A/N The story of the is not real, but things like it really happen. This chapter is kind of long, but since we haven't seen Dot before this I think an explanation of her past and whereabouts is in order. This is a different portrayal of Dot than what (I think) people will be expecting, but I always saw her as more tough-minded and independent than she was given credit for, and I've played off of this. This is the first time I've felt this way since I started this story, but – I hope everyone understands it and enjoys it. The reason the updates have been slow is because I've got several complete chapters written but I'm still working on the chronology. Once I figure out what order they should be in, there will be several updates within a short amount of time. By the way, if you buy a 60ft 1972 McGruer for five thousand dollars, you either just got the best deal on earth or it'll blow up the minute you turn it on.
"Come hear Uncle John's band…by the riverside…" Dot sang lazily, strumming her beat up acoustic guitar, her floppy hat shielding her eyes from the intense tropical sun and swinging gently in her rope hammock. "Got some things to talk about…here beside the rising tide…"
"Dot?" a voice came from behind her. "We got a problem with the cistern – "
"Ssh!" Dot hissed, trying not to break her concentration. The switch from a D chord to a C one with any sort of speed or accuracy had been a problem that Dot had been tackling all week to no avail. She gave it one last try and her fingers fumbled again, producing a rattling sound when her right hand struck the strings. "Goddammit," she muttered, dropping the old guitar over the side of hammock. "I swear to god, I've never appreciated Jerry Garcia's musical ability more than I do right now. Ok, what is it, Red?"
"The guests are complaining. When they turn on their showerheads, nothing comes out. We had a full cistern yesterday because of all that rain, so when I went to check on it, sure enough it was all gone. Dot, we got a big leak – all our water is gone – and what the hell are we going to do?" Red ran a hand through his hair. "The water boat ain't gonna be back for two weeks, and we ain't got enough money to buy more anyway."
"…once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest places if you look at it right…" Dot sang, again cradling the guitar and strumming softly, keeping her eye out on the horizon.
"Dot? What should we do?"
"…I had to learn the hard way just to let her pass by…"
"Dot! Boss, this is serious! All our guests are gonna be leavin'!"
"Let 'em leave, Red. I got bigger fish to fry," Dot said, sliding off the hammock and handing the guitar to Red. "Be glad to have them gone, actually." She grabbed a Red Stripe from the bar's small fridge and took a long sip, enjoying the iciness of drink. "They make all kinds of noise at night when I'm trying to work."
"Work? What work? Boss, we ain't been pulling a profit in close to six months, we're about to get shut down by immigration 'cause you got three illegal immigrants pushing cleaning carts around, and we're out of water. What work have you been doing?"
"Jesus, calm down Red. You're in the Caribbean. Just relax. Things down here don't work the same way they do in Galveston Bay. We're all illegal immigrants, Red, this isthe islands. No one important has ever heard of this island, that's why folks come here – a little anonymity goes a long way, yeah? I don't know where you think you are, bud, but you're on Little Trouble Island, and we got our own set of rules." Dot swallowed the rest of her drink and slammed the can down on the bar. She pulled a few crumpled pieces of paper from under the bar and smoothed them out on the surface, beckoning Red towards her. "Won these in a poker game with Jack Trapper last week. He'd held onto these papers for nearly eight years out of the hope of something that never came to be, and finally gave them up to me when I beat him. He laughed and said he hadn't lost anything, and all I said was, 'Just wait, buddy.' This is going to be sweet."
Red looked down at all of the water damaged papers. They seemed to be maps of some kind with various X's and red marks covering them. He shrugged. "I don't get it. What's so important about these?"
"These papers are going to lead me to the Charlotte." Dot, still sweating, grabbed another Jamaican lager and held it to her forehead. She lowered her voice and scrunched up her eyes. "Look Red, you're my friend and confidant so I'm going to tell you. I made a little investment last year when Billy Thomas was arrested in Nassau for thieving a boat from some hot-shot movie director who watched movies more closely than he watched his personal property. Billy landed a 60ft, 1972 McGruer and got halfway to Key West before Mr. Director even noticed it was gone and radioed the police. Billy Thomas was no fool and so he stopped on Looe Key, bought some paint and painted green sharks all over the hull of his new possession, taking off all identification numbers and making a few minor adjustments to engines and such, just enough to be able to prove to the cops that it wasn't the same boat they were looking for. I happened to hear about it when I was in the Tortugas and made my way over to see his handiwork; I saw my opportunity, Red, and I took it. Hell, they knew Billy took it even back in Nassau! All they had to do was find Billy!
