Authors: Randy Wayne White
“We damn partners!” Kondo said again. “What I say? You find me the scarecrow, five hundred clean, when we back at the dock! Hell, you worried, I pay you now! It in my bag, want me to prove it?”
“The
real
money,” Diemer said, “it’s on this boat someplace. Force me to search, you won’t be around for the split.” Then pulled the hammer back, getting down to business, which stopped the slow arc of the automatic weapon, freezing it against the Haitian’s shoulder.
“
What
money? Sheeeit, mon!” Indignant, Kondo tried to laugh, but his voice broke, which he covered by saying, “Doan be fuckin’ wid a priest of my knowledge! The rich woman, the blonde, her brother, what’s-his-name, she not tell you ’bout my powers? Kill me, it doan matter. The shit still gonna come down on yo head, mon. I’m a voodoo sacerdotal, fuckin’ highest priest! Guardian is Chango, mon! Brarilia, Rio, ask anybody what that name Chango mean!”
Speaking to me, but not moving his head, Diemer said, “Start your engines—and put that goddamn piece away!” Then got right back to Kondo. “There was a girl on Saint Martin. French, but part Brazilian. Blond, fourteen years old. You remember her name? Two years ago—February. Same month as now.”
The way Diemer spoke, trying hard to remain the cold interrogator, brought back the memory of the photos I’d seen on his yacht: pretty girl, gawky, with braces, with a family resemblance. It also stopped my hand on the boat keys and caused me to watch Kondo, anticipating his reaction, anticipating his desperate lie of denial.
Didn’t happen. Instead, the man shook his head, honestly mystified, and tried to explain, “My brother, the hell you talkin’ ’bout? So many of those tourist girls kind, mon, I can’t count! How you expect me to ’member—”
Which is when Vargas Diemer shot the Haitian drug dealer twice near the heart—
SNAP-SNAP
, like a muted cap pistol—punching a clean pattern, inches apart, despite a morning wind that was freshening, the sea gray, the sky a blue pearl edged with night. The rounds slammed Kondo’s back onto the deck, not killing him, but it did knock the air out of him, so he writhed and kicked in Charlie Chaplin silence before he spoke, his words a labored hiss because of two sucking chest wounds and the pooling blood: “Call . . . call a doctor, mon! I didn’t do nothin’!”
Diemer maintained a clinical disinterest by pushing a warning hand at me, palm out—
Stop!—
because I had my weapon up, sights focused on him. Told me, “We’ve got to get out of here!” then turned his back . . . hesitated, placed his weapon on the deck, and opened a black tactical bag, first time I’d seen it.
The Zodiac was drifting away, so I had to yell, “You can’t just dump him over the side. Not like he is!”
Diemer, taking something from the bag, replied, “Start disconnecting your electronics—the navigation system, anything that gathers a GPS footprint. We have to throw it all overboard—but not here.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
The man looked over his shoulder, his impatience asking a question I had asked him moments ago:
How goddamn stupid are you?
“Okay, okay,” I said, but was still confused. “Fishing guides, a few of them might head out here after mackerel. We have half an hour at most.”
Kondo was groaning, “Chango . . . Chango, come heal my heart, I bleedin’ to death, Chango!” while Diemer zipped himself into a cheap plastic rain suit, then sat and swung a leg over a knee: he’d brought along surgical booties and a face shield, too—a man who knew the risks of forensic evidence. Getting to his feet, neatening the pliant creases, he called to me, “Don’t watch this!” but I did. Watched him slide down the ladder with his dancer’s grace, pistol in hand, then straddle the Haitian, the Haitian staring up, terrified by this space-age creature garbed in plastic, which is when I decided, yeah, it was better if I looked away.
POP-POP.
When it happened, I was busy disconnecting my navigation electronics, even though I knew my special ops version had a default shredder if disconnected without first typing in a password. No need to explain to Diemer. Once I heard the splash of Kondo’s body, we would be going our separate ways. I would reconnect the system later.
No telltale splash. Instead, a full minute passed before I heard the Brazilian call, “I want you to follow me—but run side by side. Better if fishermen mistake two boats for one boat. Understood?” He was topside again, dismantling electronics, hurrying to stack everything in a box, his rain suit blood-splattered, the face shield tilted up like he’d just come from surgery.
