There were two entrances to the harbor at Man-O-War Cay and we stayed close enough behind the men to see which way they approached. We wanted to give them time to board the sailboat and also to lessen the possibility of being spotted.
Once passing Pelican Cay, they took a heading straight for Man-O-War Cay. This was good, as we could run close to the mainland, hugging the shore. Dave decided to go around the north end of Dickie's Cay and come down through the north entrance to the harbor. It would bring us past the main part of the settlement, and out of sight of the men we were tailing.
Man-O-War Cay could be summed up in one word, paradise. A mere two miles in length and a quarter mile wide, it is oriented in a northwest-southeast direction. It lay like a sleeping goddess. The Atlantic Ocean washes her north shore and the Sea of Abaco her south side.
Idling through the harbor, we could see the outline of Albury's boat yard where the seventy-foot wooden schooner, William Albury, was docked at the pier. We passed Government Dock, Edwin's Boat yard, and Norman Albury's sail loft.
Ghosting by the main entrance to the harbor, Dave pointed out his sailboat. We could see the men's cigarette tied to the stern. There were only four other boats anchored in American Harbor, and all were dark and quiet. Dave cut the engine and we drifted silently up next to the hull. Easing into the cockpit, careful not to make noise or cause motion, we could see the two men through the open hatch. They would never be accused of being overly smart. Having found the cocaine, they were helping themselves to big snorts of the white crystal powder, forgetting all else. Their weapons lay on the cabin sole out of reach even if they had wanted to make a play.
The expression on their face made me feel sad. Maybe they were the two who sat on the overturned dinghy and drank rum on Family Beach. The men were frightened of Dave, had seen him kill before, or so they thought. The white powder caked around their nose and mouth appeared comical.
Dave went forward, rummaged around in the Vee-birth, and returned with two pair of handcuffs. It struck me as funny that he could produce handcuffs out of nowhere at three o'clock in the morning on board a sailboat anchored in a small harbor two hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. He looked at me with dark, deadly eyes. Not given to frivolity, the humor escaped him. He could see further into the night than I. The present was hard for me to comprehend, much less the future.
We cuffed the two men together around the mainmast, where it runs through the cabin and down into the keel. It was the most secure place and there was no way they could get loose. We would leave them until the business was finished back at the Sun Dog. If for some reason we didn't make it back, then someone would find them, eventually.
It was now after three a.m., and we had to hurry to beat daylight. We retraced our route back to Sanchez. The plan was risky, but it was the only way.
As we approached the Sun Dog, two men stood in the cockpit. Since they were expecting a cigarette boat to return, they weren't alarmed when we idled up beside the sportfisherman.
We brought the two automatic weapons confiscated from the men on the sailboat along with the guns Dave furnished. We were ready.
Easing the cigarette around so that my side would pass close to the stern of the Sun Dog, Dave maneuvered to within a few feet of the two men. When one knows death is close it heightens awareness and the usual facts do not make sense.
There was a look of surprise and fear on the face of the man closest to me when he realized who we were. He snarled like an angry wolf as he raised his rifle to fire. Spraying both men with a full clip from the AR-15, I saw one fall overboard, and the other slump into the cockpit. Dave opened the throttle and we started a circle around the Sun Dog. The two women bolted from the salon door, one running around the portside, the other the starboard. Both were heading for the bow and carrying automatic weapons as if they were trained to use them. They were kittens at play, but tigers in battle.
Dave abruptly closed the throttle causing the cigarette to slow suddenly, settling bow first. We both fired at the two women. One of them got off a burst, hitting inches in front of the windscreen where I stood. If Dave had not shut the throttle off when he did…
The two women were dead before they hit the deck. Dave throttled up again, and we started another circle, expecting Barrel-chest and Sanchez to come out firing. Instead, to our amazement, someone waved a white cloth out the salon door. Emerging slowly, with arms raised, Barrel-chest threw his weapon into the water. I had expected more from the man.
"Careful, Dave."
"Damn cowards."
