The Skill Conspiracy Page 14

“Sure,” Kevin replied, dismissing my misnomer of the establishment. “Anyway, this is a win-win for you two.”

  “What?” Annie asked indignantly.

  As Kevin had dropped the hammer in revealing he knew who we were, his demeanor had turned a little dark. But for this last comment, he made it sound like he was our best buddy.

  “Yeah. A win-win. You get to take a boat to Colombia just like you wanted, and you don’t even have to buy a boat. Oh, and to make it a win-win-win, we won’t contact the authorities in New York or Florida and tell them where you are and what you’re doing.”

  “Crap,” I said out loud. They knew everything. But this sucked. I was already being accused of a bunch of stuff I didn’t do, or least, didn’t mean to do. Now they wanted to add smuggling to the docket? “No way,” I said out loud. Then, for good measure, “No.”

  “You don’t really have a choice, Alden,” Kevin replied. He reached into his pocket, and the move triggered a part of my brain that caused an instant reaction. As he drew the object out of his pocket, I slapped at it, causing it to fly across the floor of the building.

  “What the fuck, man?” he said, very annoyed as I watched his PCD clatter to the wooden floorboards near a small puddle of water.

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed. But wait, why was I apologizing to this guy?

  He walked over to his PCD, picked it up, pointed it at me from a few feet away, then came over close, but not too close, and showed me the screen.

  “See this guy here?” he said, pointing at the picture he’d just taken of me, which was on half the screen. “He’s obviously this guy here,” he said, while pointing at the other half of the screen, which was a clip from one of those news programs that was continuing to cover our story.

  “Yeah, we get it,” Annie said, aggravation evident in her tone. “You know who we are. So what?”

  Kevin looked at Annie with an almost admiring look that bespoke, “Wow, look at the balls on this one,” but what he said was, “So what? All I need to do is send this picture”—pointing at the pic of me—“to these people”—pointing at the logo of the news station—“with a Tether marker, and they’ll coordinate with the Cuban police so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  “Let me buy your boat,” I blurted out, a desperate idea coming into my head.

  “No,” Kevin said dismissively.

  “A million,” I replied.

  “A million what?” Kevin asked, obviously annoyed.

  “A million dollars. Let me buy your boat for a million dollars. We’ll just go on our way, and you’ll make a pretty amazing profit for doing nothing other than figuring out my name.”

  “No deal, Rumpelstiltskin,” Kevin replied.

  “One point five,” I blurted out.

  This actually gave Kevin pause. He blinked at me, looked away, and motioned toward the man he’d earlier identified as Domingo. The big man walked over with a smile on his face.

  It struck me how casual all of this was. No guns. No threats of violence. No intimidation. Nothing. Well, nothing except the threat of turning us in, which I guess was pretty much all the intimidation they really needed.

  Kevin and Domingo spoke for a few seconds. “Blabbidy blabbidy blah blah blah.”

  I really needed to learn some Spanish.

  I subtly tried activating the Spanish to English translation feature on my PCD, and it literally said, “Wet faint try sandwich after frogs.”

  Useless.

  A moment later, Domingo turned to me and said, “Two.”

  “Two what?” I asked.

  “Two million,” he replied with a thick accent.

  “Done,” I replied without hesitation. I told you I sucked at haggling.

  Kevin and Domingo looked at each other, eyebrows raised, then Kevin looked back to me and said, “Two and a half.”

  I was literally just about to agree when Annie jumped in and saved me.

  “No,” she said. “Two million is way more than fair.”

  Domingo and Kevin shared a laugh, and Domingo said “Bueno,” then walked away.

  That apparently meant the deal was done because Kevin came over and extended his PCD, awaiting his two-million-dollar transfer.

  It hadn’t even been a whole day and we’d already burned through more than half of the money Frank had given us. I was not happy about that at all. Though, I had to admit, I was happier to part with the money than I would have been to have gotten turned into the Cuban authorities by Kevin and Domingo. I’d seen plenty of those TV shows about getting locked up in foreign prisons, and those never ended well.

