Wood's Wreck (6 page)

Mac got out of the truck and went to the door. He held it open for Mel to enter and the conversation was put on hold as they ordered food and sat down. 

“We need a plan.” Mel said. “They impounded the boat and locked up the house.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the best thing for me is to go out to your dad’s place and figure this out. Humanity is rubbing me the wrong way right about now.” He noticed her look. “I was talking about
us
going out there,” he corrected himself.

Her look remained unchanged. “That’s not what I was thinking about. I know you have no issue running from your problems, but this needs to be handled, and quickly. The faster we can figure this out, the better chance you have of walking away unscathed.”

Their food came and they started to eat.

“What do you mean figure this out?” Mac asked as he set a stripped rib bone down and wiped his hands.

Mel took a bite of her sandwich, “The Feds are not going to solve this. The burden is on you to prove that you’re innocent. They think they’ve already done their job catching you and confiscating your property. There’s probably some high-level backslapping going on right now at your expense.” She stopped and finished eating. 

“Here’s what I’ve been thinking about. You want to find a boat and go out to my dad’s for a while, and that could work. I ought to give you a bunch of crap about running away, but I’ll save that. From his place, you can scout out the area and see who
owns
those casitas. Find out what’s really been going on out there.” 

“And it doesn’t sound like you’re coming with me.”

She looked at him with as much empathy as she could. “Mac, I can help more from Key West. The legal system is my tool.” She finished the last french fry and pushed her plate away. “What about a boat? How are you going to get out there?” 

“I can take a board and paddle out. Your dad’s skiff is still there, and I’ve been meaning to have a look at that boat that’s wrecked on the beach.”

“Figured you had a plan. You good if I take the truck?”

“Better you than the Feds.”

***

Mac watched as Mel pulled out of the driveway and waved to him. He walked to the front door and tugged on the lock placed there by the authorities. A bright yellow notice stated that the house had been confiscated and could be auctioned at a to-be-announced date. He felt like tearing it off, but thought better of it. Around the side of the house, he found the neglected kayak leaning against the stucco and pushed it over. It was an old sit-on-top, and hadn’t been used in several years, since he had discovered paddleboards. But his best board had been on the boat when the Feds took it, and if he were going to make the passage to Wood’s Island at night, the kayak was the safer vessel. 

Spiders crawled frantically from the shell as he pulled it to the seawall and went back for the paddle and his backpack. The night was dark and he knew the moon, though it would be near full, wouldn’t rise for several hours. An unlit boat at night was dangerous and illegal. A light would be essential for the trip, especially as he had to pass under the Seven Mile Bridge on his way to the Gulf side. Even at this time of night, there would be anglers and boat traffic. Without a light, the kayak sitting low in the water would be invisible to passing traffic.

He walked around the house, looking for anything that could illuminate the kayak enough to warn boaters, but found nothing. About to give up, he dug in his pocket and retrieved his phone. It would wear down the battery—if it even made it the entire three hours he expected the paddle would take—but the camera flash would put off enough light. The problem now was keeping it dry. The motion sensor detected his movement and he looked up at the lights on the back porch, which came on when he walked past. Each light was surrounded by a glass globe in the shape of a jelly jar. If he could seal the bottom, the globe would protect the phone. He climbed the stairs and retrieved one, juggling the hot glass from hand to hand as he descended.

He dragged the kayak to the edge of the seawall, then took the phone and placed it inside the globe and started looking for a way to seal the open end. The plastic kayak had several drink holders molded into it and he stuck the globe into one. Happy with the fit, he placed the phone in the jar, reset it in the holder, and dragged the boat to the edge of the seawall. 

He needed to get out of there quickly, before someone reported seeing him, and the light was a sure giveaway. So he pushed the front end of the boat over the wall and into the water four feet below. Careful not to lose control, he leaned down and then got on his belly with his arms extended to the water to place the stern in. The kayak bobbed in the light chop as he eased his body over the seawall, using the wall to brace the unstable craft until he could sit. 

