Buzzard Bay (50 page)

Benito was more to the point, “You Sniff?”

The black man on the bed acknowledged them for the first time. “Welcome gentlemen, I’ve been expecting you. Now if you’ll all mind your own business for a little while, I’ve got something I have to look after.” The men looked at each other with amusement as Sniff turned back to his woman. “Look at it,” he said to her. “Limp as shit, I been snortin’ and strokin’, but it just won’t get hard.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” the girl told him, “bring it here, I’ll fix it for you.”

The men watched as Sniff stood up on the bed; the girl began rubbing his balls then stuck his limp dick in her mouth and went to work on him.

One of the men grabbed the front of his pants. “Bring it over here, baby, I got something hard for you to suck on.”

It was Benito who got Sniff’s attention. “Hey Sniff, how about throwing that bag of coke over here then we can all get hard together?”

The men all laughed but Sniff didn’t. “Nobody touches my coke,” he growled.

The girl grabbed the machete from the headboard and was on them before they could react. She sliced Benito’s arm to the bone then cut a red ribbon across another man’s chest before the third man was able to grab her arm as they wrestled over the blade. She continued to attack him, but he managed to slice open her neck before all the blood made the handle so slippery neither of them could hang on to it. Everything stopped for a second as she watched the blood spurt from her neck, and then she attacked them again scratching at them with her fingernails, covering all the men with her blood. Finally, the blood stopped spurting, and she slid down the men to the floor, dead.

The men looked at each other not believing what had just happened, and then they looked up to see Sniff jumping up and down on the bed. In one hand, he had a big hard-on; in the other, he held a pistol pointed at them.

“Look what you did,” he yelled at them. “Now what am I going to stick this into.” He pulled the trigger, but there was no bang. He pulled the trigger again, but there was only a click. “What the fuck—is this a toy gun?”

niff looked stupidly down the barrel and pulled the trigger; again there was only a click. Benito began looking around desperately for his gun when he heard Sniff scream, “Tommy, you little bastard, you stole all my bullets.” Then he heard a loud bang followed by the sound of bone bouncing off the ceiling. Sniff had blown his brains out.

Benito, winced, and turned his head away from the pieces of bone showering down on him. “Where’s my gun?” It was his security blanket, and that’s what his mind told him he needed right now.

“Here it is,” one of the men picked the gun off the floor, wiped it on the bed covers, and handed it to him. Benito was no stranger when it came to inflicting pain, but being on the receiving end was another matter. It had definitely rattled him and was the catalyst in his decision to head for the sack of cocaine beside the bed. One snort brought everything into perspective immediately. One of his men was standing by the bed trying to hold the skin on his chest together with his bare hands.

“Take a shot of this,” Benito said as he handed the coke to him. “It’ll make you feel better.” His other man, except for being scratched and covered with blood, seemed to be all right.

“You’d better do something with that arm,” one of the men said.

Benito looked down and saw the blood dripping from his sleeve. He tried to raise his arm, but that only resulted in pain shooting up through his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I saw some clothes hanging on a line outside. Maybe there’s something out there that’s clean enough to use on these wounds.”

Once outside, the man who wasn’t hurt wrapped up their wounds. He made a sling for Benito’s arm, while Benito stuck his head in a rain barrel trying to wash some of the blood off his face.

“You take a quick look inside,” Benito told his man. “I’ll look outside. There must be some more coke and money here somewhere.”

That’s when the man who went inside found Tommy laying on the floor in a little back room. Tommy had watched the whole thing through a crack in the wall. His mind told him to run but instead, his body just curled up in a ball, frozen with fear. He didn’t change position as the man dragged him outside.

“Look what I found,” the man showed Benito. They asked Tommy a bunch of questions kicking him a few times for encouragement, but it was obvious the kid was too scared to talk.

“Someone must have heard the shot,” Benito said, looking around. “Grab that burlap bag covering the door. We’ll put the kid in it and drag him along.”

The driver saw the three men coming down the hill dragging a bag behind them. He jumped out yelling, “You guys can’t get in my car looking like that.”

