When it came to chartering I was a generalist. Flats fishing, deep-sea trips, scuba diving, leisure outings for the booze-cruise crowd—whatever it took to cover the overhead and give me a little wiggle room, I had boats for every purpose. I could have sat back, hired other captains, and kept the entire fleet in operation on a semi-regular basis. But I liked doing it all myself. I was lucky. I had socked away a little money and could afford to run my business in an inefficient manner. Doing it the other way wouldn’t have been any fun. I didn’t claim to be the sawiest fishing guide, or the best divemaster, or the most knowledgeable tour captain. I spread myself too thin to excel in any one area. Blame it on a chronically short attention span. I will do anything to avoid boredom or sidestep the routine. Besides, I knew too many specialty guides who had grown to hate their occupations. They became sour and bitter at the prospect of taking people out on the water. I didn’t want it to ever come to that. I still enjoyed the hell out of what I did. Only problem, I wasn’t doing it anymore.

  I didn’t have a grasp on the current real estate market, but I was hoping the property would fetch enough to allow me to buy a decent boat and start all over again. If I was fortunate enough to find another trawler like Miz Blitz—not damn likely, but I could dream—I might even be able to live on board at Minorca Beach Marina.

  I was on my way out when the phone rang. I answered it.

  “LaDonna Charters,” I said.

  “Zack, that you?”

  I recognized Jo Hardwick’s voice.

  “In the dazzling flesh,” I said. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Were your thoughts pure?”

  I had to laugh. Jo was closing in on seventy-five. A very well-maintained and attractive seventy-five, but still . . .

  “As pure as you deserve,” I said.

  “My, my. Then they were totally indecent. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Had to admire the old girl. She still had plenty of spark.

  “Good news on your listing,” Jo said, getting down to business. “I have one offer in hand and I expect at least two more by this evening.”

  “That was fast”

  “Not really, not when you consider the uniqueness of the property,” Jo said. “Zack, I want you to know that I have qualified the potential buyers. Not based on whether they have money—they’ve all got too much money, bucketfuls of it. No, I’m only accepting offers from people who will be good stewards of that land, people who will give it the respect it deserves. I won’t let you sell it to someone who is going to come in there and build something big and awful just to show off. I just won’t have that”

  “That means a lot to me,” I said. “It means more than the money.”

  Then Jo mentioned the amount of the first offer. It was more than I had expected, a lot more. I might be able to buy a couple of boats. Might even be able to put a little aside and pretend like I was flush.

  “You think you can get that much?”

  “God isn’t making property like that anymore, Zack. It’s a precious, precious parcel. You’ll get top dollar for it. The people who are interested in your place, I wouldn’t be surprised if they got into a bidding war. Of course, some of that will be ego. But mostly it’s the property. There’s nothing else out there like it.”

  Yes, the place was precious beyond anyone’s imagining. And here I was, on the verge of letting it go. But I’d already beaten myself up about that. It was time to move on.

  “You want me to drop by this evening with the offers?” Jo asked.

  I told her no, it would have to wait. I was only sticking around for a few more minutes. I’d give her a call as soon as I got back from the Bahamas.

  After we said our good-byes, I pulled out Chip Willis’s business card and dialed the number for Ruby Booby’s. All I got was a recording. It told me the joint opened at 7 P.M., there was a ten-dollar cover charge, two-for-one beer until ten, and twenty naked ladies at all times. But it wouldn’t let me leave a message.

  I walked back up the hill toward the house and stepped inside the open-air tin-roofed shed that doubled as my garage. It was mostly filled with tools for the nursery—hoes and shovels, pruning shears and post-hole diggers. Swing blades for keeping the grass low. Not much in the way of mechanical equipment. My grandfather had left me a low-tech operation and I had done little to improve it.

