Wreckers' Key (33 page)

“Ben? Ben Baker?”

Arlen nodded.

I let go of him and walked away a few steps before turning back. “He’s the one behind all this?” I threw my arms out. “I thought it was Ocean Towing.”

Arlen sighed. His shoulders sagged and his eyes were still shiny with tears, but once again I saw the light of intelligence there, tinged with resignation. “Baker is Ocean Towing. When his mother died, he came into a lot of money.”

Pieces started fitting together as a new picture formed in my brain.

“Ben is the partner Pinder talked about?”

Arlen nodded again.

“Of course, why didn’t I see it?”

“Neville hasn’t got the intelligence to run an operation like this,” Arlen said. “He still hasn’t figured it out. The man thinks he’s just lucky, that he’s got some sixth sense for the business of finding wrecks.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to adjust my thinking to fit this new reality. “So you still haven’t told me where Catalina is.”

“He took them.”

“Them?”

“Catalina spotted your friend B.J. parked out on the street early this morning. She asked him inside.”

“What does he want with them?”

“He’s using them. To get to you. He thought you would follow Catalina when we left last night. He’s waiting for you. He said it’s always been about you. Even the
Power Play
and Nestor.”

I turned my head aside as though I’d been struck. I didn’t have time for this now. I shoved the guilt and hurt back into a corner of my brain and looked back at Arlen. “But I went by the dock and
Hawkeye
is gone.”

“He’s got them. He didn’t say where he was going. He told me he wants to make you come to him for a change. That you’d better be smart enough to figure it out.” Arlen reached down and picked up an envelope on an end table. “He told me to give this to you. He said you would understand.”

I reached for the envelope. “It feels like there’s a key in here.” I tore open the paper. That was it. There was a key—but no key chain, no lettering on the key itself, no note, no indication of what the key would fit. “This is insane.”

“I know it sounds that way, but I’ve never seen him even raise his voice before today. He gets tense, yes, but he doesn’t act like a crazy man. He always seemed so normal. I knew what we were doing was illegal, but I needed the money. For Sarah. Then yesterday he came by the house in Shady Banks and told me I had to bring Catalina down here. Right away. I couldn’t leave Sarah alone.” He ran his hands over the top of his head again. The long strands of hair now hung down, touching his shoulder. “I was such a fool.”

“You were, but I can understand why.”

“Not Sarah. She couldn’t understand. He came here this morning and took Catalina while she was sitting on my wife’s bed. The girl struggled and Baker hit her. Sarah just looked at me. She expected me to do something more. When I didn’t, she turned her back to me and faced the wall.” His voice grew hoarse with emotion. “I couldn’t take it. I left the room.” He covered his eyes with his hands. “When I came back to her, she was gone.”

I pulled a hand away from his face. “Arlen, you’ve got a boat here, right?”

He shook his head. “It’s too small for the ocean. And there’s not much fuel.” He turned away and walked across the living room.

“Do you have any idea where he might have taken them? Charts, do you have any charts?”

He kept on walking back down the hall, pointing to his radio room as he passed, then entered their bedroom and closed the door.

I ran into the radio room and began searching the shelves. I finally found a box near the top of the closet with half a dozen rolled-up charts sticking out of it. I tucked them under my slicker before I ran out to my Jeep on the street. I slipped the key I’d taken from the envelope into my jean pocket. I had an idea where I could find a boat.

XXX

The plastic zippered windows on Lightnin’ didn’t do a very good job of keeping out the rain, and with all the moisture inside the vehicle, the plastic was now completely fogged over. I was parked behind the Waterfront Market with a chart of the area surrounding Key West spread out across the steering wheel.

Ben Baker had told Arlen that he wanted me to come to him for a change. That meant he wasn’t hiding. He was someplace he hoped I would find him. And though there were lots of banks and keys within a twenty-mile radius of Key West, there weren’t many anchorages that could accommodate a boat like
Hawkeye
with her seven-foot draft. Depths in the anchorages and over the banks looked like they averaged about three to five feet.

