Suitcase City (3 page)

Teach slapped him hard on the shoulder to stop his mouth. In a hearty voice he said, “See you tomorrow, man. The bar, just like always. Drinks on me.”

Teach always pushed the shrimper out along the same route he had taken coming in. Only it couldn’t be the same. Not this time. He knew it now: the Guatemalans wouldn’t do anything until he had taken them back to the Gulf, deep water under the keel. Then, something would happen. If Teach read those satisfied eyes right, there would be another body burning in a boat. The boat would be a Boston Whaler, cut loose from the stern of the
Santa Maria
. The body would be Jimmy Teach.

So the route tonight would be different, and Teach had to hope that the three Guatemalans didn’t notice. He had to hope that they trusted him, believed in his seamanship, hadn’t counted the turns he always took in this maze of mangrove canals.

Teach was approaching the place where he would take the new turn when the wheelhouse door slid open. Carlos. Teach said, “Hey man
. Qué paso?
Quiet night now, huh?”

“
Sí, mi amigo. Muy quiet
.” He looked at Teach. “It is too bad about the man in the boat.” He shrugged. “But it had to be. You understand, don’t you?”

Teach gave back the same sad smile. Soldiers lamenting the necessities of war. “Sure,” he said, “I understand. It’s tough, but it had to be.”

Carlos looked ahead into the night and then over at Teach again. “Amigo?” he said, a look of supplication on his face. The Indian licked his lips, smiling.

“Oh,” Teach said, “sure.” He pulled the Wild Turkey from his hip pocket and passed it to Carlos. The man drank and handed it back. Teach reached to put the bottle away.

Carlos said, “Have some, drink with me.”

The turn was just ahead. Teach said, “Sure, buddy.” He drank and returned the bottle to his pocket, drawing his fingers across the pistol butt under his shirt. At the bend, he swung the shrimper right instead of left. It was a tight turn, but so were many of them. He could feel Carlos tensing beside him. Teach didn’t look at the man, just waited. Carlos’s hand was on his shoulder. On the foredeck below, Esteban turned and looked not at Teach but at Carlos.

Carlos said, “
Vamos bien?
We going the right way? You sure about this?”

Teach turned to the man, smiled. “Hey, Carlos, who’s the pilot here? I know what I’m doing.” Teach let go of the wheel, stepped back. Let a little anger come into his voice. “You think you can do better, man, you take over.”

Carlos looked out at the walls of mangroves. In seconds the
Santa Maria
would plow into the bank. Fear in his voice, Carlos said, “I am sorry,
Señor Piloto.
Take the wheel. Take it.”

As he took the wheel, Teach heard Esteban call out from below. The man shouting in Spanish, pointing at the looming trees. Teach turned the shrimper back into the channel. If it was going to happen, it had to be soon. The place Teach wanted was only a few minutes away, and so was the man he would become.

Teach felt Carlos relax beside him. Keeping one hand on the wheel, Teach raised the other and stretched, yawned. “Long night,” he said.

Carlos looked at him, took out a cigarette, and lit it. He offered Teach the gold case.

“I told you, man, I don’t smoke.
No fumo
. I drink. We did that together.” Teach lowered his right hand and scratched his back.

“Then why you tell Esteban you go to the truck for a cigarette?” Carlos dropped the cigarette and reached inside his coat.

Teach snatched the Smith from his belt, fitted it to Carlos’s skull just below his ear, and pulled the trigger. This time he was ready for the noise and flash in the little wheelhouse. Carlos grunted, “Nuh!” and stiffened, exhaled, went down limp. Teach cut the engine, pocketed the key, and stepped over Carlos’s twitching chest. He pulled aside the sliding door, its little glass pane painted red with blood and brains, slipped out of the wheelhouse, and slid down the ladder to the narrow passage between the deck and the rail. He crouched there, listening. Footsteps came from the stern. Julio called, “Esteban, did you do it? You did it already?”

Julio thinking it was Teach dead up there. Well, now there would be no more calm, uncurious eyes. There was going to be some serious curiosity. Moving fast, Julio appeared in front of Teach, looking up at the wheelhouse, his pistol low by his thigh. Teach fired from a crouch, his pistol barrel almost touching Julio’s chest.