I started to say, “Not following you clear to Lostman’s River—” but realized I was being dense again, so amended, “Tell me what you’ve got in mind. The little son of a bitch was dangerous—I wouldn’t have killed him, but that’s not the issue. I’m shitting in my own nest here, so tell me the truth.”
“No time!” Diemer hollered over the rumbling engines. “Follow for a mile, maybe two—whatever it takes. I’ll have the autopilot on. Due west. No radio contact. I’ll be down below—but watch for me! When I come up, I’ll give you one of these”—he waved an arm side to side—“then I’ll dump the electronics and jump. Got it? At twenty knots, planing speed, I go over the transom.”
“Jump while the Haitian’s boat’s on autopilot,” I said, confident I’d figured it out, picturing the Stiletto cruising two hundred miles until fuel was sucked dry, a dead man aboard—and hope to hell no innocent vessel got in the way of a drug deal that had, from all appearances, gone bad.
I was wrong about one detail.
“My
client’s
boat,” Diemer corrected. “It was stolen, the registry, all the papers changed—and Kondo almost got away with it.” Then stressed again, “Watch for me! It’ll happen fast.”
He didn’t add
Then you will stop and pick me up.
But I did.
—
I
WAITED
UNTIL
the Brazilian was aboard the Zodiac, hidden from view, sitting beside me on the deck, to ask: “Now what? I’m not taking you back to Dinkin’s Bay.”
Diemer shook his head. “Of course not!” He had brought only the tactical bag with him—heavier or lighter, no way to know—but it at least contained running shoes, shorts, and swim goggles, which he was changing into. His bloody rain suit, apparently, was already somewhere on the sea bottom with the box of electronics. “The emptiest stretch of beach you see,” he added, “a half mile off, that should be safe.”
“Sanibel, you mean.” I turned the wheel toward a distant hillock of coconut palms and gumbos, south of the Island Inn.
Diemer nodded and asked, “Do you have bottled water?” his accent sharpening as he reacquainted himself with the role of the class-conscious Castilian. When the bottle was empty, he said, “I’ll call Captain Futch and ask to fly with him tomorrow.”
The man was still interested in the Avenger wreckage—either way, I wouldn’t have been surprised—so I nodded. Yeah, it was better if his yacht stayed in plain view right where it was.
“The hippie will be flying?”
I replied, “I knew there had to be a reason you didn’t want Tomlinson with me.”
“He was smart to hide. Kondo is . . . he
was
a nasty little predator. A lucky break for me, him showing up this morning.” Said it in a way that suggested he’d been tracking the Haitian for a while, waiting for an opening.
Again, I nodded. “It happens that way sometimes.”
Diemer, too focused to respond, pointed ashore and told me, “Don’t slow down. I’ll roll off the seaward side, no one will notice. And
do not
look back.”
“Swim half a mile to the beach, then run to Dinkin’s Bay,” I said, impressed. I was thinking,
Whatever happens with Hannah, maybe I’ve found myself another workout partner.
Sliding his belly onto the Zodiac’s portside tube, getting into position, Diemer reminded me that his alibi had been established, saying, “Every morning, the tourists, your local people, they see me taking my exercise. Always I am friendly. I wave. So friendly, you Americans!”
The jet-set assassin in a joking mood after a good day’s work.
I was closing the distance on the
No Wake
buoys, half a mile away, only a few strollers on the beach at this hour, the tide too high for serious shellers to be out. So I glanced back to tell the Brazilian, “A couple more minutes.”
Too late—the man was gone.
Still on the deck, though, was his tactical bag. No accident—swimmers and joggers don’t carry luggage, so he’d meant to leave it aboard. But . . . had he left it to somehow damage me, a man he considered to be a competitor in a strange business?
In the space of three days, the Brazilian and I had been partners in a burglary and a murder—crimes that typically divide but can also bond. On a gut level, I trusted the guy, but I wasn’t going to risk incriminating myself by muling his luggage to Lostman’s River.
I waited until I was four miles offshore, back on a southeasterly heading, before locking the Zodiac’s autopilot, then unzipping the bag.
“Holy shit,” I whispered when I opened another bag and saw the blocks of oversized euro bills—hundreds and five hundreds. Twenty blocks, give or take—a half million U.S. dollars, by my quick estimate.
