Trap Line, Page 5

  Jimmy sat on the gunwale, hanging his legs over the side so his bare feet tickled the water. His white T-shirt seemed to glow against the indelible outdoor brownness of his arms and neck; the starlight gave his blond hair a silvery cast. To Albury, the twenty-five years that lay between him and the mate stretched out as dull and hot and halting as U.S. 1. He couldn’t find a lesson anywhere that he wanted to share with the kid.

  The sound of the big outboard sprang out of the mangroves on Ramrod Key. The whine grew louder, but Albury could see no boat, which meant it was running with no lights. His watch said ten minutes past twelve.

  The outboard was only about a hundred yards away when the driver cut the engines. Albury went to the console and flicked his lights four times. Jimmy started to say something, but Albury shook his head sharply and put a finger to his lips. The outboard started once, then stalled out, then started again. The driver idled toward the Diamond Cutter, and Albury was able to identify the boat as a twenty-one-foot T-craft. It was basically nothing but a broad hull with a flat open deck, powered by an absurdly oversized Mercury. A boat with only one function.

  “Captain?” called a voice from the T-craft.

  “Yeah.”

  “You and your mate are supposed to come with me.”

  Jimmy glanced apprehensively at Albury.

  “What about my boat?” Albury demanded.

  “I’ll take good care of it, pardner.” It was the voice of the second man in the T-craft.

  Albury put it together quickly. He asked anyway, “Why can’t I run my boat?”

  The T-craft came alongside. “This ain’t the Diamond Cutter,” muttered the second man.

  “Yeah, it is. I just hung a new name on the transom.”

  “What for?” asked the driver.

  “For looks, asshole,” Albury said. “Now, why can’t I run my own boat?”

  “Tom said we’re switching captains. Captain Smith here is gonna run your boat and you’re gonna run his,” the driver explained. “If either of you gets taken down, the other guy reports his boat stolen. That way Customs or the Marine Patrol can’t seize the damn thing. They gotta give it back. It’s for your own goddamn good, so quit complaining and hop in.”

  “Is that right, Breeze?”

  Albury nodded, but he didn’t get in the T-craft right away. “So if something happens to the Diamond Cutter …”

  “Tell ’em it was stolen. Tell ’em Captain Smith must have stole it from the fish house.”

  Albury snorted. “Captain Smith. Jesus.”

  He and Jimmy stepped into the T-craft. Albury didn’t recognize the slender man who climbed out, but the sight of the other captain in the wheelhouse of the Diamond Cutter stabbed him, like watching a stranger trying to fuck your girlfriend.

  Before Albury could issue a warning about the mortal importance of treating his boat properly, the T-craft was skimming through the chop toward Big Pine Key, its graceless hull slapping and plowing alternately. Albury and Jimmy framed the driver, each on one side of the console and he in the center, all hanging on with certitude. Albury made out the silhouette of another crawfish boat at anchor. The driver of the T-craft took one hand off the wheel and pointed. “There she is,” he shouted.

  As soon as he got the anchor up, Albury knew that he and the borrowed boat would not get along. The name on the stern was Miss Alice. It was cranky, old, and too damn slow to be a dope boat. Albury expected radar. Most of the grass boats carried the best; this one had none.

  “You ever seen this boat?” Jimmy asked as Albury steered toward the coordinates provided by the T-craft’s driver.

  “No, I haven’t,” Albury said. “But it’s a Marathon boat. I don’t know a lot of the guys up there.”

  The Machine was smart. On nights of a run, it would deliberately plant false intelligence with the police, usually through a double informant at Customs. Out in the Gulf, to the west, there probably was a shrimper with a couple of lobster boats alongside, whose captains were being paid to have a raucous, suspicious-looking, but entirely innocent drink together. Albury could only hope that every cop in the Keys was watching the party.

  To the east, in the Atlantic, he throttled the Miss Alice toward a big Texas shrimper. Another crawfish boat was ahead of him, alongside the shrimper, and Albury imagined he could hear the sound of the bales dropping onto the deck, the muted rushing footsteps on the bigger boat.

  “Is that the Diamond Cutter?” Jimmy asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Albury replied. He hoped not. It would be just fine with him if Tom had decided to use the Diamond Cutter as one of the barren decoys.

