Suitcase City (2 page)

The moon was high and Teach could see for miles. Off to his right, a low, scudding banner of clouds drifted south on a fresh ten-knot breeze. Teach hoped the clouds would swell and obscure the moon before he made the rendezvous point. He doubted it. Ahead of him, the sky was high and starry, and he could see the silver contrail of an airliner heading for Tallahassee. The DEA Cessna Skymasters flew without running lights, and Teach had little hope of spotting one silhouetted against the heavens before it saw him. He ran without lights too, but it wasn’t much of a precaution. Anyone up there would see his wake, a mile of silver ribbon tacked to his stern.

Well, the Whaler was full of the usual fishing equipment, a lunch, a cooler of beer, and a thermos of coffee. The live bait well was stocked with shrimp, and Teach had even taken the precaution of buying some ballyhoo. If a Coast Guard or a DEA boat stopped him, he’d look like the real thing. But all of this, Teach reflected standing at the Whaler’s steering station with the wind throwing his hair straight back behind him, was little protection. His best safeguard was the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico.

Twenty miles out, he saw the huge bulk of the mother ship rise like a black moon out of the horizon. Six miles away and she had seen him. Her bow doors slowly opened and she gave birth to the shrimper
Santa Maria
, a dark blot on the shimmering sea. If the timing was right, Teach would arrive just as the
Santa Maria
was powered up by Carlos, the best of the three gangsters. Carlos, Teach had learned from scraps of stray talk, had been a fisherman before he had taken up the drug trade. He understood and loved boats. Teach cut his speed, and the twin Yamahas complained a little, then settled into a five-knot idle.

He made the bow of the
Santa Maria
just as the mother ship started her slow, ponderous arc west to deeper water. She would steam a wide five-hour circle and meet the shrimper when she returned, deadheading. Teach tossed a line to Julio and scrambled over the shrimper’s transom.

For the next five hours, the night would belong to Teach and Naylor. Teach had once asked Esteban why the Guatemalans didn’t just let Teach and Naylor take the shrimper in, bring her back out. Why they risked going ashore, three armed illegal aliens. Esteban blew a big huff, gave Teach those
el stupido
eyes. “What if you jus take de boat? Never return? What about dat?” Esteban struggled with English but had no trouble with his sneer.

Teach had smiled, shrugged. “Hey, we’re all businessmen. We honor our commitments.” Again, Esteban had opened his coat, letting Teach see the big pistol.

The trip was fast and lucky. The banner of wispy clouds filled up with moisture, became a thick dark curtain, and covered the moon. Steering by the loran, Teach found the mouth of the tidal canal and eased the shrimper through a hole in the mangroves with only three feet of clearance on either side. From a hundred yards offshore, no one would even see the hole. From twenty yards off, no one would think the passage was more than three feet deep. But Teach knew a strong current flowed here from a spring not far inland, sweeping the hole deep enough for the
Santa Maria
.

From this point on, it was slow and careful going. Sometimes Teach had to cut the power so much that he almost lost steerageway. The thick green mangrove walls of the canal lashed the shrimper’s rails. Leaves and torn branches rained on deck. Roosting anhingas and herons cried in the night as the boat ghosted past, her engine thumping. When Teach could take his eyes from his work, he watched Carlos and Julio moving around on deck, kicking branches and debris overboard. Sometimes the sides of the shrimper scraped the great, spidery mangrove roots, painting the boat with streaks of mud.

A half-mile inland, the canal widened and Teach breathed easier, loosening his grip on the wheel. On the foredeck, Julio and Carlos relaxed, lit cigarettes. Esteban stood in the bow like the captain he was, staring ahead into the darkness.

Teach reached down and turned on the radio, a rock station from Gainesville. The Stones singing their hearts out: all these years and still no satisfaction. The wheelhouse door opened, and Carlos’s flat peasant face emerged from the darkness. Teach switched off the radio.

“No, no,” said Carlos, smiling. “
Déjala encendida
. Let it go. Play it.”

Teach turned the music back up. Carlos lit a cigarette, filling the little wheelhouse with the heavy stink of caporal tobacco. He shrugged, offered the gold cigarette case to Teach, who shook his head. “
No fumo
.” Teach thinking,
This little Indian with a big gun wants to be my friend. Well, we’ve been through a lot together.