Julio dropped the heavy nine-millimeter at Teach’s feet, then sank to his knees, blood pouring black from his mouth. “
Madre,
” he gasped, his face close, his breath garlic and cigarettes and blood. He clawed at his chest, tore at his tie, fell backward, and pulled his knees up to his chin.

“She’ll be waiting for you,” Teach muttered.

In the dark, the quiet, with the engine stopped, the
Santa Maria
drifted toward the canal bank. Teach could hear only the breeze that rustled the tops of the mangroves, the sluicing of water against the sides of the boat, the buzz of insects, the single cry of a heron, “Scrawwk.”

Teach had been lucky with the first two, and now it would be grim. He would have to hunt Esteban, find him, and kill him. Still in his crouch, Julio relaxing into his death three feet in front of him, Teach picked up the big nine-millimeter, lowered the hammer, and stuck it in his belt. He reconsidered the matter. He would not hunt Esteban. He knew the boat better, knew the mangroves. What could the man do? What option did he have but to hunt Teach? If Teach left the boat, Esteban would be stuck here until he was discovered in the morning, or he would be lost out there in those miles of swamp.

Teach slipped through the door of the lazarette beneath the wheelhouse and into the head. He lowered himself to the toilet and waited in the foul stench of thirty years of seagoing piss. His back was protected by a bulkhead, he had walls on either side, and anything that passed by the door was dead. That was how Teach figured it.

He waited, hearing what he could over the thumping of his heart and the ringing in his ears. Twice he thought there was movement, a foot scraping, the boat subtly shifting under a moving body. The
Santa Maria
would hit something soon, and Teach decided to wait until she did, to see if the collision would give him Esteban’s position. He braced himself against the walls of the toilet, waited, felt first the deep scraping of the forefoot on the canal bank, then the shrimper rising as she plowed up the bank. Hearing the pop and snap and groan of the mangroves as the bow tore into them, Teach thought:
Don’t drive yourself too far aground. I’ve got to get out of here. After.

When the boat had shuddered to a stop, Teach waited again for what seemed a long time. Then he heard the twin Yamahas roaring to life.
Damnit,
Teach thought,
I forgot about the little boat. Damn me for leaving the keys in the ignition. He’ll take the Whaler and, with any luck, find his way out of here before morning.
He tried to keep the panic down, tried to sort through the possibilities. Maybe it was better if Esteban left him here. He could do what he’d planned to do with the shrimper and then run. Get away. What could the Guatemalans do tonight? Esteban couldn’t meet the mother ship for another hour. Could he even find her out there in all that water? Had he bothered to learn the loran coordinates? By morning, Teach could be long gone. Lost in a new life.

He peered out of the head into the darkness of the lazarette. The Yamahas were still running, idling now. Why hadn’t Esteban gone yet? A trick. Esteban was waiting out there for him. Teach heard the Yamahas grumble as the transmission shifted into gear. Then the Whaler seemed to be moving away.

Teach remembered something: there was a hatch in the roof of the lazarette. Through it you could climb into the wheelhouse, a way to get up there in heavy weather. He went to the hatch and pulled down the ladder bolted to the ceiling. He pushed at the hatch, but Carlos was up there. Dead weight. Standing on the ladder, Teach forced his shoulder against the hatch. Warm blood dripped down onto his head.

He managed to shove the hatch open enough to get past Carlos. He slipped out of the wheelhouse and crawled back to look down at the stern. As he reached the spot where he would have to risk his face to look down, the moon came out from behind the clouds. He could see the empty Whaler fifty yards away, churning its bow into the mangroves. He lifted his face an inch more, then another, and saw Esteban below, crouched behind a big winch housing, his pistol aimed at the lazarette door.

It would be a difficult shot. From above, the available target was the top of Esteban’s head and his shoulders. Teach sighted the Chief’s Special, then changed his mind. He slipped the Special into his belt and pulled the nine-millimeter. He eased back the hammer, released the safety, and got to his knees. He could aim and fire better from this position. He was trading risk for effect. The advantage of position was his; the advantage of killing for a living was with Esteban. A moment of fear came, sliding cold into Teach’s bowels and rising thick into his throat. He could turn and run, leap from the bow of the shrimper, and disappear into the mangroves. But no, he thought, his mind clearing, his hands ceasing to shake. They would only come for him later. Find him and kill him. This was better. The only way now.

