Spy (5 page)

C
ome on in, why don’t you, it’s open.”

Daisy hadn’t even heard the cruiser pull up in the drive out front. Now she could see the good-looking boy from the kitchen table. Standing out on the front porch, plain as day.

“It’s Homer, honey,” she said.

“I can see who it is.”

Homer Prudhomme was right outside the screen door under the yellow bug light. Reason he wasn’t in any big hurry to come inside, Daisy guessed, was the bad news writ all over his face.

“Homer,” her husband said to the boy, swallowing his macaroni and scootching his chair back from the table a few inches. “Come on inside the house, son. You are not interrupting anything special in here. We eat supper every night.”

Homer pulled open the flimsy door and stepped inside the parlor, taking off his hat and riffling the dusty brim through his fingers. His big dark eyes were a little puffy and red. He had waves of dark hair and a cowlick that just wouldn’t pay any mind to Brylcreem.

“Sheriff,” he said, nodding to Franklin. “Evenin’, Miz Dixon.”

“Hey, Homer,” Daisy said to the boy, “You got something in your eye, baby?” It was true she wanted to mother this child. Nothing wrong in that.

Homer wiped the back of his hand across his face. “No, ma’am. Had the windows down driving out here, that’s all. Just a gnat or something flew in my eye.”

They waited for the boy to say something else, but he didn’t. He had been crying, that much was plain to see.

“What brings you out here this time of night, son?” Franklin said.

“Bad news, Sheriff.”

Homer was a tall, good-looking kid with the uniform hanging off of his bones. The Tuesday Girls down at the Bon Jour beauty parlor all had a crush on him. Hell, every churchgoing one of them, every lady in Prairie had a sneaker for that boy. The general consensus was he looked like Elvis right before he got famous, when he was still living at home with Gladys and Vernon.

Homer was older than that, shoot, he was almost twenty now and a high school graduate. But he had those same sleepy eyes and those long silky eyelashes. Behind his back, all the gals called him
La Hilacha.
The threadbare one. Homer had grown up semi-Anglo in the barrio part of town.

“Speak up, son.”

You could see the boy’s mind looking for a way to say it, whatever awful thing it was he’d come out here to tell her husband.

“Let it out, Homer. It’s all right, honey,” Daisy said.

Those bedroom eyes looked like they were liable to start filling up again. But Homer bravely took a deep breath and got himself under control.

“They’ve done…I’m sorry, Sheriff, seems like they took another one.”

“Another girl.”

He rubbed his sleeve roughly across his eyes. “Yessir. I reckon I’m not too good at being the bearer of bad news. I just came from telling Mr. and Mrs. Beers about what happened to their daughter. They’re pretty shook up.”

Daisy wanted to get up and hug the boy.

She would have, too, if not for how embarrassed he’d be in front of Franklin. It had been a tough year for him. He lost his American father when they had that explosion out at the fertilizer factory here about a year ago. Family had to move out of their house after that. Staying in some apartment over the hardware store now. And his momma, Rosalinda, who was originally from Juarez, was never any damn good. Drugs or alcohol, everybody said.

His mother just upped and took off with some married John Deere regional sales manager from Wichita here about six months ago. People said she and her lover boy run off together. Went down Juarez and kept on going. Nothing runs like a Deere, as they say on television. Rosalinda left Homer to take care of his baby sister, graduate high school, and do his part-time courthouse job all at the same time. Last June, after graduation, that’s when he’d come to see Franklin about a job on the force.

Of course, Franklin had said yes. He always did, somebody needed something in this town. And now she saw those damn worry lines around her husband’s pale gray eyes coming back again. Those damn worry lines never stayed gone too long lately, worries piling up like they were around here. Illegals, drugs, border shootings. And now the abductions of four beautiful young girls.

The shit around here was knee deep and rising.

The boy looked over to the window, watching something out there maybe, trying to compose himself.

“She’s just a baby, you know, Sheriff? Not even fourteen.”

“I know what you mean, Homer,” Franklin said. He let go of a sigh and shoved his chair all the way back from the table. Then he reached for his boots.

Daisy knew what Franklin meant, too. She’d felt it coming as soon as she’d seen Homer at the door. Everybody for miles around was living in fear until they were sick with it. They’d finally sent a posse out on horseback to look for the girls. Now another one had gone missing. They’d been snatched from their houses in the middle of the night. Stolen from the roadside in broad daylight, waiting on the school bus or coming out of the Piggly-Wiggly. Drugged and trussed up and hauled across the border to God knows where all or whatever.