  My Jeep Wagoneer sat under a canvas tarpaulin. I yanked off the tarp and stepped back to let the cockroaches and spiders skitter away. The Wagoneer was twenty-two years old. I’d bought it with my signing bonus from the Dolphins, and it had weathered the years much better than I had. The key was in the ignition. Before they’d hauled me off to Baypoint, I’d asked Boggy to forgo his disdain for automobiles and crank it up every now and then just to keep the battery charged. I slid behind the wheel, juiced the accelerator a couple of times, and turned the key. The engine sputtered and coughed, and then it rolled over.

  But there was a problem—two pallets of fertilizer stacked behind the Wagoneer, blocking its way out. Must have been fifty bags, seventy-five pounds apiece. Looked like a recent delivery. What had Boggy been thinking? The place was for sale and he knew it. I didn’t want to dump money I didn’t have into something that soon wouldn’t belong to me. Let the new owners worry about fertilizing palm trees.

  I turned off the Wagoneer and sized up the chore ahead. I figured it would take at least thirty minutes of lifting and hauling and catching my breath. I’d probably throw out my back as part of the bargain. But there was no other way around it. I couldn’t hit the road until I’d moved the bags of fertilizer.

  Used to be, when I was younger and helping out my grandfather, I could carry a bag of fertilizer in each arm. I gave it a try. Still had it in me, although I’d probably pay hell for it the next day. I began lugging the bags and stacking them along the side of the shed. My shoulders were burning but they were burning good. My shirt was soon drenched with sweat. I cleared the first pallet and was starting in on the second one when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Chasteen . . .”

  I swung around. There were three of them, silhouetted by sunlight as it streamed in the shed’s entry. I didn’t have time to make out their faces. All I saw was one of them swinging something. A shovel, it looked like. I heard the sick crackle as it slammed against the side of my head, and everything went dark.

  8

  I’d been knocked out once or twice before, but all the other times it had been on a playing field, and when I came to, a trainer or a team physician was hovering over me with water and towels and a comforting word. When I limped toward the bench there was applause. Teammates gave me pats on the butt. It was much better that way. Which is not to say that I was particularly fond of those pats on the butt.

  Coming out of it, I heard them. They were talking in Spanish and I couldn’t make out any of it. I was lying facedown on concrete and my hands were tied behind my back. It felt like they had used duct tape. My legs were lashed together at the ankles and the knees. There was duct tape over my eyes, too. I was bleeding from a big chunk that I had bitten out of my tongue and my mouth had pebbles in it. I spit out the blood and realized the pebbles were broken teeth. The whole right side of my face was throbbing. I wiggled my jaw. It stung like hell, but, except for the cracked molars, everything seemed to be in place. Gee, if I’d only been wearing my protective gel mouthpiece.

  And then one of them was saying, “Hey, Chasteen, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I can hear you.”

  “That’s good, that’s real good. Because we thought we had fucking killed you. And if we killed you, then we would be fucked, too.”

  They laughed. They talked some more in Spanish. I could hear water lapping against something. I was in the boathouse. They had dragged me back there so passing boaters wouldn’t see what was going on.

  I tried to roll over, and all it got me was a kick in the back, and then one of them planted a foot on me and held me down. He ground his heel into my neck.

  “How’s that feel, asshole? Huh? How’s that feel? You lucky Raul’s not here or he’d rip your head off. He wants a piece of you, man.”

  He took his foot off my neck.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “You supposed to show us where it’s at, man.”

  “Where what’s at?”

  “What you got that don’t belong to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You want us to tear this fucking place apart, man? We’ll do that. We should have already done that. I don’t know why we’re fucking waiting around.”

  “Tell me what you’re looking for.”

  They talked some more in Spanish. And then the one who was doing most of the talking said: “You got something that belongs to Victor Ortiz.”

  The name I’d been waiting to hear.

  “I thought Victor Ortiz was dead.”

  The men laughed.

  “Yeah, he’s dead alright. And he wants to stay dead. Only he wants what you got that belongs to him. He wants it back. Or else, you gonna be the real kind of dead. Sabe, asshole?”

