Robert Jones - Blood Tide

It offered disaster in a smart-ass package. He’d come ankling down the marine dock where she was moored, at Cape San Lucas, a tall, skinny, loose-limbed guy with a dog at his heels. He wore sloppy, salt-bleached canvas Topsiders with spliced laces, denim cutoffs faded almost white, a rigging knife in a scuffed leather sheath at his hip, a blue chambray shirt worn so thin by saltwater soap that she could see his dark nipples through it, and a sun-bleached bandanna that had once been red, knotted pirate-fashion on his head to contain a sprawl of curly black hair. Boat bum if she ever saw one. She noticed all these details to avoid his impudent grin and the hard, frank stare of his blue eyes. She returned to the job at hand—polishing brightwork on the binnacle.

“So you’re Captain Bloodblister,” he said finally.

“What?”

“That’s what they call you out in the islands,” he said. “Or so I hear. A hard driver. Runs a taut ship. Lady Doom. Admiral Grief. I’ve never been out there much, mostly in the Caribbean and Colombia, but guys I’ve shipped with told me about you.”

She grunted.

“Nobody messes with you.”

She grunted again.

“I like a driver. I like a taut ship.”

“So what?”

“So I need work,” he said. “They said at the office you needed a hand.”

She put down the rag and screwed the cap back on the can of polish, flipped her hair out of her eyes, and took a pull from a Dos Equis. The beer was warm. She spit it over the side and then spit again after it.

“That dog come with you?”

“Brillo?” he said. “Sure. He’s a sea dog. Born in a boat, grew up in a boat, fully boat-broken. Hunkers over the gunwale to do his business and never wee-wees to windward.” He leaned over and scratched the dog’s ears.

Brillo was as curly haired as his master, and nearly as big. He had hard, yellow wolf’s eyes that gave the lie to his happy, doggy grin.

“He earns his keep,” the man said. “He’s a guard dog, the best I ever saw. I picked him up as a puppy over in Colón from a guy who said he was descended from a long line of guard dogs—from the famous Bercerillo of Ponce de León, who could sniff out bad Indians from a crowd of good ones. Balboa had one of Bercerillo’s pups, and that’s how the line got established in Panama. This guy’s official name is Bercerillo, too, but I call him Brillo for short.”

“What make is he?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Must have some wolfhound in him, judging from his size, and probably some Chesapeake, from the coat. He’s terrific in the water. Here, toss me that beer bottle.”

Miranda tossed up the empty, and the man threw it far out into the anchorage. The dog watched it splash but didn’t move. He quivered, though, waiting.

“Fetch it, Brillo boy.”

Gone like a shot, the dog launched himself from the end of the dock in a flat, hard racing dive that must have carried him nearly thirty feet, then swam to the spot where the bottle had sunk. With no hesitation Brillo surface-dived, his tail wagging briefly. He was down for a full minute, then emerged with the bottle firmly in his jaws. He paddled back to the beach and shook himself dry, dropping his catch at the man’s feet.

“Okay,” Miranda said. “I’m sold. Now if he can hand, reef, and steer, tell good sea stories, and polish brightwork during the off watches, I’ll hire him.”

The man laughed, and she laughed, too.

“Come on aboard and have a beer.”

His name, he said, was Hugh Curten—Curt for short.

They worked the Baja and the Sea of Cortés for most of that year, carrying whale watchers to Magdalena Bay and Scammons Lagoon to see the gray whales rolling and mating and calving, their big barnacle-crusted hulks as long as, or longer than, the ketch itself. They had an inflatable—a twelve-foot Avon Redshanks—in which to run alongside the whales and surf on their bow waves, veering off only when the wide flukes rose to smash at them. The whales retaliated by spouting to windward and drenching them with spray that reeked of rotten fish, but the passengers loved it. They wanted to pet the whales and got huffy when Miranda wouldn’t let them. She soothed their feelings with ice-cold cerveza and fiery tequila.

In other seasons they cruised the Sea of Cortés from La Paz north to Mulegé, stopping to skin-dive among the sea lions on rocky reefs eerily sculpted by the waves or to spend the night on an empty beach, the passengers sleeping in tents after an evening of song and chitchat around a roaring driftwood bonfire, Miranda and Curt sharing the wide bunk in the master’s cabin aboard the ketch. Curt proved a charmer with the customers, far more tolerant of their lubberly ways than Miranda, and the money was good.

From what little he revealed of his shadowy past, she came to realize that he’d run contraband in the Caribbean—marijuana, cocaine, automatic weapons and ammunition now and then—making small fortunes from time to time and just as quickly blowing them on cards or poor investments. For a while he’d owned a bar called the Cockleshell in Christiansted, down in the U.S. Virgins, but that had gone up in smoke, literally, when he crossed a Bolivian cocaine supplier on a run to Bimini. “The DEA was watching me,” he told her. “I could just feel it. So I deep-sixed the load in a thousand fathoms off Turks and Caicos. I tried to explain the bit about discretion and valor, but the Bolivian didn’t buy it. I’m lucky he didn’t waste more than the Cockleshell.”

“Did you have insurance on the place?” Miranda asked. They were sitting on the sea-lion rocks of Isla de Santa Cruz, north of La Paz, on a leisurely cruise to Loreto, while the passengers snorkeled in the shallows. Frigate birds swung overhead on crooked black wings.

“Yeah,” Curt said. “All in a phony name. I had to beat it fast. Never collected a penny, and I guess I never will.”

“Sounds like a loser’s game, the smuggling trade.”

“Tell me about it. I used to tell myself I was doing it out of contempt for society, that the money didn’t really matter except as a way to keep score. Curt, fifty thousand; yuppies, zip. All I needed was to hit a cool million, and I’d be out of the game. Well, if I ever show my face down in the Caribbean again, I’ll be out of the game all right, for keeps. Even this side of Mexico is scary.”

“I know some nice islands out thataway,” Miranda said, pointing west. “In the Cooks or the Tongas, or up around Kosrae in Micronesia. No fortunes to be made out there, but a good life anyway. And nobody to recognize you.”

“You figuring on heading out that way again?”

“Maybe. It depends.”

She could see in his eyes the fear that had driven him across the isthmus and up the coast to Baja. She could see, she thought, that he’d learned his lesson. She could sense that deep down he was a fairly decent man. She was wrong.

A month later they were back at Cape San Lucas, doing day sails around Los Friales, the twin rock-spires near the tip of the Cape, awaiting the start of the whale-watching season. Curt seemed more nervous than ever—too many wealthy gringos who might recognize him, she thought. If he were spotted and word got back to the bad hats—either his Bolivian nemesis or the DEA—both of them might be killed. But she could not betray a shipmate, couldn’t leave a buddy in the lurch. She liked Curt. Well, maybe she even loved him. It hurt her to see him so frightened.

Had Miranda known the truth about Curt, she would have been even more hurt. Far from being a dope runner, he was an undercover agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, one of their best. Over the past eight years he had infiltrated half a dozen South American and Caribbean drug networks, posing as a hard man with a heavy hand on a fast boat’s throttle. But the longevity of deep cover is like that of the mayfly—ephemeral in the extreme. He was lucky to have survived this long, and when it became evident in Saint Croix that the ruthless barons of the cocaine empire were getting wise to him, his superiors had sent him to Baja, out of harm’s way. He was merely marking time, awaiting orders to a new scene of action.