There’s an alarm on my watch, which I set, and I set the alarm in the cottage’s bedroom, too-both for 2:45 A.M.
But I didn’t need either one of them because I couldn’t sleep. I laid awake in the darkness with a Gulf wind blowing through the screen, berating myself for my insensitivity, my stupidity. Why hadn’t I the foresight to come up with a more plausible, less insulting lie?
Twice I dialed Amelia’s home number, got the machine each time.
Clearly, she didn’t want to talk to me. The woman had taken enough cheap shots over the last few months, and now I’d added to her pain and humiliation.
At 2:30, I dressed and checked the duffel I’d packed for the boat. Inside were military BDU pants with tiger-stripe camo, my old black watch sweater, Navy blue stocking cap, leather gloves, mask and snorkel, Rocket fins, and a small waterproof flashlight. Back in Dinkin’s Bay, I’d decided against packing my 9mm SIG Sauer semiautomatic handgun. That was before I’d seen Dexter Money and his pit bulls. I regretted that decision now.
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.
I was just opening the door when the wheelhouse lights suddenly flashed on. I stood with my hand on the knob, frozen.
Behind me, a woman’s voice said, “What I may do is shoot you. Or jes’ feed you to Daddy’s dogs. Sonuvabitch, I’m sick to death of you leeches actin’ like you own the place, hurtin’ me like I ain’t got no feelin’s at all.”
I turned to see a high school-aged girl holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a pistol grip instead of a butt-a weapon known as a “street sweeper” because of the pattern it fires.
The girl had brown hair layered shag style, cutoff shorts. Abdominal baby fat bulged beneath her midriff T-shirt. Her face was narrow, pinched around thin lips, and the divider that separated her nostrils-the columella-was creased. She was a type: skinny hips, heavy breasts. Physically mature by thirteen or fourteen, emotionally old before thirty; a producer of fertile eggs and barroom dramas.
The girl squinted at me for a moment before saying, “Hey-you ain’t one of Daddy’s dogfight buddies. I don’t remember seein’ you here when they decided to have their fun.”
Her piney-woods accent was familiar. I’d heard it earlier that day on the pay phone. Shanay Money, the girl who was having trouble fending off a kid named Oberlin Carter, only her voice was different now. Some of the steeliness had gone out of it. Her arms and shirt, I noticed, were smeared with blood, and her eyes were bleary, red, perhaps from crying. The intensity with which she held the weapon, the tone of her voice, her expression all communicated a resonant hysteria. I got the feeling I’d stumbled into something very personal. Catch a burglar on any other night, she’d have probably called the cops. Or her father. Tonight, though, she was ready to use the shotgun.
I decided to take a chance. “You’ve never seen me before, Shanay, because I’ve never been here before. Never met your father. But, from what I’ve heard, I wouldn’t like his friends. Probably wouldn’t like him, either.”
That earned me a bitter smile. “I suppose you man enough to want to say that to Daddy’s face?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“Hoo-eee, I bet you wouldn’t! I once saw him strip one of my boyfriends naked, pants and undies, then spank him like a baby! He likes hurtin’ people, my daddy does. His sick friends, they ain’t no better.” The hysteria in her voice now had acquired a shrill edge.
I said, “Tell me about the blood on your shirt, Shanay. I’m not here to harm you. But I might be able to help you. What happened here tonight?”
She jabbed the barrel of the shotgun at me, as she used her head to gesture vaguely toward shore. “There ain’t nothin’ you or anybody else can do to help my ol’ Davey dog. He’s up there bleedin’ to death right now. You’re the one who needs to do the explaining, mister. If I thought for a minute you was one of ’em, I’d blow your damn head off!”
I raised my hands slowly, palms out. “Your dog’s injured? Then wake up your dad, call a vet.”
“You don’t call a vet for animals hurt in a dogfight. Not unless you want the law stickin’ their nose in, and my daddy’s so fucked up on that powder of his and liquor, he didn’t wake up when I was screamin’, and he ain’t gonna wake up now.”
I put my hands down and took a step toward her. “Then I might be able to help. I’m a doctor. I’m telling you the truth. Take me to your dog, and I’ll tell you why I’m here. Then you tell me what happened.”
