Backwater Bay

  Backwater Bay

  A Kurt Hunter Mystery

  Steven Becker

  The White Marlin Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Steven Becker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Backwater Channel

  Thanks for Reading

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  Also by Steven Becker

  1

  If I had a knife I could have sliced the humid air like a loaf of bread; it was a day when I would have rather been somewhere else. Whatever parts of my body weren’t covered by my wet, sticky uniform were coated with fiberglass dust. It was misery at its finest, and I longed for the crisp air and cold streams of the Sierra Nevada. The locals said if you lived in South Florida long enough you became acclimated. Since I’m from Northern California, it took some getting used to. It’d been a month, and I didn’t think I would ever be comfortable there.

  The entire neighborhood was out watching, playing, and helping me repair the Park Service boat that I had run into the dock last week. Adams Key wasn’t much of a community, but the small island with two houses was my home. By Caesar Creek, the popular pass to the Atlantic Ocean from Biscayne Bay, the small atoll sat in the middle of Biscayne National Park. Ray was helping me, or rather, I was helping him repair the damage I had done to the bow last week when I misjudged the wind and current and came in too hot on the concrete dock. His wife, Becky, was sitting under a palm tree watching their son, Jamie. Zero was doing what Zero does—barking at everything that moved.

  This kind of repair was new to me, and watching Ray work, I wasn’t sure it was something I would ever be good at. I was more a wanderer than a workman, which was a good fit for my job—patrolling the national parks. While Ray laid up the fiberglass and resin over the foot-long scrape and we waited for the chemicals to cure, I watched the parade of boats stream by, on their way to the ocean side of the barrier islands. Then it was my job to sand. Through three different grits, I shaped the resin to match the contour of the boat. Feathering the edges was a little tricky, but with Ray’s guidance, I was getting the hang of it.

  “You think this is the last coat?” I asked.

  “Maybe one more. We can lay it up tonight, then sand and paint in the morning.”

  “Cool. I gotta work tomorrow. Do you have time early?”

  “Dude, I got nothing but time. Martinez can be as pesky as those No-See-Ums with y’all agents, but I’m a lowly maintenance guy. He looks at me like I’m one of the greenskeepers at those fancy golf courses he’s always talking about. Unless there’s a brown spot on the putting green or such, we’re invisible.”

  Ray had pretty much summed up my boss. From my short experience with Martinez, I had learned he liked things clean, simple, and off his desk. Ray’s job was to maintain the buildings and infrastructure of the park. Something, after a decade here, he could do on autopilot. For an area with a permanent population of a dozen—the four and a half of us here and two other families on Elliott Key—he was the man. From the lighthouse up on Boca Chita Key to the two campgrounds in the park, he kept the outer islands working. He was a happy man, but Becky was getting anxious about bringing up their two-year-old son, Jamie, a twenty-minute boat ride away from the closest street.

  “Why don’t you finish that up? I’m gonna grab a shower, another beer, and fire up the grill. We can cook up some of them fresh tails me and Zero got this morning,” he said. Grabbing his tools and supplies, he walked toward the small shed by his house.

  I had heard about the underwater exploits of the pit bull mix with the eye patch that reminded me of the Little Rascals’ dog, Petey.

  Becky picked up Jamie and turned to me. “Hey, Kurt, how’s about you keep an eye on old Zero for a few? Got to get the young’un down for a nap and get a little quality time with the old man.”

  That was a little more information than I needed, but she had one of those singsong Southern accents that you couldn’t say no to. Not that I would. Zero was about all I had for family here. Just when the first sign of the fiberglass mat started to show through the smoky resin, I stopped sanding and cleaned up the rest of the supplies. Taking a few steps back, I looked at the boat, still not satisfied it would pass muster under Martinez’s critical eye. He was far more interested in the condition of the equipment and facilities than in doing investigative work. It was all by the numbers with him. Hopefully, the final coat of resin and paint would blend it all together.

  I was halfway down the path to my house when I heard the whine of an outboard engine. A bird’s-eye view of my neighborhood would clearly have shown the deepwater channel called Caesar Creek. Named after Black Caesar, the famed eighteenth-century pirate who plied those waters, the winding channel was the only pass from the bay to the Atlantic for miles. From my brief explorations of the small keys, shoals, and lagoons, it was no wonder that pirates and smugglers had used this area to hide out. It was a complicated maze of mangrove islands, lagoons, creeks, and shoals.

  If I wanted to fill out incident reports all day, which would have made Martinez a happy man and my life easier, I only had to stand on the long concrete pier outside my front door. Although it was a well-marked pass, many boaters, either lacking in patience or not paying attention, misread the shallow waters and grounded. I’d usually check that they were okay and leave them in the hands of Sea Tow or BoatUS. There were ordinances about damaging the fragile seagrass beds, but most of the groundings were accidental.

