Key West Connection (12 page)

“Hope you don't mind, Cap'n MacMorgan, but I thought it would look nice,” she had said.

And I smiled—smiled for the first time in more than a week.

She added, “Janet, your kids—I sure was awful sorry to hear about them. They was so good. They say us Conchs is cliquish, but I liked that woman the moment I met her. We ain't standoffish when it comes ta good people. And I just want you to know that if'n there's anythin' you need—ever—you got friends on this island. Like tha' business off Middle Sambo th' other night? Well, had you needed any help, my old man an' a buncha other Conchs woulda slipped out there with ya. We take care of our own, we do. Always have, always will. I just wanted ya to know. . . . ”

I didn't ask her what she had heard, how she had found out. The few true islanders that are left have their own ways of knowing. Something about her concern, her affection for Janet, her way of telling me that they would help—no matter what—touched me. Really touched me. I winked, said nothing, and I managed to hold back the hot rush of tears until I was offshore, well away from Cow Key. . . .

There was a guy waiting for me when I got back to the docks. I nosed the
Sniper
around, port engine forward, starboard engine in reverse, then backed her in, stopped my sternway with a forward thrust of power, then shut her down.

“Are you Captain Henry MacMorgan?”

“That's right.” I looked up briefly as I made the lines fast and rigged the spring line. He was a big man in a neat business suit. Short black hair, angular face: the Clint Eastwood type, only burlier.

He took a wallet from his jacket pocket, opened it, and held it up plainly for me to see. “My name's Fizer, Captain MacMorgan. Norm Fizer. I'm with the federal government.”

“Great. Enjoy the benefits. Buy more suits.”

“I think we might have met before, Captain MacMorgan. Remember, Dusky?”

I stood up and studied his face. And, finally, I did remember. Stormin' Norman. Special Forces. CIA, maybe. One hush-hush mission and too many jungle nights in Cambodia, long, long ago. A good man that we all had entrusted with our lives. And he had come through—unusual for a government man in those times. And these times. And all times.

“No,” I lied. “Can't say as I do.”

He smiled. “Guess I can't remember, either. Mind if I come aboard and we talk about our poor memories?”

We sat in the forward salon, me with Hatuey, him with ice water and a squeeze of lime.

“I told that Lenze character everything I know about the murder of my friend, Norm, so if that's why you're here . . . ”

He held up his hands. “Hold it, Dusky. Not so fast. Give me a chance to set a few things straight, first, and then we'll talk. Okay?”

“Sure.”

He sipped at his lime and water. “Before you resigned from the Navy, you had a very high security clearance. That's why we were together in that place neither of us can remember. A very high security clearance, and so, back then, I could have prefaced what I am now about to say with ‘Restricted Information' and gone on with every assurance that you would not blab, and get me fired and force me into selling that crummy secondhand heap that my wife drives. Now I have to ask you for your word.” He chuckled. “How about it, Dusky? A few minutes of talk, all strictly confidential.”

“You're not here, right?”

“Correct. I'm up in Atlanta this very moment—just as you were up in Miami one Friday night—”

“Now hold it, Fizer!”

He waved his hands at me, relaxed, self-assured. “I didn't come here to entrap you, Dusky. Take it easy. We're on the same side.”

“And what side is that?”

“Oh, the side of law, order, and justice for all, of course! But all sarcasm aside, Dusky, I . . . well . . . we need your help.”

I set down the Hatuey bottle and looked him straight in the eye. Brown eyes. Serious, dark eyes deep-set within the fraternity-boy face. “Why should I help you? Your people didn't exactly put a lock on one Benjamin Ellsworth. Where in the hell were your people when he was planning to put a bomb in my car? A car which just happened to be holding my wife and kids when it blew up!”

He lowered his eyes. “I know, I know—that's why I'm down here, Dusky. And I'm sorry, I truly am. We've got problems in the department. We've been having people go bad. People in high places. It's money, Dusky. Big money. And the weak ones can't resist it. Would you believe that I myself was offered a quarter million in cash just to turn my head once? Just
once
.”

“So what happened?”

His eyes focused, his nostrils flared. This was the guy I had known in Cambodia. “That fellow is taking a nice little vacation in federal prison. And he spent the first two weeks in court hobbling around on crutches. Okay?”

“You made your point, Norm.”

“So how about it, Dusky? Come back into the fold.”

“I don't like wearing a suit.”

“We have too many people who wear suits already. We want someone who knows boats, knows the water, and can take care of himself—and that's you. You'll still run your charter business. But every now and then I might drop you the word, and then you'd tell your friends that you're leaving on a little vacation cruise. We'll back you, we'll finance you—but you take orders from us.”

“And what if, on one of these little assignments, I get into trouble?”

“It'll be like the other place neither of us were—you have to fight your way out—or die trying. Because we'll disavow all knowledge of your activities.”

“And what about the local law?”

“I'll take care of that.”

“And what if I say no?”

“Then I'm afraid we'll have to let Mr. Lenze—who is headed for a hard fall very soon, incidentally—continue his investigation into the murder of five drug runners, all of whom had records longer than both of our arms. By the way, the way you treated the old man impressed us. We made him give back the money, of course, but your sympathetic treatment—well, it helped us make the final decision.”

