Just Different Devils (7 page)

Nacho.

Of all the people in the world I would expect to charter my boat, Nacho would be the last. He was more likely to steal it.

What can I say? During our acquaintanceship, for lack of a better word, I've known him as a drug punk, kidnapper, murderer, and a man of mystery who makes things happen. Bad things.

His phone number, the one I have burned into my memory in case I need a bad guy, is 1-800-gotbadzz, and his motto: We get what’s bugging you.

It used to be 1-800-gotbads? until I reminded him there is no question  mark on the phone. He said it didn't matter because I was never, ever, to call him again.

Which is kind of a shame, since he has used some of his questionable skills to get me out of a couple of jams, and that murder I mentioned? He killed a guy who was gonna kill me, so I can hardly hold
that
against him. The fact that he has strongly hinted he'd prefer I hold something else of mine against him—and I gotta admit the temptation's tantalizing—is flattering. And, to his credit, he
has
forgiven me for stealing his off-road vehicle, credit cards and flattening one of his gang rides.

Jan and I think he is both handsome and charming, in a criminal sort of way. Tantalized by his dark secret life, we've spent untold hours speculating on who he works for, but we simply don't know.

But one thing I
did
know
now
: We work for him.

As we waited for him on deck while he shut down the boat, Jan whispered, "Oh, crap, Jenks isn't gonna like this."

Boy was she right. Until I turned over a new leaf and fell for Jenks, Nacho was just the kind of man I was attracted to: untrustworthy, uncontrollable, unpredictable, handsome, charming and certainly no one you could take home to meet the folks.

Jenks is infinitely trustworthy and lets me think I am in control. He's also solid and handsome in a Nordic way, and his charm is genuine, which is why my Mom and I love him. He is also the most self-confident man I know, and he sort of trusts me, but where Nacho is concerned, he was not going to like the idea of us cohabitating, so to speak, on my boat for an entire month.

"What Jenks doesn't know won't hurt him," I said between my teeth.

"Chino ain't gonna be thrilled, either, even if Nacho did sort of save his grandmother from drug dealers once."

"You gonna tell him?"

"Not no, but hell no."

"So, what
are
we going to tell Jenks and Chino? They're already gonna have a cat that we left the dock, much less for a month."

"You'll figure it out, like always. You are hands down the best liar I know."

"Thanks. I think."

While Nacho settled into his cabin, Jan and I speculated as to why he chartered us. Me. We whispered while putting together a tasty array of hors d'oeuvres. Smoked marlin, a mound of boiled Sea of Cortez blue shrimp, some lobster chunks, melted butter with garlic, and a fresh baked baguette did the job.

"I don't get it," Jan murmured. "Why would he choose you, instead of another real charter? I mean, he
knows
you are freakin' nuts."

"While you, on the other hand, are the very epitome of sanity?"

"He didn't even know I was involved. Or did he? Anyhow, he's never seen
me
run someone down in the street like a dog."

"I see your point. But, he knows when folks just need killin'."

"Ya think he wants us to kill someone?" She sounded a little too excited about this possibility.

"Why would he want us to off anyone at all? I mean, he's the killer for hire."

"I can heeear you," Nacho whispered in my ear.

I jumped about a foot, shrieked, and almost cut off a finger with the bread knife. "Dammit, Nacho," I yelled, waving the knife at him, "don't you know better than to sneak up on a woman who has a sharp instrument in her hand?"

When I yelped, Po Thang, who had made a habit of inhabiting any deck Nacho didn't, ran growling and snapping into the galley. One look at Nacho and he turned tail again.

Nacho shrugged. "We will reach our peace. He is very friendly when you are not around."

Jan laughed. "Isn't everyone?"

I poked her in the ribs, but she ignored me and told Nacho, "Just slip him some smoked marlin, he'll be your new best friend. Trust me. Now, who wants to choose the white wine?"

We moved out on deck where we sipped a crisp white Nacho had paid big bucks for, noshed, and made small talk, which was somewhat difficult. There was that nine-hundred pound gorilla at the table. I was doing my very best to keep a civil tongue because I was in possession of a bunch of Nacho's money and wasn't inclined to give it back. But what did he want for it?

I took a ladylike slug of wine and asked, "Okay, Buster, what do you want?"

Jan cut her eyes at me, Po Thang looked up at my sharp tone, and Nacho didn't even blink. "I want to fish."

This was not what I expected. "Is that spelled with a Ph, or an F?"

He looked confused. "Excuse me?"

"Are you after fish, as in F-I-S-H, or are you P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G?"

"I do not know what phishing means."

"Snooping around for information to be used for nefarious purposes," Jan explained. "Hetta's just being a pill. I mean, what on earth could we know that you want to find out about?"

