Bone Key (13 page)
The old man took the card and glanced at it before putting it in the pocket of his grass-stained white shirt. “I’ll do it,” he said to Deal, who turned then and urged the others out.
“I can’t believe we’re just going to leave here like nothing’s happened,” Annie fumed as Deal worked at turning the Hog around on the narrow street.
His rear wheels were already up over the curb. Maybe once you got yourself in this neighborhood, he mused, you weren’t supposed to get out.
“Not much else we
can
do,” Russell offered, his head out the window to help with the maneuvering.
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Deal said, glancing at her as he stopped backing and cut his wheels.
“We can check the hospital again later, but if we called in the sheriff, they’d be all over that old man’s house,” he continued, mindful of what he’d found inside Dequarius’ closet. “Who knows what they might turn up. And if they did come across something, it’d be Spencer who’d pay the price.” And never mind his suspicions about Conrad, Deal thought as he wrestled with the Hog’s wheel. Those he’d keep to himself for now.
And what
had
happened, when it came right down to it? A well-known scam artist had been bird-dogging him since his arrival in Key West, anxious to unload some unknown swag—gold, jewelry, shoe boxes of marijuana—for reasons Deal couldn’t begin to fathom. There’d been a phone call, a shooting, some smears of blood left behind.
For all he knew, there’d been a turf battle between a couple of drug dealers, and one of them had been winged in the process. If it weren’t for the fact he’d been sure it was Conrad’s voice he’d heard, and that Dequarius had been so eager to contact
him
, even warn him to get out of town, Deal would be ready to forget the whole thing.
“You think the police would harass an old man like that?” Annie’s reply to Russell broke into his thoughts.
“Old
black
man,” Russell shot back.
It stopped her. Deal had the Hog pointed back the way they’d come by now and had begun to pilot them slowly up the dark street. For all he knew there were dozens of pairs of eyes upon them up and down this gauntlet of dark houses, watching through all those blank windows and ghostly curtains. Waiting for the invaders to leave, he thought, waiting to close ranks, begin the healing of the wounds.
“Look out!” Annie cried suddenly, and Deal turned to find something flying out of the darkness at the windshield. He hit the brakes and turned loose of the wheel at the same time, throwing one arm up in front of his face and using the other to shield her. The Hog skidded to a halt, rocking them forward, then back.
“Goddamn rooster,” Russell Straight said as the thing fluttered over the roof of the Hog like the world’s largest, angriest moth.
Deal released his breath and glanced at Annie, who stared up at the sound of scratching on the roof above. In the next instant, he realized that his hand was resting on her breast. The jolt that ran through his body was electric, almost painful.
“Sorry,” he said, removing his hand.
“For what?” she asked, staring at him neutrally.
He opened his mouth to say something, then realized he had no words. His heart seemed to be hammering from a run that had begun about twenty years before.
“We better get out of here before the chickens get their shit together,” Russell said, giving him a baleful glance.
Deal nodded, then gripped the wheel and drove.
***
“Right here is good,” Russell said as the Hog came to a stop at a signal perhaps a quarter mile from where they’d started out. Trees shrouded the streets into leafy tunnels and the smell of gardenia drifted on the balmy air. They seemed to have traveled halfway around the world.
Deal glanced aside at Russell, then noted the silhouette of a compact car parked in the shadows catercorner from where the Hog idled. The signal turned green, but at this hour there was no one behind them.
“I’ll catch you first thing,” Russell said, levering the door handle at his side.
Deal nodded. What was it Russell had said what seemed like aeons ago? There’s women everywhere? He stared at the porch of a gingerbreaded bungalow where a yellow light still burned, then stole a glance at Annie. Well, apparently not, he thought.
“We’ll get some sleep,” Deal said. “Figure out what to do in the morning.”
He’d added the last as much for Annie’s benefit as anything. What was there to do but wait and see if Dequarius turned up like the bad penny he seemed to be? Track down Deputy Conrad and ask for a sniff of his riot gun’s barrels? Whatever had taken place this night, he thought Conrad might be all too eager to go along with that request.
Russell lifted one of his big hands to wave acknowledgment, then nodded a goodnight to Annie. In the next moment he was gone, slipping through the shadows down the block.
“It’s green,” Annie said after a moment.