He started paddling out of the canal and toward Boot Harbor. The sensation of paddling at night was unique. All his senses were on full alert, looking for obstacles in the ink black water ahead. Twenty minutes later, he was warmed up and heading out the Knight’s Key channel. As soon as he passed the second marker, he cut to starboard across the shallow bottom. He never would have tried that maneuver in a power boat, but with high tide and the negligible draft of the kayak, he sailed across the flats, spooking several fish that jumped in front of him.

The Seven Mile Bridge lay ahead of him now and he took a few deep breaths, knowing what was coming. The current through the spans was noticeable even in a power boat. If he faltered for any reason, he would be pushed back or—worse—slammed into one of the piers. Ready, he put his head down and paddled hard, remembering advice he had heard somewhere—“
Whatever happens, paddle harder”
. 

Five minutes later he was catching his breath on the calmer Gulf side. 

The crux of the trip over, he settled into an easy rhythm as he paddled the five miles to Wood’s Island. The paddle was uneventful, the light from his phone bright enough to alert the few boats that passed that he was there. He figured it was two hours later when the boat kissed the small, sandy beach. His legs were shaky for the first few steps, but he quickly recovered and hauled the boat up the beach to a clump of mangroves that were pulled aside to reveal a clearing with a small skiff on a trailer. 

Usually the mangrove branches
hid
the clearing, and he was sure he had left it that way the last time he was here. 

He slid the kayak next to the other boat, yanked the jar from the cup holder, and used the now-dim light from the phone to replace the mangroves. The trail was overgrown from lack of use and the mosquitos found him, but he held the light in front of him and pushed through the brush until the trail ended at a clearing with a small stilt house and shed. 

***

Cayenne squinted as the group walked through the doors of the sheriff’s station and out to the sun-baked parking lot. Two attorneys flanked her and a confused Trufante followed. The sweat and salt from yesterday still coated her skin, and she worried her hair was a shade darker from the dirty jail cell. She waited until they were in the rented sedan and the air conditioner was blasting before she spoke. 

“Where can we drop you?” She looked at Trufante and drank from a water bottle one of the suits handed her. 

“I want to thank y’all for springin’ me. Don’t know when Mac would’ve got around to it.” 

“Please answer the question,” Cayenne continued. “I want to be clear here. You are to forget ever seeing me. You don’t remember what I look like, what color my hair is, or the size of my chest. You got that?”

“Well, shit. I thought we were gettin’ on fine.” 

She sighed. “You don’t get it, do you?” The best way to buy his silence was to get him out of jail and defend him. Left in there, the Feds would make a deal or interrogate him. 

And that would not work in her favor. 

Her lawyers had pleaded her absolute innocence, claiming she had just gone for a boat ride. But she needed this guy to go along with it if she were going to maintain that as her story.

“How about this? If you play your part, I can send one of these nice men to defend you at your trial. Probation guaranteed. Otherwise, I can run back in there and file a restraining order against you and rescind your bail.”

“I might be slow, but I’m gettin’ your drift. My bike is at Mac’s. You can drop me there.” He leaned back.

They pulled into Mac’s driveway ten minutes of silence later and dropped the Cajun in the driveway. Without a word, Cayenne turned away from him and waited to be driven home.

Chapter 7

Mel ran along the beach barefoot, letting the feel of the hard, wet sand by the tide line burn off her anger. She had slept little, turning the puzzle around in her mind, but the pieces still didn’t fit. The sun was only three-quarters above the horizon as she picked up the pace for the last stretch of beach, hoping it would clear her head. She arrived, out of breath, at the public restrooms located at the end of Duval Street, and found her running shoes where she had stashed them earlier. Thankfully it was too early for the homeless people in the area to be on the prowl. The stopwatch on her phone showed she had run for almost forty minutes; not a bad time for five miles, especially with two of them in the sand. She felt better, but was no closer to an answer. 

