Cuban Death-Lift Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PRAISE FOR RANDY WAYNE WHITE AND HIS NOVELS

  “What James Lee Burke has done for Louisiana, Tony Hillerman for the Southwest, John Sandford for Minnesota, and Joe R. Lansdale for east Texas, Randy Wayne White does for his own little acre.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “White takes us places that no other Florida mystery writer can hope to find.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  “White brings vivid imagination to his fight scenes. Think Mickey Spillane meets The Matrix.”

  —People

  “A major new talent . . . hits the ground running . . . a virtually perfect piece of work. He’s the best new writer we’ve encountered since Carl Hiaasen.”

  —The Denver Post

  “White is the rightful heir to joining John D. Mac-Donald, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Geoffrey Norman. . . . His precise prose is as fresh and pungent as a salty breeze.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “White doesn’t just use Florida as a backdrop, but he also makes the smell, sound, and physicality of the state leap off the page.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “This satisfying madcap fare could go seismic on the regional bestseller lists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “He describes southwestern Florida so well it’s easy to smell the salt tang in the air and feel the cool Gulf breeze.”

  —Mansfield News Journal

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, February 1981

  First Printing (Author Introduction), April 2007

  Copyright © New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1981

  eISBN : 978-1-101-53061-0

  Introduction copyright © Randy Wayne White, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For those of us who made it out of Mariel

  Introduction

  In the winter of 1980, I received a surprising phone call from an editor at Signet Books—surprising because, as a Florida fishing guide, the only time New Yorkers called me was to charter my boat. And if any of my clients were editors, they were savvy enough not to admit it.

  The editor said she’d read a story by me in Outside Magazine and was impressed. Did I have time to talk?

  As a mediocre high school jock, my idols were writers, not ball players. I had a dream job as a light-tackle guide, yet I was still obsessed with my own dream of writing for a living. For years, before and after charters, I’d worked hard at the craft. Selling a story to Outside, one of the country’s finest publications, was a huge break. I was about to finish a novel, but this was the first time New York had called.

  Yes, I had time to talk.

  The editor, whose name was Joanie, told me Signet wanted to launch a paperback thriller series that featured a recurring he-man hero. “We want at least four writers on the project because we want to keep the books coming, publishing one right after the other, to create momentum.”

  Four writers producing books with the same character?

  “Characters,” Joanie corrected. “Once we get going, the cast will become standard.”

  Signet already had a template for the hero. He was a Vietnam vet turned Key West fishing guide, she said, talking as if the man existed. He was surfer-boy blond, and he’d been friends with Hemingway.

  I am not a literary historian, but all my instincts told me the timetable seemed problematic. I said nothing.

  “He has a shark scar,” Joanie added, “and he’s freakishly strong. Like a man who lifts weights all the time.”

  The guys I knew who lifted weights were also freakishly clumsy, so . . . maybe the hero, while visiting a local aquarium, tripped during feeding time?

  My brain was already problem-solving.

  “He lives in Key West,” she said, “so, of course, he has to be an expert on the area. That’s why I’m calling. You live in Key West, and I liked your magazine story a lot. It seems like a natural fit.”

  Actually, I fished out of Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, a six hour drive from Sloppy Joe’s, but this was no time for petty details.

  “Have you ever been to Key West?” I asked the editor. “Great sunsets.”

  Editors, I have since learned, can also be cagey. Joanie didn’t offer me the job. She had already settled on three of the four writers, she said, but if I was willing to submit a few sample chapters on speculation, she’d give me serious consideration.

  Money? A contract? That stuff was “all standard,” she told me, and could be discussed later.

  “I’ll warn you right now,” she said, “there are a couple of other writers we’re considering, so you need to get at least three chapters to me within a month. Then I’ll let you know.”

  I hung up the phone, stunned by my good fortune. My first son, Lee, had been born only a few months earlier. My much adored wife, Debra, and I were desperate for mone
y because the weather that winter had been miserable for fishing. But it was perfect for writing.

  I went to my desk, determined not to let my young family down.

  At Tarpon Bay Marina, where I was a guide, my friend Ralph Woodring owned a boat with Dusky painted in big blue letters on the side. My friend, Graeme Mellor, lived on a Morgan sailboat named No Mas.

