A Quarter for a Kiss (23 page)

As we drove past Turtle Bay, Tom went slowly, keeping an eye on the depth finder to get as close into shore as possible.

“I think this is about as good as we’re going to get,” he whispered.

I took over at the wheel and he climbed down to the main deck. With a slight grunt, he heaved that bone as high and as far as he could. Though we didn’t hear it hit the sand, we also didn’t hear a splash. He came back up and took over at the wheel, and we agreed to hope for the best.

From there it was time to get home and get to bed. We didn’t know what time the dogs got their morning run, but we thought it might be prudent to be back out on the water by sunrise, watching and listening to see if Plan A just might work.

“Wonder if Jodi’s having another party tonight,” Tom said as we sped back across the black waves.

“With that girl,” I replied, thinking of Jodi and her friends swarming all over the house, “it’s hard to guess what she’s up to next.”

Twenty-Five

Fortunately, there was no one back at the house after all. I had a rough night’s sleep, but I was up and dressed and ready to go by 5:00
A.M
. Tom didn’t look very chipper either. We grabbed enough fixings for breakfast and lunch and then trudged out to the car and drove back down to the dock.

It was early yet, but there were a few folks stirring. As we walked down the wooden slats to our slip, we heard some friendly “hellos” and were met with the smell of coffee from several directions.

The sun was just coming over the horizon when we pulled clear of the harbor and started out across the water. I was starting to feel more confident about being in a motorboat. Perhaps it didn’t bring back many memories of Bryan’s accident because the setting here was completely different.

The challenge this morning was to get close enough to the beach at Turtle Bay to be able to see what was happening, but not so close that anyone there might notice us. We finally settled on a spot a little further down the coast and out a bit, dropping anchor at a depth of 22 feet.

Tom fooled around with the listening station while I assembled the telescope. There was a spot inside the forward cabin, a tiny porthole of a window, where I could put the telescope right up to the glass. I doubted anyone would be able to see me, and from that vantage point I could focus right in on the sandy beach.

It took a while to find the bone, and by the time I had it locked in my lens, I was a little bit dizzy from scanning up and down the sand. Still, I twisted the knob on the telescope to secure its place and then called Tom over. Unfortunately, the boat was drifting so badly that when he looked, the bone was no longer in view.

I went out on deck to see if I could spot the bone with my naked eye now that I knew where it was. It was no use, so I came back down into the cabin, sat on the bench beside the window, and used the binoculars.

“See it?” I said to Tom, pointing. “Right there. By that bush with the red blossoms.”

I handed him the binoculars, and he peered through them until he found it.

“Perfect!” he said proudly, adding that some skills gained young can last for life—particularly throwing newspapers.

Once we had a visual confirmation of the placement of the dog bone, I turned my attention to the listening station. There was a small speaker next to the recorder, so I flipped the switch to change it from headphones to speaker.

“Wow,” Tom said, “you can hear the waves.”

“Yeah, we’re well within range,” I replied. “Now all we have to do is pray that one of the dogs finds the bone and carries it back up to the house.”

“And then hope their sweepers don’t detect the bug. Seems to me like a lot of long shots in a row.”

“Yeah, with our luck the dumb dog’ll bury the bone in the backyard.”

Eli’s note had said that the dogs were brought down to the beach twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. While we waited for their morning run, I dug out the food we had taken from the house and made a simple breakfast for us in the tiny galley. We were quiet as we ate, and I kept stealing glances at the bunk beds in the forward cabin, wondering if I might grab a nap later. I felt certain Tom wouldn’t mind.

Finally, we had some action around 8:30
A.M
. We heard before we could see the sound of shuffling feet and barking and a man whistling. The telescope didn’t give us a wide enough range to catch all of the action on the beach, so we sat at the larger window next to the dinette and used the binoculars. Meanwhile, we switched on the recorder and Tom sat ready to take notes.

There wasn’t much going on at first. It wasn’t exactly thrilling to watch a trio of dogs relieve themselves while a man sat on a rock and read a book. Several times, the dogs ran past the bone, which was well placed just at the edge of the sand where it met the brush. The dogs seemed excited and jumpy, two black Labs and a German shepherd.

The man stayed down there for at least 15 minutes, and in that time, the dogs managed to spray every tree in the vicinity, chase a crab into the water, dig a hole among the bushes, and even engage in a little horseplay with each other. Finally, the man closed his book, stood, and whistled for them.

They didn’t all come right away. One was busy chewing at something he had found on the beach, and the other one, the shepherd, was sniffing near to the bone. Suddenly, you could hear the sniffs over the speaker, and then, like magic, I watched as he leaned over and picked it up in his mouth.

“The Eagle has landed,” I whispered.

The sounds changed after that. As the dog ran to his master with the bone in his mouth, all we could hear was the sound of the canine’s heavy breathing. I watched the two dogs standing at the man’s feet while he whistled for the third.

“Bob!” the man yelled. “Get over here
now.”

The third dog reluctantly abandoned what he’d been chewing on and ran to the man, who scolded him. The man’s attention was on that dog, fortunately, which left our friend the shepherd free to keep his newfound toy.

