Nympho: Book One (Nempho Book One) (12 page)

As we left their campsite, I could hear Jenny asking Jose if he knew what was bothering me and why was I acting so strange? She didn’t hear the third degree that Jose was giving me. I’m glad that Strawberry didn’t hear anything either.

“I do not know Jenny. I think he is having girl trouble.” Jenny nodded in agreement.

“I wouldn’t doubt it a bit that he is having girl problems, especially with that girl. You should have heard some of the tall tales she was telling me. I sure hope Chris knows what he is doing, if you ask me she has more than a few loose screws.” Jenny give Jose an awkward look.

Now, I have heard enough. They are not talking like my friends. Strawberry didn’t act like she heard any of their comments. So we headed on down the beach. I looked back to see if we were far enough away from their camp before I confronted Strawberry and asked her what did she tell Jenny back at the house. She looked at me and asked if there was something bothering me. I turned toward her, took her in my arms.

“Strawberry if you want to continue our friendship then you need to be honest with me. You can start by telling me your real name. I care about you and I do not want to start our friendship off with a lie.” I look into her eyes.

“So what do you say? Can you be honest with me?” She looked deep into my eyes as if she was ready to confess.

“What! You don’t believe me, do you really think that I would lie to you about my name. My grandfather has been calling me Strawberry since I was a little girl, because whenever he played hide and seek with me I would always hide in the garden and he would catch me picking strawberries.” She answers with a sad expression.

“If you must know my god given name is Megan but you can call me Meg.  It not safe giving a perfect stranger your real name, unless there is some reason to trust them.” She gave me that questionable look again, wondering if she could trust me.

“Wow…. Megan…. that’s a nice name.” as I said it out-loud, it had a nice ring to it. She looks at me with her brows up.

“Well, now
that you know, are you happy? You better not let me down, I want to trust you Chris. But, it isn’t easy trusting everyone you meet on the highway.” her eyes squint.

“Now that we have gotten everything out into the open, maybe I can finally give you something that I been waiting all day to give you.” As kneeled down next to her, I drew a big heart in the sand and wrote Happy Birthday Megan. I looked up at her as I was writing
her birthday gift in the sand.

“I hope this can be the happiest day of your life.” As I stood up and took Megan into my arms I gently brushed my lips across hers letting her know that I wanted to kiss her, she held back for a moment and as she turned her head and leaned in to kiss me. Instead of kissing, she playfully licked my lips and
she playfully took off running down the beach. I could hear her calling out to me as she ran into the darkness.

“I bet you can’t find me
Chris.” So I ran down the beach looking for her on the way, but I could still hear her voice in the distance.

“Oh Chris I am over here if you want me then come and find me.” The voice was getting fainter.

I was just about to give up when I caught a glimpse of her hiding in the mangroves, I did not want her to know that I knew where she was hiding so I kept running past her and calling her name. Just ahead around the bend, there was a group of trees, where I could stop and gather my thoughts. At first, I had planned to sneak back to where Megan was hiding and scare her for taking off the way she did. Now that I have had time to think it over, I realized that I still did not feel comfortable with her latest story. After all, she has lied to me repeatedly. Therefore, without any further hesitation I turned around and headed back to my car and her backpack where I hoped I would find some answers. As I walk, back towards the car a glimmer of light coming from a wooded area caught my attention. It was not a bright light like a campfire. No it had a soft orange glow like a grass fire or some smoldering coals. I decided to check it out and make sure that there was not the beginning of a wild fire. After all, with the heat wave, we have been experiencing the last couple of months, combined with dried pine trees and tall grass the whole island could go up in smoke. So I decided to look before I continued my walk back to the car. As I went along the path into the woods, I thought I saw a man kneeling down in the brush, almost as if he was trying not to be noticed. Well I did not have the time to be checking on every stranger I seen in Grassy Key. If I was going to make it back to my car before Megan, so rather than stopping to see who was hiding in the bushes I continued walking towards the orange glow. As I got closer, I could see that it was an old campfire that someone had not covered properly with sand. A small fire had started to spread to the patch of tall grass nearby.

I quickly threw sand in the area of grass that had been catching fire and then buried the smoldering coals of the campfire in a deep hole. I will never understand how people can be so
careless when their camping, after all it does not take long to clean up a campsite and leave it safe. Not only for the future campers but to protect the local wildlife as well. It was not long before I was on my way back down the path to the beach and suddenly without warning the same man I had seen earlier stepped out from behind a tree and scared the hell out of me. He had long mated brown hair and wearing and old ragged red poncho with yellow strips and he tied it with a piece of rope at the waist just like in the old cowboy movies. After I regained my composure, I realized how much he resembled a homeless man who would hang out on Duval Street in Key West. The only thing missing was the unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Even so, how could this be cigarette Willy, after all he disappeared two years ago right after the big federal drug bust in south Florida. It was rumored that he was an undercover federal DEA agent and had managed to get the goods on many people just by hanging around Duval Street. They said that he even planted some wiretaps down at the old San Carlos Theater where the locals would play dominoes every afternoon. It didn’t surprise me that he was able to get the goods on so many locals, after all he would sit there on the steps of San Carols everyday talking to himself and nobody would pay any attention to him because they all thought he was crazy. Cigarette Willy pretty well had the run of the town. Sometimes he would hang out at the B&B Cuban sandwich shop down by the fishing docks on the corner Front Street and Duval where most of the local shrimp boat captains would stop to have lunch. Usually Cigarette Willy did not have to wait very long before someone would buy him a sandwich and a cold drink. In the end, he never bothered anybody and I don’t think I ever heard of him panhandling or begging like I’ve seen other homeless people do in Key West. The locals just took his being there for granted and as long as he kept to himself, even the Police paid him no mind.

