LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes when the cigarette made them visible. He said, “Old Esteban can find two new humps. We’re sticking to our deal, all right?”

      Naylor raised the glass of fruit and alcohol. The next drag on the cigarette confirmed what Teach had seen. Greed.

      “A deal’s a deal,” Naylor said. “But what if old Esteban decides he like the two humps he got? Wants to keep them. What we do then?” Naylor put out the cigarette in the sunrise.

      Teach wanted to say, That’s up to you, my friend. You made the deal with Old Esteban. You promised me I’d be the ship-to-shore connection, tote a few bales, and that was all. But Teach didn’t say it. Instead: “I got what I want out of this. Next trip’s our last. Cool?”

      “Cool . . . cool,” Naylor said. Teach was glad he could not see the man’s eyes now. The voice, the regret in it, was bad enough.

      * * *

      Naylor came by the bar, middle of the noon rush. He drank a beer, paid for it, and wrote the loran coordinates on a bar napkin. At midnight, Teach took the Boston Whaler from a rented slip behind the house of an old woman who had known his parents. She was eighty, nearly blind, and had no idea when Teach came and went. It was late September, still hot, and there was a bright harvest moon in the sky. Teach wove the Whaler through the maze of canals with high green mangrove walls, following the pathways he had memorized from boyhood fishing in a handmade plywood boat with a three-horse kicker. He smelled the open Gulf before he saw it, punching the Whaler out through a little delta of white sand and driftwood into a low line of breakers.

      The moon was high and Teach could see for miles. Off to his right, a low, scudding banner of clouds drifted south on a fresh ten-knot breeze. Teach hoped the clouds would swell and obscure the moon before he made the rendezvous point. He doubted it. Ahead of him, the sky was high and starry, and he could see the silver contrail of an airliner heading for Tallahassee. The DEA Cessna Skymasters flew without running lights, and Teach had little hope of spotting one silhouetted against the heavens before it saw him. He ran without lights too, but it wasn’t much of a precaution. Anyone up there would see his wake, a mile of silver ribbon tacked to his stern.

      Well, the Whaler was full of the usual fishing equipment, a lunch, a cooler of beer, and a thermos of coffee. The live bait well was stocked with shrimp, and Teach had even taken the precaution of buying some ballyhoo. If a Coast Guard or a DEA boat stopped him, he’d look like the real thing. But all of this, Teach reflected standing at the Whaler’s steering station with the wind throwing his hair straight back behind him, was little protection. His best safeguard was the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico.

      Twenty miles out, he saw the huge bulk of the mother ship rise like a black moon out of the horizon. Six miles away and she had seen him. Her bow doors slowly opened and she gave birth to the shrimper Santa Maria, a dark blot on the shimmering sea. If the timing was right, Teach would arrive just as the Santa Maria was powered up by Carlos, the best of the three gangsters. Carlos, Teach had learned from scraps of stray talk, had been a fisherman before he had taken up the drug trade. He understood and loved boats. Teach cut his speed, and the twin Yamahas complained a little, then settled into a five-knot idle.

      He made the bow of the Santa Maria just as the mother ship started her slow, ponderous arc west to deeper water. She would steam a wide five-hour circle and meet the shrimper when she returned, deadheading. Teach tossed a line to Julio and scrambled over the shrimper’s transom.

      For the next five hours, the night would belong to Teach and Naylor. Teach had once asked Esteban why the Guatemalans didn’t just let Teach and Naylor take the shrimper in, bring her back out. Why they risked going ashore, three armed illegal aliens. Esteban blew a big huff, gave Teach those el stupido eyes. “What if you jus take de boat? Never return? What about dat?” Esteban struggled with English but had no trouble with his sneer.

      Teach had smiled, shrugged. “Hey, we’re all businessmen. We honor our commitments.” Again, Esteban had opened his coat, letting Teach see the big pistol.