I told him I'd pay him five grand in cash, no questions asked, and he could blow it all on hookers and tequila sunrises the week before his court appearance. He took me up on it. He's sitting in a jail cell somewhere in Miami now but the Green Shark is going to find the Charlotte, sure as I'm standing here now. And some director in the Bahamas is still missing his McGruer."
Red wiped the sweat from his brow. "What's that got to do with a little hotel in the Caribbean without water like ours?"
"Luck and fate come in all forms, Red. Look, for years I was a star in Toontown but when they dropped me like a ton of bricks, I learned something: always be on the lookout for potential opportunity, even if it doesn't look like opportunity. Why else would I buy a thinly disguised, wanted vessel with two measly 55hp diesel engines, hm? Opportunity. The Charlotte was a pirate ship that sank somewhere around here in 1718 with today's equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars. It was commandeered by an English naval-officer-turned-pirate named Bryant Smith when his own ship ran around the shoals south of Key Largo. The original crew of the Charlotte saw the survivors and stopped out of the goodness of their hearts, only to have every person on the ship have their gullet ripped out like a fish by the pirates on the shoal. The Charlotte terrorized the Indies for years until a storm in 1718 downed her." Dot shook the maps she'd gotten from Jack Trapper. "A Spanish vessel saw the whole sinking happen and the cartographers recorded it all down on charts, and these are the only surviving copies of those charts. Once I find the Charlotte, we'll never have to worry about water or anything else ever again."
"So I'm coming along with you, huh?" Red said with a grin.
"There ain't a person within a hundred miles of here that knows these waters as well as you, Red. Plus I got Scooby coming in as my diver, and he's bringing along a few of his pals to help me out. To make an old McGruer seaworthy? I'm gonna need all the help I can get."
Dot had never really looked at her life in terms of what had happened as good or bad – it just was what it was. Whether it was God, Fate, or the Devil didn't make too much difference in her mind because so far it'd been quite a ride. When Warner Brothers had shut down production of she and her brothers' TV show, she tried to make it as a once-star toon in Toontown but had learned quickly that what you saw wasn't always what you got in Hollywood, and before she knew it she was barely scraping out a living in tomcat cocktail lounges for forty five dollars and dinner for a set, and the sun didn't seem to be rising on any of her prospects. She'd headed to sea with the first cruise ship she could wrangle her way onto both for the fact that she'd never really seen the ocean up close and because her life of drunken reprobates and drunken brothers was getting dull. She hadn't spoken to her brothers since she left California soil.
Even during her first set that night on the cruise ship Dot Warner knew there were greater things awaiting her in the Caribbean, and she was determined not to pass by without getting a little of what it might offer her. She abandoned ship at the first stop in Mexico and gradually worked her way east over the continent by either singing or stealing, and sometimes both. She wasn't often recognized, and for the most part it had worked to her advantage. On the show she'd always been written to play an over-the-top cute kid, which didn't mesh too well with the kind of person she considered herself to be – a fiercely independent enterpriser who didn't take shit from anybody. She might have had a small body, but she had the mind of a Warner. That was all she needed.
She'd worked her way down the Mexican coast, eventually hitting Belize. Dot had run into some trouble there when she'd gotten caught stealing someone's gold watch from their back pocket to hock it down at the pawn shop for a few bucks. She'd been pursued down to the waterfront, where she managed to jump into an aging speedboat, hotwire it and be half a mile away before the police crews could get themselves assembled for a chase.