Most of the people behind these kinds of operations hire someone to do the dangerous and messy work. Sanchez was proving not to be the exception. We were still wary, though. My ears were ringing, my heart was pounding, and I could feel the adrenaline flowing into my bloodstream. Any movement, a blink of an eye, and I would cut Barrel-chest in half.
Dave yelled, "Get Sanchez out here. Do it now, or you're a dead man."
Barrel-chest turned, said something to someone inside the salon. Sanchez appeared in the door and threw his rifle overboard. I boarded the boat while Dave kept me covered. There was no one else on board. Dave tied the cigarette off and climbed into the cockpit.
"So it was you," Sanchez snarled. "I should never have trusted you. Very clever, pretending to kill your friend, here. Smart, extremely smart."
He appeared to be in his early sixties. The structure of his bones and the looseness of his clothes suggested that he had once been muscular. The lifeless indifference of his eyes hid the fact that some degree of intelligence resided somewhere in his brain. The overall appearance was one of a wasted man who'd been sampling his own product.
"What is it we can do? You want part of my action? Together we could make plenty of money. I'll cut you in for fifty percent. What you think? We work together, yeah?"
Dave looked hard at him. He was edgy, angry, and I had no idea what he might do. "We want no part of your filthy operation."
Sanchez shrugged, the movement running through his body like a shudder. "Then what? I can get you anything. I have millions. What you want, Mon? Money, women, dope? What?"
Dave's finger tightened on the trigger, so I eased up and looked Sanchez in the eyes. "You want to save your life, tell me what the Renoir girl was doing aboard this boat? Who pumped her full of dope? And why?"
A strange, crazed look crossed his face, but he didn't say anything.
"I know she was brought to Bimini. Someone drugged her, beat her, put her aboard Chalk Airline, then called the Miami police and told them she was coming. You got ten seconds."
He shot an ugly look at Barrel-chest, then bellowed with a wild-eyed hatred. "You didn't kill her? You sent her to Miami still alive?"
Sanchez, standing beside the salon door, suddenly lunged inside for a gun lying on the deck. Dave shot him with a burst from his rifle, but not before he got off a shot at Barrel-chest. The bullet hit the big man in the lower right side and, from the angle fired, traveled upward, and exited beside the collarbone. The destruction to vital organs was evident as bright red arterial blood pumped in arcing spurts from the wound. He was a dead man, only he didn't know it.
Sanchez lay on the salon floor. His eyes were lifeless, as if they had seen nothing. They held no spark of excitement, no personal sensation, neither in defiance or of regret, neither of shame or suffering. They were empty ovals that held no response to life, ovals that held nothing but a dull, still, mindless death.
Barrel-chest slumped into the fighting chair holding onto the armrests with a death grip. There was a rigid stillness to his body, a body that sat too straight. It seemed broken, held with a slight, unnatural angel at his waistline and shoulders, the arms stiff but slanted back.
The effort not to move was turning the force of the violence against him, as if the motion he resisted were running through his muscles as a tearing, searing pain. His fingers convulsed, struggling to keep their grip on the armrests. I wondered which would break first, the fighting chair or the man's bones.
Taking the white cloth waved in surrender, I tried to stem the flow of blood. "Look, you tried to save Rene's life. It was you who alerted the Miami Police. You are not going to survive this. If you cared anything about the girl, tell me about it, now."
"Did she make it?" Blood foamed from his mouth.
"No, she did not. Do this one last thing before you die. Tell me about Rene Renoir."
Five minutes later he was dead. I never knew his name, but what he told us was an astounding story, one that would take some time to absorb.
Dave and I sat for a long time in silence, listening to the water lap against the hull of the sportfisherman. The night feeders made splashing sounds as they slashed through the dark sea after prey. To kill is difficult; the extinguishing of so much life is a troublesome thing.
"It'll be light in an hour," Dave said in a tired voice. "Let's get the bodies below. We'll take the Sun Dog across the bar, out into deep water."
