Paul Levine - Riptide

Harry could tell from the way light reflected off the tank that someone had opened the front door, but he didn’t turn around. He was watching the tank, and as he did, a cream-colored lionfish sneaked up behind a blue-and-yellow angelfish, tailing it like a cop on surveillance. The angelfish would wiggle right, the lionfish would wiggle right, flaring its large gills, the mane of a lion. They swam inside a little cavern, out again, up and down, and finally, the lionfish grew tired of the game. It came from behind the angelfish and swallowed it whole, just swallowed it, no bites, no struggle. One second there were two fish, then there was one.

At about the same time that the Miami Beach fish population decreased by one, Harry saw a reflection in the glass tank, a man behind him, strong guy, the silhouette of sinewy muscles bulging from each side of his neck. Harry felt a shiver, then turned around to see the unsmiling face of Keaka Kealia.

They shook hands, Harry’s knuckles ricocheting off each other like billiard balls on a clean break.

Harry massaged his right hand with his left and said, “A guy walks into a bar with an alligator and asks the bartender if they serve lawyers…

Keaka was studying the smaller man as if he were a moderately interesting chimpanzee at the zoo.

“‘Sure,’ the bartender says. ‘Good,’ the guys says. ‘Give me a beer and my gator a lawyer!’”

Keaka didn’t smile.

“It’s a joke,” Harry said. “But I’m worried about the lawyer.”

“Lassiter?”

“Yeah. He’ll be there, won’t he?”

“In the lead boat, nothing to worry about.”

They talked about the coupons, Harry lifting the canvas tote bag with two hands. Keaka said, sure he could get them to Bimini if they fit into a backpack. The added weight, no problem, he was the best in the world. Customs? No problem. Customs doesn’t check guys coming over on a sanctioned, nationally televised windsurfing race.

“Okay, partner, you know where the Great Bahama Bank is?” Harry Marlin asked.

“Yeah,” Keaka Kealia said, showing the first trace of a smile. “It’s not hard to find.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“What?”

“At the bank. I’ll meet you at the Great Bahama Bank. At a teller’s window. You bring the coupons and we’ll settle up, a nice safe place for both of us, no monkey business there.”

Keaka spoke slowly then, as if he hadn’t understood what Harry said. “You want me to meet you at the Great Bahama Bank?”

Shit, Harry thought, this guy is two pickles short of a Whopper. Gotta explain it all twice. “That’s right, partner, any problem?”

“The Great Bahama Bank,” Keaka Kealia repeated. “That’s where I’ll be.”

Good, Harry Marlin said, relieved to have worked it out. Then Harry said that he’d be watching during the race, he’d be right behind, and not to be threatening or anything, but he’d be packing heat.

“No problem,” Keaka Kealia said, baring his teeth in what Harry Marlin mistook for a smile.

“Easy as pie,” Harry told Violet that night. “The sucker’s gonna do it for a ten percent commission — that’s what I called it, a commission. He’s taking the risk for a lousy ten percent and we’ll deposit more than a million in the Great Bahama Bank, just like some cocaine kingpins.”

“You gave him the coupons?” Violet asked.

“Not to worry, I got his pecker in my pocket.”

“Harry Marlin, you ain’t got but lint in your pocket.”

“Vi honey, I wish you wouldn’t be always putting me down that way. I got feelings, you know.”

“You? C’mon, Harry, you’re as sensitive as an aluminum foil condom. Now, tell me everything.”

“I told him I’d be on his tail, put the fear of a steel-jacketed. 38 caliber right into him.”

But Harry hadn’t seen any fear. He had watched the guy leave the bar, walking on the balls of his feet, head perfectly still, shoulders back, a cocky walk, an alert walk, like he could see all around him.

If the guy wasn’t so dumb, Harry Marlin thought, I’d be worried about him.

“Not much time to make plans,” Keaka Kealia told Lila Summers in their suite at the hotel. The sliding door on the balcony was open and the wind from the ocean rustled the drapes. “Better call Mikala. Has a friend here from ‘Nam can get us a plane.”

“What about the haole?” Lila asked.

“Stupid and weak,” Keaka said. “Thinks the Great Bahama Bank is a place to cash checks, has hands like a baby’s ass.”

“Haoles” Lila said, shaking her head.

“Thinks he can shoot me from a boat crossing the Gulf Stream.”

“Not unless he’s Buffalo Bill,” Lila said, laughing. They emptied the multicolored coupons into a yellow waterproof backpack, filling it. Lila hefted it and whistled. “It’s a load.”

“It’s our big chance.”

Lila walked to the balcony door, letting the ocean breeze cool her. “There’s a risk. The DEA knows we’re here, especially after the other night.”

“The DEA’s looking for drugs coming into the country, not bonds going out,” Keaka said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

If you look at a map of southeast Florida, you see a string of islands. Just offshore from Miami are Miami Beach, Virginia Key, and Key Biscayne, all sedimentary barrier islands that began as sandbars, the ocean currents depositing tiny particles of limestone and quartz over the millennia. The islands farther south along the Florida Keys began as coral reefs, the skeletal remains of ancient marine animals. The early sailors — Spanish, English, and Dutch — faced a perilous journey through the Straits, avoiding the Florida Reef to the west and the Great Bahama Bank to the east.

A ridge of limestone sand only six feet below the surface, the Great Bahama Bank runs close to the Biminis, which appear on maps as a cartographer’s mistake, tiny splashes of ink from a fountain pen. No casinos or fancy nightclubs on these islands. Just waters rich with fish and saloons with shutters open to the southeast breeze. Ernest Hemingway fished and wrote and drank in the Biminis and did all three better than anyone else. More than four hundred years earlier, a Spanish explorer set out for Bimini, lured by tales that the island’s waters could turn old men into youths. Juan Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of youth but on Easter Sunday in 1513 he saw the sedimentary barrier islands that would become Miami Beach and Key Biscayne. Rather than step ashore, Ponce de Leon sailed northward along the coastline of what he believed to be an island he named Florida. He landed near what is now St. Augustine, far from Bimini and without finding magic waters to soothe the aches of a fifty-three-year-old explorer.

Two years later he again sailed, this time exploring the southwest coast of Florida. It was there, probably near Sanibel Island, that the Spaniards came upon the Caloosa Indians. Like the native Hawaiians encountered by Captain Cook two hundred years later, the Caloosas were warriors. They were deadly with bow and arrow and hurled spears from crotched sticks. When the soldiers commanded the Caloosas to convert to Catholicism, the proud warriors responded with battle cries and a hail of arrows, killing many of the Spaniards, including Ponce de Leon.

Europeans had discovered the New World.

“Better secure your gear below, Charlie,” Jake Lassiter said. “We’ll be going too fast to troll, and bouncing through the chop, you may break something.”

Charlie Riggs frowned and held on to the rail of the Big Daddy, an excessively well-equipped fifty-eight-foot Hatteras that was swaying at anchor three hundred yards off the Key Biscayne shore. “Don’t know why I agreed to this. I could be in Bimini in thirty minutes by seaplane, have my first Acanthocybium solandri by noon.”