Over the Garden Wall

Readers: Over the Garden Wall is a "prequel" of sorts to my earlier three-part series Ride on a Unicorn, so if you haven't already, please read that first. Thanks!

WF1

"Wow," Mike said breathlessly.

Not because he was still basking in the afterglow of the best sex he'd ever had.

He suddenly saw his lover in a whole new light, and not just because of the rising sun glowing about her as she rose from the bed.

Sharine revealed she was Finbar's sister. Meaning: "You're the spy!"

Sharine muttered to herself and continued hunting for her undergarments, the vibe in the room quickly cooling to glacial. The day was dawning and they had a lot to do. Beginning with setting Mike straight on whom he'd just been fucking and why he should be fucking quiet about it.

"I'm going to tell you this once," she announced firmly. "Yes, I am an agent in Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service. But I'm not a double-O anything. I don't drive an Aston Martin or carry a Walther PPK. And if I did have a licence to kill, the person I would have used it on for spilling his sister's very private business is already dead."

Mike put his hands up in surrender. Understood.

He got up and picked up his pants. "And if he weren't dead, he'd be killing me for sleeping with his sister."

Sharine looked at him slyly. "I don't remember anybody sleeping," she said as she located her bra and reholstered her breasts.

Before she dressed she drew Mike's attention to a small, tattooed script of the SIS motto across the small of her back that he somehow overlooked in the lovemaking.

"Semper Occultus means Always Secret," she explained before covering it with a blouse fished from her suitcase. "I warned Finbar to keep a lid on what I was up to for his own good and mine. I also warned him if he kept bragging about it to his buddies I'd carve a motto into his back with a rusty fishing knife: Non claudet os suum -- Won't Shut His Mouth."

"To be fair to Finbar, he was very proud of you," Mike said quietly.

She nodded. "I miss his too. But mum's the word, yes? Let's go to work."

Sharine explained she was on leave from MI6 where she worked in a mid-level capacity liaising with agents around the world, sometimes assisting with operations in the field -- more cloak than dagger.

Upon hearing about Finbar's demise, she realized at once something was up. The entire family knew the powers that be on their very corrupt island had been compromised by drug cartels and other arms of organized crime -- any hope of getting the straight goods on what happened would be dashed if the investigation was left under the direction of the incompetent and paid-for constabulary.

She was heartened at first to learn the British Navy had stepped up to find the bodies and provide the first theories on what had transpired, but they were soon thanked for their help and directed back to sea. It would be left to the ass-covering resort owners and their crooked overlords.

She opened a very detailed map of St. Basil's and its offshore topography on a dining table. The blood-red nail of her index finger went directly to Half Moon Bay, the scene of the tragedy. It was well known to locals that the area was of great interest to drug cartels which reputedly used the beach area as a trans-shipment point for their island-hopping boats zipping northward through the Leewards, right under the noses of the handful of U.S. troops remaining at the nearby abandoned airfield. St. Basil's was the final stop before the trickier challenge of navigating through the U.S. Virgin Islands where the U.S. Coast Guard and DEA operated in force.

"As it happens, I know someone with intimate knowledge of this area," Sharine continued. "Poppy Kingston, my grandfather, helped build the American Air Force base onshore. He's seen a lot and would never talk about it." She folded the map and looked at Mike. "I am thinking he will now."

An hour later Sharine and Mike found the old man in a ramshackle diner by the beach, playing dominoes with his cronies. As they entered his eyes widened and he shooed his friends away, gathering up his granddaughter in his big arms and lifted her off the floor.

"My beautiful, beautiful girl!" he crowed, "Let me look at you! My girl don't they feed you in London? Sylvester! My girl needs bakes, and keep them coming will you?" An equally old man waved back and got to work on the popular fried dough dish that came with spiced salted cod.

Tears suddenly came to his eyes as he saw the face of his late grandson's in Sharine's. She took his sad face in her hands. "Oh Poppy, please don't cry. You know Finbar was all about laughter and mischief!"

He forced a smile, and then surprised Mike by gathering him in too. "And you, my boy, such a lovely eulogy and such a good friend! I hope you are hungry too." Mike felt the breath squeezed right out of him as though a bearded python had gotten hold of him.

