Cuba blue

3

Aboard police cutter PNR-48, Havana Bay

Here on the water, the air smelled more like rain than it did from onshore, and the sky seemed even darker, more threatening. Quiana expertly piloted the police cruiser, pushing it to maximum speed across the choppy waters of the bay. She wanted to reach the Sanabela before daylight faded or rain fell. The ponderous government boat rocked and bucked over the surface. Sergio, never one for boats, had turned slightly green from the bouncing and the foul smell of polluted water. The sound of wind and motor had become a constant barrage of noise, making conversation impossible.

Outside the bay, in smoother waters, Quiana reduced their speed as they cruised in search of the trawler.

“Gutierrez sure seems to have it in for you,” Sergio shouted to be heard.

“Yeah,” agreed Tino. “That wily old, card-playing poker-faced bit of nastiness, our beloved Colonel, is a hungry dog, and he bites.”

“Even when you throw him scraps,” added Sergio.

Quiana laughed at the apt comparison. “Hey, are you two playing suck up?”

“Nahhh…we’re your main guys!”

“How’s your family, Tino?” she asked.

“Wife’s pregnant again. Kid’s doing better.”

“That’s good, yes?”

“Only if you got money.”

“Hey, don’t listen to him. Carmela’s having our second, too,” said Sergio, smiling. “Tino’s always complaining.”

“What’s a cop got to complain about,” she facetiously asked. “Low pay, long hours. Nobody listens anyway.”

Sergio replied, “The weight of the job can kill a man-or a woman in your case.”

Qui considered Sergio’s last remarks, although flippant, a serious matter. Other than Tino and Sergio, she had no one to confide in about the job, certainly no one in her personal life. Few people outside law enforcement understood the pressures. Still, Qui wished she had one friend or relative to whom she could openly and easily discuss such matters, but who? Her longtime friend Liliana concerned herself with her dancing career, dreams of one day making a splash on a real stage-somewhere in America maybe, and she simply did not care to understand what Qui faced on the job. Qui’s father did not want her on this job period, wishing she’d pursue any other career, something safe, perhaps photography as he had. As for her boyfriend, Dr. Estaban Montoya, he could hardly be bothered with such trivialities as her problems with Gutierrez or the department.

“I just thank God, that I have you guys to talk to once in awhile,” she confided.

“In that case, beer’s on you tonight, boss lady,” responded Sergio.

Tino, looking a bit despondent with his own thoughts, added, “I could damn sure use a beer.”

In smoother waters now, outside the bay, Qui was first to spot the Sanabela II. “There she is!”

Sergio asked, “How do you know that’s the one?”

“See the Christmas tree lights?” she replied.

“Yeah, so?”

“I recognize them. Only on the Sanabela.” Quiana went on to explain the meaning of the lights.

As she turned the boat toward the shrimper, Qui’s thoughts turned to her pending assignment aboard the Sanabela. Wanting this case to be by the book perfect, she reminded herself of each step in a successful investigation. In training, each lesson was learned in the company of other recruits, but now, although Tino and Sergio were here, she was the primary investigator, and any and all results depended on her competence. She steeled herself to deal with whatever lay ahead.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of shouting. “Finally, somebody in authority,” bellowed Estrada. “I radioed when it was still daylight!”

Noting the rebuke, Qui waved at him before aligning the cruiser with trawler, gently bumping alongside the Sanabela.

“Help us tie off, Uncle!” Qui called to Estrada, who nodded to someone outside her line of vision.

Lines were tossed and Tino and Sergio coordinated with Estrada’s crew to lash the boats together.

From the side of the cruiser, Quiana looked up into the piercing eyes and the inscrutable face of Luis Estrada where he stood aboard the Sanabela. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, still robust but pale and uncharacteristically grim.

While Tino held the ladder steady, Qui handed off the evidence kit to Estrada. As she stepped aboard the foul-smelling fishing vessel, Qui immediately wished she hadn’t eaten that pork and rice lunch at the sidewalk cafe in the plaza.

“So Uncle, what sort of tragedy do we have? Accident?”

“This way. See for yourself.”

He maneuvered easily across the deck, while she cautiously picked her way past fishing paraphernalia and other obstacles. Streaked with an enormous yellow-brown stain, the deck had forty years of smeared and ground-in fish guts and tobacco. He suddenly stopped ahead of her, and she looked up. What she saw made her gasp and wince, her hand flying to her mouth. Suspended before them at eye-level dangled a heavily burdened net that slowly twisted with the shifting winds and seesaw motion of the boat.

