“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” the radio crackled.
“Hey, June. We’re on 59 and headed in. Deputy Prudhomme told me about Charlotte. You know, I just—hold on a sec, June—what the heck is this big fella doing here, Homer?”
“Beats tar out of me, he just wants to play, I guess.”
The big truck seemed to have changed its mind. It lurched along the shoulder and all of a sudden roared back up on to the blacktop and started accelerating down the middle of the road. Deputy Prudhomme stayed on his tail for a moment or two and then the gap started widening. You had to wonder what he had under the hood.
“He’s doing more’n a hundred, Sheriff. Company puts governors on them rigs, I thought.”
“Pull up alongside and move him gently over into his proper lane.”
“Yessir,” Homer Prudhomme said, and mashed the go pedal. But just as he was about to pull even with the cab, crowding him, the truck’s engine emitted a high-pitched whine and the whole rig leapt forward again, going much, much faster. The big red taillights diminished to pinpricks on the horizon in seconds.
“Well, I’ll be,” Franklin said, moving his head side to side in disbelief. “You hear that whine? Superchargers.”
“He has to be doing near a hundred forty miles an hour, Sheriff.”
“Trucks can’t go that fast.”
“Well. I dunno. This one can. We’ve lost him.”
“Ain’t lost one yet and don’t plan to start. Stay with him, boy. Do the best you can.”
“Yessir.”
“June? You still on the air?”
“Right here, Sheriff.”
“Listen, we got a race-car driver in a souped-up tractor rig out here headed south on 59. Bright red, white, and blue Peterbilt cab with a big red baseball bat painted on the trailer’s side. Some outfit called ‘Yankee Slugger.’ Never heard of ’em. Rolling fast toward the border. Get Wyatt to send a couple cars out to the intersection, will you please. Block the road and—now, what’s he doing?”
“He stopped up there on the hill,” Prudhomme said.
“June, I’m going to have to call you back. We got to go see about this truck.”
“I ain’t going nowhere but here. You still want Wyatt to order two squad cars out there, Sheriff?”
“No, June, thank you. We’re all right.”
Of course, as it would turn out, they weren’t all right. Nobody was.
Not even a little bit.
8
DRY TORTUGAS
W hat’s so dry about the Dry Tortugas?” Luis “Sharkey” Gonzales-Gonzales asked nobody in particular. He was staring down at all the clear blue water below. Sharkey, who was tanned a dark nut brown, was sitting two rows back on the other side of the aisle looking like a true citizen of the Conch Republic. A wicked-looking shark’s tooth swung from his twenty-four-carat gold neck chain. He wore a faded fishing shirt with blue marlin leaping around, some old khaki shorts, and his trademark white suede loafers, no socks.
Sharkey had his head turned to the window, cheek pressed against the glass. He was gazing down at the glassy blue-green sea a thousand feet below the seaplane as the pilot banked left and lined up for a landing at a giant brick fortification called Fort Jefferson.
Stokely Jones didn’t answer Shark’s question about the Tortugas being so dry. He was too busy looking for the Isaac Allerton’s skeleton. Wrecks, man. For the last ten minutes, he’d been seeing bones in the white sand beneath the turquoise water, the scattered and broken backbones and ribs sticking right up where you could see them. The Allerton was down there somewhere. She’d been caught in a blow off Saddle-bunch Keys back in 1856. After her anchor lines were cut, she ground over Washerwoman Shoals, lost her rudder, and sank in Hawk’s Channel in five fathoms.
Mick Hocking, the young Aussie pilot sitting to his left, said Allerton’s remains were coming up. They were flying over the exact area where Mel Fisher had discovered the Spanish galleon Atocha and about a billion dollars in gold. Survey boats were moored in the shallow water, fifty feet or so, Stoke thought it looked like. You could tell the treasure hunters by the survey cable reels mounted on the transoms.
Off the Marquesas, and west over to the Dry Tortugas, the typical things you might find, if you stuck with it a few years, were artifacts and emeralds. Emeralds were almost common. Stoke had always had a fondness for buried treasure, a feeling he’d shared with his boss, Alex Hawke. He’d caught the bug the first time they’d worked together. They were down in the Caribbean, looking for the pirate Blackhawke’s lost treasure.
Hawke told Stoke something one time they were diving down here in the Keys. Hawke said it was interesting how many decades it took professional wreckers to figure out that the big Spanish galleons, loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver, would not be found in deep water. They would most likely be in shallow water, like you had right here.
The galleons headed back to Spain would have been here in the South Atlantic during the hurricane season, Hawke said. That was June to October. And, if you looked at any map of the trade routes, and saw the storm tracks, many of those galleons obviously have been blown here into the Florida reef line. Some would be lost in open sea, sure. But many of them would fetch up in shallow water before they ran aground. Then, huge rollers would lift them up and split their keels on the reefs. Voila, they’d spill all their booty on the bottom down there.
Stoke heard a little crackle in his headphones.
“Ponce de Leon called these islands ‘Las Tortugas’ because they looked liked turtle shells on the far horizon,” Mick said. “The ‘dry’ part came later when he found out the hard way there was no fresh water to be had down there. Still isn’t, so bring that bottle of Fiji along with you.”
“Ponce de Leon, huh? Is that right?” Stokely asked the pilot. Stoke was up front in the cockpit, in the right hand seat of the seaplane.
“Yep.”
“Huh. All that time I was down here, I never knew that.”
He’d liked the guy, Mick, right away. Mick was a high time bush pilot from Queensland, Australia, who’d spent most of his career up in Alaska, flying wildcatters around. Mick seemed to understand that this flight was of an extremely sensitive nature. That the missing plane might be a matter of national security, Mick said, and this is a quote, ‘You’d have to be a fairdinkum wanker or a drongo to fly in here at night below the radar, mate.’
Stoke liked him on sight. And he’d asked just the right amount of questions when Stoke had first reached him on his mible.
“You spend much time down here in the Keys, Mick?” Stoke asked him now.
“I did. I was in and out of Key West Naval some back in the day. A few years after your lot, I guess. Did some spec ops training with the SEAL blokes just down the road. Pissingly hot, even for an old sandgroper like me. Heat and Skeet we called it, Mr. Jones. Tough outfit, your SEALs are. I was impressed.”
Mick had a crinkly smile, and, like that guy in the Crocodile Dundee movies, he always had a grin stuck in his voice. Cheery. That kind of guy.
“Take a gander down there, Stoke,” Mick said in the headphones. “That must be your mate’s boat coming up now.”
A moment later, Stoke saw an old fishing boat below, moored at the island’s disintegrating coal station. The thirty-foot boat, which had been painted blue some time early in the last century, was bobbing up and down, tied to the old wharf. A skinny white-haired guy stood on the bow, waving his floppy straw hat at the approaching seaplane.
Little was left of the island’s broken, rusted-out black wharf. It was standing in turquoise water on the west side of the fortress island. This was where all the southbound steamers used to refuel before heading across the straits to Cuba and points further south. The battleship Maine had made her last pit stop here, before she was mysteriously sunk in Havana harbor.
