The great thing about walking into a boat shop is that everyone in there assumes that, by the very nature of your being there, you own a boat, or you want to. It’s like a guy walking into a lingerie store. They don’t find it strange that you’re there, they just assume you’re shopping for something for your wife, girlfriend, mistress, or whatever. They never think that you were just in the mood to pick out a little something for yourself. Nobody expects you to ask if they have the frilly red one in XXL and if so, can you try it on? When Mathias entered Big Ted’s ‘Seas the Day’ Boat Emporium just south of Naples, Florida off Interstate 41 nobody thought to themselves, “I bet he’s in the market for a weapon.” But he was.

  The drive down I-95 from Philadelphia had been uneventful. Mathias kept with the flow of traffic, typically not more than five miles per hour over the speed limit, and generally made a point not to draw attention to himself. Recently he had bought a dark grey Crown Victoria Interceptor, one that started life as an undercover police car and had north of two hundred thousand miles on it. This was its maiden voyage outside of the city and he was curious to see what kind of attention it drew. The dark tinted windows, a half dozen antennas that were connected to nothing, a push bumper on the front, and a searchlight over the mirror cemented the perception into reality. Twenty hours on I-95 had taught him what it was like to be visibly invisible. Every other driver on the freeway knew what this car was, or what they thought it was, and they gratefully forgot about it as soon as he was out of view. He would always be noticed but never be remembered. It was perfect.

  Big Ted’s was just the opposite. It was the kind of place you never noticed until you had to go inside for some reason. Then you’d never forget it. The decor was just as gaudy as the name. Faux tiki huts in the corners with boat brochures from years gone by littered the bar tops instead of liquor bottles. Taxidermied fish caught by Ted over the years hung above every door, including a replica swordfish mounted on the wall behind the register. Someone had suspended a sign from its dorsal fin that read, “little Ted”. Little Ted hadn’t been dusted since the day he’d been hoisted up there.

  The walls were painted in the fifties with murals of lake and ocean boating scenes and hadn’t been updated since. The floors had been refreshed in the eighties with black and white checkered linoleum tiles that, decades past their best years, were peeling up at the edges. Mathias suspected that the only reason the place was still in business was because they sold bait. It also helped that they were the last boat, fishing, bait, or tackle shop before entering the Everglades. If someone opened a bait shop one hundred yards closer to that swampy wilderness, Big Ted would be forced into retirement in under a year.

  Calling the place an emporium was laughable. There were only three boats on the lot, two of them well used, at least twenty years old, and the third had a faded sign that said ‘end of year closeout model’. It was April so Mathias wasn’t sure which year’s model it had been, but probably not last year’s. Inside there were two boats. One was obviously Ted’s personal water chariot, a bit older than you might expect from a boat shop owner, and the other was a brand new pontoon boat. There was room for at least four more boats inside but it was just empty space.

  Off to the side there were eight or ten aisles for boating and fishing accessories. Mathias knew this because behind the rows of shelves was another fifties style mural, this one of a girl in the background fishing from shore while, presumably, her husband in the foreground worked on the motor of their boat at the dock. She obviously had a fish on the line and he was covered in grease. As for actual accessories, there were few, and they were scattered about. At some point in the past these shelves might have been full of anything and everything a boater might need. Today you’d be lucky to fill one aisle with everything they had in stock. Among the sparse offerings was exactly what Mathias was looking for, a ten pound mushroom anchor.

  Mathias was in and out of the shop in less than six minutes. He paid cash, didn’t speak to anyone, and had parked on the side of the building where there was less likelihood of security cameras. After six minutes in the place Mathias was certain there were no cameras anywhere inside or outside. The only security they had was a sawed-off shotgun hanging on the wall just under little Ted. Mathias would bet money it was loaded. It was backwoods Florida, after all.

  From Ted’s it was a forty-five minute drive down Highway Forty-One, then a right on State Road Twenty-Nine into Everglades City. The ten pound mushroom anchor, with its smooth rounded bottom and thick medium length shank rested in the trunk of the Crown Vic. The shank was just the right diameter for Mathias to hold firmly and swing comfortably. He would have settled for a five pound anchor if he’d had to, but he worried it wouldn’t have carried enough momentum behind it. A fifteen pound model was also an option, but the extra weight would certainly slow down his swing and if he happened to miss, might pull him off balance. The ten-pounder was perfect and he felt lucky to have found it.

