Key West Connection

Nels Chester was wrong. There weren’t two of them. There were three. And when that fatal unknown jammed the phallic muzzle of a .45-caliber service automatic in my back I knew that, in unintentionally breaking my long-ago promise to Billy Mack, I had vanquished all our vows.

It had started out as such a fine day: old morning sun lifting up over the turquoise expanse of coral sea; rolling its fresh August heat over Crawfish Key, and Mule Key, sweet with the cloying odor of jasmine, right into Key West. As always, I awoke with the first sound of waking birds. My wife, Janet, slept beside me, cool on cotton sheets, long auburn hair and soft nakedness in revolving shadow beneath the ceiling fan.

I had nuzzled her face, felt her mouth open to accept the proffered good-morning kiss, felt her legs part as I stripped the cotton sheet away, felt her buttocks lift and rise as my tongue traced the curve of back, reaching deep into the abyss of white thighs, finding the auburn and silken source of my own two sons. I had entered her from behind, then, sliding gently into those well-loved depths. Her nipples flushed, swelled, lengthened; that soft body coming alive as she lay half asleep, eyes closed, wry smile on her face as if we enjoyed the common bond of all secrets of all time. She whimpered, shuddered, gasped, and grew feverish.

Down at the docks, with the smell of freshening sea wind moving over the long white brigade of charter boats, I saw bottlenosed dolphins hunting the flats off Trumbo Point. A good sign. I am a man who looks for good omens and worries about the bad. Superstitious. Like every circus performer on earth. Carlos de Marti, who had trained with me for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was already on the docks, a long night of dark sea behind him.

He helped me load the two cases of excellent Cuban beer aboard the Sniper. Once a month, Carlos made the dangerous crossing to Cuba alone, meeting the love of his life on a rural shore of the northern coast, then heading back the next night. Someday he’ll be caught. And shot or imprisoned. But for more than two years, once a month, he has brought me back forty-eight rations of that good Hatuey beer. I had learned to love it when I was barely a teenager. It was my first time in Key West, and after our third show, nearly midnight, I had walked down to Mallory Docks alone. And there was Papa, a writer I had loved but never met. Grizzly white beard, whiskeycask chest, he stood with hands in pockets on the deserted docks, looking out into the midnight sea toward his beloved Cuba. Even then, I was almost as big as he: six feet tall, 185 pounds. The fact that I worked the trapeze interested him. And he came to watch me the next night. And afterward, we went out walking again, through the empty old pirate streets of Key West, down to the docks. With him he carried a huge thermos of beer.

“Old-timer,” he had said, “drinking and writing have many similarities yet one great difference. They both make you feel fine, they both should be approached with discipline and respect. But drinking should be taught. And writing—good writing—can never ever be taught.”

That night he taught me how to drink beer. Good Hatuey beer. The rest of the world already looked upon him as a living legend. As I did. But that night, standing side by side, looking out into the strangely promising expanse of black sea, I came to look upon him as a friend, too.

Once I had the Johnson couple, alienated man and wife, secured in the head below, I headed for the shoals inside Eastern Dry Rocks. But not before I had taken the Randall knife from its storage place in the starboard locker. That knife was made for two things and two things only. Life. And death. I hadn’t worn it in seven years. I took off my belt, took off my shirt, strapped the knife firmly just between armpit and left breast, then put my shirt back on. It wouldn’t show. I had a rifle aboard. A Russian assault automatic, an AK-47, fully loaded with 7.62mm cartridges. I had smuggled it back from Nam. I kept it secured horizontally above the forward controls in spring clips. I used it for sharks, the open-ocean sharks that vector in on a hooked billfish. But I didn’t want to use it on these guys. You shoot someone down at sea—no matter what they’ve done—and you end up in court. I wanted to make it look like selfdefense. And besides that, I wanted to look into their eyes. I wanted them to know why they were going to die. I wanted their last thoughts to be about Billy Mack.

