Cross Current (9 page)

“Yeah, you’re right. But then again, if there was no birth certificate, no way of proving paternity, he might not have had much of a choice. It’s not like the old U S of A is exactly welcoming Haitians with open arms these days. She could’ve died on the streets of Port-au-Prince waiting for a visa.” 

“Okay, then where is he? Shouldn’t he have been waiting for her to arrive?”

“Give it time, kiddo. Tomorrow the kid’s story will be all over the papers and the TV. Maybe he’ll show up, maybe he won’t.”

“It seems like after everything she’s been through, it’s like she’s earned it. The right to stay, I mean.”

“Tell that to the rest of the people here. You know how crowded it’s getting. The last one here wants to slam the door and not let anybody else into Paradise. We may have to rewrite that little plaque on Lady Liberty.”

“But the Haitians are getting an especially raw deal. Back home they face death squads and starvation. They escape that only to die here in America.”

“Like the woman in the boat, you mean.”

“She’s not the only one. Collazo stopped by tonight. He told me that she was the fourth Haitian found dead. They’ve all had massive head injuries. Sounds crazy, I know, but somebody is killing off these immigrants. Maybe they do it to set an example for the others, I don’t know. Hell of a way to prevent mutiny. Collazo says the Haitians are still protecting the smugglers, even when they’re killing off a few on the way over.”

“And Collazo’s pretty certain all four murders are related?”

“I guess so. He says they’ve put together a task force with FLPD, Border Patrol, and the FBI. They call themselves DART—the Deceased Alien Response Team.” It sounded so silly when I said it out loud.

“Oh, that’s good.” He laughed, and I could hear the sound of clinking ice cubes as he took a drink. “Sounds like the pilot for a bad sci-fi TV show.”

“They think Solange can ID the killer, but she’s not talking. Mike, I don’t want to make her any more of a target than she already is.”

“Have they got a guard at the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“Then don’t worry about her. She’ll be fine. They got nothing on the identity of these smugglers?”

“Nothing they shared with me. Collazo sounded ‘out there’ on this one. He has to be to ask for my help.”

“Yeah, I’d agree with you there.”

After I hung up the phone, I headed back outside with my beer to sit on the dock, my feet dangling over the river. I watched the water swirl past the pilings with the tide. There weren’t many stars visible, but the few that could outshine the glow from the city lights appeared as dancing white dots in the black river water.

The thoughts in my head were churning like the ocean caught between a current and a crosswind. And it was creating just as much turbulence. If Erzulie was already dead, why did someone set her adrift in a boat? Why not just throw her overboard? If they were aboard the
Miss Agnes
, how did they wind up drifting off Pompano? And why would people who are supposedly making money off immigrant smuggling be killing their cargo? Why didn’t they kill Solange, too? How was I going to find her father? Where would I start?

I was still clutching the sunglasses I’d found on board the
Miss Agnes
, and I wondered if they belonged to Solange’s “bad man,” the one who had killed Erzulie. The skulls painted on the glasses were in some thick glossy paint, maybe fingernail polish. I could feel the design as I ran my fingers over the plastic, the rounded skulls, eyeholes, crossed bones beneath. Over two hundred years ago, ships had sailed these same waters bearing that insignia. Then, too, the design had signaled that the bearers were dealers of death.

When I’d finished the last of the beer, I had no more answers than when I’d started, but I did feel my eyelids drooping. It took a fair amount of willpower to force my fatigued limbs off the dock and into bed. I felt completely whipped. Seeing a person dead made me feel how fragile human life is. In my bathroom, as I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror, I examined my face, skin over bone and cartilage, brain only a few centimeters below the surface, and I marveled that so many of us live into old age. We are not a well-armored species. With my hand on my neck, I felt the rhythm of the blood pumping through my veins. I thought about the only real armor we humans have—our intelligence and our will to survive.

VII

The night seemed to pass in one quick blink of deep, dreamless sleep. I awoke around 7:30, late for me, but I felt refreshed. A front had moved in overnight, and the dark sky seemed almost to touch the masthead of the ketch moored across the river. The air was thick and heavy with moisture.

