Bone Key (22 page)
“What the fuck
was
that, anyway?” Russell Straight asked as Deal piloted the Hog resolutely northward along Beach Road.
“A marlin,” Deal said.
“I thought that was baseball players,” Russell said.
Deal stared. “That’s where the nickname comes from, Russell. It’s a kind of swordfish.”
“Whatever it’s called,” Russell said, shaking his head, “I’d hate to pull something like that into my boat.”
Deal glanced at him. The big man had been the one who’d caught him as he came backpedaling out of the closet, like some scared-stiff heroine from a horror film. It hadn’t taken long to realize that Stone had been telling the truth about what was inside: just a dusty, cobwebbed nook beneath the staircase, crammed full of boxed records, a few moldering Audubon prints, and the enormous stuffed trophy fish propped atop some filing cabinets, with its bill pointed toward any unwary intruder to come barging through the door.
“They’re usually dead before they come over the gunwale,” he said idly, still trying to come to terms with what he’d found, or rather, hadn’t found. He’d been so sure. Some detective, he thought.
“Dead of what?” Russell was asking.
Deal shrugged, ready enough to divert his thoughts. “Somebody might lean over the side and club it,” he said. “Or pop a bullet in its brain.”
Out of the corner of his eye Deal saw Russell shaking his head again. “Puts a whole new wrinkle into being a fish,” he said finally.
Deal nodded. Not long after he’d recovered from his fright and disentangled himself from Russell, he’d gone back to check inside the closet, gradually coming to realize he’d actually seen the gigantic stuffed marlin before: For years the trophy had graced a wall above the bar in the Full Moon Saloon, a once-favored locals hangout long since closed. One of the regulars had landed the near-record game fish in the waters just off Cuba and had brought the carcass home as proof.
The last time Deal had seen the thing, there had been a Florida State gimmee cap smashed on its head while a boisterous crowd cheered a college football game on the bar’s television sets. How it had become part of the historical society’s holdings, he couldn’t quite imagine.
“So maybe your buddy Malloy is right,” Russell said, glancing at Deal through the greenish glow cast by the Hog’s dash lights. “Maybe we ought to beat it out of Dodge, let things sort themselves out.”
Deal raised an eyebrow in response. “You think Malloy’s right? All this is just some fantasy I’ve dreamed up?” After what had just happened, of course, he couldn’t blame Russell for feeling that way about his cockeyed theories. He was beginning to have doubts himself.
Russell shook his head. “Not what I said at all.”
Deal glanced at him. “Then what?”
“Far as I know you’re absolutely right about Dequarius having something somebody else wants,” Russell said. “But this somebody already killed one dude. No reason for them to stop now.”
Deal slowed, bringing the Hog around a curve and past the entrance to the airport. No traffic at this time of night, of course, but the vapor lamps still glowed orange above the parking lot, and strings of red and blue runway lights winked in the distance. In a few hours, they could board a plane, be back on the mainland for breakfast, have someone—Balart maybe—drive the Hog up in due time.
“You could be right,” he finally said to Russell. “But just going back to Miami wouldn’t put an end to anything. If I’m right, whoever jumped me back at the Pier House thinks I know where Dequarius Noyes stashed a valuable case of wine—or maybe thinks I have it—that’s the bottom line.”
“Yeah, but you’re a fish out of water down here, my man. You could end up stuffed and mounted like that marlin.”
Deal considered it a moment. It was true that paradise tended to cast a certain rosy glow on things. Spend enough time in cozy Margaritaville, you could end up thinking that calamity meant running out of rum before the sun was up.
And Russell was right. He didn’t know Key West well enough to be certain that anything he saw was the same as what was real. Take what had happened between himself and Annie, for starters.
He turned back to Russell finally. “This isn’t your show, you know. There’s no place in the DealCo handbook that covers gunfire or breaking and entering.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t we take that up at the next contract talks,” Russell said. “I came down with you, I’ll go home with you. Whenever you say.”
