Chapter 5

I needed to get going, the moment I was certain that Wallace was done for, but I didn't. I just couldn't.

The mental exhaustion and the relief I felt once I'd consigned the Monroe Masher to the deep, and its hungry diners, just dropped me into some sort of mental collapse. Not quite a breakdown, but something like the sort of debilitating mental depression where you don't even have the energy to get out of bed or even press the buttons to change channels on the TV.

I was exhausted and I just didn't fucking care how much later that would make me in recovering my car. Hell, it was probably fine ... what was I worrying about anyway? No one could prove shit. I was going to get away with this ... I had to!

Just kicking back in a mental fog, I hung around Golden Grotto for the entire rest of the morning and a good bit of the afternoon, just lazing about enjoying the sun. I'd avenged Tori and Phil, but it just didn't give me the sense of complete and utter total satisfaction that I had assumed that I would feel, once I'd caught and killed her murderer. The more I walked about the sand the more frustrated I seemed to become, even to the extent that I sat down myself on the grotto ledge, feet kicking in the water, and spread my legs wide so that I could masturbate.

After getting close and then ultimately losing the rush of climax at least four different times, I gave up. Now I was angry, annoyed, frustrated and now horny ... and for me that is not at all a good combination!

I thought about pulling Wally's body up a bit with the rope to check on his diners, but I decided that I didn't really want to have that particular memory. Looking down I could already see a golden covered mass starting a few feet below the waves, and that was more than enough for me. As I warned him earlier, by sunset he'd be nothing but bones at the bottom of the grotto and by tomorrow even those would have been crushed and digested. Gone without a trace.

At least this would become a mystery that not even the hundreds of Watters investigators would ever discover.

In the early afternoon I realized with a sudden shock that I still had a helpless victim back at the cabin who needed to be rescued and that I was already a lot later than I had intended about getting police and EMS response to the cabin. I should still be ok for time, but this lapse cut my safety corner more than I would have wished. I had hoped that I could have dumped Wallace and the others and been back with the catamaran at the boathouse long before now, so that I could be in my car and gone before 911 arrived. Lost in my screwed up thoughts, I neglected to complete that final cornerstone of my plan.

I had an alternative plan that would work, but it was going to be slightly more complicated and dangerous. I wasn't 100% sure it would work, but the alternatives were worse still.

I had a satellite cell phone in my pack that could get a signal out here in the Gulf, or out in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and it was another parting gift of sorts that I'd kept from my old unpleasant job before I'd run away to the Keys. I'd had the SIM card and the phone number immediately changed out by an expensive professional, so in theory my phone couldn't be traced, but I tried to only use it for emergencies, and this mess counted as one. I needed to call a geek friend of mine in Key West and I hoped that he could manage the tricky technical details of my emergency plan.

"Jack? This is Ree. I'm calling from a phone that's probably secure but I need to make another call to a place that could possibly back-trace me, Miami-Dade 911. Can you help me right now?"

"Sure, in fact I'm right in front of my computer now as we speak! What do you need? And what is this about?"

"You don't want to know, trust me. Not even a hint. This is life or death though. There's a girl near Homestead that needs an ambulance and the police too, but my name can't be involved with it. My voice also needs to change to something electronic or scrambled so they can't even guess if it was a male or female who made this call ... and have it preferably bounced off of a dozen or satellites to get there for good measure. Can do?"

"Sure thing Hunny Bunny! I've done trickier things already today, and before breakfast! You'll owe me though ... the usual."

Jack Saunders was a genius and geek extraordinaire and there wasn't a computer network or telco that he couldn't hack into, given the proper inducements. Namely my baking. He couldn't cook worth a shit but he loved cookies and cupcakes, washed down with oceans of Mountain Dew. I'd owe him a pretty big sized snack basket, and a big kiss on the cheek. No, I've never slept with him ... he's just a good friend, and he was a good friend of Tori's as well.

