Under Cover of Daylight (18 page)

“What game is this, Thorn? What kind of weird game?”

“Kate left all of it to me. All but twenty-five thousand dollars. Vacation Island, the house, property, all of it. You get twenty-five thousand.”

She closed her eyes briefly. When they came open again, they were narrowed and mean and fixed on him.

“Twenty-five thousand.” Thorn gave her back her look. He said, “Before it happens, you think you’d rather die than keep living with this other person alive out there. But then, when they’re gone, it’s all just how it was. And that makes it even worse.” He bore in on her eyes. “That started happening to you yet? Started feeling any of that?” He saw something alive in there. A worry. Her eyes shifting back and forth between his.

“I’m late for work,” she said in a small voice.

“I haven’t decided yet what to do about you,” he said. “I know what you’ve done, Ricki. I didn’t know when I came down here. But I know it now.”

“You never were very smart, Thorn. And you sure haven’t gotten any smarter lately.”

She tried to burn him with a last look, then walked away.

Thorn watched her go. She had Dr. Bill’s smooth gait, without bounce or sway. Dead serious. How you might walk through hip-deep water.

Thorn ate in a diner near the southernmost point in America. He ordered the southernmost burger with extra tomatoes. His hunger was back, and he devoured that one and ordered another when the waitress brought him his beer.

“You been away from food for a while, honey?” she asked him as she set his Budweiser before him.

“I have,” he said. “For quite a while.”

He picked up a leftover morning paper from the chair beside him and tried to interest himself in the miseries there. Everywhere there were eruptions, plagues, radical rearrangements. Better, worse. It was hard to tell that. But the stories were all about that one thing, how much it hurt for things to be suddenly different.

After eating, he left his car near the diner and walked five blocks to Sandpiper Bay Club. He had passed it on his way into town, and now he wanted a closer view of it.

Until a year or two before it had been the Sands Piano Bar. A restaurant and bar, a place where grit always covered the floor, tracked in by the beach crowd. At night a piano playing quietly in one corner of the room. It was always a place tourists had skipped because the bathrooms smelled and there was no air conditioning.

That place had been bulldozed. Now it was Sandpiper Bay Club, a condominium, five stories high. A gate out front with a security checkpoint. Some serious men in uniforms in the booth, seemed ready to do whatever was necessary.

Thorn walked the perimeter of Sandpiper Bay. He stayed on the sidewalk across the street from it to get a view over the twelve-foot wall. Lights were coming on. Up on the penthouse terrace there seemed to be a party. The place was pink, trimmed in white, and spotlights shone on royal palms planted beside the building. Like all the new buildings in Key West, it tried to convince you it belonged here, that it wasn’t concrete block, that it had the same graceful airiness and gingerbread charm of the authentic Conch houses. It looked like a goiter to Thorn.

He found a jetty that hadn’t gone private and sat out there in the strong southeaster. He took off his boat shoes and let his toes touch the water. Voices blew in from a sailboat anchored a mile out.

After a while two drunk couples discovered the spot. They were having an argument. They stood about ten feet away and took turns being articulate. It seemed to be about a friend of theirs who had turned gay. To one couple it was a devastating tragedy; to the other two their friend seemed unchanged by it. Was it possible, someone asked, for anyone ever truly to change? Or weren’t all changes in personality just the outer layers, a kind of molting? Nothing fundamental. They were talking loud and seemed to be impressed by their conversation, by its philosophical merit. They kept glancing at Thorn as if they were about to poll him about it. He rose and left them there, out in the hard wind, shreds of their conversation following him for a block.

When he got back to the bash-mobile, he let the passenger seat all the way back, wadded Jerome’s work shirt into a pillow, and closed his eyes. He could hear the tide washing against the seawall at the southernmost point. He fixed his mind on that, picturing Ricki’s face when he’d lied to her that he knew she’d killed Kate.

He saw again that day’s hundred miles of bridges and Winnebagos and rental cars, Jerome in his wig, Sammy in his guayabera, Amos Clay. Thorn lay still and felt the hot wind coming into the car. A wind that rose from the deserts in Africa, flooded across thousands of miles of oceans. Bringing with it the scent of parched grasses, the bleat of extinct animals. Trade winds that carried to Key West the topsoil of another land, delivering it to Thorn’s windshield, to his tongue.

