Hall looked down at the T-shirt. “It’s just a chicken, sir.”
“It’s a cock,” the counselor said. “You know it and I know it. I don’t want to see it in this school again.”
* * *
Hall married Sue the June after high school graduation, joined the Coast Guard at the end of a glorious summer, and after boot camp and advanced training, was stationed in Fort Lauderdale.
Sue Hall went to Broward College and became a registered nurse and started working on a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Hall found the boatyards of Marina Mile to be the most amazing places he’d ever been. When Sue got pregnant with their first one, he got off-duty work rebuilding diesel engines in one of the Marina Mile engine shops. The extra work would get them childcare money so Sue could finish her BS degree.
At night, they’d drink PBR under palm trees in their trailer park, until Sue got pregnant, when they switched to ginger ale, and she’d say, “Barnes, we’re gonna do good in life. I can feel it coming on.”
The owner of the engine shop had a pile of old boats out back, which he couldn’t sell, and Hall kept looking at a 1999 Boston Whaler 260 Outrage that had been stripped of the twin outboards and had a hole in the hull, and now sat derelict atop a tandem trailer with two flat tires on each side, overgrown with weeds. After some talk, the owner agreed to give Hall the boat along with two badly abused, but salvageable, Merc 225s and the trailer—all Hall had to do was work five additional unpaid hours a week, in the evenings and on weekends, on top of his regular weekend shift, for two years, and the boat was his.
Plus, he could use the shop and its tools to rehab the trailer and the Mercs and do whatever fiberglass work the boat needed. The boat was solid, except for the hole, which could be fixed.
* * *
That’s the entire backstory as to why Hall, Sue, and their first boy, Lance, almost a one-year-old, were trolling down the debris line on the outer reef south of Pompano Beach, Florida, looking for dorado—mahi-mahi—when Hall spotted something unusual happening with a snazzy-looking Mako center console a half mile ahead of them. He said, “Sue, hand me the glasses.”
The Mako had two white outboards hanging off the back, which Hall recognized as big 350s, giving the boat seven hundred horses with which to get across the ocean.
“What’s out there, Barnes?” Sue asked. She was a rangy young woman, would have been a cowgirl in Texas, sunburnt, fighter-pilot blue eyes, her rose-blond hair frizzy from salt water.
“Something strange going on, babe. I’ve been watching him, ’cause that’s a sharp boat. All of a sudden it slowed down and stopped and it looks like it picked up a diver in the middle of the ocean. I mean, who was already in the middle of the ocean before they got there. Went right to him.”
“You don’t see that every day,” Sue said.
Hall was still on the glasses. “He’s, uh, looks like they’ve got some lift bags coming over the side . . . in the middle of the ocean.”
“Maybe picking up some bugs?” She was referring to spiny lobsters.
“From a guy they left in the middle of the ocean?”
Sue said, with a sudden urgency, “Barnes, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Let’s turn around. Bring the boat back north.”
“Yeah.” That seemed like a good idea.
Hall turned the boat in a wide fisherman’s semicircle and headed back north, but kept watching the Mako through the glasses. He was careful to be standing behind the center console when he used the binoculars, because he’d learned early in his Coast Guard training that if you saw somebody whose arms, head, and chest formed an equilateral triangle, they were looking at you through binoculars—and every few minutes, one of the men on the Mako would check them out with binoculars.
Twenty minutes after it stopped, the sleek-looking craft lurched forward and headed south. Hall got his cell phone, called in to the watch officer at the Coast Guard station at Fort Lauderdale.
“Sir, this is Barney Hall. I’m south of Pompano Beach in my own boat, but I saw something strange out here. There’s a black-and-white Mako 284 heading toward Port Everglades. We saw him picking up something from the middle of the ocean. He was running fast, then stopped, and there was a diver waiting for him right there in the water. There were no other boats around, no dive flag. They were using lift bags . . .”
“Can you stay with him, Hall?”
“No, sir, not entirely, he’s running fast. I can keep him in sight until he makes the turn. I’ll be a mile back of him by then.”
“He looked suspicious?”
“Yes, he did, sir. If I was on duty, I’d stop him, for sure.”
“We’ll do that, then. We’ll have somebody waiting for him inside.”
* * *
Hall told Sue to put on her life jacket and bring in the fishing lines; the baby was already wrapped in a fat orange PFD. He turned the boat and they tracked the Mako until it made the turn into the Port Everglades cut. Hall got back on his phone and called the watch officer and said, “It’s Hall, sir, he’s making the turn.”
“We’re on it, Hall. Good job.”
* * *
The Mako was ambushed by a Coast Guard RIB—rigid inflatable boat—which had orange inflatable tubes wrapped around a hard-shell hull. The petty officer second class who was running the boat got on channel 16 and called, “Mako 284 Chevere, this is the United States Coast Guard coming up behind to make a courtesy inspection. Cut your speed to five knots and hold your course. We’ll board you from the starboard side.”
Coast Guard inspection boats were usually larger RIBs with pilothouses; the boat that had been scrambled to intercept the Mako was smaller, three men aboard, no pilothouse. The Coast Guard boat pulled up behind the Mako and the petty officer in the bow saw two men waiting in the stern—bulky guys, dressed like sport fishermen, bright-colored shirts and shorts, sunglasses, and billed hats.
Then, as they were a few feet off, ready to board, one of the men on the stern of the Mako lifted up a heavy long-nosed black rifle with a red-dot sight. With a motion that was practiced and almost graceful, he shot the two Coast Guardsmen in the bow, and then twice shot the PO2 who was running the boat. The four shots together took no more than two seconds. The gun barked, rather than banged, a flat noise because of the suppressor on the barrel; the gunshots were loud, but not especially audible over the sound of the boat engines.
The PO2 had killed the boat’s speed for the boarding and when he saw the rifle come up he reached forward to hit the accelerator, but a bullet took him in the throat and then another in the chest, and the slugs turned him away and he fell into the bottom of the boat, dying, blood spreading around him on the wet floor, a purple flood. The Coast Guard boat turned into a slow circle across the wide port and the Mako accelerated away.