  21

  You’d think that for two million bucks, Kevin could have left us with the snacks in the refrigerator, but nope. That jerk took out every bag of chips, every pretzel rod, and every bit of trail mix that was in the little kitchen before he transferred ownership of The Runner over to my PCD. I went online to double-check ownership of the vessel, to make sure it wasn’t still registered to his PCD as well as mine, but in this at least, he was telling the truth. Now, the only way the boat would start up is if I were personally standing on it with my PCD in hand and had my thumb right on it. Kevin and Domingo did at least hook us up with some fuel for the trip. Well, by “hook us up,” I mean, they let us purchase fuel at the going rate from their marina. But at least we didn’t have to go driving up and down the coastline looking for a fueling station. Now, two million dollars’ worth of boat and twelve hundred bucks worth of fuel and Annie and I had to go spend a few more bucks on food.

  “We also need to get toothbrushes and deodorant,” Annie pointed out.

  “Hold on,” I said. I was messing with The Runner’s onboard GPS and trip planner. Our eventual destination was Bogota, so I called up a list of popular ports in Colombia and was trying to find the closest one that we could set as our destination.

  “Ahhhh,” I half-sighed, half-grumbled out loud.

  “What’s wrong?” Annie asked.

  “Where we’re trying to go,” I said, not daring to speak out loud our eventual destination, “is like a million miles away from any water.”

  “A million?” she asked with a slight eye roll.

  “Well, let’s put it this way, the distance we need to travel from here to get to the coastline of Colombia? That’s about the same distance we’ll need to travel on land to get to our eventual destination.”

  “Oh,” Annie said with a grimace.

  Neither of us were exactly what you’d call awesome at geography, and I don’t think either of us had realized how far inland Bogota was. When our original plan was just to fly there, I hadn’t exactly been looking at how far away the nearest seaport was on a map. I was mentally about to start going down the road of “do we really need to be going all the way to the space station” again, but I’d already hashed this out a hundred times, and I couldn’t let seven hundred miles of land-travel change my mind now.

  It looked like Cartagena was going to be our best bet. It was just under eight hundred miles from here to there, and it would be about seven hundred from there to Bogota. Not wanting to pull into the most obvious port in the entire country, though, just to be on the safe side, I set the destination for a little beach spot just up the road from Cartagena called Castillogrande. The little trip advice thing I was looking at said that Castillogrande was “exclusive” and “up-market,” so I was hoping that the two of us pulling up in our $400,000 boat would just look like another couple of stupid-rich Americans on vacation.

  “Okay,” I said, clearing the GPS and search history of the boat, just in case anyone got curious while we were off doing our shopping. “Let’s go.”

  Annie decided she’d go get us some extra clothing, and I took off in search of some food. If we went pedal to the metal, or whatever the boat equivalent of that was, we’d be able to make it to Castillogrande in about sixteen hours. Allowing for the possibility of some hiccups or delays during the trip, I figured it’d be smart to buy enough food to la
st us a couple of days, just in case.

  I had to admit, though, being on the run was exhausting. Mostly because I was now quite literally running. Not only did my lack of GPS on my PCD make it hard to know exactly where to go in order to get some food, but I really didn’t trust Kevin and that Domingo guy being back there with The Runner while I was away. I mean, no surprise there in me not wanting to trust them, but now that they had their money, I guess there really was nothing holding them back from turning me in. It was a concern, though not a full-on red-alert worry. I mean, sure, they could turn me in, but some authority, either American or Cuban, would want to have a chat with the person who logged the tip, and neither Kevin nor Domingo struck me as the type who wanted the long arm of the law snooping around anywhere near them. Just to be on the safe side, though, I ran all the way to the edge of town, then kept up a super-quick, but not overly noticeable, pace as I searched random streets for some sort of food store.

