Mexican Booty: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 2) Page 13

  "There's a lighthouse at the south end of the island, just under the point," said Maggie. "With the current that's probably where you'll end up. You'll see a Mayan ruin up on the cliff, and the lighthouse is right below it. Over there." She pointed down the island. They were too far off to make out any details.

  "Well, wish me luck, girls," Lucy said. They did. Then she pushed off quickly and began her swim. She skimmed over the shallows to the east side of the reef, and headed north, swimming slowly and steadily, just as if she was doing her hundred laps in the pool. That was 5,000 feet, close to a mile, and she swam it every day. Chlorine and obnoxious lane hogs, however, made for less adversarial freestyling than did ocean currents and sharks. At the top of the reef she turned more westerly, on a tack that would take her to the northern tip of Isla Mujeres, if there were no currents to contend with.

  Lucy launched into the deep waters, feeling small and vulnerable but certain that she could make it. She had never swum long distance in a fight with a current, and didn't intend to here. Instead, she would point north and let it push her along, half-riding and half-resisting, and hit the island at the south end. As she found a steady rhythm she let her breathing take over, and with every exhalation pushed out the images that rushed her, at first—images of herself on the surface, seen from below, from the shark's point of view. From there, she looked like a lively little snack. She forced the images away, counting her strokes, telling herself not to check her progress until she'd reached a thousand. Once she'd gotten well clear of the reef the swells grew larger, and she rose up and drifted down with them, occasionally finding her shoulder buried deep, making the stroke harder, or flailing the air as she broke free of the water.

  At a thousand strokes she stopped. The abrupt halt disoriented her, and she thrashed, briefly panicked. A wave hit her in the face and filled her mouth with salt water. Choking it out, she surfaced with a lunge, gasped "Oh, shit," and then internalized her voice: be calm, be calm, breathe slowly, slowly and deeply. She regained her composure. Treading water and controlling her breath, she surveyed the scene. She felt tiny beneath the huge blue sky, surrounded by dark blue water. Looking back, she couldn't see over the waves to where her friends waited on the reef. Ahead, the island loomed, although it didn't look any closer than before. And she felt tired. The water pushed at her, pushed and pushed. She was moving south at a faster pace than she had anticipated. She would have to swim harder, or miss the island completely. Cancun was the next stop—ten miles southwest. She would never make it that far, even if the current chose to push her that way and not southeast, out to sea just in time for dinner.

  Lucy fought off the looming panic. Pointing more sharply north, she started up again at a slightly faster pace. This time she vowed not to look again until she'd done 2,000 strokes.

  At 1500 she stopped for another look. The island loomed larger now, but she had drifted further south. It would be close. A cramp hit the arch of her left foot. She grabbed, rubbed it out. Her shoulders ached. She drifted alone in the middle of the ocean, exhausted, frightened, responsible for three lives. The last time her life had been so threatened, a psychotic woman had pointed a gun at her. On a Jamaican beach. Harry Ipswich. She swam on, thinking about Harry, and how much she loved him. She would see him again, and let him know. Why wasn't he here to help her out? Because she had discouraged him. She had wanted to handle this story on her own. She was an independent woman.

  And so she would die alone. The thought flashed through, she couldn't help it. Lucy swam on, crawling endlessly against her own exhaustion, eyes salt-stung, back burning from sun and salt, half-choking on salt water that slipped into her mouth and down her raw, tender throat. Her right shoulder ached. The cramp in her left foot returned. She swam through the pain, swam and swam and swam into a state of mind beyond weariness, beyond the evil baby voice of Isabel Starfish Chapin (Chapin; where else had she seen that name?), beyond anything she'd ever known, where the water was a tunnel she thrashed through forever; a sunsplashed vortex filled with rippling, roaring light; and then there were fins flashing and the sharks came and she knew she would die; except that they were dolphins, dancing on the whitecaps, circling her with their wise, friendly faces. They came close, watching her curiously as she labored. She was too tired to talk as she struggled on, but she tried to communicate with them telepathically. Wasn't that how they did it? Come here, Mr. Dolphin, come here and give me a lift to shore, I need a ride, baby, can't we glide together I promise I'll buy you all a beer and a fish dinner at the restaurant of your choice perhaps Le Bernardin? if you'll only give me a ride. They swam away, leaping over the waves which had begun to wash over her head. Lucy stopped. She looked. She was maybe halfway in, and almost all the way past the end of the island. Against the falling sun she could just make out the ruins above, the lighthouse below. She wouldn't make it.

