Wood's Reach Read online

  Mac had spent a sleepless night anchored on a shallow mudflat in Boot Key Harbor. Trusting the tides, he had risked the shallows and grounded the boat in two feet of water, using several nearby wrecks to provide some cover. It would be morning before the tide came back in and floated him off. Until then he was stuck.

  The only hassle he had encountered was the mosquitoes that kept him awake. They were gone with the dawn and, like clockwork, just after the sun rose, the boat lifted and he was free. After pulling the anchor, he motored across to the main channel and turned to the west, following the markers past the gas docks and turning into a small canal before the harbor entrance. He idled to a dock on the left that serviced the boatyard and tied off the boat.

  While he walked to the office, he looked around the work area for his boat and found it sitting on supports near the back of the yard, buried behind several other boats that were currently being worked on. It didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon. Head down, he entered the small office.

  “Hey, Mac,” the man behind the counter said. “I’d shake your hand, but… ” He continued to clean his hands with a rag.

  “Bill,” Mac replied. He stood there, staring at the coffeemaker.

  “Go ahead. First one’s on the house,” he said. “Come to take care of that invoice? Just need to get paid and put a few finishing touches on her and she’s ready to go.”

  Mac poured a cup and sat down on a barstool by the counter. “That’s going to have to wait. I see you’ve got her in the back anyway. Just add on the storage charges.”

  “So, what brings you by?” Bill asked.

  “Got into a bit of a scrape last night. I was wondering if you can pull the tower from my boat?”

  “Sure. No big deal. What am I doing with it?” Bill asked.

  “Store it until I can find a new top,” Mac said.

  Bill put down the rag and went to the door. Mac grabbed the coffee and followed him out. Together they stared at the center-console.

  “You got a story to go along with that?”

  “If I told you Tru was involved, would that suffice?” Mac answered.

  “Probably. I’ll keep an eye on the Keynoter for the official account.”

  “You do that. I just can’t be running around like this,” Mac said.

  An hour later, the tower was unbolted, and a forklift lifted it off the boat. Mac watched the operator set it next to his fishing boat, then climbed back aboard the center-console. “I’ll cover that next week,” he said and fired the engine. Mac untied the lines, waved a thank-you to Bill, and waited for the flooding tide to push the boat away from the dock. When the boat was in the center of the canal, he eased down on the throttles and idled out of the canal.

  He steered through the last pair of markers and accelerated, surprised by the additional speed the 250-hp engine provided without the weight of the tower. The only drawback was that without the antennae, the electronics were worthless, but this was his backyard, and he steered back to Wood’s by memory.

  After tying off, he climbed down and walked back to the house. He found his phone on the workbench, the battery dead. Starting the generator, he set the phone to charge and left the shed. Sitting on a stump, he thought about what he needed to do next. He wasn’t a gun guy and had nothing more powerful than a twenty-two, a small-gauge shotgun, and some spearguns, but thinking there might be a need now, he remembered Ironhead and Wallace dropping theirs into the water when the sheriff arrived.

  ***

  The sun hit Trufante in his eyes and he rolled over, smiling when he found Pamela was next to him. Day eight. A few ups and downs yesterday, but the streak was still alive. He brushed the hair covering her face aside and watched her eyes move as the light hit them.

  Finally she opened them. “Hey. We gotta go,” he said.

  “We were supposed to go last night,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and propping herself up on an elbow.

  The sheet fell from her body, and Trufante did all he could to pull himself away. “Needed to chill for a bit after that near-death experience. Anyway, old Alicia’d get her fangs out if we came barging in there at two a.m.” What he didn’t say was that he needed a drink after being sealed in the compartment in the floor. He looked at what little remained in the bottle next to the bed. Maybe more than one, he thought.

  “It wasn’t like you were in a rush either.” The words came out meaner than he had meant and he quickly countered, “You and Mac had your hands full too.”

  “Me and Mac Travis. Ought to be a song.”

  He ignored the line, getting up and going for the shower. With his head under the water, he started to think about how to apologize, something he wasn’t very good at, when he felt a body rub against him.

  They were out of the apartment half an hour later, heading toward Miami. They cruised through the Upper Keys, passing stacks of lobster traps and strip malls with small businesses and tourist shops huddled on small spits of land between the bridges that spanned miles of clear blue water. Trufante pulled over at a small restaurant in Islamorada and they went in for breakfast, failing to notice the white sedan that skidded to a stop and pulled in next door.

  ***

  “You’re supposed to be watching them,” Wallace scolded the man in the passenger seat.

  Ironhead set down his phone, resisting the urge to swat the smaller man like a fly. Instead he tried to control his breath and watched as Trufante and the woman entered the restaurant. “It’d be a piece of cake to just take it from him.”

  “Boss said no. If he’s right, they’re heading to see this woman that’s supposed to have ninja skills. Let the expert figure it out—then we take them both,” Wallace said.

  “True that,” Ironhead said. He needed to watch himself now, his experience telling him that the next few hours would be bad. The drugs he had bought at the bar last night had worn off and his pockets were empty. That thought took over his mind and he picked up his phone.