  It was the sound of the engine that was bothering me. Even my inexperienced ear could tell from the high pitch that the driver was running too fast. Approaching from the ocean side, the go-fast boat sped by the dock, rocking my Park Service center-console and causing me to hold my breath hoping the fenders would protect our repairs. These were the guys who made my job hard. Besides their other nefarious activities, they liked to flex their horsepower and often pushed other boaters out of the channel and into the shallows. Looking to the left, I saw the boat fly past Caesar’s Rock. Instead of following the main marked channel into Biscayne Bay, the boat turned hard to port, cutting around the piling with the square green 23 placard attached to it.

  After a month there, I knew the main cuts and passes, but there were areas I hadn’t yet explored and this was one. I was still green as a boater and had taken to using the kayak I had found leaning against the house to both explore some of the sketchier areas and get some exercise. From studying the charts, I knew the deepwater channel the boat had entered passed between Rubicon and Reid Keys. It was unmarked and ended in an area called Islandia, which, although it sounded exotic, was pretty much a swamp with winding creeks connecting the bay and ocean. These were smuggler’s waters. The eye of Hurricane Andrew had passed
directly over this spot in 1992, cleaning out the old buildings and shacks, but the trade remained.

  Nothing good went on in these backwaters. I ran to the dock and jumped down to my twenty-two-foot center-console. In less than a minute I had cast off the lines and was under way. Expecting trouble, I pulled my webbed gun belt from the console and, steering with one hand, put on the belt and checked the weapon. The gun did little to calm my nerves as I stared at the screen of the chart plotter watching the depth drop from ten feet to three in seconds. The cut suddenly ended and I slipped into neutral. With delusions of building some great resort, developers had dredged channels like this one in the fifties and sixties. They were abandoned now, marked yet still dangerous. The boat coasted to a stop and I looked around. I didn’t need the electronics to know I was surrounded by shallow water. The brown color all around me was a sure sign that I should exercise caution.

  I dropped the Power-Pole to anchor the boat and cut off the engine. It was quiet now. Waiting for the last of my wake to wash through the mangroves, I listened for any man-made sounds. The outgoing tide pushed against the hull, but the pole held and I waited. The usual sounds of birds squawking and fish jumping were gone. It was too quiet. Looking around, I zoomed the chart plotter in on the area, trying to figure out where a boat that size could be.

  The guidebooks showed the famed Florida Keys extending from Key Largo, at the southern boundary of Biscayne National Park, a hundred twenty miles to Key West. Geologically, the chain of islands began fifteen miles above Key Largo and ended seventy miles past Key West. Biscayne National Park was a unique environment, billed as 95 percent water. There was a lot of blue out there but also a lot of shoreline. Most of this was mangroves, which trapped everything the tide brought in—and from my short time there, I knew most of it was trouble.

  A small boat-shaped icon showed my position, and I scanned the display in search of an adjacent area I knew. For the past month, I had been methodically exploring the park. Starting at Bayfront Park on the mainland in Homestead, where the headquarters building was located, I had worked my way south along the shoreline, which was crosshatched by the grid of cooling canals for the Turkey Point nuclear plant; through Card Pass to the Card Sound Bridge; and back via the chain of barrier islands.

  If the blue water and brown land were reversed, it would have looked like the Plumas National Forest, where I had been stationed before I was relocated here. The forest had a network of trails and fire roads that resembled the channels and passes here. Much like the huge expanse of water in Biscayne National Park, not much happened on the vast land tracts that made up the forest. It was the thin lines on the maps—streams in the forest and islands in the park—that attracted man.

  In the national forest, I had soon found the best way to walk my beat was by working the streams. And the best way to work the streams was by fishing them. It had taken time to learn to read the water out west, but once I did, it allowed me to discover the largest pot grow ever found on public land.

  If I hadn’t been fishing, I never would have noticed the small current running through an eddy. It looked unnatural and I followed the flow, uncovering the intake for an irrigation line that ran up the steep banks and serviced the grow. That find had gotten me publicity I didn’t want, which had split my family and now had me in the Park Service version of the Witness Protection Program. It may have ruined my life, but it hadn’t made me quit fishing.

  Fly fishing had become a passion and I relished the opportunities the bay offered. After hooking a small tarpon on a spinning reel when I first got there, I was addicted. Fishing fresh and salt water were different and I still had a lot to learn. Practicing my casting on moving water taught me not only the secrets of the bonefish, tarpon, and trout but also showed the cuts and eddies I would never have noticed just cruising by.