The other consideration was that he would want to be left alone. There was no way he had just followed a channel to the tourists’ favorite anchorage. Even if the weather was likely to keep most boaters away, he would not want to be someplace where a swim and walk ashore would lead to civilization. Ben wasn’t insane. He may have killed and kidnapped, but he knew exactly what he was doing.

I considered and rejected the islands in Florida Bay to the northeast. The Bluefish Channel, the Bay Keys, or the Lower Harbor Keys all had areas with enough depth for the big schooner, but the approaches were all too shallow. Due west from the entrance to Key West, however, was a string of islands: the Barracouta Keys, Woman Key, Ballast Key, and Boca Grande Key.

As soon as I saw the name on the chart, I remembered that evening aboard his schooner. Ben had told me that he wanted to take me out to Boca Grande Key someday. The last of the Florida Keys out at the edge of the stream where his great-great-grandfather had once anchored. Once upon a time, Boca Grande Key had been a jumping-off spot for the wreckers on their way out to Cay Sal Bank. Wreckers’ Key.

I stopped at the pay phone outside the public restrooms and tried the Key West Police Department. I found myself in voice mail hell again. Press one if you want to report a traffic accident, press two if you would like to speak to a detective . . . After pushing several more numbers, I got Lassiter’s voice mail. Frustrated, I launched into my explanation of the death at the Sparkses’ residence and a suspected kidnapping aboard the
Hawkeye
. I had just started to explain what I intended to do when the machine clicked and hung up on me. I glanced at my watch. It was already four o’clock and darkness would be here in less than two hours. I dug in my bag for the change for one more call. At Jeannie’s house, I also got her answering machine. I tried to leave a more succinct message and got most of it out. This time it was my money that ran out. I had no more change. It was time to go.

A momentary lull in the rain had been filled by an increase in the strength of the wind. I figured it was blowing more than twenty knots now, and the noise of the flapping flags and banging halyards was nearly as loud as the whistling in the rigging. The docks were deserted except for my friend and his dog. He still stood at the head of Ben’s dock, his poor soaked dog shivering in the wind. I had to squeeze around him to get down Ben’s finger pier, but I didn’t want him to grab hold of me again, so I tried not to make eye contact.

“You see,” he shouted almost making me fall into the harbor. “I told you so. Find the dark one in your dreams.”

Wet wooden docks are treacherous—many a sailor has been on his back before he knew it—but I didn’t care. I broke into a run.

The
Rapid
was a Conch 27 with a single 227-horsepower Mercury outboard, and as I had guessed, the key fit the ignition. The engine fired up at the first crank of the starter. I flicked on the instruments switch, and what had looked like a panel of dark glass just forward of the steering wheel lit up with the colors of a GPS plotter. I’d seen a radar dome resting on the hardtop; while I wouldn’t need it right away, when darkness came it might be my only way to find the
Hawkeye
.

I threw off the dock lines and pulled away, trying to get a feel for the boat. Immediately, a gust of wind pushed me way off course. It took a few minutes for me to learn how to correct for the growing wind.

Outside the harbor entrance, I pushed the throttles forward and put her up on a plane. It was a hell of a bouncy ride; my wet pant legs felt like they’d turned to ice in the wind. I reached up and turned on the VHF radio that rested in a rack just under the hardtop. No digital numbers appeared on the channel readout screen. I double-checked to make sure I had turned the radio switch on at the panel. Damn. That meant Ben had disabled the radio. I wished I’d checked it out before leaving the harbor.

The boat’s motion changed significantly when I lost the protection of the island and entered the open ocean. I was forced to slow way down in the six to eight foot seas that rolled out of the east, to where I was only making about six knots of progress. Visibility was almost nonexistent, and I didn’t know how I was going to spot the schooner—assuming I had even guessed right and was heading in their direction.

I’d been closing my mind to thoughts of them and what they might be going through out there, but in that moment I pictured them bound, injured, or worse, and I felt the panic start to rise in my chest. My breathing grew fast and shallow; I was going to make myself dizzy by hyperventilating if I wasn’t careful. I forced my body to slow the breathing. I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds and tried to picture something that would calm me down. I saw B.J. looking straight into my eyes, and I could almost hear his voice telling me I could do this, that it would all turn out all right if I would just think it through.
Think
, he said again.
Think
.