Not to be put off by Jan's attempt at peacemaking, I said, "I want a straight answer, Nacho. What are you doing here, and why for an entire month?"

Nacho sighed and handed my dog a large piece of smoked marlin. Po Thang vacuumed it down and gave his new BFF an adoring look. Fickle little dung dropper.

"I'm waiting. It is not too late to put you back in that fancy panga and send you packing."

"I am being truthful. I want to go fishing for some very large fish, and I could think of no one more perfect to do it with than you, and your boat. Jan? She is an unexpected, but delightful bonus. At least we will eat well."

Jan gave
her
new BFF a dazzling smile and batted her eyelashes. Fickleness was out of control on my boat. "For dinner we're having
Steak au poivre vert
,
pommes
dauphinoise
, and
salade
with my homemade vinaigrette. Chocolate soufflé for dessert."

"Fabulous. I brought a bottle of el Presidente brandy that will be perfect with the soufflé."

"Why don't you two get a room, and take my dog with you," I snarled.

"So touchy," Nacho said.

"And,
amigo
, are you sure you wouldn't rather have the little woman here whip up some refried beans and a
cerveza
? She slaps a mean tortilla these days, what with her culinary studies at the fish camp."

"Bravo, Café, you have outdone yourself. You managed to insult both of us
and
work in a racial slur. I see your impertinence has not been abated by achieving middle age."

Ouch! Does this guy know how to get even or what? And with such a big word, to boot!

All three of us broke into raucous laughter while Po Thang used our inattention to dash in and finish off the marlin.

Our shared inappropriate senses of humor broke the ice, which is what happens when three people, all of whom live lives outside the norm, crack themselves up over their ability to be impolitic together.

An unspoken truce was reached, and we enjoyed Jan's fabulous dinner of steak with a green peppercorn sauce accompanied by tasty mashed potatoes fried into savory bites. I had to admit Nacho was right, and having Jan aboard was going to make this little voyage a culinary delight, and what the hell, sooner or later Nacho would have to let us know why we were
really
hired.

After our soufflé, we took our brandy and retired to the deck again. Lights from several other boats twinkled in the anchorage, but for now we were the largest vessel. Mellowed by good food and wine, I decided to let the big question rest until morning, and we managed to find neutral topics to talk about. Not easy when our history together is rife with turbulence, but I figured recounting our adventures the past summer diving for the remains of a Manila Galleon was fairly safe ground.

"So, you both did a lot of diving?" Nacho asked.

"Oh, yes," Jan told him. "We learned to use rebreathers and helped with the discovery dives. No really deep stuff for us, because I'm just about as much a chicken as Hetta is. And Po Thang got really good at retrieving—"

I kicked her under the table before she could blab that we did a little extracurricular treasure hunting, and Po Thang was masterful at retrieving Spanish
reales
that didn't have a chance in hell of finding their way into the dive ship's discovery records. 

"Uh, shells," I said. "He dives for shells. Doggone good at it."

"And did you find the treasures you sought?"

"Nothing earth shattering. As you know, Chino wanted to dig up, literally, some family history. We raised a few cannon and coins before Hetta went and sank his ship."

Nacho smiled. "I heard something of that."

"Hey, I didn't do it on purpose. Those Japanese guys were gonna take us out to sea and feed us to the fish, so I had to do something. How was I to know the ship would get all lopsided and sink?"

"So much gold is indeed heavy." Nacho said this in a matter-of-fact tone.

Rats, he knew about the bullion we'd found in the wreckage of a Japanese WWII freighter loaded with loot meant for the purchase of Mexico. After Japan won the war, which they really believed they would, I guess they figured they'd need to secure their borders from warmongers like themselves, so they made some kind of deal to buy Mexico. Anyway, it was interesting that Nacho knew so much about what we did on our summer vacation. How does he do that?

My uncharacteristic silence snagged Nacho's attention. "And what a shame you had to legally give
all
those Spanish
reales
you recovered from the galleon to the Mexican government." Sarcasm, when not used by me, is annoying.

Jan and I, once again surprised by his implied knowledge of our alleged crime, tried to look innocent, but Po Thang hung his head. It was he, after all, who found those Spanish coins. I could see us in court, pointing and saying, "The dog did it!"

"Of course, if you had, by chance, ended up with a few coins, you'd have a problem finding somewhere to sell them, no?"

We innocents bobbed our heads in unison.

"Unless," he sipped his el Presidente Mexican brandy—which to me tastes a little crude, but he evidently loves, considering he had us buy two cases and then brought a bottle—"you knew someone with connections who could find a market for such things as stolen Mexican archeological treasures, and booty left over from ill-gotten and ill-intended Japanese gold? Not to mention pearls?"