  Then she heard a motor, lunging erratically over the waves. She screamed, she thrashed, she kicked her feet hard with a last flurry of energy and managed to get high enough out of the water to spy a little boat headed north a hundred yards away. She flapped her arms with a shriek and fell back, exhausted. A moment later two Mexican fishermen dragged her out of the water into their boat. She didn't speak much Spanish and they didn't speak English, but she managed to make them understand about the dos señoritas on the rocks. They headed out across the channel.

  Fifteen minutes later they found Maggie and Rosa, treading chest deep water. Maggie had tied the ankle strap of her left fin to a knob on the reef with three knotted-together rubber maskstraps so they wouldn't drift away, and Rosa held her hand. As soon as the fishermen pulled Rosa and then Maggie aboard, the three women burst into hysterical tears, hugging so hard they almost capsized the little boat before the two fishermen could turn around and head back towards Isla Mujeres.

  Lucy took stock as they bounced over the waves, headed home. A blister on her left heel, where the fin had rubbed it raw; sunburnt shoulders; aches, pains, and exhaustion. Her friends were burned and weary. Not so bad, considering how close they had come. She had given up. If that boat hadn't appeared she would have gone down, her friends close behind.

  The fishermen dropped them off on the beach in front of the house. Maggie had the men wait while she ran into the house and returned a moment later with a hundred dollar bill. They refused it at first, then took it. They would probably spend weeks talking about the three biggest fish they ever caught, and the price they fetched.

  As they putted away in their little boat, Rosa said, "God sent them." Apparently she'd gotten a dose of religion out there along with the sun and salt water. Lucy didn't feel like arguing the point. Someone had kept the sharks off her ass.

  Maggie said, "Yeah, I guess. Meanwhile, Nate's in the house. He's drunk." On cue, the sound of the saxophone drifted out. Slow, slow blues. They looked that way. The sun had gone down behind the island.

  They found him lying on his back on the long dining table, wearing bikini underwear and sunglasses, playing the mournful horn, with a bottle of gold tequila close by. A cigarette smoldered on the edge of the table, next to another one that had been set on the table and forgotten, burning a black scar onto it. "Hey ladies," Nate muttered when they came in. "What's happenin'?" He honked his horn.

  "Damn you, Nathaniel," said Maggie. "Get off the darn table."

  "Hey, take it easy, sis," he slurred, swinging his feet off the table and sitting up. "Wow, you guys got a little too much sun today, huh?" He grinned. "Those rays can be fierce, eh?"

  "Where's your ladyfriend Starfish?" Maggie snapped.

  "Starfish? I don't know. Haven't seen her since—"

  "She ran off with your "friends" Jack and Lewis?"

  He looked puzzled. "Yeah. I guess. Hey, what's the difference? Plenty of ladies here now, eh?" He stood, honked a riff, and grinned at Lucy. "What's cookin', Lucy in the Sky?"

  She would have grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall if he had a collar to grab. Instead,
she said, "Nate, you're a stupid fuck, do you know that? A first class stupid fucking asshole!" she snarled, putting enough into it to actually get the idiot's attention for a moment.

  "Hey, hey, take it easy, baby. Check this out." He put the horn to his lips and blew the opening lines from "Girl from Ipanema," sambaing down the room in his underwear.

  "Mother of God!" Maggie shouted, shutting him up. "Your friends just tried to kill us, you son of a cur. I can't believe you. You're like a—you’re jes’ like you were when you were fifteen, only now you're 33."

  "What are you talking about?" he said.

  "Starfish was there, too, Nate," Lucy said. He was watching them, but sweeping the table with his arm, searching for the tequila bottle. He found it and brought it towards his mouth. Maggie lunged at him and swatted it across the room. It shattered on the tile floor.

  "They tried to kill us, Nathaniel," Maggie shrieked. "Your girlfriend and those evil men you brought down here from Dallas tried to drown us today, Natty! Can you hear me?"