Sharine got straight to business and held up the map. "Poppy, we really need your help."

The old man cleared the table of dominoes and watched as his granddaughter opened the map, again pointing to the fateful dive site. "You must tell us what you know about this place, both on land and in the bay. Anything you can tell us might help us find out what really happened."

She didn't have to explain the unlikelihood that Baz authorities would delve deeper into the worst tragedy to befall the resort business in living memory, not when the Navy had already provided a semi-plausible explanation and lowly divemasters could be blamed for taking inexperienced divers to a very dangerous, off-limits location. Poppy and the rest of the family were only glad they had a body to bury -- everyone knew Finbar somehow ran afoul of very bad people. All that remained was to figure out which ones and wait patiently for an opportunity to get revenge.

"It was a long time ago," Poppy explained. "My company built the runway, the terminal building and the barracks. But we saw things. Boats offshore, a crane platform. And one day, a submarine. We were told not to talk about it -- Top Secret! Who knows what they were doing?"

He took a long draw on his coffee. "Then the Americans lost interest in the base and the offshore project. A recession, no money. We were lucky to get the coast highway project soon after that, and nobody talked about it anymore. I am not a diver but my understanding from the boys is that work on some kind of underwater tunnel took place... here." A stubby finger landed on a spot a couple hundred yards west of the anchor buoy, but he noted it could be located anywhere on the wall dropping to 200 feet.

Mike turned to Sharine who was jotting notes. "Are you thinking we just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?"

She nodded and rubbed Poppy's arm. "Thanks Poppy. Now all we need is Sylvester's award-winning breakfast and we can get to work."

During breakfast Poppy saw a man enter the restaurant to pick up an order to go. His eyes narrowed and Sharine noticed her normally ebullient grandfather had seen something disturbing. She turned and saw a Latino man leaning against the takeout counter, looking idly out the window. He had a thick bandage around his right arm and was rubbing it absently.

"What's the matter?"

Her grandfather leaned forward and beckoned Mike and Sharine to listen. "You should also know about something that happened the same day Finbar and the divers disappeared." He nodded discreetly at the Latino. Shades, flowered shirt, white tee. Nikes.

"What are we looking at, Poppy?"

Poppy curled his lip. "We've seen him before. He's cartel. He showed up at Edrick's door, bleeding like a pig, that night."

Mike frowned. "Who's Edrick?"

"A veterinarian," Sharine explained. "Not uncommon for a wounded thug to show up for emergency patchwork. They pay cash. You don't ask questions."

"Do you know what kind of wound?" Mike asked.

Poppy nodded. "Edrick guesses a dive knife. A lot of stitches."

Mike sat back. It hit him. "The German guy."

He saw both Sharine and Poppy were puzzled. "The guy we're still missing, a big man, Mr. Roid Rage. He looked like he was going to pull a knife on me when I told him he and his friends would have to stick with the group in shallow water for the orientation dive.

"Think about it," he continued. "We've got 14 drowned bodies, no unusual signs of violence in the autopsies. But if somebody fought back--"

"--you would have evidence of foul play," Sharine blurted, already finishing Mike's sentences. She looked over at the stranger, now picking up his order and heading for the door, gazing their way for a moment before he departed. "He knows something."

Mike scoffed. "Like he'd tell us anything! Hey, can you arrest him? Oooh, can I see your badge?"

Sharine rolled her eyes. "How old are you?"

Poppy took her arm. "My darling girl you must be careful."

She rose to her feet. "Mike, finish your breakfast. I'm going to tail this character for a little while, see where he goes."

As she hustled after the man into the street, Mike turned to the old man. "I should probably follow her, right?"

Poppy had a great laugh. "My boy, that woman can take care of herself! Say, do you play dominoes?"

Tracking the wounded man down Basil Town's main drag mid-morning was challenging as shops began opening and crowds of tourists from the cruise ship docked in the harbor started milling. Adding to the degree of difficulty were the throngs of old friends and family members she encountered on the way and having to take the time to hug and briefly chat with each of them while ensuring her target didn't disappear into a store or alley.

The market street was alive with activity as vendors called out in sing-song tones, hawking fruits piled in rainbow-hued pyramids, glistening fish packed in crushed ice, and handcrafted trinkets hanging like ornaments from wooden stalls. The air was thick with the mingling scents of ripe mangoes, sizzling meat skewers, and the tang of the nearby ocean breeze.