Benito pointed his gun at the driver’s head. “Shut up, and help us get this bag in the trunk.” They all got in the car. “As you can see, getting back to the plane is out of the question. You’re going to have to hide us until we can find a way off this island.”

The driver looked disgusted.

“Here, have a shot of this,” Benito told him holding up the sack of cocaine, “It’ll make you feel better.”

The driver took them to a house where an old woman crudely sewed up their wounds. After a barrage of phone calls, it was decided a boat would pick them up between eleven and one in the morning at the little marina on Buzzard Bay. Then they brought Tommy in and with a little coaxing gleaned whatever he could or would tell them.

“That’s the one good thing you guys did was to bring the boy along. It fits into our plans perfectly, just make sure the first thing you do when you get on the water is get rid of him,” the driver told them.

Henekie made good time after he left Lena. There was only a small chop on the water allowing him to make the crossing between Nassau and Andros in good time. The boat performed beautifully, something Henekie had worried about, but he was a meticulous mechanic and had done a good job of dry docking the boat before he’d left over two years ago.

Every chance he got, he brought fresh fuel back to the old warehouse in the little fishing boat. Now all that planning and hard work was paying off. There was no use going into the marina early. He didn’t want to get trapped in there by the other boat in case he had to wait for the men he was to pick up. He sat out in the bay until his watch said eleven then headed into the marina. He was pretty sure the men would want to get off the island as soon as they could and would be there early. There was only a small yard light at one end of the marina leaving everything dark and casting long shadows more than anything else. It wasn’t until he pulled up to the small dock that he saw the man standing there with a gun pointed at him.

“Julio sent me to pick you up,” he told the man. Immediately, he saw two other men appear on the dock carrying a big bag. The first man seemed impressed with Henekie’s boat. “I thought that cheap bastard Julio would get us some old fishing scow,” he said as they piled in.

Henekie kind of laughed. “This is a cartel boat. Julio probably has no idea yet what this is going to cost him.” Once the men were in the boat and he began navigating his way out of the marina, Henekie saw the state of repairs these men were in. “Jeez, you guys look like you were put through a meat grinder.”

“Yeah,” Benito answered, “they knew we were coming and ambushed us.”

Henekie nodded his head toward the bag, “What’s in there?”

“Shark bait!” was growled back at him, giving Henekie the impression the men were in no mood to talk. He started out across the bay keeping his eye out for other boats. “There’s rum in the cooler if you’re interested?” He didn’t have to ask twice; the men each grabbed a bottle and drank it straight. Henekie got out on the main water and relaxed a bit; the rum had loosened up the men and soon turned their attention to the bag. Henekie saw a boy come out of the bag swinging at the men, but he was quickly subdued with a kick to the head.

The men found a mooring rope hanging on the side of the boat and tied one end of it around the boy’s ankle. “Hey,” one of them shouted up at Henekie, “slow down a bit. We want to do a little trolling.” Two of the men were standing at the back of the boat; the other big man with only one good arm was sitting just back and across from him. “Guess this is as good a time as any,” Henekie thought to himself as he threw the throttle wide open. He turned and shot both men as they went over the back. He didn’t care whether he killed them or not; nature would take of that. He turned his gun toward the big guy only to see a rum bottle coming at his head. Henekie managed to get his arm up in time to deflect the bottle, but Benito was right behind it attacking him. They were eye to eye when Henekie got his arm down and got two shots off as Benito’s full weight came crashing down on him pinning him between the two captain’s chairs.

Henekie sensed it was three hundred and fifty or more pounds of dead weight that was compressing his chest. The fact that he was pinned between the seats with no way of getting out and the boat going at full speed put him in a real predicament. He was on the verge of blacking out when he felt the boat come to a stop, and then the weight on top of him being transferred from his chest to his legs.

A black face appeared above him. “Are you alive?” it asked.

Henekie sat up gasping for air.

“Are you going to kill me?” The boy looked at him with big eyes. Henekie shook his head.

“If I was going to kill you, I’d have let them do it.” There had been a fleeting moment when Henekie had thought of letting the men throw the boy in. After all, what was he going to do with a boy, but he couldn’t do it. He was getting soft and in this business that could be lethal or as in this case, it had saved his life. It made some of the rules Ginter had beat into him a little confusing.