  "You didn't have to do that," he said. "Go breaking my bottle."

  "Fuck it," said Rosa. "He's not going to hear you, Maggie. Forget it." She looked straight at him. "He's just a piece of human wreckage that washed up on the beach. If we're lucky he'll wash away again."

  Maybe it was that Rosa had said so few words to him until that moment; or maybe it was her tone. Whatever the reason, her words seemed to penetrate the tequila fog in Nathaniel's brain. He stared at her, a stupid grin flickering and then dying on his face. "You have no right to talk to me like that," he said. "This is—I'm a—" he clutched his horn. The three women watched him. His eyes were cast down, shoulders slumped.

  "I'll get some coffee made," Maggie said. "Come on, Nathaniel. Why don't you put some clothes on? We've got a lot to talk about."

  After showering away some of the aches, pains, and sunburn, and changing into fresh clothes, they gathered around the long dining table, with coffee, fruit, bread and cheese, as night fell over the sea beyond the patio and beach. The women told Nathaniel parts of what they knew, and finished where they had begun, with the attempted triple murder—what else could they call it?—at sea earlier the same day.

  "But how could Starfish be involved with them?" he said. "I've know her for years. We've always looked out for each other."

  "How did you meet those guys?" Lucy asked.

  "I don't know. I mean, I had a bookie in Dallas and when my bill got outta control and time came to collect he sent them."

  "Well, she arrived here with them, Nate," said Maggie. "They checked into the Boca together a couple days before you got here."

  "But that's impossible!"

  "No, it's the truth," said Lucy. "What's impossible is for me to believe you didn't recognize her the other night at the Villa Maya. You knew she was there—so you had to know she was the one who broke into my room. You knew she was working with them, Nate. Why are you lying? Why are you protecting her? She tried to kill your sister, for God's sake!"

  "I don't know," he said, faltering. "We have this little game we play, where she dresses up, wears that wig and pretends she's someone else, and then—but she didn't know them before. She would have—"

  "Who was she playing the game for, Nate? You? Or was it Partridge?"

  "She plays for whoever pays, I guess."

  "Pays? What is she, some kind of prostitute?" Maggie snapped. "Is that your lady love's true calling?"

  "No, no, it's nothing that cut and dried, Mags," he said. "She—just—Fuck, I don't know. She does what she has to." Funny thing, Lucy thought. Starfish had said the same thing about him.

  He took a deep breath, taking stock, and fixed his gaze on Lucy. "You want your pre-Colombian art story? You wanna know how it works? What the fuck, I'll tell you," he said. "Here's the deal. I met this guy down here last year. He works for this artist named Alberto Gutierrez who is really famous for making perfect copies of pre-Colombian pieces."

  "Yes, I know who he is. But what's your guy's name?" Lucy asked. She was taking notes.

  "It doesn't matter. So anyways—"

  "Yes it does," she interrupted.

  "OK, OK. His name's Tomas. Just Tomas. So Tomas knows another guy who works in this little private museum in Merida—a museum endowed by a local gringo dope millionaire who happens to have an incredible collection of Mayan stuff and doesn't know shit about it. He just buys it because its expensive, know what I mean? So me and Tomas—Tomas figured it out, I'm just his ticket across the border—came up with a way to make a lot of money. It's very simple, really. Gutierrez marks his copies with a secret code that can only be read by an infra-red sensor, but you know who actually applies those code markings? Tomas. So this is how it works."

  "First, Tomas takes a Gutierrez copy of one of the pieces in the dope guy’s museum—and they are damned good copies—aged to perfection. And he doesn't mark it with the ID mark. Instead, he gets his friend—he gets a cut too, of course—to switch the copy with the original, so there's no theft reported. Then he codes the original, so everybody assumes its a copy, and I take it over the border in a batch of Gutierrez copies, some coded and others uncoded. They get all mixed together, and only I know which ones are "real" and which ones are fake. Then I go to my friend Hamilton Walking Wind—went to school with Ham—and his amigo Calvin Hobart, who provide me with the documents I need, which describe the uncoded fakes as real, give them legitimate history so I can sell them for good money. Meanwhile, the real pieces ended up in your hot little hands, Mags."