Sharine fended off numerous requests to tea, for lunch, for dinner, all to catch up, by explaining breathlessly that she was late for an appointment, there being much left to do in the aftermath of Finbar's passing. All the while her sharp eyes continued to scan the shifting crowd, moving with practised precision through the chaos. Her long black hair tied in a ponytail swung back and forth like a metronome as she picked up her pace, her sandals softly clicking on the cobblestones, as the wounded man slipped further into the crowd.

As she neared him, she saw him clutch his side and that the white tee beneath his Hawaiian shirt was now stained with a telltale crimson that confirmed he'd taken more than a knife to the arm. She smiled to herself -- she knew exactly where he was going: back to the vet's.

She watched as he entered Edrick's clinic and feigned interest in some batik for sale in the shop across the street. She now had time to chat with one of her cousins who worked there, all while keeping an eye on the clinic door.

Twenty minutes later, the man emerged and she resumed her careful surveillance. He soon headed for the town pier and Sharine watched as he was helped into a waiting zodiac boat by another unshaven tough. They cast off and she pulled a small pair of binoculars from her purse to follow their progress, a short voyage to a yacht anchored in the harbor. Sharine took note of the ship's registration number and the name across the stern: Mi Virginia.

"I see you," Sharine whispered to herself.

"Te veo." The Colombian woman lowered her binoculars. I see you.

Aboard the yacht, she watched as the young black woman who had shown great interest in her man Carlos turn and walk back to the market street. The glint of sunlight reflected by Sharine's binoculars brought her to the Colombian's attention. As she zeroed in on the source of the flash through her own field glasses, she cursed under her breath at Carlos' latest act of blinding incompetence.

As if things weren't hot enough already. In three short days the biggest shipment of cocaine ever directed in the short history of her cartel was on the verge of being scuttled through the stupidity of the men she had saddled herself with. She dubbed them Los Tres Chiflados -- The Three Stooges.

Bad enough that her state-of-the-art cargo submarine used to ship the coke got spotted underwater by a group of holiday divers. Instead of frightening them away, the men herded them into the caged waystation and drowned them all, an act of appalling cruelty that offended even a hardened killer as herself. Worse, it took all three to subdue one of the tourists who carved up Carlos before Miguel could put a spear through him. They then presented this clusterfuck to the boss as un pequeño problema -- a "small problem."

A small problem that took a ripping fortune to mitigate the damage. The sub was used to move the dead divers to a deep cavern they located well away from the waystation and a story was concocted about a dangerous current that sucked the hapless tourists and their guide to a tragic end. The speared diver was weighted and dumped into the abyss. Palms were greased on the island and while the Navy proved incorruptible, they were powerless when the government at her direction told them to fuck off and leave the inquest to them.

Next time, she pledged to herself, the crew would be women. She was training them now, in Colombia. They wouldn't let her down. Anything had to be better than this.

As she continued to watch the progress of the zodiac and the return of two of her chiflados, she felt a pair of warm breasts press against her back and moist lips touch her neck. She closed her eyes as she felt hands playfully peruse her muscled chest and abdomen before descending to more pleasurable depths. Her anger dissipated at once.

She turned and smiled as her woman came in for a long, passionate kiss. The blonde was as soft and curved as the Colombian was hard and taut and she succeeded in luring her back inside the yacht to bed. There would be time enough to chide Carlos for getting noticed and to interrogate him on his whereabouts in town. Maybe he could shed some light on the black woman -- what could her interest possibly be?

"You need to relax, baby," the blonde breathed and the Colombian chuckled.

"Easy to say, mi amor."

The blonde smiled. "Easy to do," as she began eating her lover's throbbing pussy, while stroking her clit. It didn't take long before the Colombian's fears were chased away by the rising flames of desire, a frenzy she had long felt for the woman she'd rescued from the cruelty of her previous lover. A man the Colombian killed to free and win her.

The blonde's expert tongue probed deep into her cunt, the Colombian riding above, threatening to suffocate her lover. "Si! Si!" she groaned before the wave of orgasm broke and she slumped to the bed. She turned to the blonde and smiled.

