The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  “Ah! Another one!” Annie chirped.

  Oh, and there was that too. Mosquitoes the size of gumballs kept popping up, and with teeth like Doberman Pinschers. Wait, do mosquitoes even have teeth?

  “There it is,” Annie said, pointing a finger ahead of us.

  The road we’d been following had caused us to cut inland a little bit, the reason for our unscenic tour, but as we were angling back out toward the water, the marina was now in sight. From behind, I heard the roar of a motorcycle on the road. I turned my head, slapped at a mosquito that had attached itself to the back of my neck, and saw what I was pretty sure to be Biker Guy zooming past us at about a hundred miles an hour. Giving myself a little whiplash in following his path past us, I saw him slow down and pull into the parking lot of the marina just ahead.

  Vaca Docks, the sign said. As we walked into the parking lot, I could see that it was most definitely Biker Guy’s ride sitting in one of the spaces, but he obviously hadn’t felt like hanging around out front to give us another one of his fine greetings.

  “Well, they do have a lot of boats,” Annie said, as we got close enough to see a number of different water craft both tied up to the docks and set out of the water up on trailers.

  “Do you have any idea what we should be asking about?” she asked me.

  “I, uh, hmm. No, I don’t,” I admitted.

  I remembered that when Mr. Dirty Shirt had asked what I was looking for, I had said something like “seaworthy,” which in retrospect was pretty stupid. I had meant to convey the fact that we wanted something that could travel long distances over the sea, but since every boat was obviously meant to be in the water, I’m guessing that “seaworthy” didn’t help explain anything other than the fact that I had no idea what I was looking for or talking about.

  “Give me a minute,” I said. I decided to try to alleviate my ignorance toward water craft by doing a quick online search.

  Small or medium boats that can travel great distances, was the query I thought-commanded into my PCD.

  After just a couple minutes’ worth of reading, I decided that what we needed to look for was a “mid-sized distance vessel.” Most boats designed to travel a thousand miles or more ran on a combination of gasoline and solar power. Solar technology had come a decent way in the past few years, but even the little solar-powered land vehicles that had been coming onto the market lately still had restriction on them to the point that they were basically being treated like street legal golf carts. They just didn’t have enough juice to let them keep up with the fossil fuel vehicles, and certainly not the Mag Cars. I think the fastest any of those little solar cars could go was like twenty-five miles per hour. Similarly, a boat run solely on solar power might as well be powered by a galley full of dudes with oars. It wouldn’t cost you a dime in fuel, but it would take forever to get where you were going. The solar/gas hybrid distance vehicles could travel at much quicker speeds and, using the energy collected from the sun, it would make it so the gas didn’t have to do all the work and allow the boat to travel farther on one single fill-up.

  “Mid-sized distance vessel,” I said out loud and showed Annie some image results that had come up on my PCD. She would be doing all of the talking. I wasn’t awesome with new people, and I was flat out horrible at negotiating. Annie was good at both of those things and also seemed to really enjoy shopping, no matter what it was that she was buying.

  We walked through the dirt and sand parking lot, past Biker Guy’s bike, and entered through the main door of the marina.

  I laughed out loud, Annie didn’t ask why, but it was because this place did actually have a door on it. Improvement, I thought, though I kept that to myself.

  “Hello?” Annie called out as we entered the large, open structure.

  It was a tall room, maybe about twenty feet high. Half of it was filled with random little boat parts, and the other half was set with a long desk strewn with papers that were, even as we stood there watching, flying off the desk and landing on the wood floor due to the breeze coming in from the large, open double doors set in the wall opposite the entrance.

  “Hello?” she called out again.

  Didn’t seem like anyone was there, so we walked toward the big double doors and out onto the main dock.

  “Hey,” a voice suddenly said, scaring the crap out of me.

  Some dude was sitting down on the dock just outside the door. He was holding a pair of sunglasses in his hands that were connected to his neck by a thick, lime green, rubbery-looking leash. He was polishing the glasses with his shirt, and after breathing heavily on the glasses one more time and polishing off the breath-mist, he stood up to greet us.

  “Vaca Tony,” he said.

  “Huh?” I replied, shaking his insanely calloused hand.

  “Everyone calls me Vaca Tony,” he said by way of explanation.

  Great. I finally get a guy’s name, and it’s some goofy nickname.

  “Melissa,” Annie said, filling my moment of dumb silence. “And this is Randy.”

  “Good to meet ya,” Vaca Tony replied.

  I wondered for a minute if that would be like me calling myself New York Alden and decided it would be, then decided that would be dumb.

  “You guys looking to take a trip?” he asked.

  That was weird. Why would he assume that right off the bat? Why didn’t he just ask if we were interested in a boat?

  He stammered a bit, looked over at a couple of boats tied up at the end of the dock, and said, “A, uh, sunset trip? Little tour of the island? We offer guided tours and boats for the day.”

  Oh. That makes sense . . . I guess.

  “No,” Annie replied. “We’re actually looking to buy a boat. Do you sell them here or just rent them?”

  “Both,” the man said, with the same kind of grin I’d see on Brandon’s face whenever he would talk about a big sale he’d made at Adventure Plus skills.

