American Tropic (3 page)

A
gray sixty-foot-long Coast Guard cutter tows the small wooden raft with dead bodies toward Key West Harbor. Noah follows the cutter in his
trawler. The cutter slows to a stop. Noah motors alongside and shouts to a uniformed guardsman on the cutter’s deck, “What’s the holdup?”

The guardsman shouts down, “Harbor’s blocked, powerboat race starting, have to wait before going in.”

Noah cuts his engine. He sees around him an anchored flotilla of fancy yachts, paint-blistered skiffs, sleek ketches, and listing lobster boats crowded with beer-drinking revelers waiting for the spectacle to begin.

From the harbor’s distant shoreline a cannon booms, signaling the race start. Cheers go up from the anchored flotilla. A roar of jet-propelled engines vibrates the air. Twelve long-hulled powerboats emerge from the harbor entrance. The waterborne herd thunders at full throttle, their boldly painted hulls nosed high, sharp bows tilting six feet into the air, their rear exhausts blasting water up behind them. Deep within the cocooned cockpits bolts of sunlight reflect off the driver’s and throttle-man’s crash helmets. The boats race in front of Noah’s trawler with an earsplitting engine snarl; white-hot jet exhausts plow a showering spray. Above the powerboats a TV news helicopter chases the action. From the copter’s open doorway a cameraman leans out, filming the boats as they roar toward the ocean’s distant horizon and over its edge.

Noah’s boat rocks in the watery wake left behind by the powerboats. The Coast Guard cutter’s engines rev to a turbine whine. Noah follows the cutter towing the raft. Inside the harbor’s anchorage, the cutter slows to a stop, and guardsmen secure it alongside a cement pier. Noah steers his boat around the cutter and ties up behind the raft. He watches through his pilothouse window as a
crowd gathers on the pier, gawking at the sight of the raft with its cargo of bodies.

Among the crowd is Hogfish, straddling a rusty bicycle. From the back of his sun-faded fisherman’s cap hangs a ragged swag of graying hair. IPhone earbuds are jammed into his ears. A tight T-shirt on his bony chest reads
DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER
.
A queer grin spreads over his forty-year-old face, remarkable for its smooth, unlined quality. Only his bulging eyes, washed of all color and seeming to spin in opposite orbits, indicate a man burned out from battles fought in distant wars. Between the handlebars of his bicycle is stretched a fishing line, dangling with barbed J-hooks. He pushes the bicycle’s front wheel against the taut rope mooring the raft to the dock.

A bullnecked deputy detective with a slick sunburnt shaved head, Moxel, shoves through the crowd to Hogfish. A shiny badge is pinned to his crisp blue uniform shirt. His lips carry the arrogant expression of a young man barging through life based on a combination of brute force and triumph over his low social origins. He grips the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle above the line of dangling fishhooks and snarls in a Southern accent: “Get away from that rope. This is a crime scene.”

Hogfish’s head bobs to the clash of heavy-metal guitars playing through his old-model iPhone’s earbuds. He pushes his front bicycle wheel harder against the rope to get a closer look at the grotesque scene in the raft.

Moxel tightens his fists on the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle. “I’m talking to you! Back off! Didn’t you hear me? Take out your goddamn earplugs!” Hogfish’s head keeps bobbing.

Luz, dressed in her dark pants and guayabera shirt,
steps quickly through the crowd and grabs the scraggly ponytail hanging from behind Hogfish’s fishing cap. The muscles in her arm tighten as she tugs the ponytail, pulling him away from the rope. She leans into his face and shouts,
“Dios da sombrero a quien no tiene cabeza!”

Moxel elbows Luz and sneers. “What the hell does that mean?”

“God gives hats to some who have no head.”

“Why not just say it in English? Your kind are always trying to make this a Spanish-speaking country.”

Luz ignores Moxel and steps to a guardsman protecting the raft with a rifle clutched in his hands. The guardsman nervously holds up the rifle, blocking Luz. “Ma’am, you’ll have to stay on the other side of the rope. This is official Coast Guard business. No one goes on the raft.”

Luz pulls out her wallet, flips it open, and flashes her silver badge. “I’m Detective Luz Zamora, Key West Homicide. This dock is city property. I’ve got jurisdiction here, not the Coast Guard. I’m boarding the raft.”

The guardsman looks at the badge and stands aside. “Yes, ma’am!”

Luz steps over the rope onto the edge of the concrete bulwark. She winces at the rotting stench drifting up from the bloated bodies. She jumps down onto the raft and moves quickly among the jumble of dead people, feeling the wrists of stiffened arms for a pulse.

A siren wails from the dock. The crowd parts for the arriving ambulance. The side door swings open; a paramedic hurries out. He jumps onto the raft and shouts at Luz above the still-wailing siren, “Is anyone alive?”

Luz turns to the paramedic. “No one. All dead.”

The medic gazes in astonishment at the bodies on the
raft. He looks back at Luz. “Must be hard for you, seeing your people end up this way.”

“What do you mean, my people?”

“You’re Cuban. These are Cuban boat people.”

“These people aren’t Cubans, they’re Haitians. But that doesn’t make it less horrifying.”

Luz looks away from the bodies. She sees Noah on the fly deck of his trawler, docked next to the raft. She calls over to him, “What do you know about this?”

Noah shouts back, “The raft was adrift, banged into my boat. I called in the Mayday.”

