Albury quickly backed off the throttle. The froth at the Diamond Cutter’s bow died, and then they were gliding like a barge in sudden silence.
“Breeze!” Jimmy cried. “Don’t stop. Hit it!”
Albury shook his head. “Not yet,” he said evenly. Augie stood next to him in the wheelhouse. The young Cuban eyed the reef, only fifty yards off the bow. The roar of the advancing cutter suddenly dropped two octaves as the Bahamian captain eased up.
“Augie, tell me when he hits the blue light,” Albury said.
It was a patrol boat, and close enough that Augie could make out one or two numbers on the side. It was a sixty-footer. Two sailors with long guns stood forward. Another held a megaphone. In the wheelhouse, the Bahamian captain flicked a switch and the blue police light pierced the night, hitting the Diamond Cutter exactly once every second.
“OK,” Augie said. “Blue light.”
Albury threw his weight against the throttle, and the rebuilt 892 groaned. The bow rose and kept rising; below his feet Albury could feel the Colombians scrabble for balance. The Diamond Cutter heaved itself forward and, rebelling against the weight of its cargo, planed off.
“Beautiful,” Albury murmured. “Just beautiful.” He turned to steer a course parallel to the coral reef, expertly following its scimitar curve, clinging to the deeper water.
The gunboat gave chase. As Albury had expected, its captain chose an intersecting course. It covered the distance in great thirsty leaps, approaching at full speed, now from the port side. To starboard was the reef; a fractional error of navigation and the Diamond Cutter’s hull would be lanced by a coral head. The contest would be over.
For the second time, the patrol boat, gray and menacing, drew alongside the big crawfish boat. Albury could see the black faces behind the windshield and the gunners in position on the bow. The officer with the megaphone shouted something that was swallowed by the howl of boat engines.
“Get down on the deck,” Albury yelled to his mates. A quick look over his shoulder told him what he needed: that the combined wake of the two boats had obliterated the telltale curl over the reef. The jagged coral was masked in the backwash. To the naked eye, the way was clear.
Then Albury played the only card he had. Without warning, he swung hard to port, threatening collision. Instinctively, the Bahamian captain turned to starboard, crossing a few feet behind the Diamond Cutter. He should have paid less attention to the frantic Yankee fishing boat and more to the deadly nuances of the sea. The gunboat struck the veiled reef at thirty-three knots. It was the sound of a thousand fingernails on a blackboard.
As the Diamond Cutter cut a triumphant arc away from the reef toward open sea, Albury saw the gunboat scrape across the reef and settle in agony. He knew it would sink.
Some of the Colombians who had crawled up to watch from the stern began to cheer. They were still cheering when a death-thrash volley of machine-gun fire raked the Diamond Cutter.
Chapter 10
THE CRUCIAL THING was to get away, to flee into the arms of friendly night. Albury did not expect another gunboat from the Bahamian Royal Defence Force, but he sped south for two hours off the easterly heading he needed, just in case. Aboard the Diamond Cutter, chaos was igniting.
Jimmy burst into the wheelhouse, his voice strained, almost falsetto. His features seemed unnaturally pale in the binnacle light.
“Breeze, these people are animals!”
“What happened?”
“I was bein’ a nice guy, right? I figured they were hungry, so I go down below to make some sandwiches and stuff. Shit, as soon as those assholes smell food they mob me, like I was giving out money or something. I bet there’s not a cracker or a can of beer left on the boat. They grabbed everything they saw and ran off like fuckin’ rats, lookin’ for a hole. And that’s not the worst of it.”
“What else?”
“It took ’em all of five minutes to break the head, but what do they care? Probably no fuckin’ toilets where they come from, anyway. So what difference is a boat? They just squat down and go wherever they happen to be. Breeze, I swear to Christ I never seen nuthin’ like it.”
Albury grunted. He had expected smugglers; smugglers he understood. What he had gotten instead was a boatload of scum—coarse, ignorant gutter criminals of the most vicious sort. Albury knew the type. He had once lived in a cellblock full of them.
“Can you keep ’em below?”
