I carried the bag to the marina, stepped into my boat. On one of the liveaboard yachts, I noticed a silhouette pass across the disc of the porthole-someone in there awake-and so I didn’t risk poling my skiff away from the docks. At that hour, people who try not to make noise are suspicious people. Instead, I started the engine and idled out into the bay.
There was still sufficient moonlight to read the markers, so I didn’t use a light. I ran north, then turned my skiff east toward Mead Point and Perico Island.
Somewhere out there, beneath the blackness, beyond the flashing markers, I hoped that Dexter Money and his dogs were asleep.
I pushed my skiff upriver, staying close to the bank, where the water was shallow. My push pole is made of fiberglass, similar to a vaulting pole, and it bent beneath my weight as I levered it against the marl bottom. Standing above the engine, pole in hand, I watched the moon flatten itself over a black plateau of mangroves. Then the moon vaporized in a striated cloud of rust.
Nearing the final bend, I could see the yellow glare of sodium lights reflecting off the water. Security lights. I’d noticed the poles on my first visit, which was why I brought my swim gear.
Time to get wet. I moored the skiff’s stern to a prop root and stripped off my T-shirt and shorts, ears straining to hear: tidal drainage and wind in leaves. Nothing else. I continued to listen as I dressed myself in BDUs, sweater, and stocking cap. I had a pair of Five-Ten rubber-soled climbing shoes and fit my Rocket fins over them. Wearing mask and snorkel on my arm like a bicep band, I bellied over the side into the water. Brackish water, just a hint of salt and oil. This far up in the swamplands, the river felt earthy, warm.
I swam with my eyes above surface level. When I rounded the bend, I could see the big shrimper, the Nan-Shan, motionless beneath the security lights. Could see rooftop angles of the two blockhouses through the trees, part of an outside wall. No lights showing in the windows, no sign of life. I stayed close to the bank, in the shadows.
Once, I stopped, held myself erect, treading water. Was that a log floating on the surface up ahead of me? Or maybe an empty fuel drum?
I decided that my eyes were playing tricks and continued on.
When I was beneath the docks, I held on to a crossbeam, looking up through the deck, listening. Now I could hear something unusual. It was a faint whining noise, a weak animal sound. Maybe the sound of an injured bird… or a pump with a bad rotor. I wasn’t certain if the noise came from near or far, but it couldn’t have been human.
I pulled myself up onto the dock. Stood there crouched long enough to feel confident I was alone. Then I removed my fins, walked along the dock, and stepped over onto the deck of the shrimp boat.
The odor of an ocean shrimper is distinctive: petroleum-based net coating, diesel and paint, the protein rot of sea animals stuck in nylon mesh or in small crevices that are impossible to clean thoroughly.
This vessel smelled of shrimping, but of something else, too. I have been in places of war where battlefield sanitation required that personnel attempt to destroy the stench of death with disinfectant.
The boat had that odor, the odor of flesh masked by strong chemicals. Someone had tried hard to scour the stink out of this vessel. I tested the door of the wheelhouse and stepped inside: The smell of bleach, pine cleaner, and ammonia was nearly overpowering.
I closed the door behind me, waited a few moments in the darkness, accustoming myself to the fumes before taking out a rubberized mini-flashlight. I rotated the bezel until I had a little flood beam and then began a methodical search.
It didn’t take me long to find the ship’s log. It was a mess, nearly illegible. Entries sometimes included weather as well as the GPS numbers of where the boat was fishing at the time. Sometimes the entries were signed, sometimes not. The last entry into the log had been made in October, three weeks before Janet and the others were set adrift, signed by someone named Baker.
I made a mental note of the name. If Dexter Money hired Baker to drag for shrimp, maybe he hired Baker to run refugees, too.
I ducked down the companionway steps into the galley. It was the standard layout: propane stove, sink, icebox, dinette table that collapsed into a settee berth. Despite the smell of disinfectant, the place was a mess. Greasy dishes, empty beer bottles, dented peanut cans filled with cigarette butts, Penthouse magazines strewn around the tiny head, soiled linen in the master’s quarters. The only personal items I found-subscription labels, a locker filled with prescription medications-were in Dexter Money’s name.
One time I stopped, frozen and listening for more than a minute. Had I heard footsteps on the dock outside?
Nothing.
So I continued my search and had an unexpected stroke of luck. When slovenly types want to trash a document they don’t want found, they invariably wrap it in something innocuous and throw it away. On a boat, you’d expect them to toss it overboard. But here, someone had packed in a hurry, not much worried about covering his tracks.
In a trash bag in the master’s quarters, I found an empty, crumpled bag of Starbuck’s coffee-expensive tastes for a commercial fisherman. I opened the bag and found therein a series of digital photograph rejects. They were badly printed on standard computer paper and smeared. Each shot was graphically pornographic, featuring a tall, thin, naked albino man in a variety of poses with two naked, Latin-looking women. Oral sex was the consistent theme.
Because the shots were badly framed, I got the impression that one of the three had probably placed the camera on a desk, touched the timer button, then rushed to get into the picture. Strictly amateur.
In one of the photos, both women stared into the camera’s lens, moistened lips and sloe-eyed, their expressions so obvious and salacious that they might have been parodying stage sensuality. Because of certain grotesque characteristics of the man’s anatomy, and because the women looked to be no older than their late teens, I guessed them to be prostitutes. Women doing things they’d never do unless they were getting paid. Because of the man’s dull, glossy stare, I made another deduction: He was very drunk during the session or on drugs.
The rattan furniture in the background had a commercial look, suggestive of a hotel.
The inference got some support. Crumpled with the photos, I found a brochure for a place called Hotel de Acension, Cartagena, Colombia.
I knew the hotel, had even been in the bar a couple of times. High marble ceilings and European prices. It had been a cathedral during the time of the Conquistadors. Now it was a notorious hangout for drug cartel people, informants, and State Department types on the make. With the brochure was a copy of receipts for a one-month stay made out to someone named Hassan Atwa Kazan. He had expensive tastes and liked room service. Moet, smoked salmon, Dunhill cigarettes.
I turned and checked one of the peanut can ashtrays.
Yes. A quill of Dunhill butts in there.
I considered the name: Kazan. Probably Middle Eastern, possibly Islamic, though I have a friend in London named Kazan, and she’s Italian.
Even so, the face did not mesh with the name. Albino or not, the man in the photographs had facial characteristics common to mountain Europeans and certain North Africans.
I stood, studying the receipt, holding the paper close to my face, but then I stopped reading. Stood there listening for a moment, then extinguished the light.
Footsteps?
I decided that, once again, it was just my imagination.
I stored the papers in a waterproof bag, stuffed the bag into my cargo pocket, and retraced my steps up the companionway.