The Wreck of the Little Black Book

Eighty-six years and three months to the day after a tropical storm off the coast of Little Cayman sunk prohibition kingpin Alec O'Finnigan's private pleasure yacht the Little Black Book- taking its now-legendary cache of $20,000 in cold hard gold bullion with it- when the ocean’s ever-shifting underbelly finally brought the ship back to the mainland in three splintered pieces. Each resurfacing Piece in turn incurred several sequences of curious incidents, all of which culminated in the untimely demise of seven people on the shores of Aldous Cove, and also seem eerily too interconnected to be coincidence. I am not here to dispute the treasure's profound lack of existence by now, nor will I advise all you treasure hunters out there to keep looking, but if they gather nothing else from this account, the reader should at least understand why my involvement in these events shaped my own conviction that coincidences don’t exist.

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Thanks to the existence of the internet, and the overly-sensationalised official story’s release occurring within the last five years, a full recapitulation is unnecessary, and I may focus on the details essential here. However, urgency and a word-count limit demand the most efficient phrasing of my story, so my account begins at the point where my involvement began- at the resurfacing of the Third-and-Final Piece, which had drawn the longest trajectory from where the ship had disappeared to resurface on the shores of Aldous Cove, Louisiana. Here a crew of alligators set up camp and a barbed-wire perimeter- the latter was accomplished with the help of an obliging lifeguard and a park ranger, before they left to call in the authorities. None of them had a clue as to what was really onboard- if they had, they wouldn't all still be living in a trailer park, 5 years later.

It’s a reasonable conclusion that since the encrypted letters delivered to the Aldous County News from the snidely-named-and-still-unidentified “Zodiac Lite'' had been correct in their Nostradamesque prediction of the spot where the Final Piece would appear, and the official report corroborates this Piece as all that was left to be found of the Little Black Book, we should have heard about the discovery of the gold hidden on-board by now, yes? Kingpin O'Finnigan may have died without a legitimate heir (and the majority of his crew did move back to the British Isles to later take part in the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars of the 1980s, effectively relinquishing any previously-held claim), but his posse contained several well-respected henchman who continued to operate their boss’s machine after his retirement. So there are several descendants out there possessing debatably-sufficient claim to the treasure. It’s somehow fitting that Zodiac-Lite was the one who took most-dramatic action. These parts of the official story I can confirm to be true.

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This report was compiled by the Louisiana P.D. and Oil Mogul Howard Vogel's Office, from evidence on-scene and testimonials from the lifeguard, park ranger, and responding officers. Also included was a noise complaint from nearby, earlier that night, of an ice-cream truck’s chimes at an ungodly hour- I can provide some illumination on this point, in that I happened to cross paths with the infamous skinny-dippers at the park entrance as I was leaving on my bicycle and they were entering in their ice-cream truck. The report states that shortly after the barricade had been erected around the alligators and its builders had fled home, the wreckage was spotted by these two still-unidentified skinny-dippers. While the pair were busy navigating the alligator-guards, two vans full of armed mercenaries suddenly appeared on-scene to try and claim the treasure. It seems that in their last coded message, Zodiac-Lite had included instructions for their henchmen in the area to drive out to the spot where they’d predicted the Third Piece would show up, claim the prize, and bring it back to be divided. When the goons got there, they beheld the skinny-dippers allegedly carrying their newly-discovered payload from the wreckage, made their decision, and in the ensuing struggle every single one of those mercenaries met their untimely ends. It bears note that instead of through traditional methods, the majority of the bodies found on-site had been electrocuted; some were brought down with incredible blunt trauma; one, while the coroner found no signs of bruising around the throat, was reported as suffocated. The bodies of the two bathers were nowhere to be found, and so an APB was issued for- and I quote- ‘two people of unknown description, looking like they might have recently lucked into a large sum of money’.

However, one detail of the case at odds with the others, baffling theoreticians to the extent that many find it easier to simply ignore it altogether, is the presence of a single set of bicycle tracks on the beach underneath the bloodbath's imprints, looping twice around the spot where the high tide deposited the wreckage, parking nearby, and then departing much heavier than they arrived. These bicycle tracks have been written off as the skinny-dippers' getaway-vehicle, but in truth the reader likely realises already that for the same aforementioned reason this getaway theory is demonstrably incorrect, the tracks’ presence also unravels the official story completely, and means that the bathers never laid their hands on the gold.

And now we come to the crux of the thing- for if I have made it this far with my booty still in-hand and intact, why risk it all now just to set the record straight?

It seems that while the story of the Little Black Book should have ended when the gold bullion evaporated, one by one and without exception every publicly-named person involved in the events has- for various suspicious reasons which continue to elude the investigators assigned to the cases- either vanished off the face of the earth or been buried six feet beneath it.

