Tampa Burn

THIRTY-FOUR

It was ten-twenty when Harris swung aboard my skiff and I told him that I knew the name of the freighter we were after-Repatriate.

I backed away, turning toward the Gulf of Mexico. As I did, he took a piece of paper from his pocket on which he’d made some notes, and replied, “Good for you. You played it smart, keeping it to yourself for as long as you did. But now we need to get the Coast Guard involved. You’ve got an edge. If you can make it work, a little edge is all you’ll need.”

I said, “Fair enough.” Then I added, “What happened to Merlin Starkey? Did you talk to him?”

Harris smiled. “Mostly, I just listened. He’s a good cop, though. He says he looks forward to talking to you. But, man, he hates your uncle for some reason.”

I said, “I’ll tell you the story one day. It’s kinda funny.”

Harris was now holding the paper up to the stern light, reading. “O.K.-only four vessels were scheduled to transit, and I’m pretty sure I remember Repatriate ’s destination…” He paused. “Yeah, here it is. Our dispatcher, Terri, said they’re headed home to Bluefields, Nicaragua. That’s an easy heading to calculate. They have to stay in international waters off the west of Cuba, the Yucatan Channel. So where’s your GPS, and I’ll figure out an intercept course.”

I told him I didn’t have a GPS. Only a compass.

“Suddenly,” he said, “I don’t think you’re quite as smart anymore. So we’ll have to guesstimate it. Figure it out in our heads. But we’ll find ’em. Let me have the wheel-there are some tricky shoals in here. That’ll gain us some time while we talk it out.”

Then he said, “What about a VHF radio? Or is that too modern for you, too?”

“A radio, I’ve got.”

“Good. Do you want to call the Coast Guard? Or should I?”

I stood beside Harris as he shot us expertly through channels and beneath bridges, past Pine Key, Passe-a-Grille Beach, and Mullet Key, into a black-domed star basin that was the open Gulf of Mexico.

Beneath us, the flat water of the bay began to undulate in long, slow swells as if something huge lay below, breathing. Harris found the rhythm of the swells quickly and ran at maximum speed.

I’d told him I’d crossed Repatriate ’s stern at around 7:15 P.M. near the channel’s intersection off Gibsonton. He broke the probabilities down for me. Told me how the process worked. He said an average freighter takes about two and a half hours to travel from the Gibsonton docks to the Skyway Bridge-with a Tampa pilot always in charge of the helm, of course.

He said, “Where you saw them, they were only forty minutes or so away. That would put them beneath the bridge around eight P.M. Right at sunset.”

I could picture it. Ironically-or maybe not-Prax Lourdes had probably watched Repatriate steam past. Because I was certain that’s how he had to work it. He’d been right there on the water in a smaller, faster boat, barking orders to Kong on the cell phone, working his extortion scheme, arranging the money drop. Probably chose that spot because he could visually confirm that his freighter was outward bound.

Once he had the money and drugs, he would then run offshore, meet the freighter, and board her.

But he couldn’t do that until the American pilot had left the vessel. Harris said that on a standard freighter run, a pilot disembarked a foreign vessel approximately an hour or so after passing beneath the Skyway-probably around nine P.M. in this case.

“Our pilots disembark just past Palantine Shoals at sea buoys number nine and ten,” he said. “That’s six miles offshore.”

Standard procedure, he explained, was for a freighter or tanker to slow to about ten knots as the pilot organization’s 60-foot aluminum Brocraft transport, Tampa, approached from astern. With neither vessel stopping, the pilot then climbed down the outside hull of the freighter via a rope ladder like the one I’d seen hanging off Repatriate. Once aboard the transport vessel, Tampa, he’d be taken to the pilot quarters on Egmont Key, where there was plenty of hot coffee, food, plus a shower and his bunk waiting.

Harris pointed out that, because the transfer area is six miles offshore, there’s only another six miles to go to international waters. Most freighters run at between twelve and fifteen knots. So add another half-hour, he said. Total time to exit U.S. boundaries: four hours. Plus, add another fifteen to thirty minutes for Lourdes and the freighter to rendezvous, and for him to board.

By our calculations, Repatriate may have crossed into international waters at around ten P.M.

“We’re headed to the six-mile rendezvous point now,” Harris told me. “The sea buoys. Who knows? Maybe they got delayed. Maybe the perpetrator-Lourdes is his name?-maybe he had trouble finding the freighter. It’s a big ocean out here. Even if everything went perfectly for the asshole, we’re not far behind, Doc. We’ll find ’em.”

I said, “What do you think the chances are that they left the pilot ladder hanging?”

Mentally, I was already considering options, moving through the freighter, imagining what it would be like, seeing the ship’s layout, searching for my son.

Harris said, “Lourdes had to get aboard somehow, didn’t he? If the ladder’s not there, we can throw your anchor over her stern like a grappling hook, and you can climb aboard that way. But, Doc?” He said it like a question, then waited, wanting my full attention.

I could see only half of his face in the moonlight. His hair was combed back by the wind. “Yeah?”

“You’re going to be dealing with a guy who just picked up a half-million in cash, and a shit-hole crew who’d cut a man’s throat for a hundred bucks. We pilots know that vessel, and it’s about as nasty as they come. Same with her female skipper. She’s about the size of a middle guard, and she’d probably enjoy cutting you herself. You need to watch your six.”

Watch your six: Watch your tail.

I said, “Did you say you were carrying a weapon?”

“I’ve got a Glock nine millimeter,” he said. “But I won’t be carrying it once I give it to you.”

We left the marker buoys 9 and 10 flashing astern, and continued planing hard west, straight out to sea, where stars seemed to be rising slowly out of the horizon as we left the mainland behind.

We saw the lights of several commercial vessels. Had I been alone, I would have had to I.D. them visually, one by one. But not with Harris aboard. He knew the designs too well, even by silhouette. There was a late moon burning.

Finally, at a little less than twenty miles offshore, we spotted three separate ships, all steaming in a direction that looked to be southwest, but separated by miles. They weren’t running together.

Looking at them, Harris said, “The one most outward bound is a container ship-probably one of Evergreen’s vessels. The next is a tanker, the kind that carries liquids. The closest one, though, that’s a fertilizer freighter. That could be our boat.”

I had the Glock in my hands, trying to familiarize myself with the minor differences between it and my old Sig Sauer.

I said, “Run me up close. If it’s the one we’re looking for, dump me. Then drop way back-way the hell out of small arms range. I’ll use a light to signal you when I get things secured. Or I’ll just turn the boat around.”

He was looking at his Rolex: 11:35 P.M.

“You’d better make it fast. Unless I miss my guess, Coast Guard choppers are going to be on station out here fairly soon. They’ll be making sweeps; shining big bright lights…”

He let the sentence trail off, his mind suddenly on something else, before bellowing, “Holy shittin’ hell!”

He turned the wheel of my skiff so sharply, the gun nearly flew out of my hands.

Behind us, rocking in our wake, was the unmistakable profile of a Boston Whaler.

It was abandoned and adrift, its running lights off.