A wiry, tall thirty-four-year-old, Perez had been born in Miami of Cuban parents six months after they fled the Communist island-nation. He was deeply tanned and had short black hair and a goatee. His intense brown eyes were shielded by dark polarized sunglasses. He wore khaki shorts, a dark blue linen shirt with a white tropical flower motif, and tan leather deck shoes.
The open cockpit had seven high-back deeply padded leather seats. Perez was at the helm. The other six seats were filled with stunning blondes and brunettes with bronze tans, the girls all in their twenties, all more or less clad in the tiniest of bikinis. Two were sunning themselves topless.
On both sides of the white Marauder’s long hull and on its foredeck were images of a giant pair of rolling red dice and the wording:
MORE WINNERS, MORE MONEY!
LUCKY STARS CASINO & ENTERTAINMENT
PHILADELPHIA, ATLANTIC CITY, NEW ORLEANS, BILOXI
The boats in the pack were of a variety of sizes and styles—but all designed for speed. A few had simple solid-color hulls. Most, though, like the Marauder, featured wild graphics covering their enormous decks and hulls—everything from stylized U.S. flags to skull-and-crossbones to racing motifs with black-and-white checkered flags and circled numbers. The boat running directly ahead of Perez’s resembled a giant can of the energy beverage NRG!
As the pack of go-fasts—most of which also had attractive young women aboard—followed the island chain northward, Perez had the Marauder running not even at half throttle. The speed readout in the corner of the Global Positioning Satellite screen indicated forty-six miles an hour.
With three 1,075-horsepower Mercury Racing engines, the Marauder could hit a cruise speed of seventy-five miles an hour and a top speed of 124. In addition to the cockpit seats, the area below deck had room for another eight passengers. The nicely furnished cabin, heavily insulated and air-conditioned, resembled what one would expect to find aboard a private jet aircraft, complete with plush leather couches, a high-end entertainment system, and a flat-screen television.
In the cabin were two sunburned, balding, olive-skinned, middle-aged men, both wearing khaki shorts and ba
ggy Cuban guayabera shirts that didn’t conceal their paunches. Each sat with an attractive twenty-something bikinied blonde in his lap. They all were watching the Poker Run on the TV as a bikinied redhead poured them more frozen piña coladas from a blender.
—
Perez grabbed the handheld and keyed the mic.
“Go, Tin Can.”
“Just saw your first wave of boats pass. Over.”
“Roger that. I’m running near the middle of it. And L-Five is about ten minutes back in the second wave. Over.”
“Got it. I’m tracking your positions on GPS. We just started the first off-loading. Should be complete in twenty. What about the Red Stripe? Over.”
Perez sighed, then keyed the mic again.
“Stand by, Tin Can.”
Jorge Perez then said impatiently into his Motorola radio: “Lucky Five, Lucky Five. Lucky One. Did you copy Tin Can? Over.”
Lucky Five was Perez’s cousin Carlos, a diminutive thirty-year-old who Perez occasionally taunted by accusing him of having a Napoleon complex. He was at the helm of a forty-eight-foot Fountain Express Cruiser, one of the Poker Run boats without any graphic design. Its low-profile deep blue hull practically blended in with the sea.
Riding with Carlos was just one twenty-something, an amazingly attractive brunette whom Perez said he was sending along “so you won’t look like a fucking maricón—despite your pingita.”
Carlos had wondered if the girl spoke, or at least somehow understood, Cuban—she had smirked at Perez’s accusation that he might resemble a homosexual with a tiny prick—and that was only compounded as she wordlessly spent the day sunning and sipping the French champagne she found in the galley of the luxurious cabin.
Being ignored really pissed him off.
“L-One, L-Five,” Carlos replied, sounding annoyed. “I heard it. No problem hooking up with Tin Can in twenty.”
“But will you be alone?” Perez said pointedly, letting his Latin temper slip. “What the hell is up with Red Stripe? Over . . .”
Red Stripe, the beer brewed on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, was one of Perez’s favorites. He had a case of it iced down, along with a variety of other imported cervezas, in the aft cooler. But “Red Stripe” also was the code name that Perez had picked to mean any United States law enforcement asset, in this case particularly that of the U.S. Coast Guard, which emblazoned its boats, helicopters, and airplanes with its crossed-anchor logo within a crimson-colored forward-slanting stripe.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Lucky Five had radioed—somewhat hysterically—that just as his pack of ten go-fasts droned past an idling Coast Guard SPC-LE—a thirty-three-foot-long aluminum-hulled “Special Purpose Craft—Law Enforcement”—the boat had immediately throttled up and begun chasing the pack.
And chasing him. Or so Carlos had feared.
Lucky Five was running at the back of the pack, which was some fifteen minutes ahead of the third group of ten that brought up the rear of the entire line of thirty-one Poker Run boats.