Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby 1)

“Hey!” Hooker said. “Chill.”

Maria and Bill turned and looked at Hooker.

“You’ve got bigger problems than us,” Hooker said. “You should be worrying about the guys who trashed your apartments, twice. And the guy who threatened to kill us. And probably you should be worrying about whoever it is that actually owns the gold. Not to mention the Cuban government.”

“I own the gold,” Maria said. “It was on my grandfather’s boat.”

“I’m guessing not everyone shares that point of view,” Hooker said.

Bill locked eyes with Maria. “The truth is,” he said to her, “we could use some help.”

Maria looked at Hooker and me, and then she looked back at Bill. “And you trust them?”

“Hooker, yes. Barney, I’m not so sure of.”

“You’d better watch your step,” I said to Bill. “You’ll be in big trouble if I tell Mom you stole a boat.”

Bill gave me another bear hug.

Maria put the gun on the black granite galley counter. “I guess it’s okay. You start to tell them the story.”

“I met Maria at a club a couple weeks ago. We talked but we never got together. Then I saw her Monday night. Again, it was just hello. She left real early.”

“I met a guy the night before,” Maria said. “I didn’t like him, and when I saw he was at the club again I decided to leave. I wasn’t in a club mood anyway. I walked home, and I was about to go into my apartment building when a man stepped out of the shadows and put a gun to my head. There were two more men waiting in a car at the curb, and they drove me to the marina. When we got to the boat I asked them what this was about and they said I was going back to Cuba. They said I was going to take a helicopter trip to Cuba. That was when I started to struggle.”

“I decided to leave the club early too,” Bill said. “We were supposed to go back out first thing Tuesday morning, and I didn’t want to get wasted. I was in the marina lot, heading for Flex, when the car pulled in with Maria. I saw them help her out of the car and walk her down the pier. I recognized the car and the men as Salzar’s. He’s brought women on board before, so I didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until she started struggling at the end of the pier that I realized she was being forced onto the boat. Probably I should have called the police, but all I could think of was to get her off Flex.

“I waited for about ten minutes and then I boarded. Everything was quiet. The rest of the crew was asleep. There was a light on in the pilothouse, but that was it. I crept around, trying doors, and found her bound and gagged in one of the VIP staterooms on the second deck.”

“Wasn’t the door locked?”

“Yeah, but I accidentally came into possession of a master key the first week I worked on Flex. You never know when you might need a master key, right?”

Yessir, this was my brother.

“Anyway,” Bill said, “I cut Maria loose, and we hauled ass out of there. Maria didn’t want to call the police. She just wanted to get some stuff out of her apartment.”

“I knew when they di

scovered I was gone they would go to my apartment and search for my charts,” Maria said. “Before this night, I didn’t realize anyone knew about me. I didn’t bother to hide my charts. I thought the shipwreck had been forgotten. Gone with my father.”

“So you think Salzar wants either you or the charts so he can salvage the wreck?”

“My father discovered gold when he went diving for my grandfather. He came back with my grandfather’s remains, and he told my mother. My mother told me on her deathbed. She always said to everyone that she didn’t know where my father went to dive, but she always knew. And she knew about the gold.”

A small prop plane buzzed the treetops, and we all went still until it passed.

“I can tell you what I think,” Maria said. “I think the gold was for Castro. My grandfather was lost at sea two days after President Kennedy put the blockade up. I think one of the big Russian ships had gold for Castro. The ship couldn’t get to port, so perhaps they sent my grandfather out to get the gold. It was always a rumor in my village. I never believed it until my mother told me.”

“And?”

“And something happened. My grandfather’s boat hit a reef and never arrived at Mariel. There were two men on the boat. The one man was rescued at sea in a lifeboat. He said my grandfather’s boat was damaged and taking on water, but my grandfather wouldn’t leave the boat. For years the man who survived looked for the boat, but he always looked in the shoals around Mariel. Everyone thought he was looking for my grandfather, but now I think he was looking for the gold.”

“Oh boy,” Hooker said. “I have Castro’s gold on my boat.”

Maria cut her eyes to him. “It’s my gold on your boat.”

“How did your father know where to look for the shipwreck?”