He looked up at the signal, then prodded the Hog forward with a touch of the accelerator. There was plenty of room on the broad bench seat now that Russell had gone, and she had taken advantage of it. She sat in the corner of the compartment, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms locked around her shins. Deal was nearly loony with exhaustion, thoughts bouncing in his head like electrons popping in a skillet. Only one thing burned clear: the feeling of his hand on her breast.
“You’re upset?” he tried, turning onto Whitehead Street. The moon was behind them now, outlining the big houses down near the water’s edge.
She started to say something, then stopped and began again. “Men and women think differently about things,” she said. “Why don’t we leave it at that?”
Forever?
Deal wondered. The question was unutterable, of course. His mind raced, some voices raising questions about Dequarius, others demanding some account of his intentions. Why had he had his hand on Annie’s breast to begin with? Why had he taken it away?
He employed desperate measures to counteract the fierce feelings that seemed to have constricted his throat to the size of a pinhole.
What if your daughter were here?
But that was no good. He saw Isabel perched on the Hog’s broad leather seat grinning and bouncing in place, Annie with an answering smile.
Your wife, for God’s sake!
Same story, he discovered, willing Janice onto the scene. But she only patted him on the shoulder and wished him well, vanishing into the night as deftly as Russell had. My oh my.
“We’re here,” Annie said softly as the Hog swung past the shadow of the Hemingway house.
No help from the ghosts in that quarter, Deal thought. Four wives and who knows what all, before he’d swallowed his own shotgun. Ye Gods.
“So we are,” Deal said, turning into the drive of Stone’s mansion. No porch light here, he noticed. Some discreet landscape lighting, but no lamp in the window. He left the Hog’s engine running as he turned to her.
“I’ll check the hospital when I get back to the hotel,” he told her. “If I hear anything…”
She nodded and put her hand up to stop him. “It’s all right,” she said. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”
Would that he were as certain, Deal thought. “By the way,” he said, “neither one of us said thanks for what you did tonight.”
“Getting the drop on Spencer?” she asked, the hint of a smile on her lips. “I’m glad it wasn’t a real badass.”
“Do you always carry a gun?” he asked.
She gave him the look he was getting familiar with, the “
I’m not sure I know you well enough
” stare. “I lived in a pretty rough neighborhood there for a while,” she said finally. “I got a permit and learned how to use it, in case you’re wondering.”
He gave her an all-purpose Driscoll shrug. “Anyways, it was a pretty gutsy move. You didn’t know who was out there. Anything might have happened.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Yes,” she agreed, “anything might.”
In a movement so quick that it startled him, she leaned forward, brushing her lips against his cheek. In the next moment, she was out of the Hog and gone.
Deal parked the Hog in what seemed to be the last space available in the Pier House lot, and stood with his hand on the dew-streaked car’s roof, waiting for his head to clear before he moved toward his room. It was an unaccustomed quiet at this hour, the moon a yellow disk on the far horizon, about to sink into the sea.
He could hear the tick of the Hog’s cooling engine, the flurry of a bird deep inside the branches of a nearby banyan. Was there anything as sorry as a tourist limping back to his Key West room late and alone? he found himself thinking, and shook his head at the pathetic quality of the thought. A few hours before he’d been sitting at dockside, having a cocktail with a woman so lovely she could steal his breath with a simple glance—and how long had it been since he’d experienced that feeling, anyway?
How could things have gone so awry? he wondered. What bad karma, what past sins? Why had he ever answered that phone?
He checked the discreetly placed numbers on the building before him, made a jog left, then right, crossing a lawn that seemed smooth enough to be a putting green. Golf, he found himself thinking blearily. Maybe he should rise early, return to Miami just as Dequarius had suggested, and throw himself into the sport.
He knew more than one builder who conducted business on the golf course. Crack one down the middle, strike a deal—he could pardon the expression—then turn his attention to something important: the upcoming chip and putt. His old man had had a handicap hovering near scratch until the booze had finally gotten him, in fact, so he surely had the genes. Golf, booze, cards, and dice, a little business on the side. If there had been other women involved in his old man’s life, Deal had never known about it. Maybe there
was
an answer to this feeling of uncertainty that now gripped him, if he just searched hard enough.
He found the right staircase and made his way slowly up to the second floor, the memory of the last time he’d visited a golf course burning brightly in his mind.