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And so, my reason for breaking these several years of solitude and silence is self-preservation. Mathematically speaking and removing the unsolvable variables of the skinny-dippers, I'm next. Soon, there will be only this looming Force Unknown. And while this intangible agent may not have a face, they most certainly have an identity, which I intend to provide.

Now, the official report was blatantly incorrect on many accounts, chief being their initial assumption that Zodiac-Lite among the dead on the beach- but we all remember that the entire Benny-Hill/Scooby-Doo manhunt for the weirdo in the weeks afterwards was prompted by the third and final letter, tag-lined “Call Me Al”, which was hand-delivered two days after the bloodbath. When the News had run the first two letters in their agony columns, it took less than three days for a bored soccer-mom to break his code and mail in the Key, along with a sternly-worded letter against including this kind of crap in the paper where her kids could see it. Yet Zodiac-Lite still wrote their last letter in code, expressing their vitriol over being unable to claim the glory and prohibition bullion they believed rightfully theirs, and talked a lot of smack about some “influential” locals, including Howard Vogel. Zodiac-Lite had finally incurred the wraths of the wrong people, and the ensuing manhunt is a wild tale in itself, but almost entirely irrelevant- except for Howard Vogul’s Office.

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Because of course, who would his Office have requested to spearhead the manhunt other than, naturally, long-time prime online-suspect in actually being Zodiac-Lite himself, Deputy-Sheriff Mike McMackers? (The connections between McMackers and Zodiac-Lite being that the first coded correspondence arrived shortly after the First Piece of the Little Black Book chose an Australian-run Marina-For-Seniors near Bugia Beach, Florida, for its reimmersion into society, emerging through the underside of McMackers’s house-boat; that in those early messages the cryptographer did seem quite peeved over something unmentioned; and that the envelope containing the second cipher was stained in one corner by a splash of oil- the same used by McMackers to fuel his dinghy, and drawn from the same DinosOil rig where the Second Piece made its public re-entry two weeks later.) During the first ten years of his career, the Deputy-Sheriff worked several investigations for the Bugia Beach Coast-Guard, where DinosOil operated a number of drill-rigs. These cases led to an acquaintanceship of unclarified nature between himself and Vogel, and afterwards anytime DinosOil needed the police, Vogel would ring up McMackers before calling the cops-proper. McMackers and his little onyx notebook were also the first to arrive when the Second Piece appeared, and thus is among the rig-workers in the ranks of official primary sources for the Piece’s description, since the empty artefact somehow managed to disappear sometime before the arrival of the Cleanup-Crew. It’s not surprising that McMackers was at the top of the Zodiac-Lite suspect roster, given this laundry list of elbow-deep involvement in the case. But while the Deputy-Sheriff undoubtedly knows more than he's letting on, his having appeared in so many Keatonesque Florida Man news-reports over the years raises some doubts as to McMackers’ possession of sufficient cognitive function to perform that many college-level calculations.

And while the creeptographer’s continued “At-Large” status does seem to solve my own case quite quickly, suggesting that they are taking further steps to emulate their namesake and lend the weight of spilled blood to their comparatively-meagre casefile, keep in mind that Zodiac-Lite is the type to first seek out attention by writing in code to the local news before doing anything more extreme to get themselves onscreen. And, to be frank, there is another question which weighs heavier on my mind than anything to do with this tweaky weirdo, that question being what the skinny-dippers and the mercenaries on the beach were fighting over. Before the violence, nothing illegal had occurred, so there was no need for the mercenaries to eliminate witnesses, and one look at the two people emerging from the wreckage could have confirmed that the gold wasn’t hidden on their persons. So what then were they really fighting about? Was there something else hidden on that piece of wreckage? Something I missed? Something which, while not so glamourous as long-lost bullion, was still important enough to kill and die over?

The kingpin’s peers and pop-culture pupils alike recall that Alec O'Finnigan's fingers could be found in many pies, a number of which some consider to be unnatural. In the future, the opinion that O'Finnigan was overshadowed by his peer Al Capone will no doubt be regarded the same way one would a sculpture book claiming that da Vinci had been overshadowed in the Renaissance because Michaelangelo made better statues. While Al Capone gathered his following of gangsters and family men to fight the machine, Alec O'Finnigan followed Aleister Crowley’s footsteps down the Left-Hand Path, waging wars against names never uttered in daylight. It requires only an active imagination or a search engine to draw the connection from his mystical endeavours’ inherent need for secrecy to his private pleasure yacht and the allure of international waters.

I don't know what may be out there, maybe thirsting for my blood. But I know that Forces bound to Earth for the purpose of completing a task may not rest until the deed is done, and so I hope that by casting the stone into the vast ocean of content in the world, the ripples might be seen by this force, and followed to their source- but should this last hypothesis prove erroneous, I’ve included in this missive the clues needed to piece together Zodiac-Lite’s identity- with one last clue, free of charge, that they are not Deputy-Sheriff Mike McMackers.

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