“How long have you lived here?” he asked, as we gathered up our things to head back to the house.
“Oh, a little over twenty years,” I said.
“I like it here,” he offered. “That’s what I wished for when the sun went down. That I could stay here.”
“Aw, that’s sweet,” Savannah said, as we crossed the dark clearing toward the house.
“Who lives in those other houses?” Alberto asked.
“That one,” I said, pointing to Jimmy’s place on the west side, “is where my first mate lives. A first mate works for the captain.”
He looked up at Savannah and smiled in the moonlight. “And the captain works for the admiral.”
Savannah laughed.
“What about the two by the pier?” he asked.
“Our daughter, Flo, lives in one,” Savannah said. “And the other one is going to be Jesse’s workshop.”
“You have a daughter?”
“She’s away at college,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“College?” I asked. “It’s the school you go to after high school.”
Alberto stopped dead in his tracks, turned and looked back at the bunkhouses. Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see fear etched on his young face.
I knelt beside him. “What’s wrong?”
He looked at me, concentration replacing some of the fear I’d seen in his eyes. “I don’t like school.”
I looked up at Savannah; she quickly knelt in the sand beside me. “Do you remember something?” she asked. “Even if it’s something you don’t like, it will help to try to remember it.”
He seemed to study her face for a moment as he thought. Then a tear came to the corner of his eye and slowly trailed down his cheek.
“I can’t remember,” he said.
She took the boy in her arms and held him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re safe with us and your memory will come back. Remembering might be scary at first, but soon you’ll remember happy things too.”
That night, after Alberto had gone to sleep, I checked the provisions on the Revenge and did a complete systems analysis, except for starting the engines. We didn’t have enough groceries aboard to sustain five men for more than a day, but there was a small grocery store near the marina in Fort Myers.
When I returned to the living room, Woden and Finn lay sleeping on either side of Alberto’s bed, and Savannah was sitting in one of the recliners, reading.
When she looked up, I nodded my head toward the open bedroom door.
I woke early, well before sunrise, and slipped quietly out of our bedroom without disturbing Savannah. Woden raised his head as I walked past Alberto’s bed, but I held a halting hand up to him and he remained where he was.
The coffee, set on a timer, was ready. It was the smell that had awakened me. Better than any noisy alarm clock. I poured a cup, then headed downstairs, flicking on the dock area lights.
Once aboard the Revenge, I powered up my laptop, which connected wirelessly to the onboard modem. That device could connect to WiFi, but it could also connect to a second encrypted modem, which was hard-wired to an antenna, mounted to the roof of the house. While the boat was under the house, that was the only way to connect to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, thousands of miles up in space.
I sent a message to Billy, asking what his status was, then started searching the news outlets for anything of note in the Fort Myers area.
I found three news stories dated within the last week about gang activity.
One was about a shooting between rival gangs, in which more than a dozen shots were fired, resulting in one person being slightly injured. It was no wonder gangs were on the rise—they couldn’t shoot for shit.
The other two stories revolved around drug arrests in the area. Primarily methamphetamine and crack, the current drug of choice in American cities.
But none of the three stories mentioned MS-13. It made me wonder.
How many gangs could there be in a small town?
Fort Myers wasn’t Miami or Orlando. I remembered as a kid, I’d learned that the population was under forty thousand. Even today, I doubted it had grown to more than eighty thousand. By comparison, Cape Coral, just across the Caloosahatchee River, had grown from being smaller than Fort Myers to almost two hundred thousand people today.
There were also quite a few news articles about the discovery of the bodies of two known prostitutes in the area—Shaniqua Raines and Carmel Marco—though all of them were short, page-two reports from different news outlets. One of them mentioned that other prostitutes in the area were missing.
I looked at public police reports going back ten years, noting an alarming rise in drug-related and violent crimes over the last few years.
Fort Myers had changed since I’d first left there for Parris Island so long ago. In the years since then, I’d only returned maybe six or eight times. Most of those had been taking leave with Rusty during my first enlistment. Since my grandparents’ funerals, I’d hardly been back at all. I just hadn’t had a reason to return. The Keys were my home.
But in the last couple of years, I’d been to Fort Myers three times. All with violent outcomes.
The laptop pinged an incoming message. It was a reply from Billy.
First night. Nice ride. All quiet.
I heard footsteps above. Savannah was up.
Closing the laptop, I returned it to its cabinet and left the boat.
“Oh, there you are,” Savannah said, as I started up the steps.
“Just running one last check,” I said.
“Alberto’s up. And guess what?”
“He’s hungry.” I looked at my watch. “We can leave now and y’all can eat at the Anchor if you want.”
“That would be faster,” she said, then turned to Alberto. “Would you like a banana to hold you over until we get there?”
Alberto nodded, sitting cross-legged on the rug, and petting the dogs, one on either side of
