Backwater Pass

  Backwater Pass

  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.

  In March of this year (2018), the FIU walking bridge, built using a new type of engineering called Accelerated Bridge Construction, collapsed on Highway 41 and killed six people. The investigation is ongoing as are the lawsuits and talk of criminal indictments. Now, almost six months later, there are as many conspiracy theories as facts. Backwater Pass is my own spin on what could have happened. The book is purely a work of fiction. Though the collapse is accurate, my portrayal is not meant to reflect on any person or company involved in the design, construction, or investigation. I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the victims and families. Steven Becker - July 2018

  1

  The bones of the old boat were calling us through the thirty feet of crystal clear water. Allie, Justine, and I leaned over the side of the boat staring down at the wreck. Shipwrecks have a certain romance to them and this one, although not an eighteenth-century Spanish galleon, was every bit as compelling. Our minds wandered back in time to New Year’s 1966 when the ill-fated luxury yacht, running twenty miles off course in ten-foot seas, embedded itself in the reef. All aboard had been lifted by Coast Guard helicopters and taken ashore. There had been no casualties, except whatever remained below the glimmering surface.

  Allie, Justine, and I had spent the last few weekends scouting for lobster season and enjoying a part of the Biscayne National Park that I wasn’t all that familiar with. Most of my year as a special agent here had been spent on the inside of the barrier islands. That was where most of the action that concerned me took place. Lying within a stone’s throw of Miami, for centuries the miles of undeveloped coastline and mangrove-lined channels had been a smugglers’ haven. And since the boundary between the park and state waters was only a dotted line on a chart, the Coast Guard and ICE handled most of the offshore action. There was plenty for me on the inside. Since being stationed here as part of what I like to call the “witness protection program of the National Park Service”, I had found my share of contraband, as well as several floaters.

  I had learned the inside waters of the park by fishing, an activity that as often as it landed its intended target also found trouble. Fishing was a way for me to enter a kind of flow state where I could see things differently. Maybe it was the primitive brainwave signal when we turned from prey to predator or just the anticipation that anything could happen at any time, but I did my best thinking with a rod in my hand. When it had come time to choose where I was going to transfer, the water here had played a large part in my decision.

  My daughter Allie had been recently certified as a diver and I was still a novice, leaving us to rely on Justine, my girlfriend, for instruction. Lobster were protected inside the park, pushing us outside of the park boundary where we had spent the day scouting groups of coral heads and shallow reefs in anticipation of the Sportsman’s mini season. Throughout the state, the last weekend of July was reserved for recreational divers to take lobster before the commercial traps were set. There was no guarantee the crustaceans would be there next weekend, but if they were, scoping things out early would give us an advantage.

  My GPS was loaded with locations—more spots than we could check in the two days of the mini-season—so we decided to check out some of the wrecks inside the park.

  “Hey, Dad, which one is this?”

  “I think it’s the Mandalay. The Laguna is to the north.” With the semi-waterproof chart from the gift shop spread out on top of the console of the boat, I traced the Maritime Heritage Trail with my finger and confirmed my guess.

  “How much air do you guys have?” I asked.

  They went to their gear and checked the gauges.

  “Twelve hundred,” Allie called out proudly.

  “Almost two thousand,” Justine said. “What about you?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to be the low man, but diving is a sport where you have to put aside your ego. “Just over a thousand.” Justine’s experience accounted for her minimal air consumption and Allie was a natural. I sucked air like a pig. “It’ll give us a good twenty minutes,” I said, roughly calculating my own consumption at the shallow depth. This was the end of our second tanks, and after multiple drops on different areas, I had gotten a feel for how quickly I burned through my air supply.“

  “Let’s stay together and make sure the boat is in sight when Pops here has five hundred left.” Justine gave me a look that told me I would be in big trouble if I didn’t comply.

  Several minutes later we were geared up and one by one we rolled over the side of my park service’s twenty-two-foot center console—one of the perks of the job. The water was so clear that when I looked up, I was worried about hitting my head on one of the old beams that had made up the hull of the ship, but I found my equilibrium and finned to the mooring line. I looked around for Justine and Allie, who were twenty feet away and already exploring the wreck. Out of habit, I glanced at the surface and relaxed when I saw ours and the other five white balls allocated for the wreck and hoped that not having to worry about the anchor pulling would help with my air consumption. After I finned toward them we grouped up and gave each other the “okay” sign.

  The bottom came up quickly and I pressed the inflator button to attain neutral buoyancy and not smash one of my body parts into a piece of the fifty-year-old wreck. I had been reluctant to dive on something so new, thinking the older bones of a Spanish Galleon would be more exciting, but seeing the intact framework for the ship covered with multi-colored marine growth was fascinating. The saltwater and currents had long ago eaten away the wooden hulls of the older boats, often leaving little more than a pile of ballast stones to mark their graves. But as we swam around the hundred-plus-foot hull of what had once been a state-of-the-art luxury yacht, I could almost envision the New Year’s party on her last night at sea.

