Smugglers 1: Nikki (20 page)

“Sure, you did,” she said. “How much money did you hear they got?”

“I never heard,” and they laughed.

“Tell me more. What about marriage and sex?” she inquired.

“I told you I was married one time with no kids, and as far as sex goes, there’s nothing I haven’t done. I know you’ve had several threesomes and been to bed with men. Well, I do like threesomes, but where it’s about the women, either two men, and a woman, or two women and me, but I’ve never been with a man and have no desire to be with one.

Nikki felt under the cover for his Johnson, and holding onto it asked, “All this sex talk is making you hot again?”

He kissed her and started to mount her again when she said, “This will be four or five times in twenty four hours. Don’t hurt yourself, you old fart,” and they laughed until tears came to their eyes and the sex drive was driven away. “So you really like threesomes? That’s funny, so do I, with either sex.”

“Do you like having sex with two men at once, or sex with one woman and a man, which is better for you?”

“Either way, and I like pain, too.”

“That’s good,” said Mike, as he got aroused, and made love again. After, he said, “So Nikki, tell me about yourself, what do you do? Do you have any kids, have you ever been married, or do you have a full time boyfriend? And don’t tell me you are a full time dancer! I know better.”

“So you want to know about me or my past and how I got here? Well, I’m not a dancer as you already figured out, and I really own a small live aboard marina. I have been married one time and have no kids and I’ve been divorced for a year. My father is in jail for life because he murdered my mother and he will always be there. I was raised by my grandparents but went to Florida from Arizona at seventeen when my grandmother died, and I never looked back.”

“Have you been in Florida since then?”

“Yes”

“But why leave your grandpa and Arizona to move to Florida?”

She looked at him for the longest time until the silence got uncomfortable then said, “Let’s just say it was unsafe for me there.”

With that Mike kissed her and said, “Let’s get some clothes on and have coffee, Nikki. I am sorry about your life. Are you okay now?”

As she looked at him she said, “Mike I’ve been on my own since I was found next to my dead mother, and I get along fine, just fine.”

Nikki and Mike asked John and Rita, “Is there more coffee?”

“No,” said Rita, “but there is lots, and lots, of champagne.”

“Why stop now, Mike?” asked Nikki, “I will have coffee first then start for the day.”

CHAPTER 21

Everybody on the Broward was feeling good, and by the time noon rolled around, they were on their way back. No one had seen Cynthia and Tim. They were still in their master stateroom. At nightfall they dropped anchor in twelve feet of water and spent the night. Bruce was underway by seven the next morning. They were back to the dock by mid-afternoon. When they got everything secured at the dock Nikki and Mike went to her apartment. When they opened the door she let out a gasp and ran around her apartment, letting out a gasp in every room, then Mike said, “You’ve been robbed, careful they may still be here?!”

“I wasn’t robbed. At least I don’t think so. They were here to search the place for money.”

With that she ran up to Glenn’s old apartment and it was even worse. She went on the dock and asked if anyone saw or heard anything, but they hadn’t. She told everyone she had been robbed, and asked Mike to say the same. She and Mike straightened things out enough to have a place to sleep, but went to the Broward to sleep for the night.

In the morning Nikki went to her apartment and office by herself to put things away. Sometime in the afternoon the phone rang when she answered the voice on the other end said,

“Nikki? You know who this is. We didn’t get what we came for, as I’m sure you know. So here’s the deal; we’re coming back to get ya, if you don’t give up the money! So what’s it going to be, you or the money?”

“I told your boss Jeff, I don’t have Glenn’s money.”

“Nikki, you were the last one to see Jeff and Glenn. I am the boss and always have been. Now, what’s it going to be you or the money?”

“I don’t have any money!” she replied.

“Believe me”, he said, “Nikki, once my men pick you up and bring you here I will torture you for hours and then kill you. I am an expert at this, and I can keep you alive for hours, after I cut your feet off and throw them in the corner. See you the day after tomorrow.”

Nikki sat on the chair thinking about the conversation with the man on the phone, trying to think who he was. Then she looked at her phone for the last caller to no avail and just sat there thinking.

She wasn’t going to give up the money. It was bad enough that Rita showed up and wanted half. Now they were going to kidnap her and torture her to death! She must find out who the man on the phone was. She finished cleaning up her apartment then went to get Mike.

As Nikki and Mike entered her place, she said, “Sorry that you got pulled into this.”