I generally tried to fit in some kind of exercise about three mornings a week. Jogging, swimming, paddling—something that was more interesting than using a machine in a refrigerated gym. I pulled on a black tank suit and put the teakettle on the stove for my morning coffee. The wheezing window air conditioner refused to cycle off, so I finally decided to open up and let the humidity in. I gave Abaco fresh water and filled her bowl with dry dog food. In the bathroom, I grabbed a rubber band to pull my hair into a ponytail. This was typical June weather, the start of the hurricane months and the wettest season of the year in Fort Lauderdale.

Grabbing a mug of coffee and my handheld VHF radio, I walked out to the dock where I kept my thirteen-foot Boston Whaler up in davits. I began cranking the winch to lower the boat into the water. Abaco made quick rounds of the yard, checking for new smells, adding her own. When the Whaler hit the water, she came over and whined, begging to go. I told her no, and she dropped onto her belly in the grass and gave me her sad-dog look. It didn’t work this time.

I motored slowly down the New River, waving to the gardeners and the professional boatmen, the only ones out and about at that hour. Channel 16 was fairly quiet, even considering that it was a weekday morning. The only calls I heard were the occasional charter skipper hailing a buddy and switching to another channel for fish gossip.

Down at the Bahia Mar Marina, I navigated through the northern basin to the finger pier closest to the highway. I tucked the handheld radio into the boat’s cubbyhole and locked the Whaler up to the swim step of Jimmie St. Clair’s old Chris Craft launch. B.J. would probably be working here later in the day. The interior of the boat had been riddled with termites, and Jimmie had asked B.J. to tear it all out and start over. He was several months into the project and nowhere close to done.

I made it safely across A1A to the beach, then almost got run over by one of the early-morning sand graders, the big yellow monster machines that comb away the previous day’s trash and footprints, leaving straight lines in the smooth sand. I started to jog down at the water’s edge and kept up a steady pace, the low gray sky doing nothing to slow the sweat that began to drip from my brow into my eyes.

The sea looked about as flat as I’d ever seen it.

I didn’t have any jobs on the books for the next several days, although I always kept my handheld VHF radio close by, just in case. I didn’t usually chase after the emergency tows.
Gorda
simply wasn’t built for that kind of speed, and there was no way I could compete against some of the corporate fleets like SEATOW or Cape Ann. On the other hand, the big-money guys who needed to get their mega-yachts up the river to the boatyards didn’t like to hire those twenty-something blond boat jockeys in epaulets. Sullivan Towing and Salvage still ruled the river. The business would come, but in the meantime, I was free to see if I could locate Solange’s father.

When I’d jogged my four miles round-trip up the beach and back, I dove into the ocean and logged a good two miles of freestyle. I was puffing and blowing more than I would have liked. Back in the days when I used to work as a lifeguard on this same beach, I’d swim five miles both before and after my shifts. I needed to get a more regular exercise routine.

As I settled into a comfortable rhythm, my mind began to wander. The papers had estimated that there had been about fifty people aboard the
Miss Agnes
when she sank. Considering the six who had died, as well as those who had been caught and deported, that still left somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen people who must have made it to shore and now could be tracked down. The article said that the captain of the boat had not been among those picked up by authorities, and it was possible even he could be located. I figured that was where I’d start—even if it only served to determine whether Solange was ever on the
Miss Agnes
to begin with.

After toweling off, I crossed back over A1A and walked down the sidewalk to my favorite morning breakfast spot, the St. Tropez Café. Francine, the French Canadian girl who’d worked there all winter and for some strange reason had not yet disappeared north with all the other Canadians, poured me my café au lait in one of their mixing bowl-sized ceramic mugs and pointed at a gooey apricot pastry with one raised eyebrow. I nodded and she passed me a plate of confection to go with the coffee-flavored milk.