“Shit, Breeze, they’re everywhere. And the stink down there would choke a buzzard.”
“Where’s Augie?”
“He’s been working on the wounded ones. Their pals don’t seem to give a shit. They’re too busy trying to dick it to the women.”
“Jesus,” Albury hissed. “How bad off are the ones who were shot?” The Bahamian machine gun had holed the Diamond Cutter in five or six places, all above the waterline. Two Colombians standing in the stern had gone down without a cry.
“One of them is just grazed on the head. The other is bleeding bad. Augie says he can’t stop it.”
“Neither can we.”
By dawn, Albury knew, many vessels would be out hunting for a renegade lobsterboat. Not only the impulsive Bahamians, but also the more methodical Americans, with their spotter planes, their cutters, and their computers. But by dawn, with any luck, the Colombians would be ashore and the Diamond Cutter would be anonymously licking its wounds in some clump of mangroves. Maybe six more hours at twenty-four knots, Albury reckoned hopefully. They should make it, even allowing for the buffeting they would take from the heavy squall line that the radio predicted off the coast of the Upper Keys.
“Tell Augie to come up here,” Albury said to Jimmy. “Have him bring the jefe. What’s his name? Oscar?”
“His name is asshole. Like the rest of them, “Jimmy snorted.
When Augie appeared a few minutes later, a young Colombian frog-marched before him, arm twisted cruelly behind his back. Augie was panting, and he said nothing. He branded the passenger with a bitter glare.
“This Oscar?” Albury said.
Augie shook his head. “Oscar is busy, Breeze, getting a hum job from one of his lady friends. This one here”—Augie gave the Colombian a rough shove—“he’s had his turn. Haven’t you, Lover Boy? And a few feet away, one of his buddies is bleeding to death from bullet holes. A real touching scene, Breeze.”
“Easy, Augie.”
“And afterwards this one here sneaks down to your cabin for a little scavenger hunt and helps himself to this.” Augie tossed Albury the pair of socks in which he had hidden his money. “Only took you about two minutes to find the loot, eh, amigo?”
The Colombian stared at his own feet. Albury felt his control going. In a moment of self-pity, he saw himself at the helm, middle-aged, potbellied, once the master of a proud fishing boat, now only the whoremaster of a garbage scow. He reminded himself that the money that awaited was purely a one-way ticket off the Rock. Albury allowed himself a calming breath; his hands loosened their vise grip on the hickory wheel.
“Let him go, Augie.”
“Shit, Breeze.”
“Let him go now. Ask him if he speaks any English.”
The Colombian flexed his throbbing arm. He ran his hands through oily black hair and, with an almost feminine gesture, curled two fingers along his droopy mustache.
“He doesn’t speak English.”
“Then talk to him for me,” Albury said. “Tell him that he is escorio and that he annoys me. Tell him that if he annoys me again, I will personally cut him up and feed him to the sharks one piece at a time, starting with his prick. Talk to him, Augie.”
Augie talked. When he finished, the Colombian sneered.
“Tu madre,” he said.
It was a mistake. Albury’s hand flashed off the wheel and caught the Colombian on the left side of the face, savagely lifting him off his feet. The man capsized backwards into the wheelhouse bulkhead, his head hitting with a grating clunk. Then the Colombian slid to th
e deck and lay still.
“Que pasa aqui?”
The man named Oscar stepped through the wheelhouse door into a frozen tableau: Albury, right arm outstretched, a man who had just squashed a spider; Augie, rigid with fury, face contorted; Jimmy, wide-eyed, his voice raw.
“Here’s the head spic, Breeze,” he said.
He was a big man, balding, Indian-brown, with long and elegant sideburns that crawled toward his mouth. Albury guessed that Oscar was in his mid-thirties. A fashionably tight shirt, blood-red and open to the waist, revealed a powerful chest studded with a thick gold cross. In the eyes lay a feral street intelligence. Albury counted four rings on the right hand and a gold watch on each wrist. The man stank of sweat and sea and cheap rum. Albury could tell that he was a bit quicker, a bit smarter, and more than a bit tougher than the rest—the prototype of a coarse Latin ranch foreman or factory boss.
