Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (12 page)

Dave and I agreed on a price. It didn’t take much haggling, but we did anyway, because that’s how things are done in the Keys. He would fly back to Boca Chica, clean her up, and do a complete service on her before I picked her up in two days. We would be going to Elbow Cay in a week and I suddenly had a crazy idea to fly over ahead of time to get a bird’s eye view of the areas where we thought the treasure was buried.

After Dave left, I brought everyone back down to the
Anchor
. Kim and I were sitting on a table out back by the boat ramp with Pescador, waiting for the sunset. It had become my and his ritual and I wanted to share it with my daughter.

“Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“You think I could stay with you for a while? A couple days or a week maybe? I’d like to get to know you better.”

I gave that some serious thought. I hadn’t seen my daughter since she was just five months old and we barely knew each other. We had a trip coming up and might be gone for several days, but I wanted to get to know her as well.

“A couple of days, sure. Several of us are going to the Bahamas on business later this week, though. Might be gone a week.”

“Government business?”

This was as good a time as any, so while we watched the sun sink toward the horizon, I told her about her grandfather who was killed in Vietnam and her grandmother who couldn’t continue alone and took her own life. I told her about her great-grandparents who raised me and about the time Deuce’s dad and I found treasure in Fort Pierce. I told her about the inheritance Pap and Mam left me. I told her about the gold that Deuce, Rusty, and I found last spring. I told her everything we knew about the treasure we were looking for and finally, I told her all about Alex and everything she left me, both material and emotional. Somewhere during all that, the sun set with a spectacular display of light and color.

“You reached out to me, Kim. With all the stories your mom told you, that was a big step. I’m glad you did.”

“Somehow, I was certain that none of it was true. I love your little island and your friends. Can I stay? I promise I won’t get in the way.”

“You’ll never be in the way,” I said. “Call your sister and tell her you’ll be staying down here a little longer. Call your mom, too. You’re only seventeen, but you’re out of high school and can make a decision like that on your own. Still, you should call her.”

She threw her arms around my neck. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Let’s go get something to eat, then we’ll have to go do some shopping.”

Thirty minutes later, we pulled out of the parking lot in
The Beast
and headed north on US-1 a couple of blocks to Anthony’s Ladies Apparel, where Kim picked out a few dressy tops and shorts, along with a new swimsuit, some shoes, and underwear.

Then we stopped at Keykers Tropical Clothing Store and I bought her some proper working clothes. Living and working on a boat or an island, outside in the hot sun all day, requires a specialized kind of wardrobe. Tough-wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants, boat shoes, wraparound sunglasses and long-billed fishing hats. Tourists flock to the Keys to worship the sun, but those of us who work under it seek the shade.

When we got back to the
Anchor
, Deuce and Julie were sitting at a table with Doc, his wife, Nikki, Charity, Tony, and Andrew Bourke, who had just arrived an hour earlier. We joined them at the long table. I introduced Kim to Andrew and told everyone that she knew all about the upcoming trip and would be staying with me for a couple of days.

“Deuce just told me you bought Dave’s plane,” Bourke said. “Congratulations.” Bourke is my age, a little shorter, but the same weight, with broad shoulders and a thick chest. He always seemed to be able to maintain an even keel, even in the most hectic situations.

“We were just talking,” Deuce said. “And the idea came up that it might help if we could do a flyover and have a look from above before we go over there.”

“I’d bet a dollar that was your idea, Deuce.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“Yeah, that’s how I knew it was yours. I just thought the same thing an hour ago.” Deuce and I always seemed to be on the exact same page.

“I made preliminary reservations at a resort,” Doc said. “It’s privately owned and only a few miles from where the dig site is. It’s called Crystal Waters and Villas and it has a large dock on the lee side, a big main house and five smaller detached villas. I reserved the main house, but someone needs to call the lady. My credit card doesn’t have a high enough limit.”

I handed Kim my credit card, grinned, and said, “Give Kim the number, she’ll call and confirm it.” She went over to Doc, who gave her a slip of paper with the name and number on it then started outside to make her calls. “And Kim, get any GPS numbers they have.” She gave me a thumbs up and went out the door.

I turned to Rusty. “Do you think I could put some tie-downs over on the corner of the property, between the canal and the ramp? Until I can build something out on the island.”

“What? I’m your friggin’ airport now?” Then he winked and nodded and the deal was done. “I finally got the information I needed to get my salvage license approved in the islands. They were hesitant, because I wouldn’t give them the location we wanted to survey. I finally got them to understand that if someone other than a licensed salvor found it, like say the property owner, then the government might not get anything. At least with me, they know they’re dealing with a professional. I just need to go over there and sign some papers, or have them shipped here.”