Deal stared at him for a moment, then nodded, piloting them around another curve, leaving the airport and its lights behind. They were at the far eastern tip of the island now, traveling north, with the waters of Cow Key Channel on their right. Across the cut was Stock Island, the first of the coral stepping-stones that dotted the shallow waters northward to the mainland. A mile or so ahead was a bridge that carried the traffic of Highway A1A across the channel and up the line that connected all the dots. In less than a minute, he could be hanging a hard right turn, they could be back in Miami before the sun rose.
“And pigs might fly, too,” he mumbled. The asphalt surface of Roosevelt Boulevard was rolling through the headlamps of the Hog before his eyes, but what he saw was Annie Dodds’ face as she reached to pull him down to her breast.
“Pardon me?” Russell Straight said, at his side.
“Just one more stop,” Deal answered, and abruptly nudged the Hog off the boulevard. They were traveling on a narrow access road now, one that led down to a set of rickety docks where houseboats were tethered, and had been, as far as Deal knew, since the beginning of time.
“Which one of these you figure belonged to Dequarius?” Russell said, joining him at the prow of the Hog.
Deal had pulled to a stop, cutting the engine and the lights before they’d gotten too close to the line of bobbing craft. No sense getting any jittery residents riled up. One of the reasons people lived out here was for their privacy.
Deal glanced up at Russell, then back toward the docks. “Probably not that one,” he said, pointing to a boat tied up near the far end. That craft was ablaze with light, where raucous party chatter underscored Jimmy Buffett’s voice booming into the night, proclaiming himself to be the son of a son of a sailor.
There was a certain raspiness to the rendition, a hint of the been-there, sung-this-to-death that suggested to Deal it might actually be Buffett himself down there leading the revelers’ charge, but that was probably just his imagination. For that matter, maybe there wasn’t a party going on at all. Maybe the boat was just a glittering mirage.
“I never understood that music,” Russell said.
Deal glanced at Russell, feeling reassured. “That’s probably what some people say about Destiny’s Child.”
Russell snorted. “You think black people listen to Destiny’s Child?”
By that time, Deal had spotted what he’d been looking for and was moving off through the darkness. He reached the jerry-rigged post-and-shelf construction that held all the mailboxes for the docks, saving the mailman from the trouble—not to mention the potential peril—of visiting each craft individually. He pulled his penlight from his pocket and ran it over the names on the front of the boxes, which dipped and rose on the swaybacked cross-plank like the waves that lapped at the nearby seawall.
Stone
, he read.
Feathergill. Thomas. Galliard. Dobyns. McGrath. Fuck You. Catanese
.
There was a blank face plate next in order, followed by
T. Martin, Whitehurst
, and
Tucker
. The last, the party boat, was apparently occupied by someone named Pacheco.
Deal switched off his light and regarded the gently bobbing silhouetted rooflines before them, ticking off names on his fingers. “I vote for blank,” he said, turning to Russell.
“I’m not going on board Fuck You,” Russell said. “Not without a gun, anyway.”
“Of course Dequarius could have been using an alias,” Deal said, moving along the docks now.
“None of
those
names,” Russell said, keeping his voice low as he hurried after.
Deal slowed, pointing at one of the more tidily maintained boats, its whitewashed planks glowing in the moonlight, its gangway flanked by a pair of potted Queen palms. “That’s Catanese,” he said, and turned to the next in line.
“It looks like our man, all right,” Russell said at Deal’s shoulder.
Deal turned to regard a listing craft with a roofline that bobbed and dipped as erratically as the swaybacked plank that held up the floating community’s mailboxes. A jagged crack ran diagonally across an uncurtained window in the wall that faced them, and a toppled plastic trash can shifted idly on the deck. There was a plank missing from the boat’s gangway, and the lines that tethered the craft to the dock cleats looked frayed and ready to burst.