I had two plans of action. If they went aground on the shoals, I would putter up like a friendly weekend fisherman and offer assistance. If they didn’t go aground, I would try to flag them down, pretending I was disabled. And just hope and pray they tried on me what they did to Billy.

I would have no trouble intercepting them. In my thirty-four-foot Sniper I had twin 453 GM diesels, and all Billy’s old Chris Craft had was a standard-power Caterpillar 3208, single-screw. We used to laugh about the differences between our two boats. His was so slow and sure, mine was so fast and erratic: reflections of our separate personalities. He was by far the better fisherman.

“Hell, Dusky,” he had once said, “you ought to fish like me—just hunt around till you find ’em. But no, you can’t be that way. You gotta work the long shots; pick a spot an’ wait for the big ones to come by. Christ, you fish like a sniper. That’s it—a goddamn sniper!”

Key West was a heat mirage on the turquoise slick of open water. A power skiff threw silver wake as it cut across Whitehead Spit, angling inland by old Fort Taylor. I picked up the bell buoy which was Marker 2, skirted the spoil area, then dropped her down and shut her off, drifting on the inside of Eastern Dry Rocks.

I checked my Rolex Submariner watch. If they had followed Nels’ predicted course, they should have already been in sight. But they weren’t. I was flooded with second thoughts, other possibilities. Why couldn’t they just run Southwest Channel toward Key West? No, Nels had said they didn’t know boats. They didn’t know the water, so they’d head for markers. But why in hell would they be taking a hijacked boat inland anyway? Because that was the only place they could hide it. And as far as they were concerned, no one knew they had slit a good man’s throat to get it. Why would anybody be watching for them?

I finally raised them as they moved out from behind Sand Key, Billy’s white Chris Craft rolling a glassy blue wake abeam. I could see the name, three feet high, on the port side: Ernie’s Honor; named after his two godsons, my two boys.

But they didn’t. At the last minute, they noticed the change in the water, or the weak roll of water over the rocks, or looked at their chart or something. Nels was wrong. Someone aboard Ernie’s Honor knew water. Someone aboard knew boats.

I took a deep breath and moved to start my engines, ready to effect my second plan. I would play disabled, the helpless victim. And that’s when I heard the loud thud. The submerged pilings! I’d forgotten about them. They’d missed the shoals and hit the pilings! A weird low chuckle escaped from my lips; a ghastly death laugh I thought I had left behind for good in Vietnam. The piling had knocked the prop off Ernie’s Honor, and with sudden loss water resistance, the old Caterpillar engine screamed like an animal in pain. Finally, someone had the good sense to shut it off. They tried to start it again then shut the scream off again when they realized they weren’t going anywhere without a prop.

When they noticed me idling up, one of the two men disappeared into the cabin. It was the black one; Billy’s murderer. I would keep that in mind. I moved toward them, smiling broadly, waving every now and then. When I was sure they had drifted free of the pilings, I pulled up along their bow and made my port side fast to the forward bollard with a couple of quick hitches.

The man who stood above me on the bow of Billy’s boat was the Nordic type. Blond and angular with a broad Celtic face. He was nervous. His head kept sweeping back and forth, as if scanning to see if there were any witnesses around. He wasn’t much past twenty-one. About six feet tall, matted hair down to his shoulders, skinny and emaciated and pallid, as most drug freaks are.

So that was it. Drugs. They’d stolen Billy’s boat to make a drug run. Once through, they would probably either sink it or abandon it. It happens all too often in the Florida Keys. Especially around Key West. All the lost ones, the empty-headed young suburbanites, all follow that Southern Highway A1A till it dead-ends abruptly 150 miles out to sea; come to Key West where the drugs are cheap and good and dream their lives away. In the last year, Janet had talked more and more frequently about leaving our little shipbuilder’s house of white board and batten on Elizabeth Street, and heading for the rural, unspoiled areas of northern Florida or Georgia. Too many dead-enders in Key West, now. Too many druggies and dead-enders, and empty, empty young people. And she was right. It was no longer Papa’s Key West. Nor was it the Key West I had fallen in love with. It was still a pirate town. But the pirates who roamed there now—like the blond kind with the dead eyes who stood before me—were far more dangerous and far less daring than any of the pirates who had lived there before them.