  “What’re you doing? Updating your Facebook status?” Wallace laughed at himself.

  Ironhead gave him a look and turned away so the other man couldn’t see the screen. His stubby fingers had a hard time with the keyboard, but he finally entered his search phrase. A minute later, the screen showed a plain building with a blue metal awning in front. The sign said Department of Veterans Affairs, and the address put them only a mile away.

  He tapped the wheel, trying to subdue his urge to drive there now. The scam had worked more than once. But Wallace would surely report him to Hawk. He would have to suck it up and wait. Finally, the restaurant door opened and the couple walked out, mounted the bike, and headed out of the lot. Ironhead and Wallace followed a respectable distance behind, easily blending in with the late-morning traffic. US-1 opened to two lanes in Key Largo, making it easier to tail them provided he made it through all the lights. The plain white car blended in with the line of traffic following the only route to the mainland. There would be no reason for them to suspect a tail.

  The motorcycle braked and turned right onto a small side street, jarring Ironhead back into the present. He slowed just in time to see the bike turn into a small parking lot adjacent to a two-story building backed up to a dock. A big red flag with a white stripe running diagonally across it stated its business.

  “What the heck? They going diving?”

  Wallace didn’t answer for a long moment. “Be patient.”

  The couple entered the shop based on the first floor and a few minutes later followed a heavyset man with short dreadlocks sticking straight out of his head around the back.

  “What do we do if they get on a boat?” Ironhead asked. The fact that there were no pharmacies on the water didn’t escape him.

  Wallace was on the phone and held up a finger. He gave the address and name of the shop to whoever was on the other end and waited.

  ***

  “Alicia Phon!” Trufante hugged the woman. “Goddamn if you ain’t lookin’ good. See that?
I hook you up with TJ and—damn, look at you.” He released her and turned to Pamela. “Hey, babe, this here’s Alicia. We go way back.”

  “Yeah, way back to last summer,” Alicia said, and they shared a laugh. “Mac said you had something for me to take a look at?”

  Trufante dug in his pocket for the thumb drive and handed it to her. He paused and reached back in, extracting the coin. “He told you about the drive, but he wanted to you to have a look at this too.”

  She spun the coin in the light. “Interesting. Which first?”

  “I’d do the coin myself, but Mac wants you to look at the drive,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll get on it,” she said and turned to the man with the dreadlocks. “Can you do without me on the afternoon charter? I’d really like to get into this now.”

  “Shoot. I’ll fill in for you,” Trufante said before he could answer. “Me and TJ got this for you.”

  “What about me?” Pamela asked.

  “You ain’t been to the Keys until you snorkeled the reef. Hold on to your hat, babe, this is going to be awesome.”

  She smiled and they walked downstairs. TJ asked them to stay by the boat while he rounded up the passengers and brought them around back. Trufante helped the eager tourists onto the boat and loaded gear while TJ gave the safety briefing. He looked over at Pamela, sitting with the other tourists, and wondered what her real story was. She looked like she belonged more with them than with him.

  ***

  “Well, what now?” Ironhead asked as the boat pulled away from the dock.

  Wallace stared after the boat. “Keep an eye out, I’m going to check out the upstairs.”

  “Like hell. You watch the damn place,” Ironhead said. If there was a search to be done, he was going to do it. The upstairs looked like an apartment—and apartments had medicine cabinets. He didn’t wait for an answer.

  He climbed the stairs two at a time and arrived on the landing, where he opened the door to the apartment. The kitchen was on his left, and he quickly crossed to the bar-height counter, where he scanned the papers and keys strewn across it. Not finding the drive, he moved to the living room, which held nothing either. The bathroom caught his eye, and he crossed the room, passing a pair of doors that he assumed were for a closet on his way to the hallway. A bedroom was to either side, but they could wait. His first stop was the medicine cabinet, which revealed little other than a man and a woman’s toiletries. Getting anxious, he pulled the vanity drawers out one at a time, rifling the contents in the process. In the right-side drawer, he found what he was after.

  Two prescription bottles stared at him, and he picked the largest up first. The drug was foreign to him, obviously not one of the opiate family he knew by heart. He set it down and lifted the other: industrial-grade Tylenol. He took half a dozen of the large white pills, hoping the horse-sized dose might help him through a rough spot, and looked at the container. The name meant nothing, but he memorized it anyway, repeating it over and over in his head as he checked the bedrooms and left the apartment.

  “Alicia Phon—with a P-H,” Wallace repeated the name. “Maybe we ought to let the boss know. See if that rings a bell anywhere,” he said, hoping the name would salvage the mission.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alicia plugged the thumb drive into an empty USB slot in her computer and waited for the files to load. One at a time, they populated the screen. She browsed through the pictures, trying to sort through the different angles, finally settling on four that represented the group. Pursing her lips, she applied some filters to even out the images. The photography was amateurish, even though she knew it had been done quickly under less-than-ideal conditions.