She lowered the shotgun, tears now dripping down her face. “You a people doctor or an animal doctor?”
I opened the wheelhouse door, holding it for her, saying, “An animal doctor. Sort of. I specialize in fish.”
Dexter Money was in the dogfighting business, in a big way. Because I’m an obsessive reader, I know that Florida is one of a very few states in which it is legal to own, train, and promote fighting breeds, though it is a felony to actually stage a dogfight-a gigantic legal loophole that the public would not tolerate if some organization, the manatee people, for instance, adopted it as a cause.
I also know that, each and every weekend, there are dogfights taking place somewhere around Florida, and that championship purses have exceeded $100,000. The drug dealer types like owning vicious dogs because they offer an added layer of personal protection, so fighting their dogs, betting on the outcome, is a natural extension of that illegal activity.
I followed Shanay along the dock, through a door into the old machine shop. It looked to be made of cypress, open ceilinged, two stories high, rafters showing, bleachers built around a sawdust pen, bare lightbulbs dangling overhead on cords. Stacked in the far corner of the pen were the corpses of five, maybe six dogs. Most of them were brindled, brown, gray, and yellow, their skin ripped off in places, blood crusted black in their fur. They hadn’t been dead long.
“Davey dog’s over here,” the girl said, as she walked around the pen to the back of the building and knelt, then threw back a blanket. Her voice cracked as she added, “I hope he’s not dead already. I’ve had him since I was a little girl.”
The whimpering, whining noise I’d heard earlier was Davey. He was a yellow Lab, maybe eighty pounds, gray hair showing on his muzzle. He was still alive. Barely. His left ear was gone and part of his tail. When I touched my palm to his ribs, testing for a pulse, the dog opened his eyes slightly and thumped his stub of a tail, acknowledging me.
“Can you save him, mister? It’d break my heart to lose him. It purely would.”
I said, “Are you sure we can’t call a vet?”
“Daddy would kill me. He’d beat me ’til I couldn’t walk. It’s the law. The vet would have to report us, and Daddy ain’t goin’ to jail again. He already told me that.”
I said, “Okay, so we’ve got no choice. I’ll do my best.” I told her what supplies I thought I needed. She came running back with most of what I asked for. From her father’s own kennel supplies, she brought Acepromazine, an animal sedative, and a length of clear plastic tubing. She also brought several surgical cutting needles, a roll of unflavored dental floss, peroxide, and a bottle of Gatorade.
When I asked for the Gatorade, she seemed surprised and said, “If you’re thirsty, I’ll get you a beer. Anything you want.”
I’d already seen gauze, tape, peroxide, and the antibiotic cephalexin aboard the Nan-Shan, and she brought those articles, too.
“The only thing I couldn’t find is that spray can stuff you wanted. Lanacane? Can you get along without it?”
“I need something, some kind of anesthetic, or your Lab isn’t going to hold still for what I have to do.” I thought for a moment, then remembered the girl mentioning her father’s powder, and said, “Cocaine would be even better. As a topical anesthetic, I mean. I don’t suppose you know where we could get some of that?”
Some of the softness left her face. “Mister, if you’re trying to trick me into something, I still got this shotgun. What I’m thinking is, you already tricked me once today. Did you call me on the phone this afternoon, talking about cemetery plots in an Alabama accent?”
“That was me, yeah. I’ll explain why later. But this isn’t a trick. I’m serious. It’d help your dog.”
She left and returned a few minutes later with an ounce or so of white powder in a plastic baggie. I’d already placed two Acepromazine tablets on the back of the dog’s tongue and massaged its throat until it swallowed. Then I’d used gauze and peroxide to clean the bare flesh around the tail and the missing ear. Now I dabbed the powder on liberally, listening as the girl told me what had happened.
There’d been thirty or forty men at tonight’s fight. Shanay had been grounded by her father for some offense, so she had to stay on the property. She couldn’t stand to watch or hear what happened to the dogs, so she’d remained in her room watching MTV, curled up in bed, her Lab beside her.
By midnight, her father was passed out on the living room floor. Around 1 A.M., she walked down to the river.