  Silence enveloped the Miss Alice. Diesel just ticking over, Albury could now distinctly hear from the shrimper the sounds he had imagined before. Street music at sea.

  Albury watched the other crawfish boat cast off, and then he guided the Miss Alice into place. “One o’clock,” he called to the dark figure on the deck of the shrimper.

  “You got it,” the man answered.

  The bales came fire-brigade style, with Jimmy and then Albury the final links. Each fifty-five-pound package was wrapped with black plastic over the burlap; the odor was pungent, almost sickeningly sweet. Albury stacked the bales in the hold of the Miss Alice. After about a half-hour, he could feel the boat settle with its new weight.

  Once he looked aft to trace the sound of another boat. He saw in the shrimper’s wake another crawfish boat, waiting its turn. The Diamond Cutter. He tugged on Jimmy’s sleeve and pointed. Both of them saw two figures in the wheelhouse.

  Albury figured he had loaded about two tons when the bales abruptly stopped.

  “What’s up?” he asked one of the crew on the shrimper, a bearded young fisherman in white rubber boots.

  “That’s it. See you around.”

  “But that’s not a full load,” Albury protested.

  “You’re the one o’clock, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all she wrote, one o’clock. Move along now, bubba. You’re blocking traffic.”

  Puzzled, Albury steered the Miss Alice in a deft arc away from the shrimper and gave a backward glance to judge how smoothly the stranger docked the Diamond Cutter. Albury ran the crawfish boat blacked out, with only a sliver of green compass light to guide them. Jimmy sat on a stack of bales near the stern.

  It didn’t figure. Albury had assumed he would be hauling at least four tons. Christ, even the Cubans could run a boat in with two tons. You had more speed, less water beneath you. Yet Tom had paid the full freight and made such a Hollywood production out of it. It made no sense.

  Albury puzzled over it while the Miss Alice browsed through the gentle sea. He wondered if the other boats were getting the same loads; maybe the Machine was splitting the cargo among more boats to cut its losses if one got taken. If one got taken. He remembered what the driver of the T-craft had told him about switching boats.

  Albury bickered with the radio until he was able to raise Crystal. “Smilin’ Jack, this is Lucky Seven.”

  “For sure. You fat and sassy yet?”

  “Yeah, right on schedule, but not as fat as I expected.”

  Crystal was silent for about twenty seconds. “You want me to see what I can find out?”

  “I would appreciate it,” Albury said into the hand mike. “Hey, and listen, I’ve got a new lady, too.”

  “Oh? Why?” Crystal was confused.

  “I don’t know, but she’s old and slow, Jack, and I’m a little worried.”

  “Lemme call you back, Seven, OK?” Then Crystal was quiet.

  By the time he reached the mouth of Niles Channel, Albury had made up his mind about one thing. He killed the engines and turned to Jimmy. Miss Alice drifted and turned slowly in the tide.

  “You get your money?” Albury asked in a whisper.

  “Yesterday, in the mailbox, where you left it.”

  “Good,” said Albury. “Jimmy, I want you to take off. Swim to shore. I’ll take
her in.”

  “God, Breeze, what are you talking about? Who’s gonna unload?”

  “Shit, they got a dozen Cubans waiting there with Tom’s campers. Don’t worry.”

  Jimmy could see trouble. Albury wouldn’t look at him; he was smoking furiously.

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “You’ll go!”

  “Aw, Breeze,” was the last thing Jimmy managed before the big man seized him under the arms and heaved him like a sack of stone crabs over the gunwale. The diesel was hacking and the Miss Alice was back in the channel by the time Jimmy exploded from the surface. He paddled for the mangroves and scrabbled ashore.

  Within minutes, Albury was navigating the finger cut, a black ribbon of water that snaked up to the off-loading site on Ramrod Key. A short, rotting pier jutted from a clearing in the mangroves; the creek surrendered seven feet at low tide, enough for most crawfish boats. Beyond the sagging dock was a disused wooden warehouse, two junked cars, and a stack of old, broken lobster traps. At dead slow, Albury let the Miss Alice glide toward the dock. He had sweated off most of the bug spray, so the ravenous Keys mosquitoes were having a feast.

