After pulling in the towfish and coiling the line, he quickly motored out of the lagoon toward where his two companions had the pontoon boat tied off at the main opening.
“What’s going on?” one of them asked when he idled the small aluminum boat up to the port pontoon.
Jake quickly scanned the western horizon with his binoculars. The stranger’s fancy boat was nowhere in sight, but he knew that would quickly change.
“That guy from this morning is coming after us,” Jake said. “You come aboard the cabin cruiser,” he added, jumping onto the pontoon boat. “And stay put.”
“So you’re just gonna leave me here?” he said.
Jake waved a hand.
“You’ll be fine. Just keep searching for the treasure. If you find it, mark its location and we’ll bring it up later. Keep at it until you hear from me later on tonight.”
“What are you two gonna do?”
Jake looked back over the bay, then started up the pontoon boat’s three big engines.
“We’re gonna set a trap for this sumbitch.”
NINETEEN
We cut across the lower section of Biscayne Bay, making a beeline for Totten Key. Keeping our distance, we cut around the tip of the island to get a view through the main opening into Jones Lagoon.
I faced the boat into the easterly wind, then idled the engine and climbed up onto the bow. Peering through my binos over the endless mangroves, I scanned for any sign of the boats we’d seen earlier. Ange stood beside me and looked out as well.
“There,” she said.
I lowered the binos and saw that she was pointing toward the center of the lagoon. Following the line from her finger, I saw the top of an aluminum boat’s cabin. It moved slowly, heading south, its gray hull visible through the walls of foliage, then vanishing a second later.
“That’s the boat that was being towed by the pontoon boat earlier,” I said.
Ange nodded, then stroked her chin. “But where’s the mothership?”
It was a good question. I didn’t know very much about Jones Lagoon, but from what I’d heard and from our kayak expedition earlier that morning, there was a slim chance that someone could motor a pontoon boat into it. From my experience, taking a party barge in less than two feet of water was a bad idea. I reasoned that they’d brought the pontoon as a form of home base while the other boat, with its much shallower draft, did all the searching.
“Maybe around the other side of the islands,” I said. “Or in Old Rhodes Channel, where we anchored earlier.”
Not wanting to scare away our quarries, I piloted us south to get a glimpse into the channel. Seeing that it was empty, I turned to port and eased us through at twenty knots. Popping out into the Atlantic, we gazed north and came up dry as well. There were a handful of boats out on the water, but the closest was a bowrider a mile off.
As we had earlier that day, we completed a full lap, skipping north into Caesar Creek, then motoring back to where we’d started just off Totten Key. The pontoon boat was nowhere in sight.
“Where do you think they would’ve gone?” Ange asked as I idled us again.
I shook my head. “Beats me. With the marina compromised, either they scurried someplace else or we missed them in the mangroves.”
Ange cracked open a chilled coconut water, took a few swigs, then handed it to me to finish off.
“What do you think?” Ange said. “Sit tight and play stakeout?”
“I think it’s the best play,” I said, wiping the residue from my lips.
One of the things my dad always used to tell me was that “a man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.” Though I’m far from a master, it’s certainly wisdom that I aspire to.
We dropped anchor in six feet of water roughly a mile from the main opening into Jones Lagoon. From there, we could see far in all directions. If any boat went in or out of the lagoon, or if one approached our position, we could spot it far off and prepare ourselves to fend off an attack.
After thirty minutes of standing by, just hanging out and downing water to keep cool and hydrated, Ange had a great idea. She grabbed our drone from storage in the guest cabin and quickly powered it up. Manning the controls, she brought the quadcopter high into the afternoon air and zipped it across the bay.
With her eyes locked on a tablet, she watched the live feed from the drone as she flew it high above the islands and Jones Lagoon. After making two passes, we saw that, other than a few paddleboarders we’d missed in the northern part of the body of shallow water, the small aluminum utility boat was the only craft in sight.
Ange pushed the drone to the outer limits of its five-mile range, flying all the way to the lower portion of Elliot Key before cutting south to Broad Creek. After twenty minutes of flying and searching, she flew the device back and landed it softly on the Baia’s bow.
Despite not finding anything, the little device was always fun to fly, buzzing through the air at up to thirty-five miles per hour and giving a beautiful bird’s-eye view of the scenery.
“Well, I’m officially stumped,” Ange said, picking the drone up off the deck and carrying it back down to the cockpit. “Looks like this guy Jake ran away, or he’s a magician.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he ran aground and sank it. Karma works in mysterious ways.”
“Or maybe he learned his lesson and your little confrontation this morning scared him off.”
I stared out over the