Noah turns from Luz and goes back into his pilothouse. He grabs his bottle of rum off the console table. He walks over to a canvas curtain covering a storage closet in the corner. He pulls the curtain back, exposing the teenaged survivor from the raft. The boy appears terrified. Noah speaks softly in French: “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. We’ve got to keep you hidden. If they find you, they’ll send your sorry ass back to Haiti.” He drinks rum from his bottle and looks sympathetically at the trembling boy. “Kid, you crossed seven hundred miles of shark-infested ocean to escape an earthquake-racked country of poverty, disease, and violence. Now you’ve got to do the hardest thing, you’ve got to trust me.”

The boy mumbles in French, “My … name … is Rimbaud.”

Noah responds in French. “What’s the family name?”

“Mesrine.”

Noah guzzles down the last of the rum and fixes the boy with a glassy-eyed philosophical expression. “Rimbaud Mesrine, damnedest thing. They named you after a famous gunrunning poet and a famous cold-blooded
killer. They must have figured you were going to become a French politician.”

Noah turns and looks down through the salt-streaked window of the pilothouse. He sees Luz on the raft moving among the dead bodies and speaks to her in words he knows she can’t hear:

“Slaves and masters. Fucked up as it ever was.”

F
ive miles out to sea from Key West, the twelve powerboats roar across the ocean’s surface at ninety miles an hour. The TV news helicopter overhead chases the boats as they make a turn around a large channel marker. They speed away from the floating buoy. The copter hovers over it. The side door of the copter slides open, and a cameraman looks down, shocked at what he sees, almost losing his grip on the heavy camera as he shouts back at the pilot. “Damn! It’s what I thought! Can’t believe it!”

The copter’s blades whip the air as the cameraman leans perilously out from the doorway. He aims his lens down and films the naked body of a dead man tied by rope to the buoy’s metal pole.

The downward force of wind from the copter’s blades above the body creates a churning circle in the water around the buoy. The copter pulls up and banks away. The buoy rocks in the watery wake left behind. The mutilated body tied to the pole sways beneath a relentless sun.

T
he Bounty Bar faces the boat-filled Key West Harbor. The walls are hung with an array of seafaring artifacts, big-game fishing rods and reels and colorful mounted trophy fish caught in their plasticized death leaps. The humid air moves in a rush from ceiling fans spinning over the heads of sport fishermen, shrimpers, real-estate hustlers, deadbeats, lushes, lowlifes, and wide-eyed tourists wearing floral-print shirts.

Commanding the scene from behind the long mahogany bar counter is Zoe. She emanates an effortless sophisticated beauty cut by a savvy aura of understanding the world of men. She moves quickly, with the calculated feline grace of knowing her ability to land securely no matter what situation she is thrown into. She pulls two bottles of beer up from the icy water of the large bright-red cooler and bangs them down on the counter in front of two Bounty Bar regulars, Big Conch and Hard Puppy.

Big Conch’s cocked-up stature comes from the years when he outran Coast Guard cutters in his cocaine-packed cigarette boat across low-tide coral inlets. His face registers the righteousness of an outlaw who cashed out of his scam before being busted and left to rot in a federal slammer. His gray hair is dyed an unnatural blond hue and is slicked back flat against his scalp. Around Big’s neck dangles the circular gold weight of Spanish medallions. His blue-eyed stare is that of a thug feigning a legit
life in a new world of real-estate pimps and condo hustlers. He grabs the beer bottle in front of him and ham-fists it to his lips, sucking out the foaming brew.

Next to Big, Hard Puppy takes a slow, cool drink from his bottle. Hard is descended from a line of black Bahamian freemen who were once the property of British Caribbean overlords. He is outfitted in a flashy white silk suit and white alligator shoes, befitting his position as the number-one cash kingpin of illegal dogfighting from Key West to Miami. Around Hard floats in the air the lime scent of aftershave lotion that he slaps onto his sharp-featured face every day to keep away the scent of poverty he grew up with and that he always smells: the stink of unchanged shit in diapers and a drunk stepfather snoring on top of his puked-out, passed-out mother.

Hard and Big straighten up on their stools to get a better view of Zoe behind the bar. They admire her long tanned legs captured by tight white shorts and, above that, a thin strategic halter top offering the right amount of provocative glimpse of her breasts.

Big glances at his gold Rolex as if time is running out, then looks back at Zoe and rattles off at her: “After your divorce is final from Noah, you’re gonna marry me. I’ll be richer than original sin itself when my resort is completed. Bank on that, girl. Big will have you farting through silk panties for the rest of your gorgeous life.”

Zoe plants her elbows on the bar in front of Big; she leans her chin into her cupped hands and defiantly nails Big’s blue eyes with her own big blue eyes. “Everyone knows your Neptune Bay Resort is illegal. You bulldozed tidal lands before the environmental study came in. The ecologists stopped you. You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang
you from an endangered gumbo-limbo tree before you make your first dime.”

Hard Puppy snorts his approval of Zoe’s put-down of Big. His platinum-encased teeth shine as he speaks with a singsong Caribbean twang. “Baby doll, you don’t have to be marryin’ me for my monies. Just be givin’ me one hot honey night and we be doin’ the nasty black and white, then Hard’s fortune be yours.”

Zoe spins around from Hard and Big. Her attention goes to a large television behind the bar. On the screen, a basketball game cuts away to a breaking news story. A headline scrolls across the screen,
MURDER AT THE RACE
,
followed by a video shot from a helicopter of a race-marker buoy floating at sea. Tied to the pole of the buoy is the blurred image of a man’s body. Everyone in the bar stops talking and turns toward the television just as the blurred image of the dead body flashes off the screen and is replaced with
DANDY RANDY FOUND DEAD. WE RESUME REGULAR BROADCAST
.

Big jumps from his stool and jabs his finger at the television. “That was my Neptune Bay partner tied to that buoy! What the hell happened?”