Thorn kept his eyes closed. Southernmost insomnia.

I
RVING
M
C
M
ANN MARCHED
the length of his ten-foot closet. Milburn watched him from the closet doorway, rubbing the raw skin around his flesh-colored eye patch.

“Come on, man. Let’s just do tourists.”

“
You
do tourists,” Irv said. “That’s how much imagination you got.”

“All there is in Key West is tourists, Conchs, and fags. I’d rather do tourists.”

“I knew I remembered this thing,” said Irv as he reached in among the tight-packed clothes and withdrew a hanger with leather shorts pinned to it. “I bought it in Provincetown, this great queer store. Man, it’s just right.”

Irv slipped it on over his red bikini underwear. He turned and modeled it for Milburn, jutting out a hip and pressing his chin to his shoulder. Fluttering lashes.

“I’m not going anywhere with you like that.”

“I’m just starting, man.”

“I’m not dressing up,” Milburn said, there with his hairy gut hanging over the edge of a pair of tennis shorts. Tennis shorts! What a joke. Milburn swatting at a tennis ball, trying to get from here to there. They called him Earthquake at the Health and Racket Club.

Milburn said, “What’s the idea anyway? You think this girl’s going to come up with the money faster for some leather freak? Either she has the three thou or we wet her. It doesn’t call for any big drama club thing.”

“You see, Milburn. This is exactly the difference between us. You’re thinking in a straight line: The broad owes us, so we collect, one, two, three. This linear shit, man, that’s what’s crippled you up. I’m over here jumping, like quantum leaps, a jump here, a jump miles further ahead.” Irv loosened the spiked bulldog collar around his neck. He tried different angles with the leather Greek sailor’s cap, found one he liked, cocked over to the side, almost touching his ear. Just right. Fruity but frightening.

“This Ricki person. She’s gonna be a rich lady. She’s gonna need some serious financial counseling as I see it. Like from this kinky Merrill Lynch guy, specializes in resort management.”

“Man, you’re batshit. Total certifiable batshit. Nobody, I don’t care how flaky the broad is, nobody is going to hand over a resort island to some stranger buys his clothes at the pet store. You’re slipping beyond the edge here.”

“OK, Joyce Brothers, what do you recommend?”

“I say we go down there, get our three dollars, or smack the broad. Either way, doesn’t matter shit to me. Dress like boat captains or something halfway normal, hit a few bars, hang out at the nude beach tomorrow, catch the Sunday crowd, tan our hard-ons, and come on home. Nice relaxing trip. Nothing kinky. Cut the Hollywood bullshit.”

“Yeah, OK, buddy. Whatever you say.” Irv hatching an idea, taking off his collar, the hat, the leather vest. “You may have a thought there. I just may see a point to that.”

Milburn staring at him now, a little nervous he was getting his way. Seemed to be sorry for a moment. Then shaking his head firmly and snorting. Like it’s about time Irv paid more attention to his point of view.

The loran flickered in the dark, Sarah steering jerkily, overcompensating as she went off course by a few degrees and then overcompensating back the other way. Wonderful little gadget that loran, a computerized compass. It told her just where she was, but hell if that made her feel better.

At least she was away from shore. That had worried her most, running aground on the flats just offshore. Kate had shown her how it was done, aiming at the Carysfort light, keeping the dock light dead astern. But there wasn’t much margin for error, and Sarah had plowed the bow into the edges of the channel twice, saving herself only because she was going so slowly.

The meet was at 2:00
A.M.
as usual. Tonight the coordinates were 14201 and 30718. Not coordinates; what had Kate called them? Time delays, lines of position. Places where the radio signals crossed. Every place on earth had a loran coordinate, every place on earth woven through with a tight fabric of radio signals. Impossible to be truly lost, as long as you could afford that seven-hundred-dollar little computer. But there was a hell of difference between knowing exactly where you were and knowing exactly where you wanted to be.

It was six and half miles from Garden Cove to the Elbow and then about twenty more miles out, keeping the course by lining up the glowing center line with the boat position line. Like a video game, giving the whole thing a sense of unreality. Moving into what she knew was deeper and bluer water, out to about twenty-four hundred feet, four hundred fathoms. Four hundred fathoms. Impossibly deep. About half a mile above the earth’s surface, kept aloft by the powerful, capricious Gulf Stream.