Teach reached into his hip pocket, pulled out a half pint of Wild Turkey. He took a swallow and offered it. Carlos took the bottle and sniffed it, then drank. Again. “
Muy bueno
,” he said. “
Gracias, amigo
.”

Teach nodded, took another bite, and put the bottle away. He saw something, some glimmer through the trees ahead. He caught a murmur of surprised talk from the deck below. Carlos slipped out of the wheelhouse, his feet rapping on the ladder. The
Santa Maria
was approaching a bend in the canal, and now Teach made out the glow of a lantern, a small boat, a man in it, glittering through the mangrove branches. They had never met anyone back here, though Teach had always known it was possible. He also knew that the only people a man would meet back here at midnight would be locals who observed the unspoken rules of silence.

Teach put the shrimper into reverse and spun her screw until she barely drifted. He went down onto the foredeck. The man in the boat was Frank Deeks. Deeks was a sometime handyman, sometime fisherman, and full-time drunk. Deeks kept his back to the men in the boat as it drifted up, pushing a heavy wave ahead of it, and Teach could see why. Deeks was poaching stone crab traps.

Teach had heard rumors about Deeks doing it. Few men would have dared. A crabber was justified, at least by local standards, in shooting anyone he caught messing with his traps. Looking down into Deeks’s leaky skiff, Teach could see next to the hissing Coleman lantern a bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon and some sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Deeks wasn’t brave tonight, he was just more than normally drunk.

The three Guatemalans stood behind Teach, talking in low, urgent tones. Teach heard
cantar
. Informer. He didn’t get it all, but he knew he had to improvise. He stepped to the rail and said, “What you doing out here so late, Mr. Deeks?”

Deeks looked at him out of pale, rheumy eyes. He was saintly thin and egg-bald and wore a railroad engineer’s cap made of gray ticking, a khaki shirt, and old Bermuda shorts. Like a lot of thin men, he moved his limbs with exceeding slowness. His mouth was another thing. “Uh, fishing,” Deeks said. “Ain’t doing no good, though.” There was no fishing gear in the boat. Deeks looked up at the
Santa Maria
. “What you doing out here in a boat so big, boy? You lost?”

Teach kept making it up: “Uh, Mr. Deeks, these gentlemen hired me to take this boat down to Harry Parsons’s High and Dry for some repairs. I guess we a little lost.” He smiled, winked at Deeks. A don’t-let-on-how-lost wink.

Deeks didn’t catch it. “Hell, boy, Harry Parsons’s is two miles in the other direction and you know it. And . . .” Deeks’s eyes left Teach’s face and went to the shrimper again, the three men behind Teach. “Who you say that boat belong to? She sure don’t look like she come from around here. What’s her name, anyway? What you say’s wrong with her?”

Teach was about to say he hadn’t said what was wrong with her. He was about to shift the conversation to the crab trap oozing mud into Frank Deeks’s leaky boat, ask Deeks when he had taken up crabbing, when the pistol went off next to his right ear.

Teach grabbed the ear, screamed, and fell to his knees. His first thought was that the concussion had ruptured his eardrum, but soon he knew it hadn’t, and soon there was more to worry about. All three of the Guatemalans were firing, the muzzle flashes wild and bright against the green wall of mangroves, the smoke thick and sweet, hot shell casings raining down around Teach. He crabbed backward on his knees and heard Esteban yelling, “
Paren! Basta! Se acab
ó! Enough!” He had no idea how many shots they fired, just knew Carlos and Julio ignored the order, kept shooting until their magazines were empty.

Teach edged forward and peered over the rail. Frank Deeks lay in a sinking boat covered with blood and gasoline. A good-sized crab lay shot to pieces on his chest. Fragments of crab, flesh, brain, and fried egg sandwich littered the boat and the surface of the water.

Before Teach could speak, he felt Esteban’s hand on his shoulder. “Get up. Take us out of here.
Rápido. Vámonos
.”

In a fog of head-hurt and shock, Teach did what he was told. When he had the boat moving, her stern abreast of the little skiff, he felt a second concussion, heard a whoosh, saw a tower of flame rising behind the
Santa Maria
. Heard Esteban call out again, “
Rápido! Rápido
!” Teach gave the shrimper more power. When he had her out in the middle of the canal, he stepped from the wheelhouse and gazed back at the shallow place near the bank where Frank Deeks lay burning in the gasoline from his outboard.