In a separate bag was something else: two framed photos, but different shots of the same gawky teenage blonde I’d seen aboard
Seduci
. In one photo, the girl was leering at the camera, hamming it up, fingers inches from her lips as if blowing a kiss. I flipped it over and saw that it was inscribed and dated in Portuguese:
Tu Sr. Vargas mio Tio con amor en todos, Greta.
“To my Uncle Vargas with total love, Greta.”
Diemer’s niece. Dated two years ago almost to the day. She had somehow been victimized by the Haitian drug dealer, that was apparent. Perhaps Diemer’s brother had, too—in a village that produced twin siblings, it was unlikely a sister would own an expensive racing boat like the Stiletto.
Or was I wrong about the connection?
There was a girl on Saint Martin,
Diemer had said to Kondo just before shooting him,
She was French but part Brazilian.
Diemer had been in perfect English mode. The phraseology
but part Brazilian
had the flavor of secrecy, as if he was revealing something not commonly known. Or was I suspicious because there was so little up front and obvious about Vargas Diemer? Any attempt to assess offered no . . . clarity.
The girl was dead, that was my read. Or had been institutionalized for addiction—or brain damage, perhaps, thanks to a party gift from the smiling Haitian. In the future, depending on how it went, I might be able to ask questions. But not now—probably never.
I returned everything as I’d found it, stored the bag inside the locker, then stood at the helm and punched throttles forward until the twin Mercs were synced at 4700 rpm.
Fifty-three minutes later, I was running the switchbacks of Lostman’s River, flushing white birds and a couple of gators, only a few miles from the entrance to Hawksbill Creek and the silence of an ancient, ancient place.
—
T
HE
NEXT
MORNING,
before noon, the seaplane buzzed me. Tomlinson, Dan Futch, and Diemer—
Alberto
, I had to keep reminding myself—plenty of room for all of them in the Zodiac, plus gear, when I ferried them to the edge of the Bone Field.
We made camp, got out the machetes, a metal detector, string for laying grids, and we went to work. Worked fast, but with the respect and care such a place demanded: four disparate men who shared the curse of obsessive genetics, and all highly motivated because of something Dan had arranged: Candice Sampedro had agreed to let us meet with her grandfather late tomorrow, Sunday, around seven p.m. It would give us a twenty-minute window, she’d told Dan, before the nurse replaced the old Avenger pilot’s IV with a bag that contained his bedtime meds.
31
WHEN TOMLINSON AND I TIED UP AT TIN CITY MARINA,
downtown Naples, Dan Futch and the Brazilian were waiting with the taxi they’d hired, a Mercedes Sprinter van that, the driver said, usually only shuttled between hotels and Southwest Regional, so it was up to us or his Garmin to find Faith Village Hospice.
“Never heard of the place,” he said.
“Only ten minutes from here,” Dan assured us, then we sat in the back, talking in low voices, while the driver turned left onto Fifth Avenue and took us north, past all the pretty shops, then turned right onto Goodlette, a faster six-lane, the sky behind us mixing winter gray with sunset rust—6:25 p.m. Just in time to catch Mr. Angel Sampedro, ninety-one years old, before modern medicine funneled him one night closer toward his everlasting sleep.
Or maybe not from the subdued moods of the two pilots among us.
“Candice is worried because of the way Mr. Sampedro reacted,” Dan said. “We haven’t seen him, of course, but the monitors he’s hooked up to, I guess the nurses came running because they thought he was having a heart attack.”
“The granddaughter,” Tomlinson said, “she showed him the photos?”
“No,” Dan said. “But she told him what we found. I didn’t want to blindside the old guy. Shit, I don’t know . . . just got too much respect for what he did, okay? The old need-to-know-basis guys. Doesn’t matter the age, the training’s still there, and I can’t mislead a man like that.”
The photos we’d taken were not yet printed, but they were on Futch’s laptop: the tail fin of an Avenger, enough moss and mud cleaned away to show a number the old pilot would have recognized: a big white 11 stenciled portside on the tail, a 3 aft on the starboard side: Fort Lauderdale Torpedo Bomber 113. The same aircraft the man had posed with seventy years earlier.
For us, the discovery had been a disappointment, at first, but we’d rallied. We hadn’t found remnants of the iconic Flight 19, true. But what we’d found had played a role in the life of a man we hoped to meet.