It wasn’t until that hot summer August m
orning. The day of the big raid that anyone realized that Cigarette Willy was nowhere to be found, he wasn’t sleeping at the San Carlos Theater like he usually did. Nor was he at the Fisherman’s Café for his usual Cuban coffee and toasted bread as he had done every day for the past two years. In fact, Cigarette Willy was gone from the face of the earth. No one heard from him or seen him again for almost fifteen months until the day he walked in to the federal courthouse as the states star witness.  It was something watching all those federal agents in their big black Suburban’s roll through the streets of Key West and stop right in front of city hall. I heard the feds shut down US1 right at the entrance of the seven-mile bridge and had roadblocks up at Key Largo stopping traffic in both directions for miles not letting anyone in or out of the Florida Keys. As it turns out on that hot August, summer day Cigarette Willy would go down in history books as being the only undercover agent able to bring federal drug charges and Rico charges against the Columbian drug cartel and some of the biggest drug smugglers in south Florida.

And
here we are after more than two years of him missing and who would believe that I would be standing face to face with the Columbian drug cartels number one most wanted man of the century. Hell there must be over a million-dollar bounty on his head and here he is not even sixty miles from Key West. At this point, my mind is racing a mile a minute, all I could think of is what the hell he is doing here on Grassy Key. He should be a thousand miles away from here. In some little town in Kentucky at some country bar sipping Jack Daniels or out west in Colorado at some ski resort drinking Coors beer and flirting with some babes. Anywhere but here in the Florida Keys where everybody knows him. Hell, if anybody else knew he was here he might already have had a date with the fishes. I wanted to ask him why he was hanging around Grassy Key.

Didn’t he
know that there were some bad people looking for him? Did he know that there was a price on his head? I wanted to warn him, but I did not know how he would react. Would he get mad at me for recognizing him?

After all it wasn’t my fault that he didn’t put out his campfire, shoot I wouldn’t have even known that he was back there if it wasn’t for that damn grass fire. I took a long time to think about what I should do next. We stood looking at each other for what seemed like at least five minutes. I knew I should make the first move, besides I do not believe that he meant to startle me. In spite of everything, I was the one who invaded his privacy by coming into his campsite. As I stood there and absorbed the situation, I realized that cigarette Willy had stepped to one side of the trail and without saying a word turned and started walking past me toward his campsite. I decided to take a similar action and continue walking toward the beach. It was not long before I had put a safe distance between the famous Cigarette Willy and me so I decided to stop and take a short break. As I was catching my breath and thinking over the events of the day, I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“Chris, where have you been?” It was Megan, I just stood there for a moment contemplating an answer.

“I was looking for you.” I decided to lie.

“You have been gone for more than an hour.” Wow… it’s been that long. I guess the stand-off with cigarette Willy took longer than I thought.

“I have been looking for you everywhere. I got scared.” she says sadly.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, I’m right here.” I reached out and took her hand in mine.

“Didn’t you hear me calling out your name?”

“No, I guess I didn’t hear you.” I didn’t want to tell her that I was pre-occupied. Besides, I didn’t really know if cigarette Willy could be dangerous at this point.

So I took Megan by the hand and told her that I was sorry that I did not find her sooner but I had been distracted by a sma
ll brush fire in the woods. When I went to put out the fire I ran into an old acquaintance that I knew from Key West. Megan looked at me as if she expected more of an explanation. I look at her with a confused expression on my face.

“You are the one who took off running and hid from me
Megan, so why should I be the one in trouble here?” To my surprise, she decided at that point not to express any more anger and she gave me a kiss.

“Can we finish our walk on the beach, I don‘t want to fight about who‘s right or wrong.”

“Well I didn’t mean to worry you.” I looked at her with concern.

As Megan and I stood there on the beach looking out onto the moonlit ocean I could see the deck lights of a fishing boat about a mile off shore. It struck me as odd that a shrimp boat would have its nets in the water so close to shore. I mean, any fisherman worth a grain of salt knew that the waters just off the island of Grassy Key were too shallow to put your nets down. Besides I could see the port side red running light which meant she was heading north towards Miami and everyone knew that the shrimp would be running south with the gulf stream and on up past Yucatan and into the Gulf of  Mexico this time of the year. At that moment, my curiosity and experience as a boat captain took over as I took Megan’s hand into mine.

“Come on I want to get my binoculars out of the car so I can see what boat is out there and if they are alright, I think they might be too close to shore and are at risk of running aground.” Before I could take two steps toward the car, she squealed.

“Wait a damn minute Chris, I didn’t get a chance to show you what I found on the beach. I was walking along the shoreline, looking for seashells and this big square burlap bag washed up on the beach in front of me. The bag was too heavy for me to lift by myself, much less carry it back to the car so I just dragged it on shore and went looking for you.”

She looks at me with an expression of bewilderment as if she had no clue as to what she had found. So I asked her where exactly was her prize and what did she think was in the burlap bag? She answered with excitement in her voice that it had Columbian coffee stamped on the bag. She took my hand and started walking at a rapid pace up the beach. Well it didn’t take long for her to lead me to the location of her newfound treasure and it took me even less time to verify that the burlap bag didn’t have coffee beans inside it. I could see the excitement on her face as she watched me examine the large burlap bag.

“Megan, will you help me stand the bag up and hold it so I can cut open the top of the bag.” I lifted the bag into an upright position a
nd she supported with her knee.  As I cut through the burlap, I must have nicked the protective covering of the product inside and a very distinctive aroma filled the air.