  Next to the anchor was a spool of PVA fishing line in a plastic bag along with a duffle bag and a dry bag of some kind. The fishing line he’d picked up in a small bait shop in Newark, New Jersey on the way down called Master Baiter’s Crabs, Bait, and Tackle. What was it with boat people and names? They were always either absurd, perverse, or just plain bad. Walk through a marina and look at the boat names. Guaranteed that over half of them are some cheesy play on words, outright lewd, or a combination of the two. Almost every marina has a boat named ‘Wet Dreams’ or ‘Tie Me Up’. Did they think they were clever? Mathias had spent more than a couple hours thinking about this as he navigated Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia before he crossed the bridge over the St. Mary’s River into Florida. He couldn’t decide if it was intentional or if everyone involved with boating and fishing was just a complete moron. He decided that it must be intentional, some warped sense of humor mixed with an attempt at clever irony. It never succeeded. He reasoned that it must be intentional, simply because there couldn’t be that many stupid people who owned and successfully maintained watersport businesses in the country. He reconsidered his opinion when he passed ‘Bite Me Bait Shack’ south of Jacksonville.

  The thirty two mile drive down the Tamiami Trail (a.k.a Highway 41) to the State Road Twenty-Nine turn off was both beautiful and frightening. Almost as soon as you left Naples you found yourself in the wilderness. With the exception of the occasional airboat tour company, there was nothing. The two lane road was encroached on both sides by swamps, canals, low palm trees, tall grasses, and a hundred other plants with razor edged leaves, briars, thorns, and mild toxins. The animal life wasn’t any friendlier. There were the obvious like alligators but aside from these, and there were many. There are a dozen types of venomous snakes, pythons, wild boar, crocodiles, panthers, black bears, and venomous spiders too many to count. Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the mosquitos. They are so thick in the everglades that they may as well be considered the state bird. They even carry a virus named after the area, the Everglades Virus, a mosquito-borne alphavirus endemic to the Everglades that is a subtype of the Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus that even today kills a couple hundred people a year. There have even been occasional malaria outbreaks. Why anyone would choose to live in a place that was so obviously trying to kill you was a mystery to Mathias. But, still, it was beautiful. And Mathias would fit right in.

  In 1873 an intrepid, or stupid, individual named William Smith Allen decided that the middle of this forsaken stretch of death swamp was the perfect place to establish himself. He built a home on Potato Creek, bought a ton of land for probably close to nothing, and began growing and exporting vegetables. Eventually he retired and moved to Key West, probably the smartest thing he ever did, and sold everything to others who continued to develop Potato Creek, now the Barron River, and the area expanded. Over the years it grew very slowly and today the area is called Everglades City. It is a thriving metropolis with a massive population of 352, down from its heyday in the 1950s of 625.

  Mathias found this all humorous. How someone from such an obvious backwater had made their way onto someone else’s ‘enemies list’, someone who had the money and connections to make this happen, was a mystery. But, that's how these things usually worked for Mathias. He didn’t ask questions, just did as he was instructed and got paid. This one was going to net him $25,000 plus expenses, and he was absolutely going to expense that stupid anchor. The target on his sojourn through the formerly illustrious confederate states was a man in his early sixties. He owned a sponge boat; a dying profession where a diver harvests live sponges from the ocean floor and then cleans and treats them so they can be sold and used for what any synthetic sponge might be used for. Though at the cost of the real thing nobody was washing dishes with them. Typically they’d be used for washing expensive horses, applying makeup, cleaning very expensive cars, or just used for decoration. Mathias turned onto State Road Twenty-Nine, glanced at the Marathon gas station with the Subway restaurant inside, then at his gas gauge, and didn’t stop. He maintained the posted speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour for two point nine miles until he crossed the first bridge at the edge of town and it dropped to thirty-five.