Teach edged forward, and as he did, the Chief’s Special loosed from his belt and clattered to the lazarette roof. Esteban raised his arm, aimed at Teach. The moon caught Esteban’s face, and before it disappeared in noise and flash and smoke, Teach saw that smile. The smile Esteban always gave Teach when he opened his coat to show the big pistol.

THREE

Teach emptied the magazine. Fired until the pistol was hot in his hand, and the night was a hellish carnival of flash and roar. He was not sure how many times Esteban fired back. After his first trigger pull, Teach heard only his own shots and felt the rock and roll of the pistol in his hand. When it was over and he lay back again on the deck, gasping for air, his hand sweaty on the pistol grip, he felt the sting begin in his right side.

Touching himself, he found the ragged furrow that cut through the outer plane of his left pectoral muscle and passed through his armpit. He was bleeding. He took off his shirt and balled it under his arm, removed his belt, and wrapped it around his chest. He waited, counting to fifty, before going down to look for Esteban.

Any of the four wounds could have killed the man. Two in the upper chest, one just below the right eye, and one at the base of the throat. Teach found superficial wounds in Esteban’s right wrist and left forearm. The winch housing and deck around Esteban’s body were covered with bullet holes. The nine-millimeter’s magazine held fifteen rounds.

Teach backed the shrimper off the bank, then up the canal to retrieve the Whaler. He carried the three dead men down and put them in the bilge, a fetid crawl space above the keel. It was hard, dirty work, but he took his time and did it right, stopping occasionally to reposition the bandage he had fashioned with his shirt and belt. The wound Esteban had given him hurt, but he knew it wouldn’t kill him. After filling the bilge with human flesh and three weapons, he lay on his side above the dead men and poured Wild Turkey onto the shirt wadded in his armpit. Then he howled rage and pain into the belly of the boat.

Back in the wheelhouse, Teach did what he had meant to do when he had turned right and not left. A hundred yards down the canal was the deep hole where thousands of gallons of water boiled up from a spring sweeping a channel deep enough for a shrimper.

Teach crawled down into the engine compartment at the stern. The shrimper was of Central American design—even Frank Deeks had recognized her as foreign—but her engine was a Caterpillar twelve-cylinder diesel. Teach smiled, looking at the works. A truck engine modified for marine use. He found the raw-water intake and cut the hose at the intake side of the strainer.

When he stuffed the severed end of the hose under a motor mount below the waterline, saltwater poured in. There were through-hulls in the head and galley Teach could have opened, but he knew this would do the trick and do it quickly. He crawled out of the tight, hot space that held the big diesel and went topside.

Starting in the wheelhouse, he searched for anything that might identify him. He scoured the lazarette, the decks fore and aft, found nothing. Finished, he sat on the transom watching the shrimper settle. Her mast was thirty feet above her waterline, and Teach wasn’t sure she’d sink far enough into the spring to be completely obscured. He would hope and wait.

When the
Santa Maria
was ready to take water over her rails, Teach jumped into the Whaler, untied her, and sat drinking the rest of his whiskey. Water poured onto the shrimper’s decks, and she listed to starboard and sank with a sigh, an explosion of gases from her hot muffler and stack, and a groan of timbers taking the enormous weight of the water that pushed her down.

Teach raised the whiskey bottle to her as her mast-top slid under. “Goodbye, old witch,” he whispered. Then he hovered above her on the dark surface, shining his flashlight down into the roiling spring. He could see her mast-top twenty feet down, and so would anyone else who came here. And they would come until years later she rotted and disintegrated into the mouth of the spring. But only the locals, and only a few of them, knew this place, and Teach knew that any man finding a shrimper sunk here would likely keep it to himself. Likely leave well enough alone.

Teach raced home in the Whaler, tossing Naylor’s pistol on the way. At three a.m., he climbed the stairs to the room he rented in the Island Hotel. He dressed his wound, but found that he could not sleep. He walked to the bar he kept, unlocked the door, and sat in the dark, drinking whiskey and thinking. Blood Naylor would come the next night to meet him, and Teach knew what he would say. He would tell Naylor that he, Teach, was going to disappear. He would advise Naylor to do the same thing. Naylor would have to close his distribution business in Gainesville in a hurry. Time, Teach would say, was of the essence. And that was all. To Naylor’s questions he would answer only that it was better not to know more. Naylor could like it or not—that was up to him.