I opened my eyes and remembered the crazy man on the dock. He was right. I’d found the dark one in my dreams. I laughed out loud then. Despite the cold and the rain and the fact that I was chasing after a man who wanted to harm me, for me there had always been something exhilarating about steering a boat in rough seas. My legs were planted shoulder width apart, and I bent my knees to compensate for the motion of the boat until the movement was totally natural, and I felt as though I had become one with the waves.

My brain began repeating other phrases the man had said, and some of it began to make sense. He’d muttered something about abductions—that they can happen right under our noses. Maybe he had seen something and some part of him was trying to tell me about it. He’d said only the dark one looked him in the eye, and I knew that if B.J. was being forced to do something and he passed a stranger, he would have looked him in the eye. He would have to tell him with his eyes the story of what was happening to them. And maybe it took someone living, not on another planet, but maybe on another plane, to understand his message. What else had that guy said? Something about going into the precipice and seeing a big mouth?

When it came to me, I felt like an idiot. Of course. I’d only had one year of college Spanish before I quit—both college and Spanish. But living in South Florida, you’re bound to pick up a bit of the language every few days.
Boca Grande
translated into English meant “big mouth.” B.J. had been trying to leave a message for me. He was alive.

Boca Grande Key had a channel that ran alongside it through the flats. Though the current would be fierce, once the anchor set, you’d only have to worry about the changing of the tide. There would be protection from the wind in every direction. And in weather like this, you’d have the place all to yourself. It was more than ten miles out from Key West, and given my slow speed I wouldn’t get there before dark, but that was probably better anyway. I didn’t have any weapons and he was expecting me.

I hatched one plan as I rode over the waves out there, but I never got a chance to try it out. It was a good thing. It might have worked for Johnny Depp in
Pirates of the Caribbean
, but I really wasn’t looking forward to swimming out to that schooner with a knife in my teeth. I was going to pass between Woman Key and the Barracouta Keys through a narrow channel, but as I neared the island, putting my faith in the GPS unit, I realized that the reading I was getting was way off. The current was pushing me toward the banks at a speed I would never be able to fight while swimming. I tried a direction I thought would put me in the clear and soon realized I was heading straight for the shore of Woman Key.

Ben must be playing with his GPS jamming toy. We were going through some kind of battle of the wits here, and he was determined to show me that he was now the stronger of the two of us. The poor fat kid whose boat sank under him all those years ago had become a fierce competitor and a good boatman. He was trying to make my boat sink under me this time.

Okay, so I'd learned a couple of things. Don’t leave the boat and don’t rely on GPS. I made another pass at the channel, but this time I shut off the GPS, using the boat’s radar and a handheld spotlight. With the lamp, I could make out the water color, but it ruined my night vision when I turned it off. Halfway through the cut, the rain started up again, and visibility closed down to near zero.

The cold rain stung my face and blurred my vision. I kicked up the outboard, took it slow, especially fighting the current as I was. The hull ran aground on the soft bottom a couple of times, but it was easy enough to back off. By the time I made it through, the tide was running off the bank at full speed, exactly as I'd hoped.

He wouldn’t be expecting me from the north. If Ben had anchored the
Hawkeye
where I was thinking, in the old wreckers’ lair in the channel alongside Boca Grande Key, he’d expect me to approach him from the open ocean on the south side. His anchor would be up inside the pass, with his boat pointing northeast into the current and the wind.

I cut the engine on my boat long before I spotted the schooner. The sound of an engine travels through the water, and I didn’t want him to hear me coming. On the way out, I’d searched the boat for any useful weapons or tools. Though I had my rigging knife in my pant pocket, that straight-edged blade would have little effect on a thick nylon anchor rode. I'd found a paddle strapped to the gunwale on the port side; under the bench seat was a fishing knife in a scabbard with a long serrated blade. With Ben’s knife in the pocket of my jacket, I positioned myself on the bow with the paddle and peered into the rain.