My emotions had clogged into a still, solid, opaque ball within me, which the thought of those who'd been killed this night could not pierce. They were simply the enemy to be destroyed. Taking the boat hook, I reached for the body of the man who had fallen overboard. He'd floated around to the starboard side. The night feeders were already working on him. We dragged him through the transom door into the cockpit like a two hundred-pound marlin.
We put all six bodies down below. The women were the hardest. The very youngness of them moved me. They had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. Such a waste. The cabin quickly began to take on the sweet, sickening smell of coagulating blood. I was ready to be through with this.
The bow of the boat was slippery with blood, but I managed to get the anchor up, leaving it lying on deck. The ignition key was in Barrel-chest's pocket. Dave climbed up to the Flying Bridge and started the engines. He motioned for me to follow in the cigarette.
We ran a mile offshore, into deep water. Dave shut down the engines, went below and opened all the seacocks. Quietly closing the salon door, he jumped into the boat with me. We watched as she settled low in the water. It is always sad to watch a good boat go down. Soon all we could see were the tuna tower and the outriggers. A minute later she was gone, leaving only a flat, calm sea, unfeeling, uncaring, and unforgiving.
I did not examine the events of this night, did not grasp their cause, and did not consider their consequences. I tried not to think. The clogged ball of emotion was like a physical weight in my chest, filling my consciousness, releasing me from the responsibility of thought. The ball was hatred — hatred was my only answer, hatred as the sole reality, hatred without object, cause, beginning or end, hatred as my claim against the universe, as a justification, as a right, as an absolute.
"Let's get out of here," Dave said softly, as if not to anger the Gods of the sea.
It was the expression in his voice that showed total disgust with what happened, conveying the need to get as far away from this place as quickly as possible. To kill is a terrible thing, but how and why one kills is important, also. There are lines one cannot cross and return the same. This was one of those times.
False dawn was gone. Light was showing in the east. A line of thunderstorms was building out on the horizon, the same ones that formed over the Marls yesterday. It was a spectacular sunrise for those in the mood to appreciate it. The wind was from the northwest; the seas flat and calm. The breeze felt cold on my face. Dew formed on the boat, soaking through my pants, and the wheel was damp to my touch. We ran back in across the bar and turned north for Man-O-War Cay. The sun broke the horizon, its rays playing among the dark thunderstorms, causing fiery orange colors.
Pulling up to the stern of Dave's sailboat, we tied the painter off and climbed aboard. The two men handcuffed to the mainmast wore a subdued look. Dave removed the shackles and made the two men sit together on the portside bunk. His face showed no sign of an inner struggle, the skin of his temples was pulled tight and the planes of his cheeks were drawn inward, seemingly more hollow than usual. A single artery beat under the skin of his throat. I was witnessing a man making a difficult decision.
Pointing to me, Dave said, "He wants to kill you both. I tend to agree. Did you really think you could come here and take this cocaine from me? Are you really that stupid?"
They both shook their heads in unison.
"Killing you two would be a waste of good ammunition. So here's what we're going to do. Sanchez has decided to get out of the Snowpowder business, and so have you two. If either of you so much as spits wrong, I'll come back and do what I should do now. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," they both blurted out.
We led them out into the cockpit and they started to get into their boat.
"No, you swim. The boat dock is about fifteen minutes away." He slid the bolt back and forth on a machine pistol, a round clicking into the chamber.
Both men jumped overboard and started swimming. We watched until they rounded the bend and were out of sight.
"How did you know they could swim?"
"I didn't."
We took both cigarette boats back across to the mainland of Abaco and tied up to the fuel dock at Marsh Harbor. The sun was above the water and, after the storms dissipated, low, swift-moving puffball cumulus clouds dotted the cobalt blue sky. It had the makings of a great day.
Dave contemplated the thick, bleached planks of the dock, then gazed toward an infinity of flat bright-green water mottled with pale greens and blues. "Let's go to Bobby's Bar and get drunk, drunk enough to forget this night ever happened."
"I'll buy the first round."