“What’s your name?”

“Tommy,” the boy answered.

“Well, Tommy, let’s see if we can get this guy off me.” Between the two of them, they were able to move Benito’s body off his legs.

Henekie stood up and looked around, “Now if I could figure out where we are.”

“That’s the light at the end of South Andros,” Tommy pointed. “If you’re headed for Nassau, it’s that way,” he gestured with his hand.

“Okay,” Henekie sensed he was right. “Now what I want you to do is help me lift this guy over the side of the boat.”

When they managed to get the body’s head and shoulders over the side, Henekie told him that was good enough for now. He took Tommy up front. “Can you operate a boat?”

Tommy nodded.

“Show me.” Henekie watched as Tommy started the motor and smoothly got under way. “All right, this is fast enough for now. Be careful with all this weight to the one side. Now I’ve got some work to do back here, Tommy. No matter what you hear, I want you to concentrate on driving the boat and not look back, okay?”

Tommy nodded his head. Tommy could hear a hacking sound behind him, but he concentrated on the boat. What a beauty; all he ever dreamed about was owning a boat like this someday. He heard a splash and felt the boat level out. He knew the body had gone in the water.

Henekie came up beside him. “You all right?”

“Nice boat,” Tommy answered.

“Okay, you can open it up to about half throttle. When you see the lights of Nassau, let me know. I’ll be back here cleaning up.”

Tommy was in heaven; here he was skimming across the water on the boat he’d always dreamed about owning, but how could this be real when only an hour ago he was in hell. Religion was part of life on the islands and so was belief in the devil. Tommy was beginning to think he had just met him.

The lights of Nassau town came into view, and Henekie took over the boat. As they got closer, Tommy soon realized they weren’t headed into Nassau itself but rather into an area considered by most boaters as quite dangerous. He was even more concerned as Henekie entered a bay at a high rate of speed.

“I don’t think you should go in there,” Tommy told him. “There are some really bad reefs and rocks in there just under the water.”

“You seem to know this water pretty well,” Henekie observed.

“My brother was one of the best boatmen around, but he stayed out of there. They call it Devil’s Bay.”

Henekie didn’t answer, seemingly concentrating on steering the boat. Tommy clenched his teeth waiting for the sound of the bottom being torn out of the boat. Instead Henekie seemed able to zigzag his way through the maze of rocks until suddenly they were right in front of a warehouse that Tommy had sometimes caught a glimpse of when he and his brother had passed by the bay. To his amazement, they continued right in under the structure. A wall came down leaving them in what looked like a swimming pool. The water in the pool began to drop, and they went down with it, and then they stopped going down. Another huge wall on the inside opened up revealing a cavelike room with a dock and what looked like a place to live in. Henekie docked the boat while the wall behind them closed. Tommy could hear the sound of water bubbling on the other side of it. Henekie took the cooler from the boat and set it in front of a door.

“Okay Tommy, I have to leave you for a while. Make yourself something to eat. There’s lots of food in the cupboard over there. Then get some sleep. You have to be dead on your feet. If I’m not back by the time you wake up, I want the boat cleaned to perfection.” He pointed to another cupboard. “You’ll find everything you need in there. Any questions?”

Tommy was pretty direct in what he thought. “You are the devil, aren’t you? And my brother was right, this is where you live.”

“Some people may well call me the devil,” Henekie told him. “But we are not in heaven or hell. We’re right here on earth, and you have survived what you’ve just been through.” Henekie smiled, “Don’t worry, Tommy, no one’s going to hurt you here. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Henekie picked up the cooler and disappeared through a door.

Tommy found his new friend exciting yet terrifying. He ate a little bit and then laid down on the bed thinking of his brother; he cried himself to sleep.

Henekie climbed the long steep set of steps leading up from the old warehouse to the tunnel connecting the main house to the guesthouse, better defined now as Lena’s house and Julio’s house, Henekie thought. He checked out Julio’s house to make sure no one was there and then leaving the cooler on the kitchen table, he crossed the lawn to Lena’s garage.