“I thought they was all gone, all his friends,” she said. “And Daddy keeps his dogs locked in cages the nights there’s fights, so I didn’t have to worry about them, either.”
Wrong. Two of her father’s drunken “friends” cornered the girl outside the machine shop. When one of the men grabbed her, she screamed. Her old retriever, Davey, came charging to the rescue.
“He bit one of ’em, this motorcycle jock named Jason. So Jason let his pit bulls loose on poor ol’ Davey dog. It was awful to watch, and there wasn’t nothing I could do. By the time I got back here with the shotgun, they was gone. The bastards! I was hopin’ you was one of ’em, mister, I surely was. I’d’a used it. I swear I would’a. So now it’s your turn. Why are you here?”
I’d stopped much of the dog’s bleeding by using dental floss sutures to ligate the open vessels. Then took the plastic tubing and measured the distance from the Lab’s nose to its stomach and dented the tubing to mark it.
Davey had lost a lot of blood and was in shock. He needed to be rehydrated quickly or he would die. By touching the back of his tongue with my index finger, I forced him to gag the tubing down. Because it slid cleanly to my mark, I was pretty sure it was in his stomach, not his lung. Just to be certain, though, I laid my ear to the dog’s stomach and blew gently into the tube. I heard a telltale blub-blub.
I took the funnel and began to pour the Gatorade into him. As I did, I told the girl the truth. A heavily edited version of the truth, anyway. I told her about my diver friends lost at sea. I told her I had reason to suspect that they’d been picked up by the Nan-Shan. I told her that aboard the boat was an albino man whose name might be Hassan Atwa Kazan.
When I spoke the name, she began to shake her head, saying, “That could be his real name, but it ain’t what Daddy calls him. Those two freaks, I know exactly who you mean. The albino, nobody calls him Hassan, what they call him is Puff. I don’t know why unless it’s ’cause he’s a doper. The guy he runs boats with, his partner, his name’s Earl. Big fat colored man, only not like African colored, a different kind. He makes my daddy look skinny.” She touched an index finger to her cheek. “This side of his face, the colored man I’m talking about, he’s got a burn mark or something. His whole cheek.
“Both of them are pretty gross to look at, but the albino, though, he’s the worst. Gives me the spooks just bein’ in the same room with him. His face is so white, like the belly of a fish, and his eyes look like they’re made out of yellow glass. He wears like a towel on his head, shaped like a tent. It ain’t no turban, but something like a turban. I’ve seen ’em around here a few times, usually pickin’ up and droppin’ off the shrimper.”
“Do they run the boat for your father?”
She thought for a moment, shrugged. “I don’t know what it is they do. But it ain’t shrimpin’. I don’t ask. All I know is, they’ll take the boat and be gone for three, four weeks at a time, and they never come back together. The colored man, he usually brings the boat back here alone. I guess the albino gets dropped off somewhere. Like he’s the boss and the colored man does the dirty work. And stink? Man, that boat stinks so bad you can’t hardly stand it.”
“What about a man named Baker? Does he work with them?”
She made a flapping gesture of dismissal with her hand. “No-o-o-o. That’s that idiot Timmy Baker, just an ol’ boy that shrimps for Daddy sometimes when he ain’t sleepin’ on the dock drunk.”
I had pulled the skin together around the Lab’s ear as best I could, then around his ruined tail, and was stitching the wounds closed, applying Neosporin as I went. The tranquilizers had kicked in, and the dog was asleep, breathing rapidly. I said, “I need to find those two, Shanay. They may know something about my friends.”
“Mister, you don’t want to mess with those men. They’re not going to tell you nothin’ unless you make them tell you and, no offense, but you just ain’t the type. You remind me of a algebra teacher I had back when I was still goin’ to class. He played some weird, funny game. Badminton, I think it was.”
“Would you tell me where to find the men if you could?”
“Daddy’s probably got them down in his book. People that pay him money, he keeps track of where they live. The colored man, he’s got an accent. I don’t know where from. Same with the albino.”
I said, “While I finish up here, why don’t you go have a look. Write whatever information you find on a piece of paper.”