“Let’s me, you, and Doc fly over the day after tomorrow,” I said. “We can land in Nassau, clear customs, sign for your license and then do a flyover of the location and where we’ll be staying.”

Rusty got up to get one of the patrons at the bar a fresh beer and brought back refills of everyone’s drinks. He sat back down and said, “With only four locations over there to check out, we’ll probably only need a few days.”

“Four locations?” Doc asked. “I thought we had it narrowed down to one place.”

Tony said, “Chyrel’s model of the shoreline four hundred and forty years ago shows a large limestone formation that’s now a large rock jutting out of the water a hundred yards from the beach. It was once connected to land until about three hundred years ago. Plus she found two more large limestone outcroppings on parts of the island that were wide enough. One’s almost to the northern tip of the island and another is further south than the one we were sure of. Back then, she says it was a lot larger and inland from the beach about twenty yards. Now it’s the southern edge of a small cove.”

We talked for another hour and I could see that Kim was getting tired. It’d been a pretty exciting day for her, I guess. “Where are you staying, Andrew?” I asked.

“I was hoping to hitch a ride up to the island,” he replied. “But it looks like you’re docked for the night.”

“Kim can bunk with me on the
Caird
,” Charity said.

Kim had just returned from making her phone calls and said, “On the blue sailboat? That’d be cool!” Handing my card back to me, she added, “Everything’s all set at Crystal Waters. The main house and the villas have different names, but one owner. Crystal Waters is close to the dock and Crystal Villas is down the hill to the east, nearer the beach.”

I glanced at Charity, who smiled. “All right, Andrew,” I said. “You can bunk with Tony and I’ll take back my stateroom.”

“Let’s go get your stuff, Kim,” Charity said. “I’m about beat.”

As they got up to leave, Deuce asked, “When will Dave have the plane ready?”

“Tomorrow evening,” I replied. “He said he’d spend the whole day servicing and cleaning everything. I can pick it up the next morning.”

“I pay your firm to do things for me,” Valentin Madic said.

The older man sitting across the mahogany desk from him removed his reading glasses and placed them next to the documents he’d been given to read. “Yes, Valentin, my firm has done quite a bit of work for you. We know the law and more importantly, we know how to keep from going afoul of that law. I’m not saying what you want done can’t be done. It just has to be done delicately, taking the proper steps in the proper order, with the right amount of time between each. This ensures that no red flags go up anywhere. What you ask will take at least two months, probably ten weeks.”

Madic sat back in the chair. He thought of the clown he’d once seen at a circus when he was a child. The clown had dozens of plates spinning on sticks and had to move quickly from one to another to keep them from falling. Recently, he’d begun to feel just like that clown. He was in the office of the patriarch and lead partner of the law firm that handled many of his legal dealings and a few that were slightly less legal.

“Very well,” he said. “If it takes that long, then it does. I have faith in you and your team, Alfredo.”

“We’ll get started on it immediately,” the older man said. “Now, that other matter. The background investigation of certain people you asked about. Only two of the license plate numbers you provided came back to anyone living at that address. From that, I have the dossiers of three people. The owner of the establishment, his daughter, and her husband. My people asked around discreetly about who the others might be, since you could only provide first names. Island people are very tight-lipped, but we learned one of them. His dossier is here also.”

Madic picked up the four files and looked through each, with a bit more than a cursory glance. Finally, he looked up and said, “Two Navy men, a Marine and a woman in the Coast Guard?”

“That’s all we’ve found so far. The owner of the bar served many years ago and his daughter is in the Coast Guard Reserves. Only her husband has recent military service. There’s nothing anywhere that we have access to that says anything about him since he left the Navy almost two years ago. The last man left the Navy eight years ago. He was a medical specialist.”

Madic closed the files and put them in his briefcase. “Thank you, Alfredo,” he said as he rose from the chair.

The older man stood up and walked around the desk, shaking Madic’s hand. “I’ll keep you abreast of each step along the way and how long we should wait until the next one, but I don’t foresee this taking longer than ten weeks.”

Madic left the inner office, nodded to the secretary, and continued on through to the hallway, where he took an elevator to the ground floor. As he got into his Mercedes, his phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID and answered the phone.

“Valentin, we’ve learned more,” came Tena Horvac’s voice over the phone. “From the listening device that Ivo planted in the bar. They will fly an advance party to the island in two days.”

“No mention of the location?”

“Nothing yet. There are now four possible locations. They will use the airplane to look at each from the air. I know three are within a few miles of the northern end of the island and the fourth is offshore. They all reference large rock outcroppings.”

“Two days?” Madic said. “Will our people be in place?”

“This is just an advance party that will fly over. Our people will be in place before the rest arrive. We know where they will be staying now, also.”