“Are you supposed to be in charge of them?” Albury demanded, his eyes motioning toward the man prone on the deck. “This is a fishing boat, not a zoo. You keep these people under control, or I will do it. You understand? If I have to do it, you won’t like it. Comprende?”
The Colombian watched impassively from behind hooded eyes. Whether he understood the words or not, the tone was unmistakable.
“Many people are hunting for us,” Albury went on. “The weather is getting bad, and there will be a storm soon. Go below and tell your people.”
The Colombian did not allow for translation.
“I am hungry,” he said in a rumbling baritone. “Where is food?”
“You assholes ate all the food,” Jimmy spluttered.
“There is no more food,” Albury said, “Mañana food.”
“Then whiskey?”
“There’s no whiskey for you. Jesus, Augie, talk to him.”
“Captains always have whiskey, no?” Oscar insisted.
“No. No whiskey. Mañana whiskey. America whiskey.”
Then Augie intervened, speaking harshly. Oscar cut him off in mid-sentence.
“The boat is bad. Is very small, and no rápido.”
“If you don’t like it, swim, shithead,” Jimmy snarled.
The Diamond Cutter began to pitch as it closed with the summer squall. Ahead, the clouds gathered in great purple bruises over the dull sea. Oscar rocked uncertainly in the crowded wheelhouse, blinking mechanically. He looked at Albury, at Augie, at Jimmy, a long measuring stare for each. The thin Colombian on the deck began to roll and moan.
“Mañana,” Oscar said finally. It was a promise. He stalked from the wheelhouse, dragging the injured man with him.
A shiver danced along Albury’s spine. “Jimmy,” he said softly, “what have we got besides your shotgun?”
“Not much. A couple of fish knives, the spear gun, the flare pistol. And the bang stick.”
“The knives are down below,” Augie said absently.
“Go get them, Augie. We’re all going to stay up here in the pilothouse until we reach Key Largo. Augie?”
Albury turned to look at the young Cuban. Augie’s face wore a far-off gaze; his jaw was working.
“Did you see what Oscar was wearing?” he asked. “That big gold watch with the green stones on the band, like emeralds?”
Albury nodded. “I saw it when he walked in. A watch on both wrists, for Christ’s sake.”
“Breeze, when I left the wounded guy down there—the one who’s gut-shot—he was wearing that emerald watch.”
Later, Albury and his mates would learn that the Colombians had thrown their badly injured compadre into the ocean. They could never know if he was still alive when he hit.
THE SQUALL WAS worse than Albury had expected. The wind gusted to thirty knots and pushed the waves to nine feet. Water cascaded across the bow and lashed the windshield with opaque sheets. The Diamond Cutter rolled wickedly, battling the sea that snapped with white fangs at her hull. In the wheelhouse, the features of the three men were illuminated only by the green glow of the dials.
Jimmy and Augie clung nervously to whatever they could, but Albury was placid. He found the squall—it was not big enough to think of as a storm—calming. Not for a moment did he question the Diamond Cutter’s strength, or his own skill. He would not have taken her out on a night like this, but together they had ridden out far worse, Albury and the Diamond Cutter.
The weather brought three blessings. It quieted the Colombians: retching, pathetic bundles, clutching with peasant strength to anything solid. It also ruled out pursuit from the sea. And it allowed Albury to smoke. There was nothing he needed to see except the compass dial, and the jagged streaks of lightning served as eerie purple strobes.
The sole intruder in the wheelhouse then was the radio. If it had been left to Jimmy, the VHF would be off and rock music would be blaring from a tinny portable cassette deck. Augie, Albury suspected, would have steered in silence, as his forebears had.
By habit, Albury left the radio tuned to channel 16, the hailing frequency monitored by the Coast Guard. There had been the normal nighttime banter as the Diamond Cutter approached the Florida coastline, and one boat captain laconically reporting engine trouble, but not much else. Reception was capricious amidst the thunderheads; the radio mostly crackled and spat.