  The accident happened five minutes too late to save Albury. Two out-of-town college kids, liquored up and luded out, lost it on the Stock Island Bridge. Their Camaro jumped the median and crashed head-on into a pickup driven by a black electrician on his way home from an emergency repair job at the Pier House.

  The first patrol car reached the scene quickly and without sirens, the officer remembering Chief Huge Barnett’s warnings about a possible red herring. He got out of the car and vomited as he inspected the wreck. Then he called for help.

  “We’ve got two or three fatalities. Get an ambulance down here and a couple more patrol units,” he pleaded.

  “Everybody else is up at Ramrod with the chief,” blurted the dispatcher. “I think they got their radios off.”

  “Shit,” gagged the young patrolman, “then call me a state trooper.”

  Crystal reacted quickly. With one hand he turned down the volume on his police scanner and with the other he nimbly adjusted his VHF to the frequency he and Breeze Albury had agreed upon. There was only one sorry reason that Barnett would be up on Ramrod.

  “Lucky Seven, Lucky Seven! You got weather comin’. Hit it, man.”

  Albury was already running. Miss Alice was only a few yards from the old dock when the private alarm bells rang. Everything was wrong. There was nobody waiting, no campers or trucks. There was nothing, just Albury and a slow boat full of grass. It was an ambush.

  Albury slammed the Miss Alice into reverse and gave her full throttle. The diesel coughed thick gray smoke and the old engine whimpered. Albury thought the boat must be aground; she didn’t seem to be moving at all. He put the wheel hard over.

  Huge Barnett, crouching awkwardly behind one of the abandoned cars, knew what the sound meant.

  “Now!” he screamed.

  Light flooded the tiny inlet. Armed men sprang from behind the lobster traps. Albury had the fleeting image of a rotund man in a Stetson, pistol waving, waddling like a bloated duck toward the water’s edge. From around a bend in the inky creek two motor-boats appeared like angry bees. They hummed on intersecting courses towards the turning Miss Alice.

  Albury nearly made it. He clipped the bow of one police boat and might have successfully intimidated the second, but someone on shore, provoked no doubt by the sound and fury of Huge Barnett, loosed a cool, sharp burst of automatic weapons fire that sent Albury diving for the deck of the wheelhouse and kept him there, hands over his head, until the Miss Alice, undirected, backed blindly and harmlessly into the mangroves.

  Chapter 5

  ARCHIE WAS a drunk. He mewled, he hawked, he spat. His Adam’s apple fluttered like a trapped moth. When he started singing, Breeze Albury rattled the bars and demanded a new cell.

  He had stayed on the salty wheelhouse floor for what had seemed a long time, keeping his head down long after the gunfire had ended. Albury had noticed the thud of a small boat alongside and instantly been bathed in a police spotlight. He’d heard the wheeze of a fat man.

  “Breeze Albury, goddamn,” Huge Barnett had exclaimed. “We got your ass,” Barnett had chuckled, gas escaping from a balloon.

  “A couple of tons, at least, but nobody else on board,” had come a disembodied voice.

  “Where’s your crew?” Barnett had demanded.

  “What crew?”

  “The crew that was helpin’ you run this dope, shithead.”

  “What dope?”

  They had hauled him away, lights and sirens, then fingerprints and a quick photo session, in handcuffs, for the dreary local press. By the time they had let Albury sleep, it was almost dawn.

  He awoke with a hot knot in his guts. Every time he thought it through, it made less sense. Albury had made his contact with Winnebago Tom. Tom worked for the Machine. The Machine had set him up, QED. Why? Albury chewed over the question for hours. They went to a hell of a lot of trouble; they lost a boat and a couple of tons and, not insignificantly, one of the last decent Anglo boat captains on the island.

  Albury had lost his ticket out. Maybe for good. A foul taste rose in his mouth. He thought about Ricky.

  NEAL BEEKER WALKED out of the El Cacique restaurant at about nine-thirty and headed east on Duval Street, still savoring his wake-up orange juice. The studio was only five blocks away, and Beeker walked leisurely. The morning sun cast a dappled blanket of light over the Conch houses in Old Town. Beeker waved warmly at a young man selling shark’s teeth to tourists outside Sloppy Joe’s. He cut over to Simonton Street, stopping to pet a family of gaunt stray cats near a garbage bin. That was his mistake.