I seated myself at one of the tables outside and picked up the newspaper left by the previous patron. The story about Solange and the dead woman had made the lower left corner of the front page of the Sun-Sentinel:

Her name, Solange, roughly translated, means Earth Angel. She is ten years old, has big brown eyes and thick black braids. Yesterday morning, when other children her age were going to school and playing with friends, the Earth Angel was found clinging to a half-sunk boat three miles out at sea. Rescued off Fort Lauderdale, suffering from hypothermia, she was too weak to stand when brought to safety. The little Earth Angel is currently listed in stable condition at Broward General Hospital while Immigration officials decide her fate. A Coast Guard spokesperson stated that the body of an unidentified woman was also found in the swamped wooden boat.

The author then emphasized the connection between Erzulie and the three other victims.

The unusual deaths, and the fact that they coincide with a sharp increase in the number of illegal immigrants being smuggled into South Florida, have drawn the attention of several federal agencies. Investigators, who are keeping most of the details of the autopsies under wraps, say the deaths could have been accidents. They could have been the result of recklessness on the part of smugglers who routinely overload their boats to multiply their profits. Or the deaths could be something worse.

As I was reading, a shadow fell across my newspaper, and in the background, just past the edge of the story, I noticed a pair of sexy brown legs, the thighs wrapped tightly in black Lycra. “Seychelle?”

I looked up and feigned surprise at the sight of Joe D’Angelo’s face, although I’d recognized the legs instantly. I quickly chewed and swallowed my mouthful of pastry. “Hi, Joe.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Pull up a chair.”

He set down his tray with a small white cup filled to the brim, a double espresso, a glass of ice water, and a slice of papaya with lime. I glanced at the remaining half of my apricot pastry and felt a twinge of guilt, but I felt much better when I’d taken another big gooey bite.

“You’re looking exceptionally lovely this morning, Miss Sullivan. You’ve been swimming, I see,” he said, then threw back his double shot of caffeine Latin style. He was wearing a crisp new white tank top that said something about a 10K race.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the compliment,” I said, crossing my arms to cover up my midsection where I felt the jellyroll start to grow as soon as I’d swallowed. “I need the exercise, and I find gyms boring.”

“Me too.” He pointed to a red bike locked to the
No Stopping
sign out by the curb. It was one of those fancy new mountain bikes, the kind with the alloy or titanium frames that look like they’re missing parts. The thing was probably worth more than my Jeep. “I try to log my miles at least three times a week.”

“Nice bike,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s a Klein Palomino. You could call it a nice bike." He stretched his arms out wide, showing the tufts of black hair under his arms and the lovely curves of the muscles in his shoulders and his biceps. I was thinking about how he could be a poster boy for one of those fit-after-fifty diet and exercise plans when I realized he had asked me a question. “I’m sorry, what was that again?”

“I asked if your father ever mentioned me.”

“No, not that I can remember. You knew Red?”

“Well, not all that well.”

“How did you two meet? I’m curious to know how a retired DEA agent would know my father.”

He laughed. “It’s no mystery. I was with the agency for over twenty-five years, most of it here in South Florida, the Caribbean, or South America. This area was real hot in the eighties—lots of smugglers—and whenever we impounded boats and had to move them around, I always tried to hire Red. He was the best. I was sorry to hear from Mike that he had passed.”

“Yeah, sometimes even I have trouble believing it.”

He reached across the table and placed his hand on my wrist. “He was a good man, Seychelle.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And one ornery son of a bitch.”

I laughed and nodded. “Yup, no question about it. You knew Red.”

He leaned back in his chair and laughed out loud. It was good to laugh about Red. I was tired of crying.

“I’ll bet he was a hell of a good father,” he said.

I pushed away the plate with the remains of the gooey pastry. “Yeah, you know, we were just kids, my brothers and I, and we were always asking for something. In those days my parents didn’t have much money, but if I wanted a bike, Red would spend hours fixing up an old one he’d found at some yard sale. It didn’t matter that we were poor.”

“You think that made you poor? You got a bike. My old man? No bikes there. Five boys in the family, and we’d go days without food. Then he’d bring home some powdered milk, old dry bread, and Spam. I was sixteen the first time I tasted real milk. And the bastard wasn’t just ornery, he was downright mean. Used to beat the shit out of us just because he felt like it.”