“Don’t worry about me, that is what I am here for, to help you.”

Nikki made them both a drink and sat down next to him with a kiss, and told Mike about the phone call.

“We only have tonight and tomorrow,” he said. “Nikki, please don’t get mad. Just tell me the truth, because I can only help if I know the whole story.”

“Okay, I won’t get mad.”

“So do you have Glenn’s money?”

“Do you think I would be here working if I had twenty million dollars? Of course I don’t have Glenn’s money.” Nikki had turned into an excellent liar.

“That’s good enough for me, honey. I can help, so let’s sit here and figure a way out.”

Later that night Mike said, “Just leave and come with me, just disappear, leave the marina, the people, your clothes, everything, just leave! We’ll get on the Sportfish and nobody will know where you went.”

“Thank you, Mike but I can’t. I can’t just leave, as much as I would like to, I just can’t.”

“When you were telling me the complete story about running cocaine from the mother ship to here, you said Glenn and Jim made two million dollars per trip. What if we offered to make some kind of a trade where we keep half and the boss gets half, on Glenn’s account?” he suggested.

“That would probably work, if I knew who he was or his name.” she responded.

“Well, let’s figure it out and wait for his next call,” he said.

“Mike, why are you doing this or getting involved?” asked Nikki.

“I think I may love you or the idea of you, and I like the excitement and the deal.”

“Now I’m mad! You
think
you may love me? I
know
I love you!” They moved to the bed and made crazy love.

In the morning they had coffee with Don and Mark. When Mike went to refill his Styrofoam cup Nikki said, “Oh, God, if you fill that 16 ounce cup up from that pot, your heart will come out of your chest like in the movie
Alien.
That’s Cuban coffee! ”

About nine o’clock they got ready for the call from the boss. Mike put his forty-five in his back under his shirt, just in case. The call didn’t come until three. Mike took the phone and made the pitch. All of a sudden he looked at Nikki and slowly he hung up the phone.

“Well what did he say?”

“Well, nothing, he just hung up; he listened to my pitch and hung up”

“What do you think, did he go for it?”

“I don’t know.”

About an hour later the phone rang again and it was him. “What kind of boat do you have and what’s on it?”

“I don’t have one, but you state the model and everything else and I’ll get it. Okay, okay, okay.” Mike said on his side.

Nikki asked, “So what did he say?”

“I need a 38 to 42 foot go-fast with two or three outboards that will do a hundred miles per hour and can haul four thousand pounds and he will give me one million dollars per trip. And a million dollars credit on Glenn’s deal.”

“So let’s go shopping and buy a boat.”

They spent several days looking at boats until they bought one and got ready to make the first trip. The boss seemed to know when they were ready and called.

He ended the call with, “I’ll be seeing you at your place in the next couple of nights.” Two nights later he knocked at the door. After they were done with the meeting on all the ins and outs and times, the boss said, “From now on call me Sam and call this pager and leave that name. I will call you back on your cell phone.”

When he left Nikki swore she had seen him before. He was in his early fifties, nice looking with casual but expensive clothes and short cropped red hair with gray running through it. She went outside to get his license plate and the car model. She had a plan to find out who he really was and where he lived. She would ask her friend the Chief to find out from his license plate number.

After the intense meeting they sat down to talk about the plan and have more to drink. They didn’t have to make a trip until eleven the next night. Either it was the excitement about the trip or the prospect of picking up a million dollars in cash or the fact they were new to each other and all of the alcohol, they were both very hot.

It started with a simple kiss which led to red hot animal lust; they tore at each other’s clothes, and made love for two hours nonstop.

As they lay spent in each other’s arms, he said, “Nikki, I have enough money to live on so if you feel hanky about this deal at all we’ll forget it.”

“I been here a long time and nobody gets busted, it’s been years. I’m okay and will be better when the Chief finds out who he is.”

The next morning Mike and Nikki went to the café for breakfast in hopes to run into the Chief. When they walked in, he was sitting at a booth with three other men so Nikki had to wait to talk to him alone. She did and gave him the slip of paper with the numbers on it.

The Chief called her within an hour and said he found no such number and no such vehicle.

Once home they got ready for the trip. They were to leave late and go out to sea to a set of coordinates. The last twenty miles was accomplished with no lights. When they got to the GPS settings they shut down the motor to wait.