  The three teenagers caught Beeker at Simonton and Fleming. They shoved him into an alley and clipped his legs out from under him. Two of them were fat, dull-eyed, with thick flat noses. The third was tall and black, with rust-colored hair. Beeker knew what came next. He got up and offered his leather purse. They emptied it, scrabbling for the loose change. The tall one snatched Beeker’s wallet off the pavement and expertly looted it for credit cards.

  “How about jewelry?” demanded one of the porcine kids.

  Beeker said he wasn’t wearing any. The teenager kicked him savagely in the chest. Beeker’s lungs emptied in a raw wheeze.

  “You faggots always have gold,” said the rangy black kid, sneering.

  The second fat kid seized Beeker by the scalp and wrapped a pudgy, hairless arm around his neck. Beeker gulped for air. His face was moist with sweat and tears.

  “Come on, princess,” the black kid taunted, “you got some gold, I know.” He ripped Beeker’s T-shirt.

  “No necklace? What kind of faggot are you?”

  Beeker’s chest was imploding. Desperately he sank his teeth into the kid’s arm and bit madly. The kid fell back, wailing. Beeker screamed.

  The black kid slugged him twice, once in the gut, once in the testicles. Beeker went down again. His last image was of a Key West cop standing at the mouth of the alley, one hand on his hip, a look of thin annoyance on his ruddy young face.

  Two hours after Beeker was delivered to the emergency room of Duval Memorial Hospital, Bobby Freed was in Huge Barnett’s office, demanding to know how the hoodlums had gotten away. Free’s face was flushed, his neck and veins taut with rage. Neal Beeker was his lover. Huge Barnett only smiled.

  ALBURY WAS NOT surprised by the Machine’s choice of attorneys. It was the same man who had defended him the last time, an oily creep with crooked front teeth that reminded Albury of a moray eel. Drake Boone, Jr., was his name. He showed up at the arraignment with the peremptory air of an important man on a trivial errand. The crisp gabardine suit made no concession to the heat. The colorful necktie, and probably the shirt beneath it, was silk.

  Boone shook hands politely with his new client, nodded at the judge, and said absolutely nothing when bond was set at $75,000. When Albury touched the lawyer’s sleeve and
whispered protests, Boone waved him off. “We’ll talk later,” he promised.

  Boone came down to the jail in late afternoon. He and Albury were ushered to a windowless, oblong room with two scarred chairs and a Formica table. The lawyer opened his black briefcase with a click and withdrew a manila file.

  “I suppose the police report is accurate?” he began without introduction.

  “They had to send you, huh?” Albury said, lighting a cigarette. “I guess I should feel lucky they’re giving me a lawyer.”

  “That part is always understood. You know that.”

  “Why you again?”

  Boone scowled. “Why not?”

  “Eleven months in Raiford is why not.”

  “It was a locked case,” Boone reminded. “They got you cold on a boat. Just like this time, apparently.”

  “This time was no accident,” Albury said. “I was set up.”

  Boone made a palms-up gesture. “I wouldn’t know about that, Breeze. I get a call that a boat’s been taken down, I come down here to see you. That’s all I know.”

  “Shit. Did Tom call you?”

  “That I can’t say.” Boone studied the arrest form in the file. “A little more than two tons. And you were alone?”

  Albury said nothing.

  “Well,” Boone said, rising, “we’ll try the usual. I’ll file a motion tomorrow to have the dope suppressed as evidence. We’ll argue that Barnett boarded the boat illegally. Might work.”

  Albury rose and seized the pudgy lawyer by one arm. “What about the Diamond Cutter?”

  Boone shook free and slammed the briefcase shut. “Safe and sound. It’s over at Ming’s fish house.”

  “Clean?” Albury demanded.

  Boone nodded. “The fake name, too. It’s been removed.”

  “What about my bond?”

  “I’ll post it tomorrow morning. Cash.”

  Albury stubbed the cigarette into the Formica. “You gonna talk to Tom?”

  “Yep. Tonight.”

  “Find out what happened.”

  Boone rang for the jailer. “I’ll try.”