  We had intentionally stayed shallower than thirty-three feet all day, so there were no calculations or worries about decompression sickness. Air was our limiting factor diving this shallow, and when I looked at my gauge and saw the needle deep into the red area that showed I had less than five hundred psi left, I reached for a brass clip I had on my vest, removed it, and reaching behind me banged the tank with it.

  Within seconds Justine and Allie were by my side, and we swam together toward the bow of the wreck where the mooring line was secured to a huge concrete block. Surprisingly I had a few hundred more psi than Allie, who still wanted to push the limits and continue the dive. Justine had decided that the only way Allie would learn to respect the privilege of breathing bottled air was to run out. We continued and a few minutes later I was alarmed when I saw Allie take that last breath: I don’t think I’ll soon forget the panicked look on her face when she realized her tank was empty. Justine was right there with her octopus, a secondary regulator for just this purpose, and handed it to her. Allie’s training took over and the two buddy-breathed to the surface. I promised myself to thank Justine later for the lesson.

  The swim ladder was only a few feet away when it was my turn to experience the pull of nothing as I tried to inhale and felt only resistance in return. My father had taught me the rules to being a gentleman, and I generally followed them, but not this time. I kicked hard for the ladder and was first aboard.

  After dropping my tank and BC on the deck, I helped Allie and Justine aboard—but no
t before kicking my air gauge under my gear to avoid the certain lecture I would get if either of them saw the needle bottomed out. Twenty-two feet of boat is not a lot of room for three divers’ gear so we stripped our tanks and stowed our fins, BCs, and regulators in the console before dropping the mooring buoy and heading back to Adams Key.

  Located just inside of Caesar Creek, the small island was my home. I shared it with Ray, the maintenance guru for the outer islands, and his family. Zero, the island alarm skidded to a stop on the concrete dock when we pulled up. He barked twice until realizing his two favorite people were aboard, then started groaning softly. Allie, with the bowline in her hand, jumped up to the dock and tied the line off. Zero sidled up to her, pinning her against the piling and demanding the attention he had convinced himself he was entitled to. He had a moment of indecision when Justine hopped up with the stern line, but Allie was working hard to please him. We were usually buddies, but today I was on the bottom of the list and was able to lift our gear onto the dock and hose down the boat while Justine and Allie took turns playing with him.

  This was always a hard part of our time together. Allie and I had regained our closeness over the last few months with a big helping hand from Justine. It had been a good time for all of us, and I looked at Justine as she hosed down our gear, wondering when I would get the nerve to tell her I loved her. Allie was ready for us to get married, but I was a little behind the curve.

  The last six months had been some of the happiest of my life, but there had been a hard year leading up to it. I would never forget the small courtroom in Plumas County where Jane, my ex, had taken Allie from me. I had missed a year of her almost sixteen-year-old life, even though I could understand Jane’s response: our house had been firebombed by an angry cartel after I had discovered what was, at the time, the largest pot grow on public land. I might still hold the record for that discovery, but following those kinds of stats held little interest for me.

  Becky came over with Jamie, her three-year-old, following close behind. “Y’all catch anything?”

  “No, just doing some scouting,” I said.

  “Ought to talk to Ray. He knows where those buggers are.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and turned to find myself eye to eye with Zero. Allie and Justine had abandoned him to play with Jamie. Now I was good enough.

  “Y’all want to come up for some snapper? Ray’s got the grill going. Caught a bucket full of nice yellowtails this morning.”

  “Can we, Dad?” Allie asked.

  Zero answered the question by barking several times. “Sure.” It settled that uneasy time trying to decide how to end the day and take Allie back to her mother. “But, we have to go right after dinner.”

  “I know.”

  The typical teenage acknowledgment was given. We brought the dive gear up to the house to dry and headed across the lawn to Ray and Becky’s house.

  The island had a large clearing that incorporated our two stilt houses as well as a small day-use area. The well-manicured lawn was an unusual feature for the barrier islands, which were typically little more than salt marshes covered with mangroves. Adams Key, formerly called Cocolobo Key, and the adjacent area known as Islandia, had a colorful history. Back in the 1920s speculators had taken what was essentially free land and tried to tame it. Adams Key was one of the few projects that had not been abandoned and it had housed the Cocolobo club, a resort reputed to have been visited by four presidents.

  The islands fell into disrepair over the years and after the eye of hurricane Andrew plowed through here in 1992 there was little left to show for the early developers’ efforts except for some deep water channels that dead-ended for no apparent reason, and clearings such as this one. Most everything else had been reclaimed by the harsh environment.

  The smell of the barbecue sauce and butter mixture Becky used to baste the fish had my mouth watering, and the cold beers sitting in a bucket of ice looked inviting. I was taking Allie home, though, so I stuck with my bottle of water. We sat around the standard-issue park service fire pit. There were thousands just like it in every campground in America, but Ray had customized his. Instead of a partial grill that was rarely clean enough to use, rods welded to the side of the steel ring supported a full-size stainless steel grill that could be set at several heights.