  Finally, I found one. The Runner had a little microwave in the kitchen area, so I figured I’d just grab an armload of frozen meals. Looking in the freezer section of this store, however, I realized that everything was, of course, in Spanish. The pictures on the boxes were all stylized and weird, so I just grabbed two each of five different boxes and brought them up to the front, then quickly ran back into the aisles to grab some fruit, chips, salsa, carrots, and beer. I really wanted to grab more than a sixer, but I had to lug all this stuff back to the boat by hand and didn’t think I’d be able to carry much more than that.

  Oh, wait . . . tequila. There was a whole display of it right near the register.

  I put the beer back and grabbed two bottles of Petrón and remembered only at the last second to grab two sticks of deodorant, two chintzy-looking toothbrushes, and some tube of what I hoped was toothpaste.

  The old woman behind the counter rang me up, charged me the American equivalent of ten extra dollars for three paper bags, because it was pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be able to carry all of this stuff in my arms, and I started making my way back to the boat.

  I hadn’t been keeping track of the twists and turns I’d taken to get to this store, but I could tell from where the sun was where I needed to go in order to get back to the water. From there, finding the marina would be easy. It was basically just, left. So, I set out going north, and after just a couple of blocks I felt like someone was following me. Well, I guess I didn’t “feel like” it. I knew it. Someone was actually following me. It was still very early, and pretty much no one else was out on the streets. Only some of the stores had opened, and my footsteps and those of the man about fifty yards behind me were the only sounds that could be heard besides some local aviary. I crossed the street, and the man followed me. He wasn’t being very subtle. I picked up the pace and noticed that I wasn’t really increasing the gap between us. In fact, he was getting closer. Just about twenty feet before the street ended and was going to dump us out on the sandy road that abutted the beach, I looked back over my shoulder and saw out of the side of my eye the man reaching into his pocket. I spun full-around, dropping the single bag I was holding in my right hand, the one without the tequila, by the way, and readied myself.

  “Hey,” the man said, looking far more nervous than I had been expecting him to appear.

  “What?” I said gruffly.

  “Oh,” the man said, now looking more frightened than nervous. “I just, uh, man, I’m sorry.” He looked apologetically at me and the bag I’d dropped on the ground. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. I just promised my wife I’d snap a pic of myself in front of a Cuban sunrise, and when I saw you up ahead of me, I figured I’d try and snag ya to take it for me. I’m terrible at selfies.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling kind of dumb but still annoyed with him chasing me down like this. But I agreed anyway, “Sure.”

  I picked up my dropped bag, crossed the seaside street to the beach, snapped a couple pictures of the very appreciative man, and continued on my way. Have I mentioned how much being on the run sucks?

  Annie was already back at the marina by the time I was in sight. She hadn’t wanted to go in and wait for me at the boat with Kevin, Domingo, and the rest of the guys lurking around, so she met me just a little ways off the edge of the property.

  “You get some good stuff?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I replied. “Not sure if it’s gourmet, but it’s enough so we won’t starve.”

  She used her hand to pull open one of the bags to take a look, and of course, it was one of the bags with the tequila in it.

  “Won’t starve . . . or stay sober, apparently,” she said with a smile.

  We walked through the marina with none of the workers even so much as glancing in our direction. Domingo was at the far end of the building, giving some instructions to a group of men, and Kevin was actually nowhere in sight. When we’d first met him up in Vaca Key, I’d actually kind of liked him, but for obvious reasons, I’d be more than happy if I never had to lay eyes on him ever again.