After a few minutes preparation, Jack gave me a phone number to dial that was ready to be routed through the Internet and then into a couple of third-world shithole telco land lines, then back into the Internet to the Miami-Dade County 911 service. He told me to leave my message in a slow accentless voice that his computer would convert into voice recognition and replace it instead with a variety of electronic voices that the recipients would hear instead of me.

He'd done this trick before, but not for me, and he assured me that it was as close to bullet and idiot-proof as this sort of thing got. A thousand ears in law enforcement would probably be replaying this message for years to come and I couldn't leave any verbal or linguistic clues. I needed to be quick, simple and stupid. I'd already written my message out, using short words and the barest amount of necessary information needed to request police and EMS units at the James Curtiss estate cabin, behind the house near the swamp.

It had to be done, but I didn't like it one little bit. The girl had to be rescued but this would only confirm for the Watters that I was clever little bitch with high level technical assets. I crossed my bare fingers and toes and prayed that this sort of spoof just encouraged the suspicion of other high level covert government agents being involved.

After practicing my script twice, I called Jack's computer and once I heard the weak crackly phone connection and the operator in Miami announcing '911, how can I help?' I recited my lines as if I were a robot and then immediately dropped the connection. Calling back to Jack's private cell once again he gleefully reported that the voice recognition/replacement had gone perfectly and that the call should also be completely untraceable to me. As a bonus, on the 911 operators call screen, the board should have reported the call as having come from the landline phone in the cabin.

Perfect! I promised my hero all of the chocolate snacks he could om-nom, and I stretched back out on the sand to take in some more sun, and let my fingers doing some idle twiddling over my tingling clit. I needed to leave now ... but I also needed to cum even more urgently, and about an hour and a half before sunset I finally managed my very long overdue release. Like everything else so far about my revenge, it didn't quite live up to expectations, but it took the edge off enough now so that I could think and concentrate once more.

The trickiest part of the mission was now about take place and I needed all of my wits about me to pull this off right!

With the late afternoon slowly setting sun shining upon the Golden Grotto I waved goodbye to the bones of Wally-boy, and started up the boat motors for the relatively short trip to Fort Jefferson, the only bit of civilization in the Dry Tortugas National Park

The sailing trip southwest only took about an hour but I didn't hoist the sails or even yank down the throttle to make best speed. I had a rather tricky time table now for this phase of my emergency backup plan and it all had to be done just exactly right.

Fort Jefferson is an old imposing prison on a tiny little cay in the Dry Tortugas that was abandoned in the 19th century, being too disease ridden, baking hot and cruel for even the worst prisoners, like the infamous Doctor Mudd, who treated Lincoln's murderer John Wilkes Booth. Think of it as a smaller nastier and hotter Alcatraz with malaria, cholera, yellow fever and other nasty tropical diseases as bunkmates. Sixteen million blocks of stone and they still never completed the fort in a century of work and it was still without a drop of any fresh water anywhere. The old prison and fort are now part of the Dry Tortugas National Park, about seventy miles or so west of Key West. The place was easy to get to from Key West with ferries, seaplanes and the odd helicopter or two disgorging and retrieving tourists for the busy summer trade.

The ferries were expensive, well over a hundred dollars per person for the round trip, but that's about four to fives hours worth of gas and ship overhead, and everyone has the right to make a legal buck. If I missed the last evening ferry, which I probably would, then I'd be at the mercy of one of seaplane operators, who loved to nail the tardy tourist for an exorbitant fee back to Key West. Since I had a gym bag full of cash, I wasn't quite as worried about the expense now, but this would be an unfortunately more memorable passage, with a witness or two that would be extremely likely to remember me.

During the short final trip, I pitched all of the dark clothes and the boots I had worn during my assault of the cabin, weighting down each article of clothing one by one with stuff from the galley kitchen. I was still nude, enjoying the last of the sun and the sheer happiness and freedom that I felt when naked. Someday, when my days of revenge are all over, I'm going to beach myself inside of a nudist colony and get a serious start on some skin cancer! I live for today, and the problems of tomorrow might as well be next year as far as I'm usually concerned.