There was no one around as she stuck her phone into her shoe and headed back to the water. When she was waist deep, she pivoted and submerged herself, emerging in a breast stroke. She swam into the waves until she was out of breath, then turned and stroked in, using the lights on the restroom to guide her.

The sun, just over the horizon, started to dry her and she retrieved her shoes. She sat on a bench and checked her phone again, hoping for a message from Mac, before replacing it in her armband and putting her shoes back on. Still nothing from him; not all that unusual, but a quick text would have been nice, especially after she had bailed him out.

She slowed her pace on the return trip to the house that served as both Cayenne’s residence and the Coral Garden’s headquarters. Ten minutes later she had covered the mile to the house and slowed to a walk. She turned to the driveway before entering and noticed that Cayenne’s Prius was still not there. 

Inside, she checked her email and went to shower. She started thinking about Mac as the water ran over her. Their relationship went back to her high school years, longer ago than her almost forty years wanted to admit. Her dad, an engineering contractor and salvager, had hired Mac out of desperation to repair a bridge, and they had been inseparable for the next twenty years.

Until her father had died. 

It still irked her that the two held secrets that she wasn’t privy to, but she had gone through a rebellious period in her twenties and gone “
off the reservation”
, as her father said. All she wanted as a teenager was to get out of the Keys, and after graduation she had gone to college and then law school at Virginia. With her connections from several summers working as an intern in DC, she landed a position with the ACLU after graduation—something her conservative father had never forgiven her for.

As she had aged, her views changed, and she realized that you couldn’t legislate utopia. Even worse, if you followed the money that paid for the ACLU’s suits, it often led where you didn’t want to go. She’d left the liberal den of the ACLU and moved in with Mac several years ago. Infatuated with him as a teenager, she knew now that the seven-year age difference was too much when she was seventeen and he was twenty-four, but had a whole different ring to it when you said thirty-nine and forty-six. 

It had taken years to get over the teenage crush, and there had been some rough patches in their friendship, some the result of her career choice—he always seemed to back her father and others, with the bad relationships he found himself in … or, as she saw it, was trapped in. With the exception of the last two years, they had hardly spoken for a decade. 

She turned the water off, toweled herself dry, and started to think about yesterday. As she dressed, she reviewed what she knew. There wasn’t a chance that Mac was a poacher. That much she was sure of. At her desk now, she checked her email again and pulled out a legal pad and pen. There was nothing important in her inbox, and she looked away from the screen and stared at the blank page, finally writing a name in the middle of the paper. She circled it and started stabbing the page with her pen, hoping it would work like a voodoo doll; somehow all roads led to Cayenne Cannady.

***

Mac didn’t have an agenda and lazed around the upstairs living quarters of the small stilt house until the heat forced him outside. He went to turn the fan on, and remembered the power was out. When he’d come in the night before, the lights hadn’t worked, and he’d figured the solar system had shorted in a storm—a fairly common occurrence in the summer. The room heated quickly as the windows were still boarded up; the single open door providing little ventilation. He went outside to the covered porch and down the stairs of the house, crossed the clearing, and walked over to the small shed. 

Then something caught his eye as he went to unlock the door. The lock looked like it had been hammered, and now he remembered the mangrove branches that concealed the boats being out of place when he arrived. Someone had been out here. 

Circling the building, he saw a blank spot on the wall with bare wires sticking from several conduits, where the inverter for the solar system had been. That explained why there was no power. He went back to the door knob and inserted the key, hoping the lock was not damaged. Wood had constructed the buildings here to withstand hurricanes, and without access through the door he would have to tear half the windowless building apart to get in. 

The key turned in the lock and he breathed a sigh of relief as the door opened. The inside was just as he had left it: Batteries for the solar system were stacked in racks against one wall, and a workbench sat on several drawers full of tools across from it. The far wall was covered with diving and fishing gear. He grabbed a cordless drill, hoping the battery was charged enough to remove the screws from the plywood protecting the windows, and went back to the house.