  As we walked toward The Runner, Annie opened up one of the bags she was holding to show me what she’d purchased. For me, it was three black T-shirts and a pair of shorts. Getting me three of the same exact boring-ass black T-shirt felt like a little bit of a “screw you” for having ditched the “nice” shirt she’d gotten me at Trace, but I didn’t really care. One comfortable, clean shirt is as good as another to me. And the shorts, I was actually kind of excited about those. They were a pair of light gray zipper shorts with a drawstring making them somewhere between casual wear and active wear. I never really wore shorts unless I was at the gym or on vacation, and the jeans I had on now were a little warmer than they needed to be. Once we were on board The Runner, I went down into the little seating area, put away the food I’d bought, and then changed into my new clothes. I came back up to the rear deck of the boat and saw that Annie had ascended to the captain’s area above, so I went up there to meet her.

  “Nice legs,” she said with a smile.

  I might have looked a little bit silly wearing the shorts with my sneakers, socks, and pale white legs, but again, I didn’t really care. I was hot, and they were comfortable.

  The Nav system of the boat was super easy. I called it up, punched in the port at Castillogrande, placed my thumb on my PCD, and hit “START VOYAGE” on the ship’s control panel.

  I think I was kind of expecting the boat to start itself up and set us on our way right then and there, but instead, I got a message saying, “Autopilot will engage at this point,” and then it showed a little map of the area, indicating where we were at the dock and where we needed to go, which looked to me like it was just a few hundred yards off shore.

  “Uh,” I said, not really knowing what to do.

  “You got this?” Annie asked from her chair next to me.

  “I? Maybe?”

  It didn’t look all that hard. I could figure this out. There was a steering wheel and a throttle thing right next to it. All the way to the left of the console was a big red button, and my best guess what that by pressing that I’d be able to fire up the engines. So, I put my thumb on my PCD again, then just went ahead and pressed the big red button with my other hand.

  BA-VROOOOM!

  The deafening racket of The Runner’s engines roared to life. I smiled at Annie, a little bit proud of myself for having figured out at least this much, then gently grabbed hold of the throttle thing and pushed it forward.

  Instantly, every single one of the men on the dock and inside the marina jumped up and started rushing our way. As they did, the boat lurched forward, then abruptly stopped.

  “Ah, crap!” I said, realizing I’d never actually untied the boat from the dock. Living in New York City, I barely even got behind the wheel of a car, let alone the wheel of a boat. In fact, if it wasn’t obvious by now, I’d never actually done this before.

  Two men came rushing up to the side of the boat with Domingo hot on their heels. They were all making some sort of cutt
ing motion with their hands, which I took to mean, cut the engines. So, I pressed the red button again. A jarring, squealing noise ensued, and I was half certain that I’d just ruined the engine. Annie put her head in her hands, and all the men on the dock started yelling at me. Embarrassed, I searched the control console thing in front of me, pressed two silver buttons, which seemed to do nothing, then found a black one, which finally cut the engines.

  “Idiota!” was the first word I heard from one of the men on the dock as soon as the sound of the engine died down. I’d never heard that word before, but I was pretty sure I knew its meaning.

  “Don’t touch anything until I tell you to, puta,” Domingo yelled up to me as two of his men went to either side of the boat to untie the lines. Once they had the ropes untied, they threw the bumper things over the side rail onto the boat, and more insults and grumbling ensued as Domingo looked up to me and said, “Now,” then quickly turned his back on me as if he couldn’t even stand to look at me for one more second.

  I was about nine shades of red. Just before I pushed the button that was the same color as my face, I noticed that Annie’s head was still buried in her hands, but she wasn’t doing it out of embarrassment—no, she was hiding her face because she was laughing, hard.

  “Shut up,” I said lightly, then pressed the button.

  This time when I pushed on the throttle, we moved away from the dock, and I used the steering wheel to follow the little course that was plotted out on the screen in front of me. I don’t think we were going more than about three miles per hour, and I was totally cool with that. The last thing I needed was another accident. So, we took it nice and slow to the marker indicated on my Nav Screen, at which point the screen changed to read, “Autopilot engaging in ten, nine, eight . . .”

  It asked if I wanted to cancel, and when I didn’t press “Yes,” the countdown finished, the engines got even louder, and we quickly accelerated, putting a lot of distance between us and the marina.

  22