Things had been crazy then, too. Janice had gone missing and was presumed dead, and Deal himself was surely at fault. He’d found his way somehow to the club where his old man’s founding membership still stood. He’d charged a set of clubs and a lunatic golfer’s outfit to a tab that hadn’t seen action in a decade, then dressed and hauled himself out to a practice tee, where he’d smashed every ball in the enormous bucket the pro had provided until his tears were too thick to continue.
He’d tossed the clubs aside, peeled off the ridiculous clothes, right there on the tee, right down to his skivvies…which is when a solicitous attendant who’d been fond of his high-rolling father had come to escort him inside.
No, he told himself ruefully as he ticked off the numbers toward his room, golf might not be the answer. He couldn’t find the key card at first and found himself struck with despair at the thought of a walk all the way back to the office for a duplicate. There would have to be conversation, perhaps some providing of identification, not to mention the actual walking all the way there and back. There were lawn chairs and chaises down at poolside, he thought. He’d sleep in one of those first.
He remembered that he’d slipped the card into his wallet then, right behind the license that Ainsley Spencer had eyeballed a bit earlier. Blessed relief, he thought, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet and opened it and stopped, staring at the glassine window where his license—lousy head shot and all—was normally kept.
No license there now, he noted with a stupid stare. Someone had slipped a card in there instead.
Come back alone
. The words were scrawled in pencil, below his own room number.
Deal flipped the card over and saw that it was indeed the same card he’d given to Ainsley Spencer, along with the request for the old man to call if Dequarius should return. How on earth? he wondered, turning first the card and then his wallet over in his hands.
The old man would have to be a sleight-of-hand artist, he thought, or some kind of pickpocket…And then he stopped, a rueful smile coming over his features. Of course. What better way to explain certain of Dequarius’ talents? The old coot, Deal thought, fishing his key card out from behind his sorry-assed license.
He shoved the thing into the slot, then stared at the blinking red lights that danced around the face of the lock. Like the lights on Dequarius’ dumbass tennis shoes, he thought. He withdrew the card, turned it around, and tried the other way. This time the lights flashed green and he reached confidently for the lock.
He needn’t have bothered with all the folderol of the key, he realized, as the door swung inward at the brush of his hand. The latch had been open all the time.
Maybe he hadn’t closed the door carefully on his way out, he thought. Or maybe the mechanism was faulty. Hadn’t Russell Straight told him his door had been ajar earlier that morning?
If he hadn’t been so tired, the warning signals would have been flashing inside his mind, of course. But he was exhausted, dazed with the twists and turns of the night’s experiences, and still not certain he’d done the right thing where Dequarius was concerned.
He’d get some rest, though, then go see the old man first thing. He was inside the room now and had flipped the light switch in the foyer, kicking the door shut behind him.
Odd smell, he was thinking, must be his night for them. But this was the unmistakable aroma of trouble and danger, something in his weary brain urged.
The smell of blood, and something else darker and more sinister, and a clumsy smear like finger-painting on the bright wall before him…
Someone in here
, an inner voice was screaming now, his mind scrambling at last toward full alert.
He spun around, every nerve ending snapping fire, his hands raised to ward off the hounds of hell themselves.
It was then that he saw that Dequarius Noyes had turned up, after all. Sitting in the easy chair beside Deal’s ocean-view windows, his comb cocked jauntily in his thick Afro, his hand extended and clutching what looked like a card or a note or a ticket unavailable from any other source. His eyes were sightless, his shirtfront a mass of blood, and the other smells told Deal everything. He staggered quickly into the bathroom and vomited, then splashed water on his face.
Deal willed the apparition to be gone when he came back out, but there was no such luck. None for him this night, and decidedly none for Dequarius Noyes.
He walked toward Dequarius then, and reached out his hand to close his sightless stare, then take the offering that Dequarius had brought for him, slipping it out of the corpse’s cool, stiff grasp.
It was a brittle slip of paper, about the size of a note card, its edges nicked and crumbling. He turned it over and blinked, bringing it closer to the desk lamp to be sure of what he was looking at. A wine label, he realized, soaked or scraped from its bottle, or so it appeared. Faded with age, the French script dulled, the outlines of an imposing château a dimly visible outline beneath the print.
He glanced briefly at this item that Dequarius had thought so important, then slipped it into his pocket, along with the note from Ainsley Spencer and the sheet of paper he’d taken from the pad in Dequarius’ room. Finally, he sagged down on his bed and made the inevitable call.