TWO

By the time they reached the off-loading site, Teach had calmed himself and treated his headache with whiskey. His first job, he knew, was to keep quiet about what he had seen. There would be plenty of time later to explain to Naylor. No telling how Naylor would react if Teach told it now.

Teach eased the
Santa Maria
as close to the canal bank as she could go. Naylor always hid in the scrub beyond the bank until Teach gave the signal to bring the truck up the last half mile. Teach idled the engine, picked up his flashlight, and shot the beam at the scrub. Naylor flashed back twice. Teach waited in the wheelhouse while Naylor threw aboard the two lines he kept secured to the trunks of cypress trees. When the boat was moored fore and aft, Naylor lowered a gangplank fixed by hinges to the base of a cypress. A block and tackle in the treetop let the gangplank down across the twenty feet of water to the shrimper’s rail. It was a good and speedy arrangement. The plank was the only permanent apparatus, and when it was upright you had to be in the water directly opposite the tree to see it.

Naylor waved his flashlight to Teach and took off jogging for the truck. Teach went down to the deck. He hadn’t spoken to the Guatemalans since the shooting. He found them in the stern, smoking, their heads together. They stopped talking when he approached. He stood only a few feet from them, but he and they were separated now by more than land and language. It had been crazy stupid to kill Frank Deeks. If they had given Teach the chance, he could have explained Deeks to them, told them the guy was poaching traps. Told them Deeks would have cut off his hands before admitting he’d seen the
Santa Maria
.

Teach said, “
Mi amigo va por el camión. Regresa en unos minutos
.” He could already hear in the distance the slow whine of Naylor’s engine.

Esteban stepped away from the other two, looked at Teach. “It is just as it always is. Hurry with the unloading.”

Teach nodded. Ordinary nights, Teach had ten bales ashore before the truck arrived. He looked at Esteban. The man was different. Teach was not sure how. Was this the way you were after you shot someone? Esteban was always tense, wired. Now he seemed relaxed, serene, satisfied. The change frightened Teach more than the pistol under Esteban’s arm.

He looked at Carlos and Julio and saw it there too. Their faces settled, their eyes uncurious, decided. Maybe he saw a little sorrow in the eyes of Carlos, the fisherman. The man who knew boats.

Teach humped bales until the truck arrived. When Naylor’s face loomed out of the darkness, sweating from the half-mile jog, Teach only smiled and said, “Get aboard, buddy, and put some weight on your back. Those clouds are blowing south. Pretty soon it’s gonna be moon over Miami.”

Naylor looked at him. He sensed it. Something was wrong, different. Teach turned back to the gangplank, hurrying for the next bale.

When the unloading was finished, Teach went to the truck cab. As he passed Esteban, who stood at the back of the truck looking at the bales with those uncurious eyes, the man said, “
Adónde vas
?”

Teach stopped. “To the truck. For a cigarette.” Esteban nodded.

In the truck cab, Teach found the .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special that Naylor kept in the glove box. He remembered Naylor showing it to him the day they had done their dry run before the first trip. Teach laughing. “What’re you gonna do, shoot it out with the DEA?”

Naylor getting sulky, his masculinity damaged. “White man, you never know when that piece might come in handy. Better safe than sorry, I always say.”

“Right,” Teach had said. “Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.”

Teach put the pistol in the back of his waistband, under his shirt. He had been thinking white hot since Frank Deeks had gone up in flames, his mind trying for some clear, certain place where he would know what he had to do. He kept seeing things: How the three Guatemalans had stopped talking when he approached them on the stern of the
Santa Maria
, some evil fog around them of what they knew and he didn’t. Their eyes holding that serenity. It meant, Teach knew, that they had decided. They had made up their minds.

Teach pushed out of the cab and walked back past Esteban. “Out of cigarettes,” he said.

“Take one of mine.” Esteban reached into his coat pocket for the cheesy gold cigarette case all three carried.

Teach waved no and pinched his nose. “Too strong for me, man.”

Esteban gave an elaborate shrug, shook his head at the weakness of gringo lungs.

When the truck was closed up and ready, Teach stood in front of Naylor. He looked over at the three Guatemalans standing together by the gangplank. “Last trip, Blood,” he whispered. “Wish me luck.”

Bloodworth Naylor laughed, then looked at him. “What’s going on, man? Everything cool? You seem a little—”