They wanted piracy? I would show them real piracy. The United States government had spent more than a hundred thousand bucks training me, readying me, teaching me how to be far more lethal than the little stubnosed .38 I saw tucked in the back pocket of the kid’s dirty jeans. And my piracy wouldn’t be one of cold-blooded expediency, one that would barter innocent lives so that drug-induced dreams might be enjoyed. Mine was a piracy of vengeance.

“Yeah. Or somethin’.” I took a pinch of the moist stuff, feeling it burn pleasantly against my inner lip. It was all there: the roll of the boat, smell of the diesel exhaust, the good taste of Copenhagen—and a mission. I was back in Nam. I was ready to do what a very select group of us did better than any human beings in the history of the earth. Kill. Kill silently and professionally. Only this time I would enjoy it.

“Look,” I said, “I think what happened is, you hit those pilings and knocked your prop off. No big thing; I can have ya goin’ again in five minutes—after I get my spare prop out of the hold, that is. You’re welcome to use it; I trust you. But you’ll have to help me. I’m by myself, and someone has to hold the hatch up.”

Clumsily, he stepped over onto the Sniper, and when he rounded the cabin wall I was waiting. My knife was out, and I grabbed him by the throat, a firm deathgrip on the Adam’s apple; the most effective come-along of all. The guy in the other boat couldn’t see us now. I swung him down onto the deck, feeling his Adam’s apple cartilaginous as a racketball within the confines of my big left hand. I placed the point of the Randall knife inside his ear, letting it cut just enough for him to know that it was there.

“Okay, asshole. Let’s have a talk. And if you play innocent even once, I’ll shove this knife through your ear and scramble your brains. The guys in the cigarette hull. Where’d they go? Where are they hiding out?”

I relaxed my grip on his throat. Just a little. The blond Blackbeard, the visionary drug runner, trembled beneath me. There were tears in his eyes. This was a real bummer. The biggest bummer of all. The day he would pay for his sins.

“Up the Keys a ways. There’s a private island. Offshore. Some big Senator or somethin’ owns it. Day after tomorrow, we got a big pickup to make. Just needed an extra boat. I didn’t want to kill that guy. But up there, up there on Cuda Key, they told us to get a boat an’ don’t leave no witnesses. Had to do it, man. Had to do it.”

He sat up, rubbing his throat. I still had the knife ready. “Let me think, man. My mind—I been gettin’ these blank spells lately. Let’s see . . . yeah, Friday. Next Friday. Middle Sambo. That’s it. Man, this drug business is some wild-ass trip, I’ll tell ya.”

He watched me as I put the knife back within the folds of shirt. The nervous smile had returned to the pallid face, and I knew what was on his mind. And I wanted him to do it. I wanted him to reach for that little stubnose. I wanted his hand to be on the cold grip of the pistol when I killed him. But before he made his move, I wanted him to hear something.

And he took it, jerking the pistol up awkwardly. But before he had a chance to fire, I chopped downward with the cutting edge of my right hand, breaking his wrist. The .38 spun away as if in slow motion. And almost in the same swoop of lethal hand, I chopped back across his neck, knocking his windpipe so awry, and with such force, that it looked as if he had swallowed half a small hula hoop.

Carefully, I peeked through the salon windows. It was the black guy. The one who had killed Billy Mack, the man who had slit the throat of my best friend. And he was loaded for bear. In his hand he carried a big ugly .357 Auto Mag, a singularly merciless handgun. I studied my assault rifle, snug in its clips. It would have been so easy to sever that flat ugly head of his with one burst.