  “You two just buy a place here on the Island?” he asked.

  “No,” Annie replied. “We live up in Miami. Both of my parents recently died.”

  Where the heck was she going with this?

  “I hadn’t actually seen them in years, but they had a rather sizable life insurance policy, and as their only daughter, all the money went to me.”

  “I’m, uh, sorry for your loss,” Vaca Tony said, obviously feeling like that’s probably what he was supposed to say at this point in the story.

  “Anyway,” Annie said, shaking off the melancholy she’d been feigning a moment earlier. “Randy and I have always wanted to do some traveling, but I just hate planes, you know?”

  Vaca Tony nodded, the smile returning to his face, as he could now see where this was going.

  “So we’re looking for a boat that can take us places. You know, a mid-size distance vessel or something like that.”

  Hey, I thought, impressed despite myself. That was a pretty good story. Started a little weird, but got good.

  “Nothing like that up in Miami?” Vaca Tony asked dubiously.

  “Oh, definitely,” Annie replied without missing a beat. “But we’re here now and just wanted to continue the adventure south if we could. Didn’t really wanna head back home just yet if we could avoid it.”

  “How far south?” Vaca Tony asked.

  “Not sure,” Annie replied, looking at me as if she deserved a cookie for not blurting out “Colombia” this time.

  Vaca Tony looked back over at the boats he’d glanced at before, and it was only then that I realized Biker Guy didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight.

  Where was he, and what did Vaca Tony keep looking at? This newfound paranoia of mine was extremely annoying.

  He removed his glasses, let them hang from their leash, and started to polish them with his shirt again.

  “People aren’t usually in the market for boats like that around here,” he said. “We’ve got more of the shorter-range recreational types of boats. You’ll probably have to head back up to the mai
nland for something like that. That or, well . . .” He paused dramatically. “I know a couple of places that specialize in boats just like that down in Cuba.”

  “Cuba?” I asked, both annoyed and dismayed.

  Cuba and the United States had an on-again/off-again relationship going back, well, forever. It was currently on again, but . . . you know.

  “And do you have a suggestion as to how we might be able to get down to Cuba?” Annie asked.

  “Of course,” Vaca Tony said with his trademark smile.

  Yeah. Of course. I was half expecting him to try to sell us one of, if not the, crappiest boat he had for an exorbitant price, when he cut off my pessimism by saying, “We run private tours down there all the time.”

  “Oh,” I said out loud, looking to Annie to see what she thought of this idea.

  “Yeah?” she said, looking to get at least a little more information.

  “I had actually just been sitting on the dock waiting for the boat to return when you guys arrived,” he said. “My brother runs the tour on a Domanzi 33. We could have you there in just about six hours.”

  My eyebrows inadvertently crept up to my hairline. That seemed fast.

  “How much?” Annie asked, waiting for the sunburned salesman to sink his hook.

  “Well, normally we try to wait for six or more people at a time, but—”

  I kind of tuned out of the conversation, instead searching on my PCD for what a Domanzi 33 was.

  “Whoa,” I said out loud inadvertently, which apparently interrupted the haggling, but they got back to it presently.

  As they did, I looked back down at my PCD and saw that the Domanzi 33 was actually the exact type of boat we had been looking for, but bigger and faster than I was expecting. It was a solar-gas hybrid that could go up to fifteen hundred miles on one fill-up at a sustained fifty miles per hour. The price tag? Just north of four hundred thousand dollars.

  “Whoa,” I said again, earning looks from both Annie and Vaca Tony.

  How the heck did Vaca Tony and his rundown marina afford a boat like that?

  “Deal,” I heard him say as he stuck out his hand to shake Annie’s.

  The haggling wasn’t really necessary, but was more believable and less conspicuous than us just showing up and offering to pay whatever the asking price was. Tourists were generally dumb, but, there was looking like a tourist, and then there was looking like two people who were on the run from the law. We were really hoping to look like the former.

  I heard the rumble of big boat engines emerging from around the corner of the small bay. Something was definitely tickling my senses about this whole thing seeming a little . . . off. I decided that if the boat pulled up and it was Biker Guy at the helm, we were getting out of here.

  17

  Thank the Lord that as the boat came closer I saw that it was not Biker Guy who was at the helm. It was instead a man who did indeed look quite a bit like Vaca Tony, except for the fact that where Vaca Tony had short, gray hair, this man had long, messy brown hair that was blowing in the breeze.

  “Kevin!” Tony yelled to his brother as he raised a hand in greeting.

  I’m pretty sure there was no way Kevin heard his brother calling his name. The engines were insanely loud.

  Kevin returned the wave, though, and steered the boat in toward an open spot at the end of the dock, then cut the thunderously loud engines and drifted the rest of the way in.

  We followed Vaca Tony out to the end of the dock and watched as Kevin tossed him some ropes that he tied up to the deck.

  “These them?” Kevin asked as he jumped the three or so feet from the side of the boat down to the dock.

  “Yup,” Vaca Tony replied.

  “How’d you know we were waiting here for you?” I asked, my suspicion starting to return.

  Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out a PCD by way of explanation.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Right. Vaca Tony had obviously thought-commanded a message to his brother about us being here.

