Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [1]
“Get your lights on. You want the Coast Guard tailing us all the way out?”
Balaos, needlefish and a big stingray skittered out of the Donzi’s path. The third man sat in the jump seat, his back to the others, watching the spray fly from the huge inboard engines and trying painfully to set himself for the concussion of waves he could not see.
“How about a beer?” the driver yelled at him.
The third man shook his head. “No, thanks.” His eyes fixed on the wake, a mile-long seam in the black water. The small man, a gun in the waistband of his jeans, leaned close to the driver.
“What’s the matter with Ruis?”
“It’s his first time,” the driver said, grunting as the boat’s tapered hull pounded off a swell. “He’s just a little nervous.”
“That’s just great. Jesus! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hey, it’s no problem,” the driver said, smiling. “This will be easy.”
“Shit,” said the small man. He heaved a beer can, half-full, into Biscayne Bay.
Twenty minutes later the Donzi anchored near Elliott Key, a boot-shaped island nine miles off the mainland. The driver flipped a CB radio to Channel 15, turned down the squelch control, and the boat filled with harsh static and Spanish gibberish from cars in the city.
“Idiots,” he muttered.
The three men sat in silence for thirty minutes, the driver scanning the eastern horizon. The ungainly silhouette of a tanker moved south in the Gulf Stream. Occasionally the whine of a small boat broke the quiet.
Ruis, balancing like a rookie high-wire artist, stood to urinate off the side of the boat, and the driver and the small man coughed with laughter. “While you’re up there, get the anchor,” the driver said, then glanced at his wristwatch, a gold Rolex Oyster that had cost him twenty-three hundred dollars and one night’s work. “It’s time to move.”
“See anything?”
“Not yet.”
He aimed the Donzi out to sea and throttled up to thirty miles per hour. The hull pounded mercilessly in the offshore rollers, and all three men stood in the open cockpit to brace themselves. After fifteen minutes the driver cut back the engines and the bow dropped with a slap.
“Come in, Owl,” a voice on the radio said. The reception was clear this time. The driver said nothing.
“Why don’t they answer?” Ruis whined.
“Shut up,” the small man said. “Just watch.”
“Owl, come in,” the voice repeated.
“There!” the driver exclaimed. He pointed northeast. Several miles away two lights flickered. One green. One white. On, off. On, off. Over the radio an answering voice recited numbers in Spanish. The driver of the Donzi didn’t bother to write them down. He could make out the freighter’s bulk even above the four-foot chop.
“Come in, Owl, this is Pussycat. Could you give your twenty again?”
“That guy’s crazy,” hissed the small man in the Donzi. “Tell him to shut the fuck up.”
The driver snatched the microphone and spoke sharply in Spanish. “¡Basta!”
“OK,” the small man said. “Let’s do it.”
Another boat beat them to the freighter. It was a Magnum, Gulf Stream blue and built to fly. Even in the dark the Donzi’s driver could see the crew was American: tall, sandy-haired, tennis-shirted, two of them with pistols.
The Night Owl’s Colombians, shirtless and sweating, passed the bales to the Magnum with the rhythm of a fire brigade. One of the Americans perched on the bow of his boat, relaying each burlap bundle to his partners. The bales, fifteen in all, disappeared into the fat hull.
“I wish they’d hurry,” Ruis said nervously.
The small man said nothing but glanced angrily at the driver. This was the pussy’s last trip, as far as he was concerned.
The Magnum roared away, the backwash rebounding in deep echo off the freighter’s old steel hull.
The Donzi motored up to the Night Owl, and the small man tied on with a clove hitch. His hands clinging to the speedboat’s plexiglass windshield, Ruis stared up at the freighter’s bulging flanks. Framed above him against the night sky stood a lean Colombian with a rifle.
“¿Cuantos?” the crewman asked.
“Veinte,” the driver replied in Caribbean Spanish that had come with him from