She had given herself an hour fudge factor. Leaving at ten-thirty, she could make the trip, if made without a hitch, in two and a half hours at fifteen knots. She would arrive and wait, starting up only to correct for the drift. No way to anchor at that depth, of course. It would take a half hour to load. That put her back at around five, if she chose to come straight back. But she wouldn’t. She would stop at Carysfort Reef, throw over some chum, and set out a couple of lines. Fishing for mutton snapper, hog snapper, whatever. Smile for the cameras. And then come back in under cover of daylight.

That part was Kate’s idea. The DEA had never had much luck locating mother ships unloading, so its strategy lately was to take up positions close to shore, watching for boats coming ashore at night. Boats without running lights at three in the morning.

So, under cover of daylight had become the new way. It was that Edgar Allan Poe story about the letter. Leave it out in the open, where no one would ever find it. There was nothing at all suspicious about a fishing boat working the reef all morning, unloading its catch at its own dock.

Sarah took a swallow of the gin she’d brought along in her father’s leather-covered flask. She put the flask on the control panel beside the Colt .357. The gun was more symbolic than anything else. If Kate had been killed because of their smuggling operation, a revolver wasn’t going to save Sarah’s life at this point.

She had no way of knowing if something had gone wrong with this deal. She wasn’t in regular contact with her old client, Jorge Palacio. She just received the loran numbers every other week in a small envelope mailed from Miami. When the time for the meet came, sometimes Jorge was on board, sometimes not. She’d just have to wait till the fifty-foot shrimp boat showed. If the deal had fallen apart, she’d know it then.

Jorge Palacio had been her client a year or two back. It had been a routine case. Sarah couldn’t even recall which of Jorge’s rights had been violated during his arrest. She did remember Jorge had seemed different from the usual run of traffickers it was her job to defend. Never a smirk, a glint of mockery at the wimpy American justice system. He had shaken his head in amazement when Sarah informed him he was free to go. Given her a number where he could always be reached if there were ever any way to repay her. Sarah had filed it.

But now it might be that some Colombian warlord had taken exception to Jorge’s method of repayment, this misappropriation of product. And then it was possible that Kate had been killed because of it. And it was very possible, in that case, that Jorge was also dead. But now, with the deadline on Port Allamanda two weeks off, Sarah had to go ahead, find out, make the trip. No time to develop another contact. That Colt the only comfort she had.

She could have stayed home, of course. But Sarah didn’t walk out of movies, no matter how bad, how boring, how brutal. And anyway, she owed it to Kate to finish this thing, even if it did throw her way off her real mission. There was time to get back to that. Thorn wasn’t going anywhere.

She needed to think it all out anyway. Things had gotten muddled now; the quest was tainted with these other feelings. She’d had plenty of practice at keeping her feelings separate from the workings of justice. You like the guy, hate the guy, it doesn’t matter; your job is to find the glitch in the case against him that opens his cell door. Sarah had thought she was beyond sentimentality. But then there she was, over at this guy’s house, bantering with him, going long periods with him with out even remembering who he was, what he’d done, why she was there.

She had some friends in Miami she might have brought along tonight for protection. Lunch friends mainly. Good for ironic burnout jokes about work, clients, the impossible paper work. Good for a beer and a salad and back to work. There were a couple of guys she’d been dating, one especially from the state attorney’s office, a guy she’d half opened up to once. But the guy had gotten nervous, hearing her voice change. He had some other things in mind.

Big help he could be anyway. She could just picture it. Hello, Stanley, want to take a little midnight cruise? Friday night, Saturday morning. Some light lifting, wind in the face, good profit margin. Some zippy South Florida thrills.

So there she was, alone. Kate was probably already smoke and ash, carried away by the steady easterlies. And Sarah, taking the air, guzzling gin, was preparing herself to be next.

Sarah didn’t know, was it a good sign the shrimper was half an hour early? She watched its lights moving toward her. Sky very clear, a sickle moon, light swells. Sarah tried different things with the Colt while the shrimper drew close. Tuck it away in the waistband of her shorts, cover it with her shirttail, expose it, butt protruding. In the small of her back, TV cop style. She settled on display. They should know it was there, that it was going to cost them something to try to hurt her. At least make them move faster to kill her.