“I can’t say that I did.”
Crack nodded earnestly. “The surge didn’t come from the ocean, but from Lake Okeechobee, producing a tidal wave that wiped out entire neighborhoods of fieldworkers. Then I stumbled upon a wild coincidence. I began hearing about a folktale circulating to this day out at the lake. A treasure was lost in the hurricane! Some sugar baron supposedly squirreled away a fortune. When the storm hit, it took him, his house and whatever he was saving, and decades of farming have since covered up all traces. But to this day, it’s said that children playing out in the sugarcane fields occasionally come across an old gold coin. Can you imagine it? An inland storm surge producing an inland wreck?”
“Wow,” Corky said with feigned enthusiasm. “So you’re going to go after it?”
Crack sagged slightly. “More homework first. I don’t know anything about this sugar baron, which is the key to narrowing the search to a specific location.” He cut the engine.
Corky looked over the side as the quiet boat rolled mildly in the swells. “We’re here?”
“Yes, we are.”
Corky climbed over gear on the deck. “I’ll start checking the sonar.”
“I’ve got something I want to show you first.”
“What is it?”
“See this tube on the side of the shore radio?” asked Crack.
“Yeah, but I still don’t know what I’m looking at.”
“It’s a pinhole video lens. Covers the whole boat from here on back, kind of like a nanny cam.”
“I’m not following,” said a bored Corky.
Crack reached down into bow storage and pulled something out.
“Now do you follow?”
Corky was no longer bored. He’d had guns pointed at him before, but a twelve-gauge always dials it up to eleven.
“What’s going on, Captain?”
“I’m sure you have a pretty damn good idea.” Crack gestured with the end of the gun. “That tiny camera was filming every time you stuffed shit in your pockets when we came up from a site. Have I not treated you well? And then you steal from me? Don’t even try to lie. I could show you the tapes, but I don’t care about your opinion.”
Corky silently reviewed options.
The captain racked the shotgun with the distinct sound that is a natural stool softener.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Corky began babbling. “I just took a little. I was going to give it back. I had car troubles. The electric bill. I was drunk. My girlfriend needed braces—”
Blam!
Corky hit the water and bobbed, well, like a cork.
“That was fun.” Crack throttled back up toward land. “Now to do some homework on this sugar baron . . .”
Mr. Fakakta
Sugarcane is actually a grass.
A grass that changed the march of history in the New World.
It can’t entirely be attributed to rum, but that’s a good start. During the colonial period, from the Caribbean to the South American coast surrounding French Guyana, farming took off due to the region’s conducive blend of climate and rich soil. Bananas, coffee beans, nutmeg, rice, cocoa. But when they started using sugarcane to make molasses, which was shipped north to rum distilleries, sugar took the lead and never looked back.
Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Guadalupe. Plow that other stuff under, boys, and plant that cane. The cash flowed in, but at a price. Brutal conditions in a brutal business, cutthroat competition and politics.
On the island of Hispaniola, in the Dominican Republic, there was a particularly heated rivalry among the four chief growers in the early twentieth century. And it wasn’t gentlemanly. Threats, vandalism, workers attacked and maimed. Alliances shifted back and forth like on one of those survival reality-TV shows, until one of the four growers was voted off the island.
Fulgencio Salvador Fakakta drew the short straw. But it was impossible to feel sorry for him. Fakakta was one of those rare comeuppance cases where the bad guy actually lost. He had bribed, cheated, stolen and even murdered his way to wealth and power. And now it had come full circle. In short, the other growers were just tired of this asshole.
Fakakta saw it coming, and it wasn’t going to be a polite eviction notice. If he was lucky, they’d burn his plantation home, seize everything he had down to the last penny, and allow him to escape with the shirt on his back. If he was lucky. So Fakakta quietly and quickly liquidated everything into gold, which was all crated up one night and packed onto a chartered ship.
“What’s in these crates? Rocks?”
“Shut up and keep loading!”
Fulgencio set sail. The other growers still burned his place to the ground, but at least he had enough for a new start.
Besides the Caribbean, there was one other place where sugarcane had just started to catch hold.
Florida.
It would be years before the crop asserted dominance, so for now, a fugitive sugar baron from the Dominican could affordably buy up bean fields around Lake Okeechobee to plant his stalks.
Fakakta had the experience and ruthlessness to make it work, and soon he was one of the wealthier farmers in the lake region. It wasn’t enough. He began stealing from his workers. Docking pay for non-reasons, overcharging for rent on their ridiculous shanties and the food he required that they buy from him as a condition of employment. Then he realized there were far more people looking for work than there were jobs. Can’t let that equation go to waste. So he took it up a notch and started not paying some workers entirely. Of course they’d yell and argue and quit. But what else were they going to do? He was white. He’d just hire more guys.
But one particular worker, named Jacob, wouldn’t let it go. He kept demanding his money, day after day. Finally, Jacob went out to Fakakta’s stately colonial plantation house on the edge of town and pounded on the front door. The next morning he was found hanging from a prominent cypress tree with signs of torture. It was meant to be obvious, unlike the other missing workers, who were never found. The white law didn’t care, and everyone else got the message. Fakakta continued amassing his fortune, which he kept in gold. But nobody knew where.
Chapter 16
Cocoa Beach
Malcolm sat quietly in his chair.
Serge and Coleman sat quietly at a table.
Malcolm’s eyes stared up at the plastic bag taped to his head.
“Mmmmmmm! Mmmmmmm!”
Serge and Coleman wore plain white T-shirts. Open bottles of various colors were scattered across the table. Stains representing the same colors covered their shirts. Coleman leaned over and rubbed feverishly. “I’d completely forgotten about finger painting.”
“Finger painting is the best!” Serge made a blue circle with his thumb. “I don’t know why society cuts that off after kindergarten. I had dreams of becoming a world-class finger-paint artist. Huge gallery openings in SoHo, the toast of Paris. Then I found out it was just some bullshit to keep us busy until recess. It was the beginning of the counterculture, and that’s when I started seeing through all the lies. Finger painting, Vietnam.”
“This is excellent when you’re high.”
Serge looked across the table. “Not bad. You’re painting a pumpkin.”