  Dusky MacMorgan was born.

  Every winter, Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus came to town. Their trapeze artists, I realized, were not only freakishly strong, but they were also freakishly nimble.

  Dusky gathered depth.

  One of my best friends was the late Dr. Harold Westervelt, a gifted orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Westervelt became the Edison of Death, and he loved introducing himself that way to new patients. His son, David, became Westy O’Davis, and our spearfishing pal, Billy, became Billy Mack.

  Problems with my hero’s shark scar and his devoted friendship with Hemingway were also solved.

  Working around the clock, pounding away at my old black manual typewriter, I wrote Key West Connection in nine days. On a Monday morning, I waited for the post office to open to send it to New York.

  Joanie sounded a little dazed when she telephoned on Friday. Was I willing to try a second book on spec?

  Hell, yes.

  God, I was beginning to love New York’s can-do attitude.

  The other three writers (if they ever existed) were fired, and I became the sole proprietor of Capt. Dusky MacMorgan—although Signet owned the copyright and all other rights after I signed Joanie’s “standard” contract. (This injustice was later made right by a willing and steadfast publisher and my brilliant agent.)

  If Joanie (a fine editor) feels badly about that today, she shouldn’t. I would’ve signed for less.

  I wrote seven of what I would come to refer to as “duck and fuck” books because in alternating chapters Dusky would duck a few bullets, then spend much-deserved time alone with a heroine.

  Seldom did a piece of paper go into my old typewriter that was ripped out and thrown away, and I suspect that’s the way the books read. I don’t know. I’ve never reread them. I do remember using obvious clichés, a form of self-loathing, as if to remind myself that I should be doing my own writing, not this job-of-work.

  The book you are now holding, and the other six, constituted a training arena for a young writer who took seriously the discipline demanded by his craft and also the financial imperatives of being a young father.

  For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

  —Randy Wayne White

  Cartagena, Colombia

  1

  In a foreign land, a land of aliens and alien politics, the killing becomes easier. The screams still haunt you, but the faces lose shape; dissipate like a sea fog at first light, and you become more and more a stranger—and the shadows become confidants. Separated from the reality of your country, your friends, your home, the newly dead become nothing more than obstacles on a path already followed, like beads on an abacus, or fears that have been conquered, and you know—with a pain like a white cold light—that you must keep killing, you must stay on the path, because it is forever and always the only way back. . . .

  The day before my federal connection, Norm Fizer, told me about the disappearance of the three CIA agents in Mariel Harbor, Cuba, the squall hit.

  The word “squall” doesn’t seem strong enough to describe the storm that came roaring down unannounced from the open ocean of the west-northwest. Winds gusting to ninety knots, seas walling ten to fifteen feet, death written all over the face of it. And the weather boys in southern Florida did a bad job of picking it up. A damn bad job. For them it meant just one more mistake to log with the others and forget. But for the thousands of Cuban-Americans in small boats bound for Mariel Harbor to pick up relatives in the largest Cuban sealift in history, it meant disaster.

  It was a Sunday in late April. Normally, April is a time for recovery in Key West. The barrage of tourism is over by Easter, and the citizens of the little island city that has become America’s chic dead end usually spend April walking the spent streets, blinking their eyes at the new quiet, at the return of the old slowness, like bears just out of hibernation.

  But not this April.

  You must have heard all about it, headline after headline, with film at eleven. The international newsmongers have turned us all into victims. We’ve become headline addicts, and they’ve increased our supply so gradually and steadily that we don’t even realize the seriousness of our addiction. Most of us forget the dreams we’ve just had in the white glare of the morning edition, and at six we’re too busy with Cronkite’s understated lamentations to hear the words of our own children. The little man from Walden Pond saw the folly of that, but he was no anchorman, so who listens?