      The trip was fast and lucky. The banner of wispy clouds filled up with moisture, became a thick dark curtain, and covered the moon. Steering by the loran, Teach found the mouth of the tidal canal and eased the shrimper through a hole in the mangroves with only three feet of clearance on either side. From a hundred yards offshore, no one would even see the hole. From twenty yards off, no one would think the passage was more than three feet deep. But Teach knew a strong current flowed here from a spring not far inland, sweeping the hole deep enough for the Santa Maria.

      From this point on, it was slow and careful going. Sometimes Teach had to cut the power so much that he almost lost steerageway. The thick green mangrove walls of the canal lashed the shrimper’s rails. Leaves and torn branches rained on deck. Roosting anhingas and herons cried in the night as the boat ghosted past, her engine thumping. When Teach could take his eyes from his work, he watched Carlos and Julio moving around on deck, kicking branches and debris overboard. Sometimes the sides of the shrimper scraped the great, spidery mangrove roots, painting the boat with streaks of mud.

      A half-mile inland, the canal widened and Teach breathed easier, loosening his grip on the wheel. On the foredeck, Julio and Carlos relaxed, lit cigarettes. Esteban stood in the bow like the captain he was, staring ahead into the darkness.

      Teach reached down and turned on the radio, a rock station from Gainesville. The Stones singing their hearts out: all these years and still no satisfaction. The wheelhouse door opened, and Carlos’s flat peasant face emerged from the darkness. Teach switched off the radio.

      “No, no,” said Carlos, smiling. “Déjala encendida. Let it go. Play it.”

      Teach turned the music back up. Carlos lit a cigarette, filling the little wheelhouse with the heavy stink of caporal tobacco. He shrugged, offered the gold cigarette case to Teach, who shook his head. “No fumo.” Teach thinking, This little Indian with a big gun wants to be my friend. Well, we’ve been through a lot together.

      Teach reached into his hip pocket, pulled out a half pint of Wild Turkey. He took a swallow and offered it. Carlos took the bottle and sniffed it, then drank. Again. “Muy bueno,” he said. “Gracias, amigo.”

      Teach nodded, took another bite, and put the bottle away. He saw something, some glimmer through the trees ahead. He caught a murmur of surprised talk from the deck below. Carlos slipped out of the wheelhouse, his feet rapping on the ladder. The Santa Maria was approaching a bend in the canal, and now Teach made out the glow of a lantern, a small boat, a man in it, glittering through the mangrove branches. They had never met anyone back here, though Teach had always known it was possible. He also knew that the only people a man would meet back here at midnight would be locals who observed the unspoken rules of silence.

      Teach put the shrimper into reverse and spun her screw until she barely drifted. He went down onto the foredeck. The man in the boat was Frank Deeks. Deeks was a sometime handyman, sometime fisherman, and full-time drunk. Deeks kept his back to the men in the boat as it drifted up, pushing a heavy wave ahead of it, and Teach could see why. Deeks was poaching stone crab traps.

      Teach had heard rumors about Deeks doing it. Few men would have dared. A crabber was justified, at least by local standards, in shooting anyone he caught messing with his traps. Looking down into Deeks’s leaky skiff, Teach could see next to the hissing Coleman lantern a bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon and some sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Deeks wasn’t brave tonight, he was just more than normally drunk.

      The three Guatemalans stood behind Teach, talking in low, urgent tones. Teach heard cantar. Informer. He didn’t get it all, but he knew he had to improvise. He stepped to the rail and said, “What you doing out here so late, Mr. Deeks?”

      Deeks looked at him out of pale, rheumy eyes. He was saintly thin and egg-bald and wore a railroad engineer’s cap made of gray ticking, a khaki shirt, and old Bermuda shorts. Like a lot of thin men, he moved his limbs with exceeding slowness. His mouth was another thing. “Uh, fishing,” Deeks said. “Ain’t doing no good, though.” There was no fishing gear in the boat. Deeks looked up at the Santa

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