Incrementally, by degrees, her brain made sense of what her eyes dared tell her, that the grid of the net held a mass of entwined bodies.

“Que horror…” muttered Sergio, beside Quiana, slipping a flashlight into her hand.

Tino joined them, standing stone-like, as fascinated as he was repulsed.

Estrada said, “I count three heads.”

For once Estrada had not exaggerated a situation. No one could exaggerate this. This was real, and in real life bodies smelled and tore at one’s senses like hungry ghosts screaming at the living.

The three officers began examining every nook and cranny of the net and visible portions of the bodies.

“Obviously, no accident,” muttered Sergio.

Tino added, “Pure chance…a trawler out here, raising the dead.”

“Curse of the Sanabela,” Qui muttered. As if to punctuate her words, more half-dead eels and crabs dropped from the net, scuttling slowly into the shadows near the railing.

Tino lifted a camera and began taking photos, saying, “Still life takes on new meaning.”

Estrada shook his head at the words. Qui said to him, “Uncle, it’s how we deal with traumatic death. Bad jokes.”

Qui took a deep breath, her nose already de-sensitized to the odor. She stepped closer to the winch and held onto the solid metal to mentally ground herself. The death net continued to sway ever so slowly below the hoist and hook, making a high-pitched, irritating sound-sandpaper against raw nerves. A sound that made Qui want to reach out and stop the swaying until she remembered what was in the net.

Qui again stared through the crisscrossed netting at the tangled bodies. Two white-skinned males and a paler, snowier-skinned female. All of them showing signs of torture: contusions, burns, and marks indicating some sort of binding of the wrists. Some of the bruising created a shadowed blush about the woman’s neck, and the chain had cut deep furrows in her thigh. Cigarette burns dotted the men. The same thick gray chain snaked around the lower legs, creating a knot of bodies bound together by a massive ornate lock of a type she’d never seen before. Qui noticed Estrada also staring at the lock, and she gauged his weathered face, his whiskers drooping in the damp night, the deep fissures of his wrinkles without his customary smile to lift them. She’d caught him in an unguarded moment of total despair.

“Qui…why don’t we just do what my men want?” Estrada asked.

“What exactly do they want?”

Estrada conspiratorially whispered, “Send them back to the deep, where they came from. It’d be so easy. It’s why I left them dangling in the net. Why I didn’t bring the boat in…why I insisted it be you.”

“Would solve our problem, wouldn’t it, Uncle? Pretend this never happened?”

“Yes. What do you think?”

She looked at Tino and Sergio. Each in turn raised his shoulders. Tino finally said, “Your call, Lieutenant.”

Sergio lit a cigarette for Tino, handed it to him, and then did the same for himself.

Now standing so close to the bodies that she again smelled the waterlogged decay that had taken hold, Qui asked Estrada, “Did you or your men touch any of them-or anything within the net?”

“Are you accusing me of stealing from the dead?”

She ignored his outrage. “Rings, watches, jewelry? I need to know. Such things help us to identify the dead.”

He gave her a pained look and a little shake of the head.

“I know, I know, but I have to ask, Uncle.”

“Sure…sure you do…you’re a detective now.”

The warm waters of the Caribbean, always kind to the living, were brutal to bodies left in the gulf. The normally sun-dappled waters made a poor preserver, bloating the bodies like parade floats-filling the lining between epidermal and sub-epidermal layers of skin with gases from rotting flesh that eventually pulled apart all semblance of outer cohesion, doing strange and surreal things to the features and the body. Floaters were a common occurrence in Cuban waters for many reasons, but not many were found in this manner, meant to be a forever-lost trio.

Captain Estrada stared at his crewmen before saying, “These are fishermen, Qui. Something like this comes out of the sea no one dares touch it, not even for a new watch. This is no gift from the depths. This is evil.”