Deal heard a creaking noise as the tide shifted and glanced across the narrow gap separating dock and deck. The cabin door had swung open slightly, then settled back as the tide shifted again.
“Don’t look like no one’s home,” Russell said.
“I guess we’ll go see,” Deal said.
He raised one foot to the gangway and tested it, then stepped as lightly as he could across to the houseboat’s deck. He felt the surface tilt slightly as Russell came quickly aboard behind him.
He knocked softly on the aluminum door frame. “Anyone here?” he called, then knocked again, harder this time.
They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the slap of water at the seawall behind them. Down the docks, the Beach Boys were lamenting the loss of the Sloop John B., their voices as confident and cheery as ever. Not a celebrity party, then, Deal found himself thinking. Not unless it was a doozy.
He turned to glance at Russell and saw the big man’s shoulders rise in a shrug. Deal took his penlight out and pulled the door open. He had a quick, insane thought as a musty cloud of disuse and mildew swept out of the cabin toward him: The case of priceless wine had been here on Dequarius’ abandoned boat all right, but someone headed for the party had already spotted it and now it was down there being guzzled by a horde of merry parrot-heads, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
“The man had absolutely no housekeeping skills,” Russell was saying now at Deal’s shoulder.
Deal wanted to nod agreement, his penlight beam sweeping over the wild disarray before them. It was one big common room they’d entered—kitchen, dining, and living area combined—with a doorway that led down a short hallway to what was likely the bedroom and bath.
God only knew what those looked like, he thought. Here the galley doors were all flung open along with those of the oven and refrigerator, the contents strewn about the floor. Wire shelving, pots and pans, a half-filled plastic milk jug, shattered plates and glassware, cereal boxes, a lolling head of lettuce gone way past wilted and on to brown. A tabletop microwave had been dashed to the floor, its door bent awry like a twisted limb.
A Formica-topped dinette had been upended, the rug it had been resting on kicked into a wad, as if someone had been searching for a trapdoor beneath it.
Sure
, Deal thought.
Straight to Davy Jones’ locker
.
There was a couch and chair in the living room—or what had once been a couch and a chair. Now their cushions had been slashed and torn and the stuffing erupted, great clumps of it shuddering with the movement of the tides like giant dust bunnies from hell.
“Do we need to check the rest of it?” Russell said, gesturing toward the hallway.
“Not unless you’re a masochist,” Deal said. He switched off his penlight and turned to step past Russell, suddenly desperate for a breath of fresh air. He’d also had an unreasoning flash of the interior of his own apartment back in Miami, the furnishing trashed, Isabel’s things mounded into an obscene pile, and though he knew it was only his imagination, he felt his jaw clench, his hands tighten at his sides. It wouldn’t be the first time in his life that he’d managed to step into the path of a train unawares, he reminded himself, but that didn’t make the possibility that it had happened again one bit easier to accept.
No way he could slink away in the night, run home and pull the covers up over his head and hope it would all blow away with the tides, he thought. Even if there’d been no Annie Dodds in the mix. That’s what he was telling himself as he headed out the door, full of rage and certainty…
“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” came the voice out of the darkness, stopping him as he came across the threshold onto the deck. “Not here, you won’t.”
He gaped into the darkness toward the prow of the boat to find the tall and slender figure looming against the faint glow of the sky like a wraith risen from the waters, an apparition and a voice that changed everything.
“I watched them take the place apart,” the old man said as Deal approached, his tone flat but firm. “They didn’t find anything.”
“Who did you watch?” Deal said. He was close enough to see Ainsley Spencer’s face clearly now, but his heart was still racing from the shock of finding him there.
The old man shook his head, though it wasn’t clear if he hadn’t seen or if the question simply meant nothing to him.
“Fucking-A,” Russell Straight said, cutting in as he joined them on the warped and rolling deck. “You could get your ass killed, skulking around in the dark like this.”