“Give me a day to think it over, Norm.”

“Fine, Dusky. But we need you. We need someone with local cover who can work fast and clean. Battles between mobsters have a way of exposing the soft underbelly of crime rings to federal three-piece-suit men like me. It wouldn't be the first time we've used someone like you.”

He finished his lime and water, stood up, and held out his hand. “By the way, I have a message for you—Colonel Westervelt says you should keep the little toys he gave you. He hopes you'll be needing them soon.”

“I hardly know the guy.”

“
Right.
And I love Atlanta in August. Dusky, he's the one who shoved this whole thing through.”

I was glad the dogs guarding Cuda Key were Dobermans. The Doberman is a singularly merciless animal—but with one major flaw. They are so anxious to attack an intruder that they often fail to bark a warning first.

I could not afford to have any warnings sounded.

It was a full-moon midnight. I worked my way through the jungle of mangroves off Bahia Honda Key, slapping at the vectoring mosquitoes. An occasional car roared over the high arching bridge behind me, straightening and slowing for the narrow, seven-mile ordeal which would carry them to Marathon. A weekday night at midnight—one of the few fairly safe times to travel that deadly Florida Keys Highway, A1A. Few drunks, fewer tourists.

Earlier, I had made a partial reconnaissance of the area by car. Reconnaissance by day in preparation for the reconnaissance by night. Cuda Key lay about a mile off Bahia Honda in the clear, calm water of Florida Bay. From the shore, I had made notes: a broad-shouldered tourist writing postcards in the hot sun. A hundred acres of island, with plenty of cover. Gumbo limbo, bamboo, Jamaican dogwoods, bayonet plants and pepper trees. Big house on a shell mound, nearly hidden by trees, and squat like a fortress, made of coquina rock. Deepwater entry on the Big Spanish Channel side. Neat docks with two big cruisers, several smaller boats—and one dark-blue cigarette-style hull. Smaller outbuildings, a steelmesh fence surrounding the island, and the trotting Dobermans. That's all I could see—from the road. Now my little Boston Whaler was tethered to its anchor in the shallows of a jungled spoil bank, and I moved toward the island which housed members of one of the Keys' bigger drug rings. And, I hoped, the man who had masterminded the deaths of my wife and sons.

I pulled the black watch cap down over my forehead and ears, spat in and rinsed my mask, then adjusted it on my face.

I carried only two real weapons: my Randall knife, and the Webber 4-B dart pistol. But the lignum vitae darts were not armed with the scorpionfish poison. Instead, they held a simple tranquilizer—one that would knock a big dog out for an hour, or a medium-sized man for approximately half that time.

I was working for the government now. Doing it their way. And Stormin' Norman had forbidden me to kill—unless I absolutely had to.

It had not gone over well with me.

“We need to build a better case, Dusky. More proof.”

“I've got all the proof I need, for God's sake.”

“Great! We'll just subpoena them all into federal court, have you stand up and tell the judge your story, and then he'll lock them all away for a hundred years. Dusky, it's not that damn simple. We need a little illegal bugging done. When we find out who is in on it, how long it has been going on, what the connections are and when their next score is,
then
we'll get the warrants.”

“And what if you can't get the warrants?”

“If the rot goes
that
deep, then we'll turn you loose. My God, don't grin like that, captain. You look like the grim reaper himself when you grin like that.”

So instead of the RDX explosives, I carried four candy-colored and candy-sized bugging devices. My mission was to gain access to the island, place the bugs in strategic areas, then escape without anyone knowing that I had been there.

It sounded easy enough.

I slid into the water, noiseless as a seal, and began the half-mile swim. I could have walked most of the way. Except for the passes and the channels and a few potholes where the big flats fish and barracuda covey on low spring tides, Florida Bay is shallow. It is a vast littoral zone that is gravid with life: everything from mud worms to tunicates to bonefish to sharks.

The full moon cast a frosted pale sheen across the water and veiled Cuda Key in a silver mist. I had spent the previous day reading everything I could about the island. Two thousand years of human inhabitation. First, the prehistoric Tequesta or Calusa Indians. They were expert fishermen and seamen. They carved beautiful wooden masks and idols and made sacrifices to their nature gods. By canoe, they traded with the Indians of Cuba and South America, and they were such fierce warriors that they extracted tribute from the other Indians of Florida, and they held the Spaniards—with their steel swords and shields—at bay for more than a hundred years. But finally, not the swords of the Spanish but the diseases of the Spanish caught up with them. And drove them to extinction. Now all that remained of those Indians were the high shell mounds which they had built—like the mound which foundationed that fortress of a stone house. A Spanish mission came later. And then Cuda Key became a hideout for pirates. And after the American men-of-war routed the pirates, the island became the home of fishermen, and then a citrus farmer, then a goat herder, then a group of nudists trying to breed their own superrace, and, finally, pirates again.

These were the pirates that I hunted.

I made good time in the calm night water. Mullet streamed and jumped in the shallows beside me, and I heard something big—a barracuda, probably—knifing the baitfish somewhere beyond, in the ocean darkness.