White slavery, that’s what her friend and neighbor June Weaver said it was. Underage prostitution. Steal the little Anglo girls and put them to work in the cathouses south of the border. June worked the switchboard down at the courthouse. Which meant obviously that not much that happened in this county, good or bad, escaped her notice.

“Who’d they take?” Franklin said in a tired voice. He was getting to his feet, brushing cornbread crumbs from the front of his jeans. He eyed his deputy who’d managed to pull himself back together.

“Joe Beers’s youngest daughter, Sheriff. Name is Charlotte. Didn’t come home from the picture show.”

“This evenin’, then?”

“Yessir.”

“What time is it? I mean right now?”

“Just after nine p.m., Sheriff. Charlotte went to the six o’clock with her girl cousins. Supposed to meet up with them at the Rexall after the show. Didn’t sit with them at all. Went to sit up in the balcony with her boyfriend.”

“Hollis.”

“That’s him all right.”

“When did you get the call?”

“About an hour ago. I was out past Yancey in the Crown Vic, looking for our posse. It was Junebug on the radio told me. They got the boyfriend in custody already. He says she went to the little girl’s room during the show and never came back.”

“What about her purse?”

“Pardon me?”

“She take her purse to the ladies’ room?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff.”

“Homer?”

“Yessir?”

“The posse. You say it like they were vigilantes. They aren’t. They volunteered to go. And I deputized ever one of them boys.”

“Yessir, I reckon that’s true enough.”

“I know you wanted to ride with them. Your time will come soon enough. Let’s saddle up. I’ll go with you in the cruiser. Daisy? Listen to me. You lock up these doors please. Front and rear. Leave that shotgun sitting right there on the counter. It’s loaded with double-ought buckshot. I’ll be back here in a few hours.”

The screen door slammed behind him and she watched him walk all the way across the yard. She liked the way he walked.

H
IGHWAY
59 over toward Prairie proper was deserted in both directions. The hills and rocks and sage looked golden in the strong white light of the full moon. Franklin Dixon didn’t seem to feel much like talking so the deputy left him alone with his thoughts. Prudhomme could imagine where they were running without too much trouble. Four girls taken in the jurisdiction this month alone. Almost thirty people had been abducted along the Tex-Mex border over the past year. Four girls from Prairie alone. Vanished into thin air, every one of them. Make it five, now, most likely, with Charlotte gone.

“Pretty moon,” Franklin said after a few miles.

“Yessir, it sure is.”

“No word from that posse.”

“No, sir. Not a peep. I don’t know what in Sam Hill could have happened to ’em. They’re supposed to be back here yesterday evening.”

“I know that, Homer.”

“Sorry.”

“Taillights up yonder.”

“Semi. Yessir.”

“How fast you reckon?”

“Eighty. Eighty-five.”

“Accelerator’s the one on the right. Use it, son.”

“Bells and whistles?”

“Good Lord gave ’em to us for a reason.”

“Yessir.”

Prudhomme turned on the siren and the blue rotators and accelerated. The old Ford Crown Vic didn’t have much juice but what she did have, Homer used up pretty quickly.

“Slow down, son, you ’bout to rear end him.”

“Yessir. He’s slowing down pretty quick with those air brakes. You want me to pull him?”

“He’s a lawbreaker I believe.”

Homer hit the high beam flashers and the big truck slowed way down fast, moving toward the shoulder of the two-lane, brakes hissing.

“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” the radio crackled.

“Hey, June. We’re on 59 and headed in. Deputy Prudhomme told me about Charlotte. You know, I just—hold on a sec, June—what the heck is this big fella doing here, Homer?”

“Beats tar out of me, he just wants to play, I guess.”

The big truck seemed to have changed its mind. It lurched along the shoulder and all of a sudden roared back up on to the blacktop and started accelerating down the middle of the road. Deputy Prudhomme stayed on his tail for a moment or two and then the gap started widening. You had to wonder what he had under the hood.

“He’s doing more’n a hundred, Sheriff. Company puts governors on them rigs, I thought.”

“Pull up alongside and move him gently over into his proper lane.”

“Yessir,” Homer Prudhomme said, and mashed the go pedal. But just as he was about to pull even with the cab, crowding him, the truck’s engine emitted a high-pitched whine and the whole rig leapt forward again, going much, much faster. The big red taillights diminished to pinpricks on the horizon in seconds.

“Well, I’ll be,” Franklin said, moving his head side to side in disbelief. “You hear that whine? Superchargers.”

“He has to be doing near a hundred forty miles an hour, Sheriff.”

“Trucks can’t go that fast.”

“Well. I dunno. This one can. We’ve lost him.”

“Ain’t lost one yet and don’t plan to start. Stay with him, boy. Do the best you can.”