The old man paid no attention. It was the Stones drifting mournfully in the background now, “
You can’t always get what you want…
,” as if choreographed by some cosmic DJ.
“Waste of energy, kill an old man like me,” he said, with the trace of a smile.
“When were they here?” Deal asked him.
“Earlier.” The old man shrugged.
“Where were you?” Russell cut it.
The old man gestured out past the rail of the houseboat. There was a motorized skiff tied off there, Deal saw, though he couldn’t recall seeing it when they’d come on board. The old man must have been tied off in the mangroves across the channel, rowed over when he saw them board the houseboat.
“You know what they were looking for?” Deal asked.
“Could have been a lot of things,” the old man said. “Could have been some of these.”
He extended his arm and opened his palm. Deal saw several bright disks in Ainsley Spencer’s palm, none larger than a quarter, though much thicker.
“Go ahead,” the old man said. “Take one.”
Deal glanced at Russell, then plucked one of the bright disks from the old man’s palm. He could feel the bas-relief patterns on either surface, though it was the weight that suggested the thing was real.
“Gold doubloons,” Deal said.
“That some of Dequarius’ racket?” Russell asked.
“Take one yourself,” the old man said. “Gold’s good for what ails you, just holding some in your hand.”
Russell snorted, but picked up one of the coins. “You’re supposed to bite it to see if it’s real, aren’t you?”
“If it suits you,” Ainsley Spencer said.
“How much of this stuff do you have?” Deal said.
The old man shook his head. “A bit,” he said, his voice sorrowful. “I was one of the first to go down when they thought they’d found the
Atocha
.” He shrugged. “I found a few things I decided were mine as much as theirs.”
Deal glanced at him. He’d heard stories of workers in diamond mines being shot in their tracks for similar transgressions. “I’m surprised you could get away with it.”
Spencer shrugged. “It was the early days of that adventure,” he said, “everybody way too excited to pay much attention till they realized it was the real thing.”
He glanced off again, then continued. “It was me that told them where to look, you know, me and a couple of the fellows. Most of us knew where that old ship went down, a lot of us on my island did. But it didn’t matter. It was only stories. There just wasn’t any way of getting to that wreck. Not for the longest time.”
Deal had an image of Ainsley Spencer and his fellow Caymaners spending nights around their campfires on a Caribbean beach, swapping tales of sunken treasure, dreaming dreams of untold wealth. And then along comes Mel Fisher, the lucky high-tech salvor, and swoops up $400 million like a Powerball player with every ticket in his hand.
“You saying you had to claim your own share of the booty?” Russell asked.
Ainsley Spencer gave him a speculative look. “Not that it did anyone any good, when it’s all said and done. Look what’s happened.” He broke off, gesturing toward the devastated cabin.
“Then you think that’s what this is all about,” Deal said. “Gold coins.”
“I’ve been dribbling these things out for years, now,” Ainsley Spencer said with another shake of his head. “When I started getting older, I made the mistake of letting Dequarius help.” He gave Deal something of a pleading look. “He was younger, had more energy, could get out and about. He had ways of doing better, getting a little more for these trinkets, than I ever had.”
But not trinkets at all, Deal was thinking. If he could believe what Ainsley Spencer was telling them, if he could believe the heft and the very feel of antiquity that he gripped in his own palm, then Dequarius Noyes had been out there hustling the real thing, some of the time at least. In a way, you could say that the kid had been acting as manager of his great-grandfather’s pension fund. But it hadn’t been pieces of eight that had brought Dequarius Noyes to his own doorstep, that much he was sure of.
“Dequarius wasn’t trying to sell me any gold,” Deal said, his voice subdued.
“No?” the old man said, though there was no denial in his voice.