“Let’s go,” the man said in a deep island accent. “On up the hill.”

They started walking back up the winding gravel road, and the foliage was so dense it was hard to keep them in sight. But we could still hear them, the breathing echoing in our speakers like an obscene phone call.

“Come on,” Tom whispered. “Don’t drop it yet.”

Once I lost sight of them completely, I put down the binoculars and went back to the telescope, trying to see if it might allow me any glimpse of the house. But there were so many plants and bushes and trees that it was no use. The most I could make out from this angle was one corner of the roof. And our boat was drifting and turning so badly in the water that it was hard to stay focused in that direction anyway. I suggested to Tom that we relocate a bit farther away, completely out of sight of the house. He complied, deftly raising the anchor, moving the boat beyond the next cove, and then tying it up to a mooring line.

Though we couldn’t see anymore, the sounds continued. The man spoke to the dogs occasionally, but it was mostly mindless chatter, hard to understand over the sound of the dog’s breathing. Finally, we heard the opening of some kind of gate and then, a moment later, a few beeps that were probably the entryway to the biometric security system.

“Okay, time for breakfast,” the man said, and his comment was followed by what sounded like the eager scrambling of dog feet on a tile floor. “You want chicken and rice or beef stew? I think it is a beef stew day.”

There was a loud “clunk” and I had a feeling the dog had dropped the bone on the floor. He must have started gnawing on it then, because the sounds we were getting now had changed from heavy breathing to a garbled chewing.

Beyond the noise the dog was creating, we could hear different muffled sounds, and I told Tom that was the problem with electronic surveillance. You expected everything to sound like it did on a radio show—clear and distinguishable. The truth was that most sounds weren’t that distinct. It took an experienced ear to know what you were listening to sometimes. Eli had trained me well, but I was by no means an expert.

Nevertheless, I thought I caught the whir of a can opener running and then the scrabble of dry food being poured into a bowl. Suddenly, the chewing stopped, and it sounded as though the dog’s attention had turned to his breakfast.

“This is nerve-racking,” Tom whispered. I nodded.

We had to listen to the dogs eat, which seemed to go on forever. The man must have stayed there with them, because occasionally we could hear him whistling. While we waited for something more interesting to happen, I pulled out Eli’s file again and studied the satellite photos of the house and grounds.

In the pictures I could clearly make out the gravel road they had taken up from the beach. That road ended at the paved driveway, and there was a flagstone walk that led in a curve around the side of the house. I was willing to bet that the kitchen was right inside that back door, because it hadn’t sounded as though the man or the dogs had gone any farther into the home than a room or two.

Suddenly, we could hear a woman’s voice, calling in the distance.

“William!” she said, and Tom and I looked at each other, eyes wide. “William,” she said again, her voice sounding closer.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m getting an alert from the sweeper. Has anyone been here?”

“No, ma’am. I just brought the dogs down for their run and then we come back. The system was on while I was gone.”

“Call Earl for me, would you? Tell him I need a manual.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was silence except for the chewing dogs, and Tom and I looked at each other.

“Busted,” I said softly.

“Earl, this is William,” we heard suddenly, and from the crackle, it sounded as if he was using a walkie-talkie. “Miss Dianne want a manual sweep of the house. She’s getting an alert on the TSCM.”

“Right. On my way,” a deeper man’s voice replied.

“What do we do now?” Tom asked.

“We keep listening,” I said.

William spoke again.

“All right, you get along outside now. Breakfast done.”

The dogs’ nails clicked excitedly on the tile, and I had a brief hope that our shepherd might grab the bone and carry it right outside with him. Unfortunately, he seemed to have forgotten it. We could hear the door open and the sound of the dogs running outside. The door closed. All was silent.

“We’re in trouble,” Tom said, leaning back in his chair.

Suddenly, however, we heard a muffled sound, and then a loud scraping sort of noise that sounded as though the man was picking up the bone. He made some kind of grunt, and then we could hear the door opening again, a whoosh, a big thud, and some barking.

Tom and I looked at each other, eyes wide.

“Keep the toys outside, you dumb dogs!” the man called from a distance. Then the door shut and all was silent.

Tom and I looked at each other and burst out laughing—not that the situation was funny, just that we were so relieved.

“Maybe they won’t find out after all,” he said. “I doubt they sweep outside in the yard.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime, we’ve lost our ear inside the home. At least now we know what we need to know. They do have sweepers. We’ll have to use the smaller, less powerful bugs with the transmitter box.”

“Before we even do that,” Tom said, “I think we need to switch to a different boat. This one’s so tall, the flybridge is acting like a sail. We need something smaller and lower to the water so we don’t drift around so much.”

“Let’s go do that now,” I said. “Then it’s time to send in the big guns.”

Twenty-Six

The “big guns” were actually quite tiny: Twelve little low-frequency disks that would serve as undetectable bugs. The hard part was getting them inside the house—and, once that was done, placing the corresponding transmitter box near enough to pick up their signal and then send it out to the boat.

For now, we could still hear through the dog bone, though mostly we were getting silence with the occasional bird twitter or dog bark. It seemed the bone had been tossed into the garden and forgotten.