  “You guys work for Ortiz?”

  “Like you said, man, Victor Ortiz is dead,” the one in charge said. “But there’s all kinds of ways of being dead. Like if everyone thinks you’re dead, then you’re dead. So he’s dead. But he wants something from you.”

  “You tell Ortiz that there’s something I want from him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The last two years of my life.”

  “Maybe Mr. Ortiz, he wants the same thing. It is not easy being a dead man. Very much pressure. Very stressful.”

  “Cry me a goddam river. Where is Ortiz?”

  “He is where men go who are dead like he is dead. Only he cannot find peace because of what it is you owe him.”

  “Listen, you tell Ortiz I don’t have anything that belongs to him. You got it? You tell him that he’s the one owes me.”

  The three men talked in Spanish some more. I could pick up a little of it, but my Spanish is pretty lousy. Then they stopped talking. I could hear them opening gear lockers and rummaging around. It didn’t sound as if they were being particularly tidy about it. They stopped tearing things apart and then one of them kicked me in the back.

  “Don’t go nowhere,” he said and his buddies laughed some more.

  I listened as they walked away. Minutes passed. They didn’t come back. Had they left for good? Probably not. I figured they had moved on to the house to rip it apart and look for whatever they were after. They’d be back soon.

  I wiggled my wrists in the duct tape, but couldn’t pry them apart. I flailed around with my legs, but couldn’t get them loose either. My head was near the edge of the concrete now, and I could hear the water lapping against the wood pilings in one of the boat slips. I tried to remember how high the tide was when I had first arrived at the boathouse. I recalled seeing herons on the mud flats. The river had been still, almost no current. Dead low tide. How long had I been unconscious? Five minutes? An hour? At low tide there could be anywhere from five to six feet of water in the slips, depending on the phase of the moon, just barely enough for me to pull in Miz Blitz without scraping her bottom. High tide it rose to eight feet or nine feet.

  I had a plan in mind. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant plan, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I could stay where I was and wait for them to come back. They would kick me and knock me around some, maybe worse. Goatee and Raul had obviously been in touch with these guys. They were probably back on the road by now and headed this way to join their pals. They would want to get in a few licks, too. No reason why I should just hang around and be everyone’s favorite punching bag.

  So it was my plan or nothing. Might work, might not. All depended on the tide. The lower the better. Too high, I’d most likely drown.

  I scooted to the edge of the concrete, tried to judge where I was. They had probably dragged me in through the boathouse door and stopped at the first slip. I tried to visualize it. Eight wood pilings along each side, about six feet apart, with a concrete walkway separating it from the second slip. I didn’t think they had dragged me out onto the walkway, toward the end of the slip where the water was deeper. Why bother? They just wanted me inside the boathouse, out of sight.

  I teetered facedown on the edge of the concrete. I took long deep breaths, filling my lungs with air. Then I rolled off the concrete and hit the water, and the moment I hit it I knew I was in trouble. What I should have done was sling my legs off first and followed them down. That way I might have had a chance of standing up when I hit the bottom. But now I was sinking sideways and the duct tape wouldn’t let me bend my knees. I bumped against the bottom shoulder first and then bobbed to the surface. I grabbed a gulp of air, got water instead. Coughed, got more water, then I was sinking again.

  I tried to fight back the panic. I thrashed around in the water, struggling to get back to the surface, but I couldn’t leverage against the bottom with my feet. I just kept going sideways. Into deeper water. I had maybe another thirty–forty seconds of air left in me. After that, I’d be a goner. Meat for the crabs.