They broke off then as voices approached from down the dock, a trio of drunks leaving the party at last, joined in a boozy counterpart to another Stones tune blasting the otherwise quiet of Cow Key Cut. “
Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste…
”
Three of them, Deal saw, hanging on to each other, staggering past the houseboat with scarcely a glance. One man caught hold of the dock railing near the gangway leading to the houseboat and began to retch into the waters below, while one of his partners reached for him and missed, barely missing a tumble into the water. Instead he came careening across the rickety gangway, groping about for a handhold to stop himself.
“Get the hell gone…” Russell Straight began, moving for the man who’d boarded the boat—then straightened suddenly when he saw what was in the intruder’s hand.
“Hands up, all three of you,” the man who’d staggered aboard said, all traces of his former awkwardness disappeared. He waved the barrel of a stubby machine pistol over them, a weapon that might have looked faintly ridiculous if Deal wasn’t well aware of what it could so rapidly do.
The man who’d apparently been blowing chum into the dockside waters was right behind the man with the automatic, producing a cellular phone from his pocket as he came aboard. He pressed a single button, then waited a moment as his connection was made. Mobile to mobile, Deal thought. Probably secure.
“We’re on the houseboat,” the man with the phone was saying. “The old man’s here.” He broke off to glance at Deal, then continued. “Yeah. The two dickwads from Miami.”
Deal glanced at Russell, who was turned toward the prow of the houseboat, his jaw set, his hands upraised. Hardly the look of the contented man Deal had seen roll out of a pretty cocktail waitress’ bed what seemed like ages ago. And whose fault was that? Deal thought with a pang. He heard the sounds of powerboat engines starting in the distance and noted that the party music had died away.
“We’ll take care of it,” Deal heard the one with the telephone say, his gaze gone out over the dark waters. Odd, Deal found himself thinking. Here was a killer who didn’t want to look his victim in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” Deal said to Russell.
“Not your fault,” Russell said gruffly. Deal could see a muscle twitching at the side of the big man’s jaw.
“Shut up, both of you,” the man with the phone said. He folded the little clamshell unit and put it in his pocket. “We’ve got business with this man that doesn’t concern you,” he said, nodding toward Ainsley Spencer. He’d affected a tone, meant to sound conciliatory, just a man trying to get a job done. “What I’d like you and your friend to do is go inside and wait.”
He glanced at Russell and gestured toward the yawning door of the houseboat. When Russell hesitated, the man turned to the third of his party, a heavyset man still standing on the dock, a pistol with a long suppressor held across his chest. An assassin ready to deliver the Pledge of Allegiance, Deal found himself thinking, the sort of giddiness inspired by imminent death, he supposed.
“Bobby?” the phone man said. “You help these gentlemen inside, okay?”
Bobby nodded—a bit too readily, Deal thought. Why couldn’t the order have been one too many? Why couldn’t Bobby have told his scuzzwad buddy to go fuck himself? But no such luck. Bobby was already stepping off the deck onto the gangway, his pistol cocked straight up now, like the tail of a hound keen to the scent.
Deal knew they’d have to try something, he just wasn’t sure what. He could see by the tension in Russell’s posture that he felt the same. A few moments more and they’d dance whatever dance they could.
The thought had hardly cleared Deal’s mind when there was a sharp crack from the direction of the gangway and he turned to see that a second plank had given way at eager Bobby’s weight. Bobby gasped in surprise, his free hand clamping onto one of the lines as he plunged down toward the water.
There was a chuffing sound as Bobby’s bulk jerked hard against the hand on the line and a tiny penumbra of flame blossomed just beneath his chin. His eyes bulged as if in disbelief as the back of his skull lifted away, flying into the darkness with most of what passed for a brain. In the next moment, his hand relaxed its hold and he disappeared into the dockside waters with a splash.
Everyone on deck stood frozen for a moment, even the guy with the automatic. It looked as if he were about to ask Phone Man a question when Deal heard something behind him and turned. The old man had flung open the emergency chest stowed beside him at the prow and rose now with what looked like a giant derringer clutched in both his skinny hands, its hammer snapped back at full cock.
