Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby 1)

“Maria’s going to be pissed off if I tell you.”

“We already know some of it,” I said. “It’s about her father and her grandfather, right?”

Bill grinned. “Actually it’s about seventeen million, three hundred thousand dollars in gold bars.”

“That’s a lot of gold,” Hooker said.

“A hundred bars, each weighing twenty-seven pounds.”

“Is it on my boat?” Hooker asked.

“We’re taking up the last load tonight.”

“And then?”

“I’m taking it to Naples. I rented a house in Port Royal when we stopped in the Keys. It’s on a canal. I just tie the boat up to the dock and offload the gold.”

Hooker grinned. “You’re going in through Gordon Pass?” He turned to me. “Naples is a pretty little town on the Gulf. It’s built around canals and filled with multi-million-dollar houses. It’s the most respectable place in Florida. Not as much flash as Miami Beach or Palm Beach. Just tons of money. Very safe. And the Port Royal neighborhood is the richest. A three-million-dollar house in Port Royal is considered a teardown.”

“What are you going to do with these gold bars?” I asked Bill.

“I’m not doing anything with them. They belong to Maria.”

Hooker and I exchanged glances.

“We need to have a conversation with Maria,” Hooker said.

The rigid inflatable was about twelve feet long with an outboard. We all piled in. Bill took the wheel and motored us upstream to Hooker’s boat. At this lower level, the tropical forest was beautiful but claustrophobic. Ground vegetation was dense and dark. The second tier was wrapped in flowering vines and occasionally dotted with roosting waterbirds. The air was liquid, soaking into my hair and shirt, sitting like dew on my forearms, trickling down the sides of my face. It was South Beach air magnified, and the cloying scent of flowers and damp earth and plant rot mixed with the brine from the sea.

We tied up to the small dive platform at the back of Happy Hooker and climbed on board. Everything was shiny white fiberglass, which I assumed was for easy cleanup when fishing. A fighting chair was bolted to the cockpit deck. A door and large windows looked into the salon from the cockpit, but the glass was darkly tinted and it was impossible to see inside.

Bill opened the salon door and we all trooped in. Maria stood in the middle of the salon with a gun in her hand. She was maybe five three with a lot of wavy dark brown hair that swirled around her tanned face and brushed the tops of her shoulders. Her features were delicate, her mouth naturally pouty, her eyes were the color of melted chocolate. She was slim with large breasts that swayed under her white cotton T-shirt when she moved.

“I’m understanding everything now,” Hooker said to me.

I gave him raised eyebrows.

“Probably you don’t want to shoot this guy,” Bill said to Maria, “since he owns this boat.”

“All the more reason,” Maria said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Bill said. “But don’t shoot Barney. She’s my sister.”

Maria went off in Spanish, waving her hands, yelling at Bill.

I looked to Hooker.

“She’s unhappy,” Hooker said.

I didn’t need a translator to figure that out.

“And she’s calling him some names I’ve only heard in Texas stockyards. She’s going so fast I can’t get it all, but there’s something about the size of his privates with the size of his brain and neither of them are looking good.” He cut his eyes to me. “Just so you know, I’ve never had any problems with size in the privates department. The size of my brain has sometimes been questionable.”

“Gee, I’m glad you shared that with me,” I said.

“I thought you might want to know.”

Now Bill was shouting back at Maria. He was shouting in English, but it was hard to tell what he was saying, since the two of them were nose to nose, both yelling at the same time.