across the bay. Both rumors, though, said only that boats were missing. That could mean Colt had found his long- range craft and was already on his way farther down the chain to Cat Island or the Exumas. Both were a day’s travel by scheduled flights even though they were only twenty and thirty miles, respectively, from the southern tip of Eleuthera. And there was no way for me to even start a trip tonight. These were also just island rumors. I suddenly felt the sleeplessness of the last few days catching up with me. Even more, I realized I was hungry, too, and yeah, you’d have to be desperate to be in the Bahamas on Independence Day and settle for Honey Buns and Snickers bars. I turned to Petagay. “Let’s go to the Bluff.”
As I paid our tab, Denaldo remembered one more detail about the burglary.
“Oh yeah… he also took the emergency light.” He pointed to a spot on the wall where the battery still hung, part of a system designed to pop on whenever the power went out, which was frequently. The lights had been unplugged and taken. The grid had intermittingly blinked off Wednesday night, so Colt could have just been ensuring he wasn’t suddenly lit up inside Coakley’s. But why take the lights?
Another explanation for Colt’s machinations aboard the taxi boats suddenly made sense. By MacGyvering together Ricky Ricardo’s boat battery and Coakley’s fixture, Colt could create a powerful spotlight to illuminate a campsite or cave, or even to use on the front of a boat to help him navigate unfamiliar waters. His portable GPS worked well for charting general courses, but depending on the exact model—as well as meteorological conditions —it might be accurate only to within ten or fifteen yards. Like many, many boaters before him, Colt had already learned a tough lesson on the Devil’s Backbone: if you couldn’t see the myriad rocks, reefs, and sandbars in the Bahamas’ shallows with your own eyes, being off course by just a few feet could mean the difference between smooth sailing and coming to grief hard aground. If he was going to be boating after dark, a light would help him read the water in those shallow areas where just a couple hours of tidal rise separated a safe passage from bellying up to a sandbar.
THE TAXI DRIVERS HAD been right: the Bluff was definitely the place to be that night. We heard the music and smelled the barbecues a block away. People swarmed the waterfront, piling in front of the food and drink stands that lined the settlement’s large concrete dock. High-energy calypso pumped from the walls of speakers you find at even the smallest Bahamian public parties. At the booze booth I ordered a rum and Coke in an attempt to maintain the island vibe and stay awake at the same time. Petagay and I then sat on the seawall digging into huge plates of grilled lobster and cracked conch with mounds of peas ’n’ rice on the side.
We’d just finished eating when the the Falcons, one of the Bahamas’ best party bands, came onstage and kicked into a cover of “Harbour Island Song,” which celebrates pink sand on your feet and dancing in the street.
The crowd pressing toward the stage parted for small groups of Bahamian women in impossibly tight jeans who wanted to get their booties bouncing. Then everything suddenly went silent… except for the drummer, who kept thumping the bass. Power to the sound system had gone out, cutting all the mics and guitars. I took the opportunity to sidle up to an RBPF chief inspector who stood out from the crowd in his bright tunic, red-sashed cap, and swagger stick. I started to say hello but double-taked because hidden behind the six-foot-three well-fed inspector was a scrawny patrolman about a foot shorter whose cartoonishly large round motorcycle helmet made him look like Marvin the Martian.
I nodded to Marvin, who stood stiffly at attention, ignoring me. I looked up at the chief inspector, wished him a happy Independence Day, then said, “I hear the Barefoot Bandit may be in the area.”
He looked me up and down, then finally said, “We have that information,” and he made it clear that was all I was going to get.
“EVERYTHING FOR US AT that point was just information, information, information,” says another chief inspector, Roston Moss. “There was only suspicion, no proof that this individual had landed on Eleuthera.”