  Mathias’ “job information packet” said that the sponge diver’s boat was most frequently docked in Everglades City at one of the public docs next to a campground. That was all he had for location but he did have a picture. It was an old wooden boat, about fifty feet long, painted white with dark blue accents and with a small pilothouse and a broad beam. Below the pilot house was a berth large enough for four sailors in bunk bed fashion. Not a sailboat, but a workboat powered by an old inboard diesel. It was called the Saint Brendan and it was easily recognizable because the deck of the boat was covered by a stern canopy, sometimes called a shade house. The name across the stern helped too. A stern canopy was a unique feature of sponge boats; a flat horizontal wooden roof that is open on all sides except where it attaches to the aft of the pilothouse. It allows fresh air to flow easily while still protecting the deck crew from the sun and allowing them to continue working in the rain. It is strong enough to walk on and when the harvest is particularly good, sponges that have already been cleaned are stored up top during the trip back to port while the freshest sponges are still being worked and allowed to rot.

  As usual, Mathias had done his homework. Just outside of Tampa Bay, on the west coast of Florida, is a small sponge diving community called Tarpon Springs, originally established by mostly Greek immigrants who brought the trade with them from home. He spent a night there on the way down the peninsula part of Florida in hopes of seeing other boats similar to the Saint Brendan. He wanted to understand what his opportunities might be. He was thinking about stowing away but needed to know if that was a possibility before the moment came. If the boats he saw were any indication, the Saint Brendan would have more than a couple hiding places and would certainly stink like rotting meat, just like they did. He wasn’t looking forward to that part. It was apparently very hard, nigh on impossible for even the most fastidious captain, to get the rot smell out of the wood and the paint.

  The process of cleaning sponges begins by piling them on the deck of the boat for days in the hot sun, covered by burlap and regularly wetting them to drive their internal temperature through the roof. Deckhands had to be careful; at close to one hundred thirty degrees fahrenheit just sticking your hand into the pile could potentially burn you. Sponges are technically animals, simple invertebrates, and this natural baking process causes the meat of the sponge to disconnect from the fibrous tissue that makes up its structure. Deckhands slam each sponge down on the deck every few hours, called beating, to break loose the meat inside. Then they squeeze out whatever has broken free using their hands or smashing them with their feet. Sometimes the sponges hide sharp shells inside, that they’ve grown around, so while using your feet requires less work it comes with much higher risk. The meat oozes out in a brown green sludge that smells something like a combination of dead fish, wet dog, and fermenting seaweed. Once all the loose and liquified bits are removed they’re put back in the pile and covered to bake for another few hours. Then it's done all over again. This goes on for two to three days. Only in the night do they take a break. Even the constant breeze and salt air isn’t enough to whisk that smell away. Every sponge boat Mathias walked past at the dock in Tarpon Springs smelled like it. He could almost smell it now, just looking at the picture of the Saint Brendan.

  In a town as small as Everglades City Mathias couldn’t just cruise around in his undercover police car looking for the boat and its owner. That would certainly draw the attention of the locals so he parked it directly behind the office of the Everglades City Motel. The parking lot of the old place was shaped like a horseshoe with an overly large office building in the middle blocking the view from Collier Avenue. You couldn’t see his car unless you actually pulled into the lot and with April being the tail end of the busy season, nobody was here. There was only one other car and it belonged to the kid running the front desk. Mathias suspected this place wasn’t very busy even during the busy season. It was the kind of place, much like Big Ted’s, that hadn’t moved on with the times and felt like it still lived in the 1980s. It was perfect for Mathias. It did however make him think, one of these days he should really consider a real vacation at a nice five star resort. He’d never been to one.

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  The motel, in an effort to attract cost conscious travelers, offered a selection of bicycles to borrow so visitors could see the town. Mathias had seen dozens of people on bicycles after he crossed the bridge so this would be a way to blend in while performing surveillance. The entire town was only a mile and a half long and maybe a half mile across at its widest point. Bordered by tributaries of Chokoloskee Bay on both sides, the Barron River to the east and a waterway called Lake Placid to the west. There was a lot of dock space but only two docks bordered campgrounds too. He’d start with these then move on through the rest of the town. Even if the boat wasn’t docked in town currently there was only one channel that led through the five miles of marsh and barrier islands that protected Everglades City from the wrath of the Gulf of Mexico. He’d just stake out the channel where it joined Barron River and wait. He was good at waiting.

