into shorts, sports bras, and running shoes. They found a jogging path around an elementary school on the island near some marshes and did a couple of loops. The path was busy with joggers and dog walkers. A field hosted folks tossing Frisbees. On a concrete basketball court, men played five versus five, with extra players waiting for the next game.

They stopped at a public boat ramp in the shadow of a drawbridge connecting the island to the mainland. It was two hundred yards and several socioeconomic levels from the marina. There were kids crabbing in knee-deep water. Old black men sat on five-gallon buckets, fishing with cut bait. Flat-bottomed metal boats and fiberglass ski boats queued up to get out of the water. Men backed trailers attached to pickup trucks onto the ramp and snapped at their wives as they tried to load the boats onto the trailers. The men from every boat without children dumped empty beer cans into the open-top trash cans in the parking lot.

IN THE EVENING,
Joe and Tony walked across the bridge. They found two stools at a busy oyster bar with seven-foot-high ceilings and ordered two pounds of steamed shrimp, cornbread, and longnecks. The place did good business. After dinner, they bought a pack of Winstons and another round. They tipped out and went to the front porch to watch the busy two-lane street and sidewalk.

The trainers and the nurses were gone when they got home. Joe came across a small urge to track them down and have a couple of nightcaps with Ashley.

THE TRAINERS WERE
in their tight black uniforms, cologne applied and waiting by the time Ashley was ready to go out. The girls hadn’t seen much of them that day. Occasionally, Gino tried to awkwardly claim possession of one of Ashley’s friends. The intent seemed more a signal to his friends than to hers; her friend was, aside from polite interaction, unresponsive.

Generally, the guys spent the day in their staterooms watching movies, only coming out to sunbathe for a couple of hours. Now they were drinking vodka tonics. The captain poured pinot grigio for the girls, and they had sunset cocktails while he brought out a tray of snacks.

For dinner, they went to a seafood restaurant. A five-piece reggae band played the outside seating area, where there were around thirty people eating dinner and listening to the music. Ashley wondered how much the guys in the band were making for these couple of hours; they were really good. How many times did U2 play for thirty people before they started selling out football stadiums? Maybe that’s how her business would have to start.

After the band finished, the girls walked back over the bridge to the island marina. On the way, they passed the trainers, who were following their ears to a dance club across the street. Back on the boat, the girls locked their cabin door and were asleep before midnight.

A secretive knock woke Ashley and her friends. She looked at her phone: three thirty in the morning. The knock became less timid. It grew persistent, even a little angry. The girls, used to sleeping in hospital break rooms, covered their heads and went back to sleep.

7

ON SATURDAY MORNING
,
Barry went for chicken and biscuits and Jay stocked libations while Cale prepped the vessel. He lowered the boat off the lift, topped off the gas tanks from a plastic can, and primed the fuel line. He unlocked the shed, pulled out a funboard, a longboard, and bait from the freezer and loaded them on the Whaler. He added two paddleboards, then fit six surfcasters into the holders welded onto the aluminum rail above the helm.

The veins in his temples pulsed with each step, and the humidity took its toll. His fingers were fatter than Milwaukee’s juiciest bratwursts. At one point, Cale found himself holding the day’s bait—packs of frozen shrimp and ballyhoo—against the side of his head. He pondered how many times today he’d wonder why he smelled rotten fish. He tossed the bait in the boat’s well and sprayed his head with a hose.

The passengers finally loaded at a quarter to noon. Jimmy sat on the end of the dock, his head cocked to the side.

“Sorry, J-man. Hold down the fort.”

Hurricane Arlene was hammering Bermuda, but that was good news for the surf report: The sea buoys showed waves four to six feet high, spaced fifteen seconds apart outside Masonboro. That was as close to Waikiki as the East Coast got.

Cale started the Mercuries and slipped into the channel. The first
low bridge was a half mile south. A sailboat under motor and a tug pushing a barge of pine mulch both slowed for the noon opening.

Cale wondered how a pine tree could be cut down, mulched, put on a barge, put on a truck, put in a bag, put back in a truck, put in a store, and sold off the shelf for two dollars a bag? What did the guy who sold the tree get? How does three Abraham Lincolns sound? Copper, not paper.

The same thought with bananas. If a bunch three thousand miles away from the trees was bought for two dollars, how much did that guy get paid to shimmy up the trunk and get them down? Cale figured this mental threading was what all pilots did when autopilot had the wheel.

The boom of two Marine Corps Harrier jets grabbed everyone’s attention. The jets crossed paths with a floatplane. It would have been a direct hit if they weren’t separated by twenty thousand vertical feet.

Jay asked, “Have you flown those?”

His friends always fished to see if he secretly made bombing runs for the military. Knowing Jay meant the Harrier, Cale answered, “Yeah, I’ve flown floatplanes. Except for the landing, it’s about as exciting as driving a pontoon boat.”

Watching the floatplane brought back an old memory. While he was flying one in the Keys, he had spotted a cigarette boat in the hook of a small mangrove island. A cigarette boat was de facto suspicious. They were super uncomfortable, expensive to operate, and really, really fast. Their cargo tended to also be expensive and illegal. But hiding one in the mangroves? Come on.

Cale’s passenger, Agent Gonzalez, nodded downward and said, “Pilot, buzz the treetops.”

They did three loops without finding any sign of life.

Cale picked up the radio and called the patrol boat in the area, “This is Aerial One, looking for Deep Blue. Over.”

“This is Deep Blue. Proceed Aerial One. Over.”

“This is Aerial One. We have a cigarette boat stashed in the bite on the island just south of Picnic Island. Over.”

“This is Deep Blue. Roger that. We are ten minutes out. Over.”

Picnic Island had a shallow beach, a few palms for shade, and a forgiving sandbar as its only barrier to approach. It was a popular spot for a family beach day. The mangrove island where the cigarette boat was tethered looked uninhabitable and lacked either a local or formal name.

“This is Deep Blue. Per the charts, we can’t access the bite until the tide rises. We should be deep enough in three hours. Over.”

Cale was about to acknowledge they’d maintain surveillance until then when Agent Gonzalez picked up the radio. “This is Aerial One. Roger that. Is the … lagoon … clear for us to land? Over.”

Deep Blue said the lagoon was reef free after the channel, so if Cale thought he could land in the lagoon, he should be clear. Cale double-checked his charts. He buzzed the mangroves again and inspected his runway.

As the plane turned around again, Agent Gonzalez asked, “Pilot, any reason not to touch down in the lagoon?”

This was a unique situation. Cale was in charge of the operation of the plane, the safety of his passenger, and the condition of the vessel. But Gonzalez was the operational superior. So if safety in landing wasn’t the issue, Cale’s thoughts about the safety of investigating the cigarette boat didn’t matter.

Cale responded, “Sir, I think the plane can safely land as far as trees, wind, and reefs are concerned.”

“Then let’s get down there.”

“Sir, any reason we can’t keep an eye on this site and wait until Deep Blue can check things out with our support?” Cale left unsaid that they would be checking things out with
no
support.

Gonzalez replied, “Pilot, let’s get on that pond and unravel this mystery.”

A democracy was not an effective organization, but a dictatorship could effectively move you in the wrong direction very quickly—which was where, with his vote torn up—Cale thought they were headed. Gonzalez, he assumed, was rehearsing for his next press conference.