  They sat quietly for a moment, thinking it over. Lucy broke the silence. "So you're smuggling fakes that are real, and real pieces that are fakes."

  "And just plain fakes too. Pretty cool, huh?"

  "Sure, Nathaniel," said Maggie. "Except that your friends left us to die out there today—and your other friends, in New Mexico—Hamilton Walking Wind and Calvin Hobart—are already dead."

  He looked shocked. "Dead? Hamilton? What?"

  Maggie said, “Can't you grasp the implications of what you’ve done? You let me sell fake goods to those people in New York, and got Rosa's boyfriend involved, and now we’re all in this unholy mess."

  "What happened to Cal and Ham?"

  "The cops are calling it double suicide," said Lucy. "Because they were HIV positive."

  "No way," he said. "The whole point of this deal for them was to get more money they needed for special treatments for the virus. Those damn cocktails cost thousands a month and their insurance basically told them to fuck off when they tried to get them to pay. That's why they were willing to cook up those bogus documents. There's no way they would have done it otherwise.” He sighed. “Fuck. Hamilton dead. Really, Mags, I had no idea somebody else was going to double check authenticity in New York. Honest."

  "You blithering idiot, Nathaniel," Maggie said.

  "But what about the pieces those thugs just paid cash for? Who's going to cook the documents on those?" asked Lucy.

  "The papers were done in advance. Starfish brought them down. But Mon and Partridge think they're authentic. That's why they paid all that money for them the other night."

  "So Starfish knew Hamilton and Hobart too?" Lucy said. "God, quadruple cross."

  "Yeah. I introduced them. Sure. Everybody passes through Santa Fe one time or another. It's, you know, pre-Colombian central. Right now Starfish is with Partridge, but she knows the pieces are fake and Jack and Lewis don't. I cut a deal with her."

  "I would bet Jack Partridge and Lewis Mon passed through Santa Fe too," Lucy said grimly. "Very recently."

  "You don't think they did Calvin and Hamilton?"

  "Of course they did. My guess is that Hobart and Walking Wind got cold feet about continuing to authenticate fakes—or maybe got word from New York about what had happened in the gallery—and they were going to own up to forging the papers. They paid the price for trying to reclaim their ethics, I guess."

  "My God," said Rosa after a pause. "What a mess of l
ies and deception."

  "But why did they—Nathaniel, I never—nothing I ever said to you suggested any of these pieces were worth—murder. Now there are two people dead and they almost killed us, too,” Maggie said, still shocked at Nathaniel’s behavior. "They just left us out there, Nate. Left us with the sharks and blood in the water. They wanted us dead! And she was with them! How can you trust her?"

  "I bet she was planning to come back for you," he said lamely.

  "Christ, Nate, don't be a fool," said Lucy. "Sure, she might have come back—to watch the sharks feed. No way she had anything else in mind. What's the story on those two pieces, anyway?"

  "The fakes are worth a couple hundred bucks," he said. "But the real pieces, with good papers—they're each one of a kind—probably half a mil apiece. Mon paid $50,000 for them. Only he doesn't know they're fake."

  "When he finds out he’ll kill you too," said Maggie.

  "Not gonna happen, sis," he said. "There's a buyer in Dallas already set up. They'll go right into a private collection and that's that. I'm out of debt, Partridge and Mon are now Tomas' problem—but he doesn't know that. I've just gotta hook up with Starfish to get my share when she gets her cut at the other end. Then I'm outta this deal for good. And this country. I'm going to Raratonga soon as I get what's mine."

  "How much is that?" Lucy asked quietly.

  "They're supposed to pay her $100,000 once the deal is done. Our deal was she'd cut me half but I'm sure she'll cry poor. Probably give me thirty or forty grand. That should get me goin' again."

  "Mother of God, Nathaniel, I can't believe it. You've left a trail of death and destruction across two countries," said Maggie.

  "Hey, let's not get so self-righteous, sis," he said. "Don't forget you're the one who said you'd be willing to pay just about anything for the two pieces I got you."

  "Oh, nonsense, Nathaniel," Maggie said fiercely. "How dare you! You know I would never want anybody dead for an artifact."