At forty-two, Moss is already a twenty-five-year veteran of the Royal Bahamian Police Force. He’s spent most of his career in Nassau, home to the Bahamas’ meanest streets. At the end of February 2010, however, he was reassigned to Harbour Island. Normally, Briland, like Orcas, has a sergeant as its top cop, but there’d been a recent surge in crime, primarily what Kenny Strachan calls “looting.” In just the week before Moss arrived, the tiny island suffered eight burglaries. The night after he got there, robbers broke into an American tourist’s hotel room and hit him with a cutlass (the pirate-era name still used in the Bahamas for a machete). Since Harbour Island is the Bahamas’ prime destination for the rich and famous, it was extremely important to the country’s overall tourist industry to quell the crime wave and ensure it maintained its pastel-colored, celebri-quaint reputation. So Nassau sent the big man—Chief Inspector Moss stands six feet two inches, 295 pounds—to take over the station.
To assist him, Moss had eight regular officers and five reserve officers. They provided twenty-four-hour policing for the 1.3-square-mile island (compared to forty-square-mile Camano and fifty-seven-square-mile Orcas, both of which have fewer cops). As soon as he took charge, Moss also created a citizens advisory board to enhance the local crime watch.
Moss followed the events on Great Abaco after the stolen plane landed and knew about the boat found off Preacher’s. It wasn’t until Thursday, though, after the incidents and sightings at Three Island Dock, that he felt there was enough evidence the Barefoot Bandit was in his area to plan a search.
“On Friday, the ninth, at eight a.m., myself and seven officers started the manhunt in North Eleuthera,” says Moss. He split his men into two teams. Four drove around the top of the main island while Moss and three others searched by sea in a “go-fast boat,” scouting the beaches and rocky shorelines of Spanish Wells, Russell Island, Current Island, and Harbour Island.
“We were looking for footprints, a tent, a boat out of place… ,” says Moss. “But there was no sign of him.” Moss called off the search at 7 p.m. Friday, and resumed it Saturday morning, Independence Day. At five that afternoon, after again finding nothing suspicious, Moss stopped by the homecoming party at the Bluff to grab something to eat before heading back across to Briland.
AFTER NEARLY TEN MINUTES of solo boom, boom, booming, the Falcons’ drummer was drenched with sweat and looked about to pass out. I felt the same way. The cell towers were dead again. The only rumor we could scare up from anyone at the Bluff was another sketchy report about “the Bandit.” In the Bahamas, where so many people are often barefoot, almost everyone dropped that part of his nickname. The Bandit had maybe been spotted and maybe jumped off a boat and swam away. Didn’t sound likely.
A sudden screech of feedback and an electrician jumping three feet into the air after sticking something somewhere it shouldn’t have gone told me that the music wasn’t coming back for a while. Worse, the line at the drink booth was now twenty minutes deep.
Decision time. Whereas I’d made pretty good gut calls up to this point, I now made one of the worst.
I could take a chance and go over to Briland, maybe wind up having to spend the night on the beach if I couldn’t scare up a hotel room. We could go back to Coakley’s and wait until it closed and hope Colt showed up. I was going on thirty hours with no sleep, though, and if he did show, either my snoring would scare him away or I’d wake up with a bare foot drawn on my forehead. Option three won: go crash on Petagay’s couch.
We had people all over Eleuthera and the surrounding islands keyed up to call us if anything broke. Besides, what were the chances something big would happen in the next few hours? My gut told me he was still around and wasn’t planning on going anywhere tonight.
I hate being half right.
WE SWUNG BY THE airport on the way home. The police substation was empty, closed down. There was no security at all besides a chest-high chain-link fence along the runway. Commuter planes sat close to the tiny, dark terminal. Private planes—at least a dozen, including seven that Colt could fly—were farther down the tarmac. No lights, no police, no guards, and the world’s most successful plane thief somewhere within a few miles.
One of the planes on the field was a Cessna 400 that looked ready to leap into the air if you just tickled its tail. Suddenly I felt a strange urge to hop the fence, jump in, and take off.
At Petagay’s, I lay sweating beneath a ceiling fan with Bella’s dog, Jazzy, beating her tail against the couch as I fell asleep petting her.
BACK AT THE BLUFF, they finally fixed the sound system and Homecoming cranked up again. Ferry boats