  Next she cropped the pictures, placed them side by side on one of the large screens mounted on the wall in front of her, and stared at them. Ensconced in TJ’s war room, she studied the patterns. What had once been the gamer’s paradise was now their joint command center. His half of the room, with a captain’s chair in the center, resembled the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. Her side was more utilitarian. The black-painted walls and grey ceiling lent a theater-like atmosphere. The small ductless air conditioner kicked on, providing a gentle stream of cool air on the back of her neck, but she hardly noticed. The low hum of the other electronics in the room was just background noise as well.

  She stared at the photos, trying to follow the intricate patterns that were rumored to hold the secret location of a treasure cached somewhere in the Middle Keys. The tattoos passed down from generation to generation of the local Indians somehow held the key to the riddle—if only someone could decipher them. Like so many other treasures, each generation knew less and less, and now, they couldn’t put the clues together. On the thumb drive were the only images of the deceased Teqea and Diego’s bodies. Mac had almost lost his life inadvertently putting the collection together and had spent hour upon hour trying to figure out their meaning, but had run into a wall every time.

  A thought occurred to her as she sipped from her water bottle. The patterns were unique—much like fingerprints. If she could find a database to run them against, the images might match something, somewhere. Opening another window, she opened the portal to the FBI and, using a friend’s credentials, logged in. The original images on the left remained static while those on the right whirled past, seeking some kind of match.

  Her concentration was broken by a noise from the living room. TJ was out on the charter and not expected back for another hour or so. If someone from the shop wanted her, they would text. With her heart pounding in her chest, she listened and heard it again—the footfalls of a large man. Leaving the program running, she got up, went to the door, and placed her ear against it. She held her breath and listened, but there was nothing now. Carefully she cracked the door and peered out. Squinting as the bright light hit her, she scanned the room, starting with the kitchen and moving through the dining room. Nothing was there, but a movement from the hallway by the bathroom caught her eye.

  The man rifling through the drawers was frightening. She quickly shut the door and stood with her back against it, trying to calm herself down. A loud chime made her cringe and she glanced at the screen. The program had acquired a match.

  She picked up the phone and hit the recent calls screen and then the top name, hoping he would answer.

  ***

  “Where is she?” Hawk screamed into the phone. “That’s why they’re there—not for the snorkeling, you idiot. Travis had them take the drive to her.” He set the coffee down on the table before he spilled it. It was hard to find good help down here, but these two guys took the cake. Mike could dive, and Wallace knew his way around the shadier side of the law, but even with their skills they were bumbling idiots. “Find her,” he muttered and hung up.

  Then the door to the house opened and Hawk’s day went from bad to level nine in Hell. The house belonged to his ex, who, as his last resort when his house had been confiscated, had been open to a cash payment for letting him dock the boat here. He’d made a deal with the Devil when he did it, and he knew that, but there were no other options. After he’d been accused of selling Florida’s history to China, most of his friends had shunned him, even before the latest incident. The commercial marinas spurned him, leaving her as the only one willing to accommodate him—for a price. But that didn’t mean he had to like her.

  “What the hell happened last night?” she screeched across the backyard.

  “If you weren’t in some kind of a wine-induced coma, you might have seen it. Some idiot came flying through here and crashed his boat into the bridge.” He had no problem lying to her.

  “And you had nothing to do with it?” she asked accusingly. “And you still owe me alimony.”

  He’d had enough of her bloodsucking bitterness and turned away, trying to think of who would fence enough of the coins he had stashed last night to give him some cash. He was cash-poor, but treasure-rich. The salvage business had always been a free-for-all, from the original wr
eckers in the eighteenth century to the first divers not too long ago. With the improvements in detection equipment and diving technology occurring at the same time, the long-lost Spanish wrecks had started to reappear. When the state had gotten involved in the ’80s, the honeymoon was over. Now the government not only wanted a piece of the action, but insisted on sending archaeological experts to look over your shoulder. It had been speculative at best, even back then, but now with the state taking more than their fair share, it was impossible to even cover your costs.

  He’d known when Wood and Mac had found the piece of the Mayan wreck back in the ’90s that they were off the rails. The Mayans were known to have traveled much of the Caribbean and transported fortunes in gold. It had already been documented that they’d established trading routes through the Keys and up the southwest coast of Florida. But there was no need to haul along a fortune in gold to trade with the backwoods Florida Indians, or at least that’s what he’d believed. The American indigenous people had a long history of being taken advantage of, and there was no reason the Mayans would part with their gold if they didn’t need to.

  No, he suspected that the notion of the tattoos of the old Toltec Indians containing some secret to an ancient treasure was wrong. But until Travis showed up with the drive, there was not enough evidence to figure out what the body art really meant.

  The decision to send the men to follow Trufante to Key Largo had been an easy one after he’d checked Alicia Phon’s background. A quick search had confirmed that the drive was heading to one of the top data analysts in the world. Alicia Phon—even her name sounded like a wonk, but if she could figure out the riddle, he needed her.

  He picked up the phone and hit the button marked Wallace. The disbarred attorney answered on the second ring. “Get the girl and bring her and that damn drive back here.”

  “Got it, boss,” Wallace said.