“Very good. I should be over there within three days. Let me know if anything else is learned.”

I woke early and after pouring a mug and thermos of coffee, I climbed up to the bridge. It was still dark, but the eastern sky was showing a tinge of purple. I could see light spilling across the dock from the
James Caird
, but so far nobody had emerged.

A light went on in the back of the bar, so I knew Rufus was up and getting breakfast ready. Rusty now had eight liveaboards at his dock. A month earlier, he only had a couple. He raised his dockage rate by ten dollars a week and included a free breakfast buffet every morning from 0600 to 0700 for the liveaboards. Nobody grumbled and word spread to other marinas. Now, there were at least twenty people every morning, those not docked there paying ten bucks a head for Rufus’s Caribbean breakfast buffet.

Kim and Charity climbed up to the dock from the
Caird
and both started my way. “Grab a coupla mugs from the galley,” I said. They did and climbed up to the bridge as Deuce and Julie emerged from their boat also.

“How many people can that plane you bought carry?” Kim asked when she sat down in the second seat and Charity sat on the port-side bench, being her usual quiet self.

I laughed and said, “You want to go to the Bahamas, too?”

“I have a passport,” she said by way of a reply.

“Flying over open water in a fifty-three-year-old airplane?”

“Please…”

“Yeah, you can come. And to answer your question, it can carry six people, plus the pilot.”

“Got an email from the Director,” Deuce said as he and Julie walked up to my dock, hand in hand. The Director is Deuce’s usual reference to his boss, Travis Stockwell. His full title is Associate Director, Caribbean Counter-Terrorism Command, Department of Homeland Security. He was an easygoing man in his early fifties who had taken over when Deuce’s former boss, Jason Smith, went rogue and nearly killed both of us, along with the President. Stockwell had worked his way up through the ranks in the Army’s famed 82nd Airborne Division, first as Enlisted and later as an Officer. He’d retired after thirty years in the Army and was tapped to take charge of Deuce’s team and expand it.

“What’s the Colonel up to?” I asked.

“We have a new operator joining us in the next week or so,” Deuce replied. “Bender just retired from the Secret Service.”

Paul Bender was the head of the Presidential Detail when the President and Secretary of Homeland Security came down to the Keys for a little fishing last summer. He was a professional all the way and even though our first meeting didn’t go so well, I liked the guy.

“Bender?” I asked. “He struck me as career Secret Service.”

“The political writing is on the wall,” Deuce said.

Bourke and Tony emerged from the salon and together we all went over to the bar for breakfast. While eating breakfast in a bar might seem strange to some people, here in the Keys they’re the primary social gathering places for locals. The
Anchor
isn’t on any tour maps and unlike
Dockside
, which is a popular restaurant and bar just half a mile away, it’s been able to retain its local attitude, where nearly everyone that walked in is known to everyone else. Rusty had seen the need for such a place years ago and had been building it up for just that. His dad had run it as a bait shop and bar for years. With Rufus’s food now a local attraction in itself, Rusty was already in the process of planning a full kitchen addition to the place.

While we ate, we discussed what would be needed the next morning. With five people already aboard, we wouldn’t be able to take much of anything in the way of cargo or gear. Our plan was for me to fly the Beaver from Key West to Marathon and pick up the others. Then we’d fly on to Nassau to clear customs and refuel. We’d be on the ground in Nassau a couple of hours, while Rusty went to the government complex to get his license and permit. From there, we’d do a couple of low-level flyovers of the four sites and where we’d be staying on Elbow Cay. With nearly five hours of flight time, we should have plenty of daylight.

Bourke said he could go to the Home Depot, pick up some bags of concrete, large eyebolts, and other hardware, and set three tie-downs near the boat ramp while we were gone. He’d just need a few minutes to look at the plane and determine where to set them. Charity volunteered to help him any way she could.

“When I get that done, I’ll mount that infrared light I got for you,” Bourke said. “I think you’ll like the look of it once it’s installed.”

Counting the short hop from Key West to here, we’d be flying almost seven hundred miles, refueling in Nassau and Miami to clear customs both ways and arriving back at the
Anchor
before dark. I called Key West airport and filed a flight plan, departing at 0800 and returning about 1700.

With nothing much to do the rest of the day, I asked to borrow Rusty’s skiff so I could show Kim around the nearby islands and do some fishing. We packed some water and food into his little skiff and headed out, going east and then north through Vaca Cut and into the Gulf of Mexico. I pointed out a few of the landmarks, told her the names of the islands we passed, and explained what history of the islands I’d acquired after living here for over seven years. We circled the east end of the Knights Key, passing under the Seven Mile Bridge and back into the Atlantic. I showed her the mansion built on East Sister Rock, before turning into Sister Creek. We toured Boot Key Harbor, stopping to say hi to a couple of liveaboards I knew.