  The Saint Brendan wasn’t in town. No doubt out sponging and he’d likely be back soon. While it is technically true that he could have made the two hundred mile trip up to Tarpon Springs to sell his haul at the weekly wholesale auction, it was unlikely. Sponge boats typically only travel at eight and a half knots, or about ten miles per hour. At that speed it would be twenty hours up, then another twenty hours back for a round trip of forty hours, assuming he never anchored to sleep. It was more likely that he had a truck and trailer parked somewhere in Everglades City that he would take up to Tarpon Springs. By car the same trip would take less than four hours each way including a stop for gas and a meal. This doesn’t even account for the fuel cost. In the boat it would be almost nine hundred dollars. In a truck, even an old one with poor fuel economy, it would be under one hundred. So Mathias waited.

  Riverside Drive runs right along the Barron River. The homes along the river are on the west side of the road while the dock owned by each homeowner is located on the east side of the road. Quite literally the road split their property in two. This worked out well for Mathias. Whoever owned 405 Riverside Drive, a lovely little yellow beach bungalow situated up on stilts that was the closest house to the channel, had already left for the season. With the house up on stilts you could see all the way through from the front yard to the back and there were no cars. All the windows were also closed and blinds were drawn in all the windows. Additionally, the dock directly across from it had no boat tied up to it. Mathias borrowed one of the old folding lounge chairs that surrounded the pool at the motel and set it up on the empty dock facing the incoming channel. Donning a broad, but somewhat masculine, sunhat Mathias opened a book and began reading.

  Every two hours he applied sunscreen to his hands, neck, and face. Everything else was covered. He wore sunglasses, a long sleeve fishing shirt, long pants made to keep you cool while fishing but protect you from the sun, and deck shoes. He looked like every other person in town who owned a boat. He awoke each morning at six a.m. and searched all the docks along the waterfront for the boat, concerned it may have arrived in the night. Not finding it he headed to this dock on Riverside Drive and stayed until lunch, ate at a different local restaurant each day, then returned after lunch and stayed until just after sunset. Several people waved as they drove by, or said hello as they walked or rode their bicycles past him but nobody stopped to talk. No one ever returned to 405 Riverside Drive. Just before sunset on the fourth day Mathias saw the prow of a broad white boat with dark blue trim cutting through the water coming through the channel. Mathias didn’t lift his head as the Saint Brendan methodically trudged by him, but he saw her. In the wheelhouse he saw his target as well. The man never even looked his way.

  Mathias stayed until the boat rounded the next bend in the river, then he put his book and his sunscreen in his shoulder bag, left the pool lounge chair where it was, mounted his bicycle and slowly rode up Riverside Drive. He tailed the boat casually. Eventually it tied up at a city pier across the street from the Everglades City Campground. The man shut off the engine, locked the door to the pilothouse, and left the boat. He walked past a sign on one of the pylons right in front of his boat that read ‘Reserved. Do not dock’. Either he was docked where he shouldn’t be, or he was docked where only he was allowed. Either way, he crossed the street and entered one of the four cabins the campground offered for rent. In front of the cabin was an old red and white Ford pickup. There were no sponges on the boat. Mathias went to a diner nearby where he could see the boat and ordered dinner.

  He’d had a hunch that without a catch to sell the man wouldn’t stay in town long. He’d either head back out on the boat or leave town by truck. Mathias bet on the boat. Whatever he’d done to get on Mathias’ radar likely didn’t involve driving a truck around and this cabin and dock setup was way too convenient. It was probably too expensive for someone not earning any money. During dinner Mathias had checked the website of the campground and saw that the cabins rented for eighty dollars per night. No doubt he had some kind of long term rental deal, along with a discount, but somehow it included a reserved spot on the dock too. That couldn’t be cheap. If he was right, the man would be gone again in the morning so Mathias had to work fast. He waited until the sun was fully down and for the lights in the cabin and the glow of the television to go out. It was after ten p.m. when Mathias left the diner and headed for the trunk of his car.