“Yessir.”

“June? You still on the air?”

“Right here, Sheriff.”

“Listen, we got a race-car driver in a souped-up tractor rig out here headed south on 59. Bright red, white, and blue Peterbilt cab with a big red baseball bat painted on the trailer’s side. Some outfit called ‘Yankee Slugger.’ Never heard of ’em. Rolling fast toward the border. Get Wyatt to send a couple cars out to the intersection, will you please. Block the road and—now, what’s he doing?”

“He stopped up there on the hill,” Prudhomme said.

“June, I’m going to have to call you back. We got to go see about this truck.”

“I ain’t going nowhere but here. You still want Wyatt to order two squad cars out there, Sheriff?”

“No, June, thank you. We’re all right.”

Of course, as it would turn out, they weren’t all right. Nobody was.

Not even a little bit.

W
hat’s so dry about the Dry Tortugas?” Luis “Sharkey” Gonzales-Gonzales asked nobody in particular. He was staring down at all the clear blue water below. Sharkey, who was tanned a dark nut brown, was sitting two rows back on the other side of the aisle looking like a true citizen of the Conch Republic. A wicked-looking shark’s tooth swung from his twenty-four-carat gold neck chain. He wore a faded fishing shirt with blue marlin leaping around, some old khaki shorts, and his trademark white suede loafers, no socks.

Sharkey had his head turned to the window, cheek pressed against the glass. He was gazing down at the glassy blue-green sea a thousand feet below the seaplane as the pilot banked left and lined up for a landing at a giant brick fortification called Fort Jefferson.

Stokely Jones didn’t answer Shark’s question about the Tortugas being so dry. He was too busy looking for the
Isaac Allerton
’s skeleton. Wrecks, man. For the last ten minutes, he’d been seeing bones in the white sand beneath the turquoise water, the scattered and broken backbones and ribs sticking right up where you could see them. The
Allerton
was down there somewhere. She’d been caught in a blow off Saddle-bunch Keys back in 1856. After her anchor lines were cut, she ground over Washerwoman Shoals, lost her rudder, and sank in Hawk’s Channel in five fathoms.

Mick Hocking, the young Aussie pilot sitting to his left, said
Allerton
’s remains were coming up. They were flying over the exact area where Mel Fisher had discovered the Spanish galleon
Atocha
and about a billion dollars in gold. Survey boats were moored in the shallow water, fifty feet or so, Stoke thought it looked like. You could tell the treasure hunters by the survey cable reels mounted on the transoms.

Off the Marquesas, and west over to the Dry Tortugas, the typical things you might find, if you stuck with it a few years, were artifacts and emeralds. Emeralds were almost common. Stoke had always had a fondness for buried treasure, a feeling he’d shared with his boss, Alex Hawke. He’d caught the bug the first time they’d worked together. They were down in the Caribbean, looking for the pirate Blackhawke’s lost treasure.

Hawke told Stoke something one time they were diving down here in the Keys. Hawke said it was interesting how many decades it took professional wreckers to figure out that the big Spanish galleons, loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver, would not be found in deep water. They would most likely be in shallow water, like you had right here.

The galleons headed back to Spain would have been here in the South Atlantic during the hurricane season, Hawke said. That was June to October. And, if you looked at any map of the trade routes, and saw the storm tracks, many of those galleons obviously have been blown here into the Florida reef line. Some would be lost in open sea, sure. But many of them would fetch up in shallow water before they ran aground. Then, huge rollers would lift them up and split their keels on the reefs. Voilà, they’d spill all their booty on the bottom down there.

Stoke heard a little crackle in his headphones.

“Ponce de Leon called these islands
‘Las Tortugas’
because they looked liked turtle shells on the far horizon,” Mick said. “The ‘dry’ part came later when he found out the hard way there was no fresh water to be had down there. Still isn’t, so bring that bottle of Fiji along with you.”

“Ponce de Leon, huh? Is that right?” Stokely asked the pilot. Stoke was up front in the cockpit, in the right hand seat of the seaplane.

“Yep.”

“Huh. All that time I was down here, I never knew that.”

He’d liked the guy, Mick, right away. Mick was a high time bush pilot from Queensland, Australia, who’d spent most of his career up in Alaska, flying wildcatters around. Mick seemed to understand that this flight was of an extremely sensitive nature. That the missing plane might be a matter of national security, Mick said, and this is a quote, ‘You’d have to be a fairdinkum wanker or a drongo to fly in here at night below the radar, mate.’

Stoke liked him on sight. And he’d asked just the right amount of questions when Stoke had first reached him on his mible.

“You spend much time down here in the Keys, Mick?” Stoke asked him now.

