American Tropic Read Free Page B

is filled with a jumble of dead bodies. From among the bodies a bone-thin teenaged boy, shirtless and barefoot, rises. His black skin is sun-blistered and riddled with lacerations. The whites of his startled eyes loom large as he stares up at Noah in the pilothouse.
    Noah yanks the ship-to-shore radio mike from its holder and shouts: “Mayday! This is
Noah’s Lark
! Mayday!”

    A gray sixty-foot-long Coast Guard cutter tows the small wooden raft with dead bodies toward Key West Harbor. Noah follows the cutter in histrawler. The cutter slows to a stop. Noah motors alongside and shouts to a uniformed guardsman on the cutter’s deck, “What’s the holdup?”
    The guardsman shouts down, “Harbor’s blocked, powerboat race starting, have to wait before going in.”
    Noah cuts his engine. He sees around him an anchored flotilla of fancy yachts, paint-blistered skiffs, sleek ketches, and listing lobster boats crowded with beer-drinking revelers waiting for the spectacle to begin.
    From the harbor’s distant shoreline a cannon booms, signaling the race start. Cheers go up from the anchored flotilla. A roar of jet-propelled engines vibrates the air. Twelve long-hulled powerboats emerge from the harbor entrance. The waterborne herd thunders at full throttle, their boldly painted hulls nosed high, sharp bows tilting six feet into the air, their rear exhausts blasting water up behind them. Deep within the cocooned cockpits bolts of sunlight reflect off the driver’s and throttle-man’s crash helmets. The boats race in front of Noah’s trawler with an earsplitting engine snarl; white-hot jet exhausts plow a showering spray. Above the powerboats a TV news helicopter chases the action. From the copter’s open doorway a cameraman leans out, filming the boats as they roar toward the ocean’s distant horizon and over its edge.
    Noah’s boat rocks in the watery wake left behind by the powerboats. The Coast Guard cutter’s engines rev to a turbine whine. Noah follows the cutter towing the raft. Inside the harbor’s anchorage, the cutter slows to a stop, and guardsmen secure it alongside a cement pier. Noah steers his boat around the cutter and ties up behind the raft. He watches through his pilothouse window as acrowd gathers on the pier, gawking at the sight of the raft with its cargo of bodies.
    Among the crowd is Hogfish, straddling a rusty bicycle. From the back of his sun-faded fisherman’s cap hangs a ragged swag of graying hair. IPhone earbuds are jammed into his ears. A tight T-shirt on his bony chest reads DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER . A queer grin spreads over his forty-year-old face, remarkable for its smooth, unlined quality. Only his bulging eyes, washed of all color and seeming to spin in opposite orbits, indicate a man burned out from battles fought in distant wars. Between the handlebars of his bicycle is stretched a fishing line, dangling with barbed J-hooks. He pushes the bicycle’s front wheel against the taut rope mooring the raft to the dock.
    A bullnecked deputy detective with a slick sunburnt shaved head, Moxel, shoves through the crowd to Hogfish. A shiny badge is pinned to his crisp blue uniform shirt. His lips carry the arrogant expression of a young man barging through life based on a combination of brute force and triumph over his low social origins. He grips the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle above the line of dangling fishhooks and snarls in a Southern accent: “Get away from that rope. 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