  The captain of Saint Brendan was, indeed, up and on his way early the next morning. The old diesel engine cranked and sputtered to life just before the sun burst from the horizon, belching a black plume of smoke out of the rust- and carbon-bake exhaust pipe jutting from the starboard side of the transom, just above the water line. In the heavy morning air the smoke settled over the still river and just hung there waiting for any breeze to carry it away. Dock lines were thrown off almost immediately, the thump of them hitting the dock echoing off the tangled jungle of greenery on the opposite side of the river in the predawn silence.

  Just as the engine idled up to pull away from the dock the sound of additional footsteps thumped down on the deck. There were more than just a couple, possibly as many as five or six people boarded the boat in the dark. They came quickly in pairs, walking together. Each pair dragged something heavy, with just one end in contact with the floor. It wasn’t solid enough to scrape or grind—more a scuff, a rasp. Soft, rhythmic. Mathias listened.

  At the pilothouse threshold, each load bumped the elevated lower door frame as it was hauled inside. Three bumps. Three packages. The door down to the empty crew quarters squealed as it was opened. Five steps down. Fifteen bumps. Still three packages, limp weight. Each bundle was dumped on a bed, the first two on the lower bunks, the third on one of the upper bunks. Whoever carried the third one aboard muttered complaints at having to lift it up almost to shoulder height.

  The storage compartments below the lower bunks groaned at the weight despite the thin marine-grade vinyl mattresses between them. Almost as soon as their loads were dumped by the six men, Mathias was sure they were men based on the weight of their footfalls in the silence, hurried back up the stairs, crossed the pilot house, and exited onto the deck. The only clear words that could be heard were the captain’s, expressed with some limited disdain but no real malice, “now get off my boat”. Six pairs of feet stepped onto the rail, then the dock. Two steps more and they were in the grass. Then silence. Twenty-five seconds in total.

  Water slapped against the hull as the captain eased away from the dock and turned the boat in a slow arc across the narrow river. With no lights on, it was clear he’d done this before—probably many times. Bow pointed downriver and the engine just above an idle, he let the unseen current take over, drawing them quietly toward the channel and, beyond it, the Gulf of Mexico.

  Within an hour the sun was up, the engine hummed at cruising speed, and the Saint Bendan was in open water. The captain had renamed the boat thirty years ago, just after he bought it. He had worked for several years as a deckhand on other sponge and fishing boats, living in tents and old campers at cheap campgrounds to save enough for the down payment on this boat. He bought it as soon as he had cash. He had a plan. Most sponge divers and boat captains stayed in the shallower waters of the Gulf to harvest sponges. They didn’t see the point of traveling out to deeper waters. They figured that thirty or forty feet was plenty deep. They weren’t wrong, you could still find good sponges there if you knew secret spots but hey were becoming harder to find. Some of those boats would return after a two week trip without enough sponge to even cover their fuel costs. The captain wouldn’t do this. He believed from day one in going deep.

  The species of sponge that he targeted, the wool sponge, was found in water as shallow as thirty feet and as deep as eighty feet. Nobody went to eighty feet. Water that deep off the coast of Tarpon Springs, Naples, or Everglades City was thirty or more miles out. It took almost four hours one way. The roundtrip cost of marine grade diesel was over one hundred and fifty dollars. It was also more dangerous to dive deeper, especially if you dove alone or with a small crew. Nobody saw the point but the captain of Saint Brendan did. There were plenty of reasons. More sponges, cleaner sponges from cleaner water, less searching, longer trips, etc. But the main reason, at least in the captain's mind, was specifically because nobody else went there. That was the whole point. They were afraid. He was not.

  The captain wasn’t a religious man. There was no way to profess a God when he did what he now did for a living. He wasn’t Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglican but he understood who Saint Brendan was. Brendan was an Irish monk who set out on a seven year voyage to cross the Atlantic in a boat made from wood and ox hides, called a curragh. Something about this trip, at least to the faithful, made this monk into a Saint. That part the captain didn’t get. He just liked the story, that Brendan would go out further than anyone else, to do things others could never bring themselves to do. He was courageous. He was an adventurer. He was a voyager. The captain understood that. And so, he decided to name his boat after the Irish monk. Not for any religious reasons, but because he felt in him a kindred spirit. Of course, the monk Brendan purportedly brought salvation. The captain brought something entirely different.