  So you know about the Cubans who crashed the gate at the Peruvian embassy outside of Havana and demanded political asylum in early April. It was nothing new, really. Cubans tired of Castro’s pipe dream had long ago figured out that breaking into the embassies of Peru and Costa Rica was the most reliable way out. But this time the unexpected happened. When the Peruvians, as always, refused to return the would-be refugees, Castro sent bulldozers to crash down the gates, removed his military force, and announced that anyone who wanted to abandon “the dream of socialism” was welcome to take refuge at the little embassy. Within two days, more than ten thousand Cubans had collected on the grounds. There was no food, so they ate the mangoes off the embassy tree, and then the leaves, and then the bark. The embassy’s cat and guard dog were killed and roasted over an open fire. By the time the Peruvians—with the help of Costa Rica—had started to airlift refugees (fifty at a time) to South America, the world press got hold of the story, and Castro was made to look like the maniac he is. He might not care a hoot about the needs of his people, but he sure is sensitive to world opinion. He saw the refugees getting off the planes in Costa Rica as the source of his disgrace, so he found a way to halt the airlift—one of his goons pushed a Costa Rican diplomat through a plate-glass window. It wasn’t an admirable method of diplomacy, but it was effective. The airlift was halted immediately. Then Castro did something which at the time seemed even stranger. He let it be known that if Americans wanted to come to Cuba by boat, they were welcome to pick up relatives— whether they were among the thousands at the Peruvian embassy or not. At first it didn’t make any sense. I followed the news reports, like everyone else in Key West, and couldn’t figure it out. Why would Castro suddenly give his people the freedom of choice? And then I remembered something my little friend Carlos de Marti had told me. Carlos is in love with a Cuban woman—whom he had grown up with before his parents shipped him off to America in 1960. Once a month—if he can manage it—Carlos makes the dangerous ninety-mile crossing alone to visit his girl on a secluded beach, and then sneaks back, bringing with him two cases of Hatuey beer for me. After his last trip, he had told me the way things were in Cuba.

  “Very bad, amigo,” he had said. As always, he had brought the beer down to the docks at Garrison Bight in Key West where I moor my charter boat, Sniper. “My little love asked me if, on my next trip, I would consider bringing her and her family back. That is the only thing that keeps us apart—her family. But things are very bad there now and getting worse. Little bugs ruined the national sugarcane crop, and there is some blue fungus that has killed all the tobacco. At first it was a joke, see? No tobacco, so Fidel could no longer smoke his big Cohiva cigars. But then it was not so funny. There was no money, so there was no food. When starving people are caught stealing oranges from the national groves, they were imprisoned. My little love has gotten so thin, amigo, that I am worried. The next trip, she will come back with me—family or no family.”

  When I remembered that, it started to make more sense. American boats in Cuba would bring American dollars. And unloading poor Cubans would take some pressure off Castro’s economy. When the first two boatloads of refugees came into K
ey West on April 21, I understood even further. I was out off Mule Key at the time, trying to chum up some bonefish for two doctors from Moline. The first boats back were two Miami lobster fishermen—the Dos Hermanos and the Blanchie III. I watched the Coast Guard escort them back to the submarine base beside the low, dun-colored geometrics of old Fort Taylor. The boats were pathetically overloaded. One of Castro’s little jokes. Overload the American boats just to see how many would be lost on the dangerous crossing of the Florida Strait. And for all the people on those two boats, there weren’t that many relatives of Cuban-Americans. For every three relatives Castro allowed to leave, he sent about twenty of his castoffs—the elderly, political prisoners, habitual criminals. Another of his little jokes. But the Cuban-Americans didn’t care—and I couldn’t blame them. Most of them still had mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers back in Cuba, and it was their only chance to get them out. So they filed into Key West, thousands upon thousands, trailering their small fishing boats behind their cars, gas in plastic cans, food in coolers, ready to risk their lives to make the crossing and get their loved ones back. There wasn’t enough hotel space on the island, so they slept in their cars and drank their morning coffee sitting on the curbs of sidewalks.

  Yes, it was a strange April in Key West.

  There were so many Cuban-Americans unloading their boats at Garrison Bight that the Sheriff’s Department had to send deputies to direct traffic day and night. And the little harbor was packed. For those of us who had boats on charterboat row, it was a real pain in the butt. Most of them had little knowledge of seamanship, so they were constantly running over anchor lines and ramming into wharves and other boats, occasionally catching fire. It was a deadly serious kind of Keystone Kops. It got so that the other guides and I were afraid to leave our boats unguarded. When you came in from a charter, there were normally two or three Cuban-American boats in your slip, and it wasn’t easy getting them to move. There were people and noise and traffic everywhere, so finally I just said to hell with it.