"My sweet, sweet Ginny."

"My Angel."

As night fell Sharine and Mike were suiting up in the darkened cabin inside of Poppy's weathered but sturdy fishing boat, pitching and rolling atop the waves north toward Half Moon Bay. Out the window Sharine could see the moon hung low over the ocean, casting a silvery sheen on the water. She quietly stripped out of her clothes and pulled on her black neoprene shortie suit, looking over to see if her fleeting yet brazen display of skin might lighten her partner's mood.

Instead she saw Mike again studying the bathymetric map of the bay, the underwater lay of the land they'd have precious little time to explore before moving on to the beach where they had arranged pickup by yet another of Sharine's countless relatives on the island.

Calling in favors, Sharine was able to borrow a couple of DPVs, diver propulsion vehicles that Mike annoyingly referred to as "scooters" when she produced them before they boarded. These were military-grade machines with a lot more kick and horsepower than the cute yellow toys Mike ignorantly compared them to. But he was a quick study when it came to tech and was good to go by the time they loaded them onto the boat.

The plan was simple: Poppy would get them as close as he could without arousing too much suspicion while Sharine and Mike slipped over the side in scuba gear with the DPVs, descend to 80 feet and then approach the wall face as expeditiously as possible.

They had no idea what they were looking for -- theories of the scale and complexity of an underwater base ran rampant in the fertile imaginations of islanders. But both Sharine and Mike were sure the Navy didn't have time or opportunity for an intensive search of areas far from where the bodies were located.

They knew they would encounter the police boat anchored there as part of their bullshit "ongoing investigation." But Poppy would just wave and shout greetings to officers he probably knew while continuing his way up the coast, Bob Marley music blaring from the speakers as always, on his way home after spending the day shopping or playing dominoes with his pals. Something he'd done hundreds of times before and rarely drew any attention.

As they approached the drop zone, Sharine scanned the hilltops surrounding the bay, and had no doubt Poppy's boat had attracted the interest of cartel types keeping an eye on comings and goings. "You two get ready," her grandfather said, his voice low but firm. "I'm driving like I'm late for dinner and not slowing down or stopping for nobody."

Fully geared up, Sharine grasped Poppy's shoulder briefly, a silent thank-you, before nodding to Mike, the two of them creeping low along the port side rail toward the DPVs strapped to the outer hull. They released the vehicles and used gravity to pull them over the side and into the sea, quickly descending before the wake of the boat disappeared above them.

The warm water closed around them like an embrace, and they activated the DPVs. A soft whir broke the stillness as the devices propelled them downward. They were fortunate that the full moon gave them just enough light to orient themselves. Mike could see the faint glow of bioluminescent plankton stream behind Sharine as she passed. Schools of fish shimmered like liquid silver, darting away as the two of them glided by.

Soon they were deep enough to engage the DPVs' lights without surface detection. Of course, if cartel goons happened to be on the scene, the two of them would be telegraphing their approach and exposing themselves to attack. Mike checked the speargun bound to the side of the craft to be ready for that possibility. Sharine was gambling the deaths of so many divers and worldwide interest in the tragedy would inspire the cartel to lay low -- but not so low that they felt they could operate with impunity underwater.

For the divemaster and the intelligence agent, differing experiences and training informed their scans of the seabed, each hunting for unusual formations and telltale signs of human adulteration of this otherwise pristine seascape. After ten minutes of exploration, the terrain shifted, the seabed fell away and they finally reached the wall, a barren expanse of rock and sand with little vegetation.

This was the general area Poppy had suggested U.S. Navy ships had been stationed above and peering down to the floor, Mike inwardly groaned at the impossibly large expanse of vertical real estate they would have to explore. Mike turned to Sharine and made a thumbs-down gesture, signalling they should descend to roughly 150 feet and then begin a slow ascent, each taking parallel courses back to the top of the wall. Sharine winked and gave him an OK signal.

If there wasn't so much at stake, it would have been the most boring dive ever. Mike kept an eye on his dive computer, ensuring decompression would be unnecessary, while closely examining the rocky wall before him as he rose. Sharine was doing the same and once they reached 75 feet, she began to fear they'd find nothing. Another island legend debunked.