Listening to him, she felt strangely disconnected, standing here on a gently rocking boat as if she were a gatekeeper between the dead and the living. All that ground her in the present was her queasy stomach, a constant reminder that she was still among the living, that this was not some horrid nightmare from which she might awake to bright sunshine and squabbling birds. She was here, the bodies were here, and it was up to her to find out why and how these once vital people had died. She was their advocate, and she began to feel both possessive and protective of them. Odd how this sense of ownership flashed through her mind, only briefly replaced by a repeating phrase: up to me…up to me…up to me. This was what she trained for, this was what she wanted, right? But she didn’t feel that sense of detachment she’d enjoyed in training, instead she felt a ball of emotions too complex to identify at the moment. Her father had spoken about similar feelings during the revolution, a war fought without a given battlefield, but rather guerilla-style, scattered across the island world of Cuba. Once he’d spoken of a day when he stood amid a field of bloodied bodies-still wired from an adrenaline high. He’d avoided speaking of it for years, saying no words existed for so eerie a sensation. But now, she knew what he’d meant-a co-mingling of gratefulness and elation at being alive, feeling an irrational invincibility-perhaps even invisibility to the enemy, and an overwhelming sense of guilt at surviving. He claimed the more bloodshed he’d seen, the more a profound sense of isolation set in along with depression and hopelessness, all due to a disagreement that had ended in mass death.

She mused: I don’t believe that a soldier’s death in guerilla warfare is the same as stone cold murder. A seagull’s shrieking dive to snatch an escaping crab ended Qui’s reverie.

She looked at Estrada. “Murder is an evil business, Uncle. No doubt of that.”

Clearing his throat, Estrada repeated, “I also asked for you, Qui…” he repeated, “’cause my men… they wanted to disobey me, to throw these children of God back into the ocean.” He raised his shoulders and frowned. “They fear for what will come of this.”

“I don’t blame them in the least,” she quietly replied, momentarily considering the possibility of her failing the dead, being unable to solve their murders.

He stared deeply into her eyes, searching her meaning. “Then you think the crew is right? That this…this can only bring evil on us?”

Qui knew what he suggested but feared to vocalize: If a future accident befalls any one of us, will it truly be an accident? “Uncle Estrada, you’ve already spoken to my colonel, and he’s sent me here. No throwing them back, no cutting loose the net, not now. Maybe before, but not now. It…it’s gone too far.”

Everyone aboard heard her words.

She meant them to hear.

Pointing now to the cache of death, Qui demanded, “Open the net! On the deck, Uncle. Let’s get on with it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, do it. Now.”

Estrada swallowed hard but gave the signal. The pulley operator yanked a switch, and the net bottom fell out. Bodies, chain and lock, dead shrimp, and assorted sea life spilled from the net like a mosaic created by a madman. The bodies slid on the wet sea life, rippled toward them, making everyone start, and at once creating a kind of creepy knell, lock and chain having careened into a bulkhead.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted Tino from atop the nearest bulkhead. Intent on photos and observations, and not paying attention to the conversation, he’d been standing almost under the net when it opened, and had to move quickly to escape the deluge Qui’s orders had created. His shoes and pant legs were shiny with splashed fluids and be-speckled with bits of gore.

Sergio, staring at the disturbing montage, muttered, “Medical examiner’s not going to like this.”

Except for a growing cloud of scavenging sea gulls, silence again settled over the boat.

Feeling brutalized, her brain screaming, Set up…set up! Qui was hit with the certain knowledge that Gutierrez knew what she’d find aboard the Sanabela, that Estrada had filled him in on more detail than the colonel had shared. She imagined his grin at her horror and loathing. I can do this, she told herself. It’s what I trained for.

From the evidence kit, Sergio handed her a pair of surgical gloves. “Time to go to work?”

With growing paranoia, Qui knew this crime scene must be treated with absolute precision. Proper procedure adhered to with greater care than with any of her previous cases. She turned to Tino, who was about to light up another cigarette, and barked, “Tino, we need to call a medical examiner-now! Radio for one to meet us at the marina. You take the police cruiser. Sergio and I’ll stay here with the bodies.” Turning to Sergio, she continued, “I need you, Sergio, to pilot us into harbor, and oh, Tino-”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Meet the medical examiner and brief him. Also, I need you to find us a slip!”

“I can do that.”

“Make it as close to the Capital headquarters as possible. Understood?”

“Got it, Lieutenant.” He rushed off and climbed aboard the police boat, where he cast off tie lines, freeing the vessels from one another.

Qui now quietly said to Estrada, “Uncle, please allow Sergio to pilot the Sanabela into harbor.”

Her tone, body language, and action informed the crew that they were no longer taking orders from Estrada-that the lone woman on deck was in charge. Qui sensed a feeling of relief come over everyone, pleased that someone in a position of authority had taken charge. She had in effect cast an official cloak over the terrible find.

Estrada replied, “For now, Lieutenant, you are my captain.”