This is a crime scene.”
Hogfish’s head bobs to the clash of heavy-metal guitars playing through his old-model iPhone’s earbuds. He pushes his front bicycle wheel harder against the rope to get a closer look at the grotesque scene in the raft.
Moxel tightens his fists on the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle. “I’m talking to you! Back off! Didn’t you hear me? Take out your goddamn earplugs!” Hogfish’s head keeps bobbing.
Luz, dressed in her dark pants and guayabera shirt, steps quickly through the crowd and grabs the scraggly ponytail hanging from behind Hogfish’s fishing cap. The muscles in her arm tighten as she tugs the ponytail, pulling him away from the rope. She leans into his face and shouts, “Dios da sombrero a quien no tiene cabeza!”
Moxel elbows Luz and sneers. “What the hell does that mean?”
“God gives hats to some who have no head.”
“Why not just say it in English? Your kind are always trying to make this a Spanish-speaking country.”
Luz ignores Moxel and steps to a guardsman protecting the raft with a rifle clutched in his hands. The guardsman nervously holds up the rifle, blocking Luz. “Ma’am, you’ll have to stay on the other side of the rope. This is official Coast Guard business. No one goes on the raft.”
Luz pulls out her wallet, flips it open, and flashes her silver badge. “I’m Detective Luz Zamora, Key West Homicide. This dock is city property. I’ve got jurisdiction here, not the Coast Guard. I’m boarding the raft.”
The guardsman looks at the badge and stands aside. “Yes, ma’am!”
Luz steps over the rope onto the edge of the concrete bulwark. She winces at the rotting stench drifting up from the bloated bodies. She jumps down onto the raft and moves quickly among the jumble of dead people, feeling the wrists of stiffened arms for a pulse.
A siren wails from the dock. The crowd parts for the arriving ambulance. The side door swings open; a paramedic hurries out. He jumps onto the raft and shouts at Luz above the still-wailing siren, “Is anyone alive?”
Luz turns to the paramedic. “No one. All dead.”
The medic gazes in astonishment at the bodies on the raft. He looks back at Luz. “Must be hard for you, seeing your people end up this way.”
“What do you mean, my people?”
“You’re Cuban. These are Cuban boat people.”
“These people aren’t Cubans, they’re Haitians. But that doesn’t make it less horrifying.”
Luz looks away from the bodies. She sees Noah on the fly deck of his trawler, docked next to the raft. She calls over to him, “What do you know about this?”
Noah shouts back, “The raft was adrift, banged into my boat. I called in the Mayday.”
Noah turns from Luz and goes back into his pilothouse. He grabs his bottle of rum off the console table. He walks over to a canvas curtain covering a storage closet in the corner. He pulls the curtain back, exposing the teenaged survivor from the raft. The boy appears terrified. Noah speaks softly in French: “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. We’ve got to keep you hidden. If they find you, they’ll send your sorry ass back to Haiti.” He drinks rum from his bottle and looks sympathetically at the trembling boy. “Kid, you crossed seven hundred miles of shark-infested ocean to escape an earthquake-racked country of poverty, disease, and violence. Now you’ve got to do the hardest thing, you’ve got to trust me.”
The boy mumbles in French, “My … name … is Rimbaud.”
Noah responds in French. “What’s the family name?”
“Mesrine.”
Noah guzzles down the last of the rum and fixes the boy with a glassy-eyed philosophical expression. “Rimbaud Mesrine, damnedest thing. They named you after a famous gunrunning poet and a famous cold-blooded killer. They must have figured you were going to become a French politician.”
Noah turns and looks down through the salt-streaked window of the pilothouse. He sees Luz on the raft moving among the dead bodies and speaks to her in words he knows she can’t hear:
“Slaves and masters. Fucked up as it ever was.”
Five miles out to sea from Key West, the twelve powerboats roar across the ocean’s surface at ninety miles an hour. The TV news helicopter overhead chases the boats as they make a turn around a large channel marker. They speed away from the floating buoy. The copter hovers over it. The side door of the copter slides open, and a cameraman looks down, shocked at what he sees, almost losing his grip on the heavy camera as he shouts back at