It was very calm and quiet and they just sat there slowly rocking with the boat; they didn’t speak, they just looked at each other, she in the guest seat and he in the captain’s chair facing each other. Then they heard a low guttural sound of a engine running like it was under water. As they turned toward the sound they soon caught sight of a “surface runner” coming toward them at about twenty knots.

“I’ve heard that a lot of the runners are going to surface runners because they don’t have a radar foot print,” Mike said.

As they talked the seventy footer semi-submersible pulled up next to them and the hatch flew open. A South American man, who was dirty looking with a beard and carrying a side arm, said in broken English, “Are you here for a package? Okay!” He started throwing the goods.

Bales of cocaine were thrown through the hatch to the weather deck as fast as Mike and Nikki could stack them. Soon the go-fast was more than full.

“That’s it, good bye,” the South American said and sped off, leaving them to finish packing and get back to the dock. The return trip was uneventful, thank God, because there were too many bundles and they were everywhere. If they got stopped they would go straight to jail for forty years.

After tying up at the dock, they used the tarp to cover up the exposed bails. As per instructions they called the beeper number and left the name of Sam.

He called back in a few minutes and said somebody would be there at four in the morning to pick the stuff up at Nikki’s office.

“I have a briefcase for you, so move things from the boat to your office, so you’re ready.”

Nikki and Mike sat down and talked about the goings on that night. Nikki said, “Well I guess it didn’t do any good to take any salt licks, since the goods outnumbered the salt licks, ten to one.”

“What were they for anyhow?”

“Let’s say a bundle weighs fifty pounds, and they chase you. You tie a bundle to a salt lick and throw it overboard marking the coordinates, of course. The salt lick will take the bundle to the bottom, leaving nothing in the boat. In twenty four hours when the salt lick dissolves and releases the bundle it floats to the surface and you pick it up.”

“What a great idea!”

“But on this trip we would have needed one hundred salt licks to sink the stuff.”

They had a couple of hours yet to wait, so they sat and talked and had a couple more drinks. At exactly four o’clock there was a knock at the door.

Nikki looked at Mike and asked, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” He showed her his gun and then put it back beside him in the sofa. Nikki went to the door and opened it.

To her surprise it was the Chief of police. Oh, shit, she thought and held the door only open slightly. “Hi Chief,” she said, “I would invite you in but I have a guest.”

The Chief looked past her then said, to her surprise, “I was told to be here at four sharp and give you this briefcase, and you would have something for me.” For a second Nikki looked puzzled, when he said, “Nikki I’m your contact so let me in.”

She opened the door and he walked in, standing in full uniform in the middle of all the bricks of cocaine. Nikki and Mike just looked at him with their mouths open when the Chief said, “Let’s go! Let’s get it loaded, I got a stop to make,” and handed Mike the money.

“So that’s the reason Glenn and Jim never got caught!” Nikki said.

“If I were you I would tend to your own business, because if you don’t, you’ll go fishing,” the Chief said. “Let’s load.”

When they finished loading, the Chief left with a pickup truck with a camper top loaded.

Nikki and Mike went into her apartment and looked at the mone.y and talked about the night’s events, the million dollars they just made, the fact the Chief was involved and how safe it was now. Mike got out some toot and Nikki poured more drinks. Mike spread the money out on the bed and they made love on it, to celebrate their success.

In the morning, Nikki got up early and worked the dock, looking for repairs then went to Don’s for coffee. Mark and a couple of other guys were having morning coffee, and Mark had been back to work for a couple of days now.

“Well, Mark,” Nikki asked, “how’s the Bluewater, and do all your parts still work? You know what I mean by your parts.”

“I think they work.”

They had a good laugh. Nikki and the men had coffee before she went back to her office. Mike was up, hung over, but up, and she kissed him and said good morning.

“Do you think we have a future together?” Nikki asked Mike. “Do you think you will grow to love me?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“So let’s hide the money. We can’t put it in the bank or safety deposit box, but I have a place where we can hide it, right here. I can hide both our halves, and when we get five or ten million dollars we will just quit and disappear.”

“Okay.” He got the briefcase full of cash and asked, “Where’s the hiding place?” as he handed it to Nikki.

“It’s under the water line, in the corner of the houseboat,” Nikki replied.

A couple of weeks went by before the boss, Sam, called again. He informed them that he would be at their house the following midnight. When he got there, they had drinks together, and he gave them the date, time, and coordinates. Then he sat back to enjoy his drink.

When Mike thought the time was right he said, “I think we should be paid twice as much per load because the loads are twice as big as we talked about.”