“I did. I was in and out of Key West Naval some back in the day. A few years after your lot, I guess. Did some spec ops training with the SEAL blokes just down the road. Pissingly hot, even for an old sandgroper like me. Heat and Skeet we called it, Mr. Jones. Tough outfit, your SEALs are. I was impressed.”

Mick had a crinkly smile, and, like that guy in the Crocodile Dundee movies, he always had a grin stuck in his voice. Cheery. That kind of guy.

“Take a gander down there, Stoke,” Mick said in the headphones. “That must be your mate’s boat coming up now.”

A moment later, Stoke saw an old fishing boat below, moored at the island’s disintegrating coal station. The thirty-foot boat, which had been painted blue some time early in the last century, was bobbing up and down, tied to the old wharf. A skinny white-haired guy stood on the bow, waving his floppy straw hat at the approaching seaplane.

Little was left of the island’s broken, rusted-out black wharf. It was standing in turquoise water on the west side of the fortress island. This was where all the southbound steamers used to refuel before heading across the straits to Cuba and points further south. The battleship
Maine
had made her last pit stop here, before she was mysteriously sunk in Havana harbor.

Some people thought it was a Spanish torpedo that sank the
Maine,
and some thought it was Cuban terrorists. Whatever it was, America went to war with Spain over the sinking and kicked Spain the hell out of Cuba for good. You’d think Fidel would owe us one, right? You’d be wrong. Fidel was someone Stoke happened to know personally. He never talked about it, but he’d actually been awarded the Cuban Medal of Honor by Castro himself. Yeah, he had that medal in a drawer somewhere, but that was another story.

The old blue fishing boat had to belong to the guy Sharkey had arranged for them to meet. Fort Jefferson was a very out of the way place. Nobody ever came out here unless they were very curious about old island fortresses abandoned after the Civil War.

Stoke had forgotten how massive the thing was. How thick those solid brick walls were, heavy black cannons sticking out all over the place. All they did now, sell a few postcards to touristas who ventured out from Key West after a few too many Cuba Libres at Sloppy Joes booze emporium. Might come a day when America could use a fort down here, Stoke was thinking. In the event of a Gulf War in our own backyard.

Harry Brock believed, as did Stoke, that this neck of the Caribbean was shaping up fast as a place where the shooting could start. Hell, that’s why Stoke was poking around down here, wasn’t it? Latin America was blowing up in our faces. Stokely hoped to hell Sharkey had found something useful down here. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to dick around.

Stoke turned around in his seat and smiled at his sole employee. His trusty gut was talking to him, it was saying maybe Luis was actually on to something worthwhile. Besides, he was starting to feel more comfortable with Luis lately. Yeah, maybe Sharkey was a little hyper. Nervous type. But Stoke’s instincts about the wiry Cubano were trending positive.

“Hey, Shark-bait! This guy we’re meeting at the Fort. How come he’s got the same name as you?”

“His name is not Sharkey.”

“No. It’s ‘
Luis
’I’m talking about. Your real name.”

“
Si,
Luis! He’s my father. Luis Gonzales-Gonzales Senior.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that? Now I don’t have to worry about trusting the fate of the free world to this old guy. He’s still fishing, huh, your daddy?”

“Yeah. A lot of these elders here in the Keys, they came down from Miami soon after the Mariel in ’81. They were fishermen back in Cuba. A lot of them took one look at Miami and then came down here to the Keys, man. Cheap housing. Lots of fish round here on the flats back then.”

“The old man and the sea, huh? That his boat?”

“
El Bandito
, she’s called. That old man going to fish her till he dies, man. He’s a good spy, man, keeps his eyes open. Once you said I was officially in the program, on the case, whatever, I asked him to do it. He’s got a tiny stilt house on a little spit of land in the Marquesas. He can see everything from there. He’s out on the water all day and most of the night. The other fishermen, they are happy to help out. Stick together pretty much and they all hate Fidel as much as I do.”

“You guys buckled up? We’re going for a swim,” Mick said. He’d been circling the landing area, looking for any floating debris before he set the
Blue Goose
down. Now that he was on final, he’d reduced his airspeed to about ten knots above stall speed, nose up, with maximum flaps extended. Air was getting choppy.

“Is it always this rough?” Sharkey asked.

“Clear air turbulence,” Stoke said. “Relax.”

“Man, what if we crash? Look at all the sharks down there. Those are bull sharks, man.”

Stoke craned around in his seat and looked down.

“I thought you said you were a fisherman. This is an outgoing tide. Sharks don’t feed at this hour. Sharks only feed on an incoming tide. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah? Tell that to the one bit my damn arm off.”