Exiting the harbor on the west side, we went back under the Seven Mile Bridge and anchored on Bethel Bank to fish for snapper. We spent an hour there, talking and getting to know one another better as we fished. After catching a half dozen good-sized snapper and putting them in the fish box, we skirted Pigeon Key, then went west following the Seven Mile Bridge. I explained to my daughter about the early settlers and “Flagler’s Folly,” as the early railroad was known.

Henry Flagler was a prominent business man that developed a railroad and a number of resorts along Florida’s east coast in the 1800s. Not satisfied when the rail reached Miami at the turn of the century, he decided to extend it over a network of more than forty bridges, all the way to Key West. Other businessmen of the time thought him mad calling it the “railroad that went to sea” and dubbed his endeavor “Flagler’s Folly”. In truth, the man had great insight.
Pigeon Key is now a tourist attraction, set up like the early settlers in the area had lived. When we reached Spanish Harbor, I turned north and followed Bogie Channel toward No Name Bridge.

“You feel like a pizza for lunch?” I asked.

“I’d love a pizza. Don’t tell me there’s a Pizza Hut out here on these islands.”

“Not a Pizza Hut, but I know a place that makes the best pizza in all of south Florida. It’s more of a restaurant and bar, called No Name Pub.”

“Why don’t they give it a name?”

I just shrugged and turned into the marina at Old Wooden Bridge Cottages, just before the bridge. I tied up just short of the fuel dock and we got out. From there it was a short walk to No Name Pub.

Kim wasn’t exactly prepared for what she found once we went inside. Nearly every bare surface—walls, ceiling, posts, and bar—was covered with dollar bills. We ordered our pizza at the bar and got a couple of cans of Coke, then walked out the back to the terrace area.

“You were right,” Kim said, after eating her fourth slice. “This is the best pizza I ever had.”

I asked the waitress for a marker and she produced one instantly from her back pocket. I handed it to Kim along with a dollar bill and said, “It’s a tradition for first-time visitors. Write your name on it and we’ll staple it somewhere on the way out.”

She scrawled her name on the left side of the bill and slid it over to me, along with the marker. “You sign it, too, Dad.”

I did as she asked and I stapled it on a slightly bare spot on the ceiling, right by the door. Walking back to the boat, she asked where we were going from there and what we were going to do with the fish we’d caught.

“We’ll cross the skinny water up to the island and drop the fish off with Charlie. We always need more fish.”

We got back in the boat and headed out of the marina, turning north and following the shoreline. I kept close to the west bank, idling along, scanning the shore. Finally, I saw three Key deer feeding in a small grassy area and turned in, killing the motor.

“They’re so tiny,” Kim whispered, watching the buck and two does eating. “They’re no bigger than your dog.”

We watched them graze for a moment, then started the engine and threaded between Cutoe Key and the peninsula on the southeast corner of Howe Key. Ten minutes later, we tied up at the south dock and started unloading our catch.

“Rusty said he wanted first dibs on our first batch of crawfish,” Carl said while we helped him clean the fish. “I can have two coolers full in just a few minutes, if you’re headed back that way.”

“Go ahead and box them up,” I said. “We’ll head straight there from here.”

A half hour later, with the snapper in the freezer and two coolers full of crawfish on the skiff, we headed south through Big Spanish Channel to the southern tip of Little Pine Key, then made a beeline for the hump in the Seven Mile Bridge. Idling back up the canal to the
Anchor
, I asked Kim if she’d had a good time.

“It’s nothing like I thought it’d be,” she said. “Driving down, we only got to see what the islands looked like from the highway. All those little islands up around you are way prettier.”

It was midafternoon, but a cool front had moved through and it looked as if the sky would split open any minute, so we hurried with the coolers and made it inside just as the first fat drops of rain started to fall.

“What’s in the coolers?” Julie asked from behind the bar.

“Crawfish,” I replied. “Rusty said he wanted the first harvest.”

“Dot di little lobstah he was talkin’ bout?” Rufus asked, as he came in the back door.

“You have a recipe for crawfish, Rufus?” I asked.

“Dunt know,” he replied. “Nevah see one. Lemme see dem.”

I set one of the coolers on a table and opened it. “Careful, they have pincers.”

He reached in and pulled one out, its pincers reaching back for his fingers as it slapped its tail, trying to get free. “Dem er janga,” he said, dropping it back into the cooler with a grin on his face. “Di hill peoples got many recipes fer dem, mon.” He carried one of the coolers out the back door, then returned and carried the second one away, still grinning.