A King's ransom

13

My chance to confront Guillermo came and went. Two days had passed since my meeting with Agent Huitt, and I’d spoken to my father’s business partner on the telephone at least a half dozen times. He was still in Colombia, still the family’s representative in dealing with the local police. Each time we spoke, I resolved to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Each time, I let it go. I needed more than vague innuendo from an FBI agent before questioning the integrity of a man who might be completely innocent. The last thing I needed was to alienate Guillermo and end up having to deal with the Colombian police on my own.

At least for now, I dealt with Guillermo as if the conversation with Agent Huitt had never taken place. Things were so normal that he was even delegating work to me in my father’s absence. I spent the afternoon at the port checking on a shipment of scuba equipment to the lobster divers in Nicaragua.

I’d visited the port once before with my father, when I was a teenager. I remembered it well, because it had shocked me. I’d expected to see the big white cruise ships docked like a string of pearls in the shadow of beautiful downtown Miami. This was an entirely different port, up the Miami River near the airport. Chain-link fences and barbed wire cordoned off ugly metal warehouses and mountains of metal container trucks stacked one on top of the other. The boats were rusty old freighters that looked barely capable of making it to the mouth of the river, let alone to the Panama Canal. Overall, it reminded me of the kind of place a serial killer might dump his bodies. In fact, I think one had a few years back.

This time I took my best friend with me. J.C. Paez was christened Juan Carlos by his Cuban parents, but his friends knew him only as J.C. We’d been friends since we were nine years old. In fact, it was J.C. who’d set me up with Jenna. It was a toss-up as to which of us had taken the breakup harder-a toss-up between me and J.C., not me and Jenna.

“I saw Jenna on Miami Beach the other night,” he said.

I was trying to negotiate a parking space. I didn’t say anything.

“She looked great,” he continued.

I had to wonder, what was it that compelled friends to carry on about how incredible your ex was looking since the breakup? She wasn’t Bigfoot; I didn’t need every reported sighting. But now that he’d opened the door, I had to ask, “Was she with anyone?”

“You mean when she came in or when she left?”

“Don’t mess with me. I know Jenna’s not picking up guys at bars.”

“She was with a girlfriend.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

He smiled coyly. “Now why would you be interested in that?”

“Just forget it.”

“Wait a sec, she did say something about you.”

“What?”

“Something like, ‘Wow, J.C., you do kiss much better than Nick.’ ”

I just rolled my eyes and applied the parking brake. He laughed as we got down from the Jeep. “You should call her sometime.”

“Oh, right.”

“Seriously. I think there’s still something there.”

As much as I would have liked to believe that, I didn’t. J.C.’s parents had divorced when he was twelve, and some fifteen years later he was still clinging to the notion that someday his folks would remarry. That had a way of putting anything he said about Jenna in perspective.

“We’ll see,” I said, noncommittal.

We went around to the back of warehouse Number 3 to see a man named Paco. Shipments had a strange way of not making it onto the boat if you didn’t see Paco-more precisely, if you and Ben Franklin didn’t see Paco. He was busy, so we waited outside his office door. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, bright blue skies. I wished I’d had my sunglasses.

“Hey, isn’t that your Jeep?” asked J.C.

I looked over and saw a forklift pulling my Jeep toward a huge freighter. I nearly knocked J.C. over, I flew past him so fast.

“What the hell are you guys doing?”

The forklift stopped. The driver shrugged and laughed. He said something in Spanish that I couldn’t quite catch with all the engine noise. J.C. translated for me.

“He says you were blocking traffic. He was making room for the trucks to pass.”

It was possible he was telling the truth, though it was also possible that if J.C. hadn’t caught them, my beloved Jeep would have been a boat ride away from South American license plates. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were in hot demand down there-just ask any Miamian who used to own a Range Rover.

J.C. and I moved my Jeep to a safer place, a parking spot beside the warehouse that was inaccessible by forklift. As I killed the engine, I noticed the goofy expression on J.C.’s face.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just thinking, this is broad daylight. What must go on down here at one o’clock in the morning?”

“God only knows.”

“Actually, I think God must look the other way.”

“Yeah,” I said. “God and my old man.”

“Get out. Your dad’s as straight as they come.”

“You and I know that. But I have this feeling that everybody else lumps him together with every snake who’s ever slithered down the Miami River.”

“Why?”

“Why? It’s like you just said, this is the day shift. Who do you think works here at night? Nuns?”

“You’re making too much of that. So what if your dad spends a lot of time at the port. He travels back and forth from Nicaragua on fishing business. He has the bad luck of being kidnapped by Colombians. That doesn’t mean. .”

He stopped in midsentence, as if saying those things had made him see my point. “It’s just a perception thing,” he added.

The forklift drove by. The driver beeped his horn and waved. He was hauling a pallet of frozen grouper fingers. Or at least that’s what the markings on the box said. Who knew what was really in there?

I looked at J.C. and asked, “What would you say if I told you that my old man had been shaken down by customs nineteen times in the past five years?”

He was trying hard not to look shocked. “Was he ever charged with anything?”

“Nope. Not a single time could anyone tag him with anything illegal.”

“Then I’d say he’s being harassed.”

“Spoken like a true best friend,” I said, though the accusatory look of Agent Huitt was still burning in my mind. “Of course, another man might say he’s just lucky as hell he never got caught.”

J.C. looked away, saying nothing. In silence, we walked back into the warehouse to see my father’s friend Paco.