  Allie gave Ray a rundown of where we had dived today and I knew she wanted him to offer up some of his super secret spots, but he remained silent, only nodding to her. I knew they supplemented their income by selling lobster and had expected the silence. It was like asking Chico, one of the fishing guides here, for some of his spots—something you just didn’t do. The truth was that we’d had a great day of prospecting ourselves. I turned to the fire and watched as the delicious marinade dripped fat onto the coals, creating flames that kissed the underside of the fish.

  Several minutes later, the food was ready and we sat down to eat. The same conversation was playing out here as at thousands of other barbecues in Florida: where to find the lobster this coming weekend.

  Eventually, we finished dinner and said our good-byes. Zero followed us to the boat and barked as Allie and Justine released the lines and I turned the bow toward reality. Heading into the sunset, I wished I could extend the day, but also knew there would be more to come.

  “Wanna drive?” I asked Allie. At six months past her fifteenth birthday she had just gotten her learner’s permit. I wasn’t ready for her to drive in Miami traffic, but she was confident with the boat.

  “Really?”

  I moved over and let her take the wheel. She was a little hesitant, causing the ride to be somewhat jerky at first, but the boat came up on plane and I could see the thrill in her eyes as she steered toward the markers leading up to Bayfront Park and the park service headquarters building.

  2

  Divorce with children is complicated and rule number one is to not let your ex-wife near your current girlfriend. Justine continued to amaze me and made every effort to make things work with Jane. They got along, which I considered a stroke of luck, though sometimes it was unsettling when they ganged up against me.

  There wasn’t the typical animosity between Jane and I that many divorced couples had. Neither of the usual culprits: sex or money, were responsible for our breakup. We already had been heading down the wrong path before the incident. Living in a small town had been a dream for each of us, with the difference being the definition of “small”. I was fine with the four-figure number on the sign when you entered the town; she would have preferred another zero on the end. Then our downfall was set into freefall when our home was firebombed by the cartel. I didn’t blame her for her reaction.

  Though they got along and it was often more convenient for Justine, who lived in Miami, to run Allie to her mom, I preferred to pick up and drop off my daughter whenever possible.

  Living on an island had its perks, but any kind of rendezvous needed to be thoroughly planned. Adams Key lay seven miles from park headquarters, where my truck was parked, and it could take anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour to reach it. The weather played as much a part in the time it took to cross the bay as the traffic did on the mainland.

  The afternoon sea breeze had kicked up and I estimated that the first part of today’s commute would be about forty minutes. It was a little less than that when we pulled into the slip at the small marina beside the headquarters building. This late on a Sunday, the usual suspects were all there: Pete Robinson’s FWC boat, Johnny Wells thirty-nine-foot quad-powered ICE Interceptor, and my counterpart Susan McLeash’s matching center console. Allie brushed off my attempt for help and backed into the slip without incident. We secured the lines and headed for the next stage of our journey: Miami traffic.

  I gave Allie the maybe next time line when she asked if she could drive on land as well, and hopped behind the wheel of the park service pickup. Justine gracefully got in back and Allie jumped in the passenger seat. After starting the truck, I glanced over to make sure her se
atbelt was fastened and found her nose buried in her phone. Justine had speculated that Allie had a boyfriend, but I wasn’t ready to ask that question yet. Sometimes it’s better for a father to be in the dark.

  I pulled out of the lot and headed west toward the Turnpike. With one eye ahead and the other on my phone, I started to enter the address of our meeting place into the maps app when Allie grabbed the phone from me.

  “Dad,” she scolded me.

  I ignored the throat clearing in the back seat and relented. The road was dead straight and I was an accomplished knee driver, but now that Allie had her permit, I realized everything I did behind the wheel would be scrutinized.

  “Looks like there’s traffic on the Turnpike around 836.”

  “Alternate route?” With the crapshoot that was Miami traffic, using the map app had proven to be a reliable time saver. The technology had advanced to the point that it displayed real-time traffic in either green, yellow, or red. Miami all too frequently was full of yellow lines and red dashes.

  “Take the Shula Expressway to the Palmetto and get off on 41. That should take us around it.”

  It bothered me that map reading was becoming a lost art, but this was still cool. I followed her directions and a half hour later exited the Palmetto and took a left onto 41, which would take us back to the Turnpike.

  “You thought any more about what colleges you want to look at?” I asked after seeing the sign for Florida International University.

  “Gators, if they’ll take me.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of having to pay in-state tuition. I was about to ask if she had a backup plan when I heard a loud crash and brake lights flashed ahead of us. Suddenly the traffic came to a standstill and a cloud of dust rose from the road ahead. I didn’t have to look at Justine to know this was worse than a fender bender. I slammed on the brakes, barely missing the car in front of me, and set the lever to park. “Allie, stay here,” I said and got out. Justine was next to me.