Coincidence - Alan May [22]
All right, then, he thought. What about buying forty-five-gallon drums of fuel and filling up the tank in the cove? That would be by far the safest place. No, that would never work. Those drums weighed a ton; there was no way to maneuver them down to the cove. They could wait until they got as far as Peru before refueling, maybe. But then the risk would not only be getting caught with a stolen boat, but getting caught with a stolen boat that was carrying a load of cocaine.
That idiot Phillip! And that makes me a bigger idiot, Juan told himself, punching his pillow. He should never have let Stefano tell him it would be better for somebody else to handle the boat. If he’d done it himself, he’d have known they needed a larger one. Now it was too late.
Early the next morning, after a fitful night, Juan drove along the coast road, looking for an out-of-the-way place that sold diesel fuel. He was still furious at himself. Wasn’t he the man famous for nailing down every last detail? Stefano, he was the big-picture man, all right, the one who dreamed up the ideas in the first place. But Juan, the little brother, he had always been the one to deal with the all-important details. Stefano had relied on him for that, and he had never let him down. He might not have been good at anything else in his miserable life, he thought, but he was good at that, at thinking two steps ahead of everyone else, at anticipating all the potential pitfalls in a plan, and making damn sure they didn’t happen.
He should never have put Phillip in charge of something so important. Sure the guy knew boats and was a regular whiz at the helm, but he had no concept of the painstaking attention you had to put into a job like this.
Eventually Juan found a likely spot at a marina in the harbor at Punta Magdalena, some ninety miles north. The marina closed at five every evening, but if he could entice the owner to come back after dark to service a late-arriving boat, it would be as good a spot as they could hope for.
The harbor at Punta Magdalena was dilapidated but well protected by a rock breakwater with an opening about two hundred feet wide. The marina was at the end of an old wooden jetty that extended into the harbor about two hundred and fifty feet. Juan was glad to see that the few fishing boats in the harbor were allowed to swing on their moorings. That would give them plenty of room to manoeuvre the Two Wise in the harbor.
The sides of the jetty were protected by long planks of wood with old used tires suspended from them for fenders. There was a gas pump, a diesel pump, and a ramshackle shed used as an office. Lighting was almost nonexistent. It was obvious that not much happened at night. They couldn’t take a chance on being seen in the daytime; the camouflage Phillip had devised was okay for disguising the boat from the air, but at close range, in the light of day? Who the hell would stick blue vinyl all over a million-dollar yacht?
No, they would have to do the refueling at night, with as few people around as possible. Juan had found that it rarely took more than waving a few pesos under the nose of an underpaid worker to put him in a cooperative frame of mind. He jotted down the marina manager’s name and number. He’d get Phillip to make the call. That was the one thing the little bastard was useful for—passing for an upstanding middle-class citizen.
That same day, Phillip was grappling with how to get seventeen rolls of vinyl aboard the boat. He hadn’t wanted to make inquiries in Puntarenas, so had headed for San Jose, the capital. He’d had a frustrating afternoon going from one sign shop to another before he found