  The quiet was broken by an engine starting. My right hand instinctively went to my gun, and I waited. Instead of coming toward me, the sound receded. The boat was moving away. I looked down at the chart plotter, zoomed it in as far as it would go, and saw the small channel labeled Hurricane Creek that I guessed the boat had escaped through. The engine noise soon faded entirely as the boat moved on and I was stuck staring at the shallows off Totten and Old Rhodes Keys. I was unfamiliar with the water there, so this was as far as I would venture in the Park Service boat. Martinez might have gotten over the scrape, but a tow bill would put him over the edge.

  With my prey gone, I pressed the button to raise the Power-Pole. I waited for the current to move me into the channel and saw several fish jumping at the entrance to a small creek on Rubicon Key. Curious, I idled closer to the inlet and watched the water. The tide was moving quickly, making it easy to see the main channel, and I inched forward. Several more splashes caught my attention. The depth finder read eight feet and was holding steady, giving me a little reassurance as I entered the creek.

  There were no soundings on the chart plotter, so I was running mainly on instinct. The depth finder was helpful, but one of the first lessons I had learned was that the transducer, being mounted on the stern, showed where you had been already and not where you were going. Still, it was reassuring to see the depth remain constant. Watching the color of the water for any sudden changes that would indicate shallow bottom, I moved into the interior of the key. Fish continued to jump around me and I lowered the Power-Pole, reached around into the console, and pulled out my fly rod.

  After assembling the eight-weight, nine-foot rod, I installed the reel and fed the line through the eyelets. I tied on a twelve-foot leader, then looked at my fly box and chose a Clouser Minnow. The yellow and white streamer with two eyes didn’t look like it would fool anything, but once it was in the water, fish went for it. Without knowing what species I was casting for, this was my go-to fly. Stripping a dozen feet of line off the reel, I moved to the open bow and started with a few false casts before allowing the fly to drop on the water. Once it did, a swirl came up behind it, and with my heart beating hard, I used my left hand to strip in a few inches, raising the tip of the rod with each pull to make the fly swim. It only took two pulls before the fish took the fly and ran for the mangroves. The rod bent under the strain, and with the line pinched between my left index finger and thumb, I gauged the stress on the line.

  If I were in open water, I would have allowed the line to slide between my fingers until the slack was taken up and I could fight the fish on the reel, but the fish was heading hard for the mangroves. With the line held tightly between my fingers, the rod was almost bent double as I reeled in the slack, and I finally breathed when I could release my left hand and fight it on the reel. Now, with the leverage afforded by the rod and drag on the reel, I pulled the fish away from the roots and worked it toward the boat.

  I saw a brilliant silver flash and then the black lateral line that told me the fish was a snook—my first. But the fish had other ideas after seeing the boat and doubled its efforts. Even assisting the drag by cupping my hand on the reel to slow the line, there was no stopping the fish as it ran for the mangroves. I fought back, using the rod again to try to pull the snook to open water, but it was deep in the root system. I felt the line go slack and I knew the fight was over.

  Fishing is an emotional roller coaster. The most thrilling feeling you can get is when the fish takes the bait or lure and the fight begins. The most defeating feeling is when the line goes slack and you know you’ve lost. It was the latter I was experiencing as I cursed under my breath and started to reel the line in. It came freely for about ten feet and then stopped. Already frustrated, I was about to give a hard tug to free it from the root or branch it was caught on, not really caring about breaking the line and losing the fly, when I felt it move.

  2

  I knew it wasn’t a fish. There’s some kind of instinctual feeling an experienced fisherman gets when he is connected to something alive. There are the telltale signs: the downward pull, the shake of the head, or the run. Whatever I had snagged was not
alive.

  Like most fishermen, I hated to lose gear, and although it was a two-dollar fly on the end of the line, I pressed the button to raise the Power-Pole and, with the boat free, began to pull. If you’ve ever held a baby, you know the difference between dead weight and live weight. Without the stress of a fish on the end, the eight-weight line was strong enough to pull the boat toward the bushes. Fly line is pretty heavy-duty. Unlike mono or braid, PVC-coated braided Dacron is rated based on the weight in grains of the first thirty feet. The actual breaking strength of the bright yellow line was probably nearly thirty pounds.

  I was close to the snag when the T-top of the boat brushed against the outer branches of a mangrove, forcing me to change tactics. Setting the Power-Pole again to anchor the boat, I pulled the line hand over hand until I saw the clear monofilament leader. I had to be careful now. The entire stress was on the dozen feet of twenty-pound test. Slowly I retrieved the line until I saw a dark shape emerge from the mangroves. At first, I thought it was organic matter, a mass of branches and mud. That proved not to be the case when I saw the neoprene covering and knew I had hooked a body.

  Everything changed now. I was on the clock and there were procedures to follow. Reluctantly, I took out my cell phone and called Martinez. Half a dozen rings later, I breathed a sigh of relief when the call went to voicemail. As professionally as I could, I described the find, being careful to give the date, time, and location. With that out of the way, I scrolled through my contacts and called the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office.