  Looking out over the horizon, the captain checked the compass several times. He was heading due south from Everglades City toward the Florida Keys. The captain had an appointment near Marvin Key. Not on any chart, not in any ledger—just a time, a place, and a promise he’d made many times before. Out there, sixty-some miles from Everglades City and over a dozen from Big Pine Key, there was no law, no dock, and no one to ask questions about what passed from one boat to another. The merchandise never stayed long. Neither did the men. He set the wheel in the pilothouse just right, lashed it down with a salt-stiffened line, and let the old diesel carry the Saint Brendan in a straight line for Marvin Key. Out here, she could steer herself for miles.

  The Saint Brendan had a very small galley, barely bigger than a coat closet, squeezed into the back left side of the pilothouse, right next to the door that led out onto the deck and the stern canopy. There was a two-burner stove, a sink big enough to hold about two gallons of water, a coffee maker, one cabinet for dishes and pans, and a spice rack. Three coffee mugs hung from the underside of the cabinet. The counter space was about the size of an elementary school desk. You could make a meal, but just barely. The coffee had finished percolating. He hadn’t been able to brew a cup before he left his cabin that morning so he intended to enjoy his morning coffee now. The view here was better anyway. With that he released one of the ceramic mugs from the hook it was attached to and poured a cup, black, and walked out onto the deck. There was a single chair, something your mom might have had in her kitchen back in the sixties, with a torn cover and the foam padding bursting out. He sat in it facing the back of the boat and looked out over the water, both hands holding the warm mug.

  Mathias could smell the coffee. He also had been unable to have his morning cup, something he would remedy shortly. Shifting in the storage compartment under the port side bunk, he pushed up on the lid with his feet. He had an idea what was on top of it and it certainly wasn’t a sack of potatoes from Potatoe Creek. It couldn’t be anything other than a body. He just hoped that whoever it was, or had been, was either still asleep, gagged, or dead. Now wasn’t the time for anyone to start screaming.

  The body rolled toward the hull as Mathias applied pressure on the lid. As light entered the storage compartment Mathias eyes tried to adjust. The door down into the berth still hadn’t been closed an a lot of daylight was now hitting him all at once. He held perfectly still, eyes blinking. From where he lay he began to recognize shapes and colors. Across from him, still bound and unconscious on the opposite bunk, was a young woman. She faced him but her eyes were closed. He saw that she was breathing. Her hands were bound behind her back and her legs were zip tied together at the ankle. It couldn’t be a comfortable position to sleep. There was nothing covering her mouth. She looked to be no older than nineteen. A college student? White, blonde, athletic. She was dressed in running clothes; light-weight purple shorts, a black sports bra, some brand of running shoes, and even a headband to absorb sweat. There was a strap around her right arm that should have been holding a cell phone, but wasn’t. Was she just grabbed off the street this morning? Did anyone even know she was missing?

  Shifting onto his feet, Mathias slowly and stepped very quietly from the storage box. As he lowered the lid, he saw the girl who had been lying on top of it. Similarly aged, she was a light skinned black woman. She was dressed like she was headed out to a club; knee length sequin skirt, matching top, but no shoes. Her hair was still made up and her makeup looked fresh but slightly smudged in places. She too was bound with her hands behind her back and her legs zip tied at the ankle. The third body was another girl, a little younger. A brunette with olive skin, bound in the same way. She could have been latino, asia, persian, or some mix. Mathias couldn’t tell. She lay on her side facing away from him, hands zip tied at the wrist along with her ankles. Looking closer Mathias could see at least one needle mark in each of their arms. They’d been drugged, something to keep them unconscious no doubt; Midazolam, Propofol, Ketamine, or something similar. It is what Mathias would have used. What he had used. He knew the signs. But these weren’t targets, these were just girls, going about their lives. These were innocents, turned into products. This wasn’t just a contract. This was now something else entirely.