Chucking the acquired Glock 9mm pistol wasn't too painful, and I wouldn't miss keeping the Tek-9 either or any of the other toys that the various gunsels had been toting, but I just about cried ditching the two lovely shotguns into the deep blue to be lost forever. No matter how I thought the problem over I couldn't think of a way to get those babies home into my own gun cabinet. My now empty backpack had gone into the drink too, along with my Ka-Bar. Nothing I had worn or carried inside the cabin would be left to hide possible evidence of my presence there. If it didn't fit inside the gym bag full of cash, like the sat cell phone did, then it wasn't going to go home with me.

Glub, glub ... virtually everything went into the depths to be lost forever. It wasn't like I couldn't now buy some new guns with the cash ... but still I really hated waste!

I almost considered chucking my Glock 32 into the drink too on general principle, but police records would show that I was the registered owner of the .357 SIG pistol, and if they came looking for it later and I claimed it was missing, then that might definitely attract some unwanted attention. With all of the bodies disposed of and the lead from the three misses all carefully dug out from the wall of the cabin, which were also already lost at sea, they could conjecture that my gun fired all of those shell casings, assuming they found any of them - but there would be no lead for a ballistics match.

I did make a quick mental note to myself to change the firing pin, the extractor and maybe the ejector on my Glock ASAP. Hopefully if tested, none of the markings on any recovered shell casings would be a perfect match for my gun. Since I'd recovered or submerged all of the lead I'd fired, at least I wouldn't have to change the barrel. Unfortunately, I didn't have a spare in my gunsmith kit or I'd have planned to replace it anyway.

The night vision goggles also were kept and I squeezed them somehow into the nearly overstuffed moneybag. I hadn't worn them inside the cabin so I had no concern about blood splatter or transfer there. They might have some slight transferred GSR, but a good cleaning later at home would take care of that. Nothing incriminating there.

When I could just make out the buoys marking the borders of the National Park I decided that with the sun almost down I needed to put on something for clothing. The options I'd found downstairs in the stateroom were rather limited and I hadn't brought along a change of clean clothing. I found a bikini bottom that was almost a thong that showed off nearly all of my nicely tanned ass. It's not a bad ass, or so I think anyway. Every woman has something about her body she doesn't like, and I've got one or two things I'd change if I had a fortune for plastic surgery, but my butt isn't one of them. The hips are a little on the large side but I run and work out enough that I've still got buns of steel even at the age of thirty-two. My old boyfriends enjoyed a lot of fun with that ass too, but that's mostly moldy-oldie history. I've been thinking about other things, like Wally-boy for the last couple of years and have been keeping my male friends at a bit of a distance.

I was pretty sure this bikini bottom originated from some poor girl who had taken a one way trip on this boat, but it was the only thing I could find that fit me. For the top the pickings were even less helpful. There was a thin white cotton tank top, men's size, but it showed off way too much of my tits and just looked tacky the way my dark aureoles and nipples showed clearly through. I've been known to not wear much at all on the beach (or nothing if legal there) and sometimes for fun show off quite a bit of skin if partying in Key West on Duval Street, but for this mission I didn't really want to look slutty or memorable. I wanted to be able to blend in as much as possible on the ferry dock and blend in with the tourists.

Eventually I decided upon a men's Hawaiian style shirt and I tied it up into a halter top. It showed off a little cleavage and my washboard flat midsection, but it was vaguely tasteful. Sexy, perfect for a day at the beach but not 'Ooo, look at that slut – I'd like to bang her'. Touristy, but not memorably so. A pair of slightly oversized cheap rubber flip-flops, a Miami Dolphins ball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses completed the ensemble.

Arriving as close to Fort Jefferson as I dared to get, I gathered up my moneybag, and made a last check around the boat. Earlier just before leaving Golden Grotto, I'd connected up the seawater hose and washed down the deck and sides of the boat to remove any noticeable signs of blood. I hadn't left many blood stains moving the bodies around on the plastic sheeting but I wanted to leave as few clues as possible to the people that would soon be hunting for me and this boat. With luck, this boat would never be found but I couldn't 100% count on that, so every precaution that I could take now might save my cute ass late.