I felt my stomach take a dive, and then my blood pressure soar. "Hold that thought," I told him. I reached over and hit a couple of buttons on my remote, and the Garth Brooks song, "Friends in Low Places" blared from the outdoor speakers.

Jan yeehawed and sprang to her feet. We grabbed our microphones—in this case a couple of empty beer bottles—and sang the opening lines. Nacho looked confused, but when we pointed at him while singing the chorus, "I've got friends in low places," he had the good grace to shake his head and smile at our antics.

When the song ended he raised his snifter. "Bravo!"

We took exaggerated bows.

"So, Nacho," Jan said when we caught our breath, "you wanna be our fence? That is, if we had something to move, which we do not."

His smile widened. "I came to fish, however you may spell it. It seems I may have gotten lucky already." He yawned, stood and stretched. "But for now, I need sleep. Tomorrow we will plan a real fishing expedition."

As he walked away, Disloyal Dawg dogged his heels.

"Sumamabee! He's here for our stash? How in the hell does he know about...well, any of it?" Jan hissed. "I guess that's why they call him The Shadow?"

I snorted into my brandy. "He gave himself that name. His California Drivers license gives his name as Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. the Shadow. I know that because I stole it."

"Old history. He got it back. You think he went to all this trouble to get his hands on our nest egg?"

"Maybe. But why spend forty grand to do so? Nope, he's after something else, and I want to know what. Looks like you're gonna have to sleep with him."

Jan raised an eyebrow. "That's your solution? Why me? It's you he likes."

"Likes? Good grief, I wonder how he treats people
he doesn't
like." I leaned in close and whispered. "Why the hell didn't we put that loot from last summer in a bank safe deposit box instead of in the boat safe?"

"I told you, the Mexican bank wouldn't give us one. We don't have a Mexican account, and I sure as hell couldn't put it in Chino's box cuz then he'd know we stole it."

"Stole is such a harsh word. We...appropriated...our fair share. Of the coins, anyhow. And the gold was legal plunder, in my opinion."

"Chino might not see it quite that way. But you did the right thing for once in your life by giving him the bullion bars you legally plundered, except that one. I mean, it was the least you could do after scuttling his dive ship."

"I did not scuttle...oh, never mind. The Japanese government, or whoever was responsible for stashing the gold on Chino's dive boat, and then stealing said ship, are responsible. I'm sure they've recovered their bullion by now. Almost all of it anyhow." We exchanged conspiratorial grins and clinked glasses.

"Nacho for sure had some kind of connection to those Japanese goons, so he probably knew the gold existed, and they were looking for it. And that they found it."

"Then
you
found it. And since Nacho is familiar with your larcenous proclivities, he figured you couldn't possibly have
not
glommed on to some."

I ignored her insult as to my questionable ethics when dealing with men with no ethics at all. "I think he was either working with them, or against them. How
would
he know for sure we cadged a little booty for ourselves?"

"Well, duh, I think we just told him."

"Crap. We gotta cut back on the booze for the duration of this voyage. Okay, so we kinda gave up the ghost, but why would he be suspicious in the first place?"

"Uh, Hetta, he, like, knows you?"

We cleaned up the galley, which brought Po Thang nosing around to see if there was garbage in need of disposing.

He looked slightly remorseful for his disloyalties, but I wasn't letting him off the hook. "What? Your new best buddy run out of handouts? And you think we're gonna reward that type of perfidy?"

He sat, raised a paw and gave us his best hang dawg look. It worked like it always does.

Since we were now bunking together for the duration of the voyage, Jan and I had to share my queen bed, which was mostly taken up by Po Thang. We kicked him off a couple of times but the minute we dozed off, he crept back up.

We finally gave up trying to keep him in his own bed and I was just dozing off on my tiny sliver of mattress when Jan whispered, "On the bright side, it looks like we finally got us a fence. I was wondering what we were gonna do. No way, Jose, was I going to try and take a bullion bar across the US border."

I yawned. "Amen. We figure our stash is worth over a million if we could legally unload it, half to a quarter of that on the blackmarket,
if
we could even find a shady buyer. Let's say Nacho wants his cut, what do you figure is the normal percentage for a fence's take these days?"

"I dunno. Maybe we can Google it?"

For some reason this struck us as hilarious. Or maybe it was the ridiculousness of the entire situation.

Catching my breath, I gasped, "How many of our friends do you figure are on a yacht in Mexico, with a known criminal type, and a million bucks in gold coins, pearls and bullion they can't get rid of? "

"I dunno, let's Google it."