The man with the automatic was swinging his weapon into position when Ainsley pulled the trigger. There was a loud click, and an instant’s hesitation, as if the odd-looking weapon in the old man’s hand was nothing but a toy.
Then there came a whooshing sound and a tiny flame-tailed rocket shot from the flare gun, bursting against the gunman’s chest in a Fourth of July crescendo of sparks. The gunman went down with a scream, clawing at the huge glowing ember that had lodged in his throat.
Phone Man lunged for the fallen automatic pistol and was swinging it toward Russell when Deal caught the stubby barrel and shoved it aside. Deal felt a scorching pain in his palm as a burst of fire blew out the cracked window in the houseboat cabin and careened about the galley. One of the slugs ripped through the propane tank, followed by an explosion that sent Deal sprawling, blowing window glass and whatever else hadn’t been fastened down far out into the channel.
Deal rolled up on his hands and knees, groggy from the blast. He found his gaze locked with that of Phone Man, who struggled to his feet just a few feet away, bleeding from a sizable cut on his forehead. The bad news was that the man still held the automatic and was bringing it back into firing position, this time aimed squarely at Deal.
So it goes, Deal found himself thinking, as the flames from inside the houseboat’s cabin grew to illuminate the surreal scene on deck. One gunman still clawed weakly at a giant smoldering ruby lodged in his throat, and a second struggled to bring his weapon to bear.
Deal had given it the old college try, gone for the gusto, shot the moon, left nothing for another day. He’d spent a few hours in the presence of a woman who had reconstituted his soul, and while he would of course have preferred a bit more of that unearthly pleasure, there’d been that much at least.
So shoot, you sonofabitch, he thought, pushing himself up for a charge across the deck that he’d never finish.
Too far to go, no way to get there, but he’d die on his feet at least…that’s what he was thinking when he saw a fist crash against the face of the man who meant to kill him. There was a snapping sound and a groan as Phone Man flew the deck, his jaw shattered by Russell’s blow. His back slammed against the flimsy siding and he came forward again in time to meet a second blow to his midsection that folded him like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The uppercut that followed was probably a waste of energy, Deal thought, but it was still a pleasure to watch.
He’d seen Ali, Frazier, Foreman, and Tyson punch, of course, all of them powerful men. But he’d never seen any of them do what Russell’s blow did. Phone Man’s feet left the deck of the houseboat a foot or more, the upper part of his torso snapping back as quickly as he’d folded up a moment before. He landed halfway through the window he’d shot out a moment before, his hands flung up as if he were signaling a successful score somewhere in his dreams.
Deal felt Russell’s hands beneath his shoulders then, pulling him toward the forward rail of the houseboat, heard the raspy voice urgent at his ear. “Come on, now, chief. This sucker’s going up.”
Deal shook his head vaguely, knowing he was in no shape to swim. “Can’t,” he mumbled as Russell lifted him over the rail. He saw reflected flames dancing on the shallow wave tops, heard sirens in the distance.
“Can’t do it,” he repeated as he toppled forward.
“Sure you can,” he heard as strong hands took him from below.
He blinked, caught sight of Ainsley Spencer easing him to the floor of his idling skiff. Then he saw Russell Straight climb quickly down to join them.
There was a comforting rumble growing under his ribs then, and the sudden sensation of movement over water. Deal felt wave tops bouncing hypnotically beneath him, stared up at the silhouette of a tall, slender black man standing above him, his ancient hand at the tiller of his tiny boat, and it occurred to him that he might well have died, in fact.
You die and then they take you across the water—wasn’t that the way it worked? He saw the sky light up in a sudden glow then, saw the old man lean forward as if an unseen hand had lent a helpful shove.
Embers traced the darkness all around like fireworks, and sirens whooped and echoed a distant counterpoint. If it was this good here, what lay on the other side? he wondered, then laid his head down to find out.