She'd landed here, on Little Trouble Island, an out of the way haven for eccentrics and expatriates near the coast of Bonaire in the Dutch West Indies, and had sunk the boat on the shallow shoals lying just off shore. She had arrived like most people had on Little Trouble Island: soaking wet with little more than the clothes on her back, a warrant for her arrest, and a mind that was as sharp as the harpy knife she carried everywhere in her back pocket. Dot had found a good home and made fast friends with the locals.
Dot had learned early on in her Caribbean escapades that if you could fish, play the guitar, or serve drinks you would never be at a loss for a job in the islands. She'd chosen the latter of those occupations and had quickly become the only barkeep at the Island Soul bar and inn worth having. The inn itself was just a jumbled collection of rooms inside a small stucco building painted in bright hues of green and blue by an artist who had drunk himself to death in Havana years earlier. The paint was chipping but the view of the sunset couldn't be matched anywhere else in the Caribbean, and each night a little bit of magic occurred when all the chatter stopped as all eyes in the bar turned to see the last sliver of the sun slink beneath the azure horizon. Dot had always felt a sense of peace right at that moment that she couldn't seem to attain anywhere else in her life. She didn't often think of what she left behind in America, but sometimes in those rare moments of peace memories of her brothers came dimly back to her, like a song she could only just barely remember having heard a long time ago…
Of course, the moments of peace and quiet hadn't kept Lou Bergenstein, the owner of the Island Soul, from betting away his inn to Dot in one heated round of poker. Everyone on the island – everyone in the Caribbean, to be more exact – knew that playing poker with Dot Warner when you were betting something she really wanted was just asking for it to be taken away. It had all happened so fast that when Lou woke up on the deck of a ship that Dot had sent him away on, he thought it had all been a dream. But the sight of Little Trouble Island fading away on the horizon had showed him, and everyone else on the island, that Dot Warner was used to being in charge.
Red had saved Dot's ass on a number of occasions, including the time she was framed for armed robbery on the island, and the two had become inseparable in all things business. Each knew the other's strengths and weaknesses and were able to play off of them to achieve the best effects for them both. Finding the Charlotte was just the next in a long line of adventures for the two.
"So when do we leave?" Red said, lifting the brim of his ballcap up slightly to grin at Dot. He trusted her little schemes because they always seemed to pay off handsomely. "I can smell the treasure already."
"Be patient. I know you're like a shark who smells blood in the water about these kinds of things, but I can assure you it'll be well worth the wait. Give me a few more days. I've got to tie up some affairs here. I've gotta unload this inn on some poor, unsuspecting gringo who's read Don't Stop the Carnival one too many times and I got to find a good navigator. What I need you to do is to stock the boat with everything we're going to need. We're going to be gone for a while, Red. Keep that in mind."
"Gladly," Red said, still smiling as he left Dot hunched over her maps and made his way to the town center. As far as islands went, Little Trouble was about the best that someone like him could hope for. No one asked questions about anyone else on Little Trouble – everyone had something to hide, and so privacy was taken seriously. Little Trouble had been the best kept secret in the West Indies for hundreds of years, going back to the time of the pirates in the seventeenth century who needed a place to call home. Red and Dot were just modern day versions thereof.
Red spent the afternoon in town, buying up everything a crew of six would conceivably need for an expedition. He'd never been on a treasure hunt before, but he had a feeling that rum and macaroni and cheese became a person's best friend on an adventure like that. He also bought a few kegs of beer; water didn't stay good on board no matter how carefully it was kept, and since beer is sterile, often times it is much safer to drink than musty water that has been sitting in metal casks for months on end. He grabbed a few other essentials for a treasure salvaging job, most notably a few dozen knives, a dozen guns and enough ammunition to fend off the entire world. The Green Shark wasn't pretty, but he knew McGruers were good in the long run and did a complete check of everything on board, making sure all systems were go and would be for a long time. A tool kit, sharp mind and a gun were indispensable in this business.
Meanwhile back at the Island Soul, Dot was leaned over her maps studying them intently. A heavy wind blew up through the bar, rumpling her papers, as a steady stream of water began to pour down from the heavens. Unnoticing, Dot marked one spot on her map with a large red circle. She smiled to herself. "Gotcha," she muttered.