Listening to it with half an ear while he conned the Diamond Cutter to an uncertain homecoming was the worst mistake Breeze Albury made that night. He should have listened to Jimmy’s rock music. Or to silence. For the radio destroyed his pride.
All three men heard the call for help. It was weak, the transmission scored by static, but they heard it.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is the Darlin’ Betty, Whiskey Kilo Alfa Three Six Six. I lost my bilge pump and I’m taking water about two miles east of French Reef. I’ve got three men and a boy aboard … can you read, Coast Guard?”
“That’s a lobster boat,” Jimmy said. “What the hell is he doing out here?”
By law, crawfish boats were not permitted to pull traps after dusk or before dawn. “Maybe he’s just on his way to Miami for engine work,” Augie said, “or maybe he’s out here doin’ what we’re doing.”
Jimmy said, “Breeze, he’s only about ten miles south of us.”
“Mayday, Mayday!” the radio cried.
“I know where he is,” Albury said. Sweat sprouted. His guts churned. The rain fell softer.
“Let’s go,” Augie said.
“Hot damn, a rescue,” said Jimmy. “It’ll be another Vixen, Breeze.”
Albury could have wept for their innocence.
The Vixen. He hadn’t been able to buy a drink on Duval Street for nearly a year after that. What had it been, eight, nine years now? The boat had been still new, still the Peggy, and one morning just to shake her down he had run over to the Dry Tortugas; to fish, to snorkel, and to wander the ruins of old Fort Jefferson.
On the way back the weather had gone to hell in a hurry. Albury had just about decided to run for cover in the Marquesas when the Vixen came on channel 16. A motor ketch, fifty-two feet, a lovely boat she must have been, but when Albury got to her she was dismasted and listing badly, the captain fighting feverishly to free the dinghy and keep the lines around three crying kids and a sick wife. Albury had been lucky to get them all off, and even luckier to get back to Key West. It was not until then that he had discovered the captain he had saved was a United States senator. The clippings were someplace in the trailer, together with the letter of commendation from the Coast Guard. Unless Peg had taken them.
But this was not the Vixen, not a famous stranger but a member of Albury’s own tribe: a Conch fisherman. Albury knew the Darlin’ Betty; it worked out of Marathon. And he knew the captain, a gangling retired Navy CPO named Hawk Trumbull. The boy on board would be his grandson.
And Albury knew there was nothing that he could do to help. He averted his face so the two young mates would not see the tears of rage and shame.
The distress call echoed again over the VHF.
“Bree
ze,” Jimmy urged, “we got to change course.” He reached for the microphone. “I’ll tell them we’re comin’.”
Albury brushed the hand away. “Think, goddamnit. Think.”
Jimmy withdrew his hand as though it had been scalded. He looked like a baffled puppy: Albury never yelled at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“What the fuck do you think is wrong? Have you forgotten about our cargo? Hawk Trumbull might understand why I’m carrying twenty dirtbags named José, but the boys at the Coast Guard station won’t—”
“But their boat is sinking….”
“I know, Augie. I’m praying that somebody else is nearby. I can’t get caught with these assholes on board, son. They’ll lock the three of us up and seize the Diamond Cutter. I can’t afford that. Now, turn up the radio and let’s listen.”
The next ten minutes were the longest Albury would endure. Hands wrapped protectively around the wheel, he stared straight ahead through the rain-streaked windshield. The silence was wracking; Albury could taste the resentment and bewilderment that flowed from Jimmy and Augie. Jimmy did not really understand. Augie did, and, understanding, he would have run hell-for-leather to the sinking boat anyway. From the corner of his eye, Albury watched Augie. If he were five years older, he would cold-cock me and take the helm, Albury thought. That is what I would have done. Once.
The squall was losing its fury, and the Diamond Cutter rode easier. Albury willed the radio to life. The Coast Guard, a tanker, a long-liner, surely somebody had heard the Darlin’ Betty’s distress call. They were near the shipping lanes now, but tonight, perversely, there were no ships at sea. Or they were all deaf. No one had heard the dying call a Conch fisherman had launched into the thunder-heads. There was no one but Breeze Albury to lift the microphone and say he was on his way.