She’d been sitting at the dog’s side, stroking his back. Now she stood. I noticed for the first time that she had a small butterfly tattooed on her ankle, and she wore a bracelet of blue string around her wrist. She stared at her sleeping pet for a moment before she said, “Why is it people are so much meaner than dogs and such, but we call them animals?”
Tomlinson is fond of saying that a Godlike greatness is available to humanity only because we are balanced with an equal capacity for evil. My view of the world, however, is more clinical, so less certain. I replied, “I don’t know. I’m more worried about how much blood he lost.”
“Is he gonna live, mister? He’s slept with me every night since my mama ran away. Never left me alone. I don’t know what I’d do without my Davey dog.”
I wanted to tell her that, sooner or later, her companion would die, leaving her alone in her father’s nightmare world. I wanted to tell her that if she did not break away from that world soon, it would drag her in and destroy her.
Sometimes we get the urge to help even when we know we can’t.
Instead, I said, “I hope he’s okay, Shanay. He seems like a nice dog, and you seem like a nice girl. I really do hope the best for both of you.”
I was waiting on the dock when she returned and handed me a sheet of paper. The security lights were bright enough that I could read her childlike printing: Hassan Atwa Kazan had a P.O. box in Tangier, Morocco.
Tangier?
Years ago, I’d been in Marrakech and in Casablanca. Just a week or two, then gone. But my knowledge of the region’s geography wasn’t good, though I’d certainly heard of Tangier.
Kazan’s telephone number, however, had a familiar prefix: 57-5. It was the country and city code for Cartagena, Colombia. Same with a man named Earl Stallings. Not surprisingly, his address was the Hotel de Acension, Cartagena.
As I read the names, the girl said, “Hassan whatever-the-rest-of-it-is, I guess that must be the albino’s name. He’s sick-white looking, but his features ain’t what you’d call American. He was in daddy’s book under P for Puff.”
I said, “Thanks. This helps me a lot. Something else, Shanay? I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone you gave me this information. You’d be doing me a big favor.”
“I’m going to tell you again, mister: Stay away from them two. I think they even scare Daddy a lil’ bit.”
“I’ll be careful. But it’s not going to help if they know I’m looking for them. Would you promise me?”
Her voice had a touching, needy quality as she replied, “I don’t even know your name, mister. I couldn’t get in touch with you even if I just wanted to talk, so why would I make you a promise?”
I reached out, squeezed her shoulder, saw her face tilt upward toward me, felt her body soften. Sometimes, you have to operate on instinct, and I decided to trust her. I told her my name and that, if she was ever in trouble, day or night, she was welcome to contact me. As I talked, I opened my little waterproof pouch, stored the paper therein, and walked to where the Nan-Shan was moored to retrieve my mask and fins.
The girl said, “Marion? That’s a funny name for a guy. You don’t mind, I think I will call you. Just to talk some nights. It might be nice to have a man friend who isn’t tryin’… well, it just might be nice to have a man friend.”
Then she stopped as if stunned at the sight of my snorkeling gear, and added in a voice of surprise, “You’re kiddin’ me, dude-don’t tell me you swam up this river?”
Her concern made me smile. “Not far, don’t worry. My skiff’s just around the first bend, less than a hundred meters from here. I’ve had a lot of experience swimming at night.”
She grabbed my arm, pulling me back from the water. “Marion, you’re nuts. Jesus Christ, I’m surprised you’re still alive. Get in my little boat, I’ll take you.”
“I don’t mind the swim. It’s not a problem.”
“Oh yeah? Hand me that little flashlight you got-no, look, don’t even bother. There she is right by the dock. Lizzy Pig. You can see her in the light. I hate her. She still gives me nightmares.”
Lizzy Pig? What kind of name was that?
Then I saw, and understood. Drifting alongside the Nan-Shan was one of the biggest alligators I’ve ever seen. Had to be close to fourteen feet long and so broad that it resembled an Australian croc-or the empty fuel drum I’d mistaken it for on my swim in.
When the girl took my fins and mask and stepped toward her little boat, I didn’t protest. “Lizzy Pig, Daddy’s had her for years. She gets real excited the nights he puts on dogfights. Big old fat lizard. She knows, next morning, he’s gonna feed her the losers.”