The plan was simple. With the boat idling as close to the sand of Garden Key as I dared, the small island just next to Fort Jefferson, I flung my bag over onto the sand and it just made it to the edge of the dry sand. Now I programmed in the final course I wanted the yacht to take, northwest out in between the innumerable small islands of the Tortugas until there was clear sailing west-southwest towards the very center of the Gulf of Mexico. If I was lucky the boat wouldn't quite make it all the way there – my two thermite charges set on a timer would burn through both double-sealed layers of each pontoon and that should soon send her to the bottom. For insurance, the thirty gallons of extra diesel fuel, which I had drenched all over the deck, the flotation cushions and lifesavers, and the stateroom and galley below, not to mention the reefed sails, ought to burn nicely when ignited by the thermite to remove any other remaining evidence, before she sank to the bottom at just after sunset. If I had any luck at all, nothing floatable would even reveal the sunken craft's name or origin.

I'd set the timer to activate the two charges to go off in about an hour. That was as long as my nerves could stand waiting, but I also needed the ship to be safely out of the National Park zone and into the much deeper water just to the west. I also wanted the setting sun in the western skyline to mask any flames that might briefly appear on the horizon. West of the Dry Tortugas, the Gulf should be empty with hopefully no one nearby to report the sinking. Out in the western blue water anything sunk there stood about zero chance of ever being found, but nothing is ever one hundred percent perfect. It would do – it was a very acceptable calculated risk.

If I'd had more preparation time and I'd known in advance about the yacht, I could have obtained a Zodiac or other large rubber inflatable boat with a fast outboard motor. With this for a faster escape, I could have more precisely managed the scuttling and had a fast craft to get me back to shore near the boathouse unseen. Nice thinking, but that's not the way this mission went down. Food for thought for next time I had to do this sort of thing.

With all of the fuel spread, and ensuring that the boat had enough gas in its tank for its final run, I hit the engage button to bring her motors back to life and as I jumped overboard she puttered away, slowly at first but increasing speed as she began to make her programmed turns to leave the area, and even before she made her scheduled port turn west into the deep and lonely waters of the Gulf she was already out of sight.

I'd done all that I could and now it was time to trust in last minute preparations and luck. I was sorry had I hadn't brought along any other explosives to make sure of really making a sinking wreck out of the boat, but with the flotation of the pontoons breeched by the thermite, not to mention the all-over deck fire, I had zero doubt that she sink down to the bottom pretty quickly, more or less intact, and with little if any surface flotsam. That's the bad thing about explosives at sea, lots of wreckage everywhere. For me, it was better to have a slower more controlled scuttling, to leave few if any clues floating on the surface.

From Garden Key, I could see the walls of Fort Jefferson on the island next door. The water looked a nice bright blue and quite shallow and I hoped to just be able to wade across and keep my top dry but it wasn't to be. I ended up having to swim and climb over bits of coral reef a couple of times until I made it to the sand. I did try to keep the gym bag out of the water. It looked somewhat waterproof, but I didn't want the hassle of dealing with sea water soaked cash this evening. I was going to need some it soon, and passing out wet money is just different enough to be memorable, but I needn't have worried too much.

The timing was better than good. The last passenger ferry was just sounding its ten minute warning to the last dithering tourists and I was quickly just one of a couple of dozen stragglers waiting to board at the last minute. It didn't even raise much of an eyebrow when I said I'd lost my return boarding pass and the nice crewman was probably too busy looking at my tits in my wet halter top to remember to charge me for a one-way fare. He just waved me onboard and I found a quiet corner to sit and enjoy the last of the evening sun.