  Normally, I would never in a million years be hopping onto a speed boat with the brother of a guy named Vaca Tony, departing from some random Florida Key named after a cow bound for an island nation that, depending on the time in history, was either completely illegal to go to or not. However, circumstances being what they were, a fast boat out of the country seemed exactly like what we needed. Not only were the people at the STU Corporation after us. Not only were they willing to kill to contain the information I had in my head. Not only were our faces all over local New York TV for armed robbery and quite likely for the murder of those STU people Frank had shot, but by now, the authorities probably had a really good idea as to where Annie and I had landed after jumping out of the plane. Add that all together, and we pretty much just needed to get out of here, fast.

  Even having taken the time to eat our burgers and beer seemed a little crazy in retrospect, but I had been hungry, and also very new at being on the run.

  “Pleased to meet ya both,” Kevin said, extending his hand to me.

  “Randy,” I said, shaking his wet palm. I assumed it was sea spray soaking his skin and not a gross amount of sweat. “This is my girlfriend, Melissa.”

  “Kevin,” he said, as he reached to shake Annie’s hand. “When are you guys looking to head out?”

  “Vaca Tony said we could make it in under six hours,” I said, half stating the information we’d been given and half looking for confirmation.

  Kevin nodded the affirmation.

  “If we got going soon, I was kinda thinking, or hoping, we could get down there this evening before nightfall.”

  Kevin gave the briefest hint of a sigh but recovered quickly to say, “Well, I’m literally just getting back from a trip to Cuba right now. Happy to head back out again, but I need about a half hour or so to maybe grab a bite and take care of a couple other things, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Of course,” Annie said. “So long as you don’t think you’ll be too tired to drive us the whole way there. We don’t want to be too pushy.”

  Kevin laughed, and Vaca Tony joined him in the chuckle.

  “Not much driving for me to do, Ms. Melissa. This girl’s complete with GPS auto-nav,” he said, gesturing toward the boat. “She’d take ya there all by herself once I plug in the destination. Only thing I’ll really be doing is docking her.”

  “And making sure your guests have a nice comfortable trip,” Vaca Tony chimed in.

  “Of course,” Kevin said with a playful grin intended for his brother. “So, just hang tight and we’ll be on our way in thirty minutes or so. I promise, The Runner will getcha there to see a Cuban sunset, guaranteed.”

  “The Runner?” I asked.

  “That’s the name of the boat,” Kevin responded.

  Annie and I exchanged a quick look and were both obviously thinking the same thing.

  “That’s a little on the nose,” she said quietly enough so that only I could hear her.

  An expensive boat meant to cover long distances at high speeds running from a random Florida Key down to Cuba? And they named it The Runner? If I had another option, I’d be taking it. Unfortunately, we didn’t.

  Kevin and Vaca Tony walked back up the dock toward the marina’s one building. Annie spotted a small patch of beach just off to one side of the marina docks, and she suggested we could go and sit there for a little while as we waited for Kevin. Just because we were on the run from a murderous corporation and the US government didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy putting our butts in the sand and having the Atlantic lap at our toes for a little while, right? I marked the time on my PCD, and we made our way over to the patch of sand. My sneakers had never really had time to fully dry out since the time we splashed down, so I took the opportunity to take them off and put them out in the sun on the beach. I rolled up my jeans a little bit, because I refused to wear skinny jeans, and I was thus able to do so, and sat down next to Annie, letting the water come up and lap at our
feet. There was so much to say and, at the same time, nothing really to say about any of it. We held hands and, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a single way to start a conversation, but Annie, as always, knew exactly what to say.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  She gave me a kiss, then leaned into me as I wrapped my arm around her and supported her head on my shoulder.

  A little more than half an hour passed, and I heard Kevin calling our names from the dock. He was carrying a couple canvas bags, making his way down the dock to The Runner and waving for us to follow. I’d be lying if I said at least a tiny little part of my brain didn’t think those beach-bag looking things he was carrying weren’t stuffed with cocaine, but then again, wouldn’t the drugs be going to America from Cuba and not the other way around? I don’t know. I’d never even had to consider stuff like this before. My life had obviously become very strange.

  We jogged off the beach. I had picked up my shoes but didn’t put them on yet, and we caught up to Kevin at the end of the dock. When we got there, he reached into one of the canvas bags and tossed me a pouch of crinkle cut potato chips.

  “Snack?” he asked. “I brought enough stuff to stock up our entire little kitchen.”

  Oh. That makes sense.

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I tore open my bag of chips, offered the first handful to Annie, and the two of us followed Kevin up over the rail of the boat and onto its back deck.

  Now that I was on board and really able to check it out, I could see that The Runner was a pretty amazing vessel. It was mostly light gray in color and had solar panels running all around the upper part of the hull and had another ring of them around the entire edge of the deck of the boat. These were all tilted up at a slight angle, which cut down on the deck space you could walk on, but seeing as how this thing was clearly built for speed and distance, the sacrifice of a little space wasn’t all that surprising. The back part of the boat, the part we’d gotten onto from the dock, didn’t have much to it besides a couple large white boxes set against the stern.