  Then I hit a piling. My head struck against it and the oyster shells ripped chunks out of my scalp. But I didn’t mind. Those oyster shells were my salvation. They were my plan. I flipped and turned and managed to grab just enough purchase on the bottom to push my back against the piling and work my ducttaped hands up and down on the shells. I was almost out of air. Blood throbbed in my head. My chest tightened and constricted. Muscles in my gut began to cramp. I kept working the duct tape against the piling. Up and down, up and down. Every now and then I’d slip and gash an arm, then press myself harder against the piling. Tough stuff, that duct tape, but finally there was a rip and I pulled and pulled, and my arms were free, and they were swimming me to the surface.

  I hugged the piling, taking in gulps of air. I tore off the duct tape around my eyes. It only cost me about half of each eyebrow, but they were getting a little too bushy anyway. I was near the mouth of the boat slip, in the deeper water. I inched back into the boathouse, piling by piling, until the water was about chin high. I reached down and undid the tape around my knees. Then I worked my ankles free. I lost my shoes somewhere in the mud. But I was planning on swimming out of there and I was going to lose them anyway.

  I was exhausted from the struggle, but I didn’t have time to lose. The three of them could return at any minute. I might be able to give them a good fight, maybe even take them. But I hadn’t actually seen them, so I didn’t know what I was up against. Besides that, they probably had guns. In which case the fight would be over real fast.

  I sucked in air, filling my lungs. From the mouth of the boathouse, it was about fifty yards across the river to a small island rimmed with mangroves and buttonwood. If I was lucky I could make it most of the way across underwater, then lose myself in the mangroves before they could spot me. After that, it was just a matter of swimming from tiny island to tiny island, hopscotching my way across the lagoon. I figured it would take me a couple of hours to reach Oak Hill. I knew people there who could help me out.

  I was inching toward the end of the slip, getting ready to swim away, when the boathouse door opened. I heard steps on the concrete and caught a glimpse of someone stepping inside. There was only one of them. I heard him curse when he saw I was gone. And I knew he’d be running to get the others.

  I splashed in the water, made it sound as if I were struggling.

  “Down here,” I called out. “I fell. Help me.”

  He stepped to the edge of the concrete, and as he leaned down to look under the walkway I surged up and grabbed him, pulling him down with me. In the moment before I wrapped myself around him, I saw his face. It was a face I’ll never forget, because it was the face of the first man I ever killed.

  He was a young guy, no more than thirty, a wisp of a mustache, and close-cropped hair. I locked my arms and legs around him and down we went. We hit the bottom with me on top, my legs scissored around his legs. He wrenched and fought, but I had him. I hooked my arm around his throat, squeezed and pulled back hard, leveraging a knee against his shoulders. My head was out of the water now, and I was holding him down. I kept squeezing his throat and holding him down until he stopped fighting and went still. Then I held him down for another thirty seconds just to make sure.

  I let go of him and his body rose to the surface. I kept him face down. I didn’t want to see his face again. I pushed his body under the concrete walkway and, as I was doing it, I felt the gun in his pants pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it. I am not a gun guy. I’ve never owned a gun, and I wouldn’t be able to tell one gun from another gun even if I had a cheat sheet and Charlton Heston was whispering in my ear. This gun was black and shiny and bigger than the palm of my considerably big hand. I dropped it in the water and let it sink. Then I wedged the body behind a piling.

  I tried hard not to think about what I’d just done. I had killed a man with my bare hands. And it hadn’t been a fair fight. Not a fair fight at all. I was bigger and stronger and he didn’t have a chance. But if I’d learned anything over the years, it was that you take the matchups the way they come at you. You put on your game face and give it all you’ve got. Let up just once and you lose your edge, and then you’re done for. Because next time the opponent might be every bit as tough as you are. And you can damn sure bet that they’ll be looking to lay you flat, and run up the score, and laugh at you when it’s over.

  I took a deep breath, pushed off from the pilings, and swam for the other side of the river.

  9

  I made it all the way across without coming up for air, surfaced slowly in the mangroves, and hung there for a moment, looking back at the boathouse. Nothing going on in there. Nothing going on around the rest of the property either. The other two guys were nowhere to be seen. Probably still inside the house.

 

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