I almost thought about using my Amex to pay for the fare anyway. It would give me an solid cast-iron alibi, but the problem was I had delayed so long in getting here after my 911 call from the Golden Grotto, that the time difference almost made any alibi nearly worthless. With a fast boat, helicopter or a seaplane I could have made it anyway from the Everglades to the Keys, or even this National Park easily in the time allotted afterwards. This would also only add more questions ... like how had I gotten there and why did I only need a one-way ticket? Nope, it was much better to be anonymous for this trip. Besides, I normally spent my Saturday afternoons tits-up at the local Key Largo beach anyway.

The ferry had a small snack bar and seating area and a lot of the sunburned tourists were breaking out the leftover beers from their coolers. I was really in the mood for a Corona or three, but this was no time for relaxing. There is always a huge physical crash of utter relief at the end of a mission, where for the first time in sometimes days you can finally let go of yourself and relax, but I didn't want to do it here. I found a dark corner and slunk into it and pretended to sleep. I didn't have to pretend very hard and ended up taking a couple of short catnaps until the PA system announced that we'd be docking in Key West in about five minutes.

We docked at Key West at about eight o'clock, or a little after, and that suited me perfect. I really would have loved an evening at The Place, but I was already so far behind schedule that I couldn't linger in Key West. That was my favorite dive bar anywhere, filled with assorted lunatics, transplanted thoroughly insane Yankees and drink deranged Conches too twisted and degenerate for any of the mundane amusements found on Duval Street. Oh, and a blue parrot with a mouth fouler than any Marine or Sailor, but that's another story. I'd met my geek friend Jack Saunders there. In that crazy place it's possible to meet someone who has exactly the right skills or knowledge that you need, if you're witty or entertaining enough to enjoy sharing a drink or six with. As jaded as my nerves were right now I could really do with a cup of the world's best Irish coffee, but I wasn't quite dressed for the place either, so it would have to wait for another night.

The job's not done until the final bit of paperwork, and in my case I needed to get a cab or plane to take me the one hundred and fifty miles of so back onto the mainland to retrieve my car. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about leaving it there. It was a weak link that placed me near the area of the killings and a really smart cop might have done a careful area search of the whole neighborhood looking for something out place, like my car.

I wasn't quite the first person off of the ferry when it docked at Key West, but I might have been the very first person to get to the taxi stand. I didn't even blink when he quoted me $200 for the drive down the Keys, to Key Largo. It was tourist robbery, but that was my cover so I didn't care. It would be cheaper than a short plane trip, and I'd attract less attention probably.

Once home a bit over an hour later I showered and changed clothes and dumped my cashbag and equipment on the bed. I gave my night vision goggles a quick chemical washing and put them back into their storage case in my closet. The gun disassembly would have to wait. Nervous about the gym bag full of cash, I emptied the bundles of bills on the bed and quickly shoved them all under the mattress. That wouldn't survive a careful extensive search, but it would do for a casual unexpected police visit without a search warrant. It was better than leaving the full bag on the bed or in a closet.

The bikini bottoms and the halter top, along with anything else I'd worn on the trip went into a plastic grocery bag. There was a used clothing shop with a donations drop box a few blocks away and that was my first stop after leaving the house again to walk down to the main strip near Highway 1 to wait for my taxi.

I forced myself to eat something at a sidewalk pizza cart while waiting for an acquaintance that drove a cab here in Key Largo that I was pretty sure could and would keep his mouth shut about this trip. Josh was a stoner and a confirmed Conch-head (not to mention Deadhead) that I'd hired before on a couple of occasions. He liked cash money a lot to avoid the tax-man and to buy 'kind bud and brew', and he really liked his privacy. We'd known each other long enough to build some prior trust, albeit based upon cold hard cash.

Tonight I kept the cover story simple; I'd had car trouble last night coming home from Miami during the storm and my carburetor had flooded out as I pulled into what I thought was a closed garage. Now I needed to get my car back, and I could offer a bit of a bonus if he'd stick around for a few minutes until I was sure that my car would start up again. Straightforward and very believable, or so I hoped. It was the best cover-story I could think of while on my trip home.