The Four Corners Of The Sky (33 page)

Slowly the head turned, the eyes opened and looked at Annie. Years, decades, flung away and memory rushed in. She had known those facetious green gold-specked eyes from the beginning of her life.

“Annie…”

“…Dad?”

J
ack Peregrine’s face was bruised, his cheek and lip swollen and cut, his color flat white. His breath was so shallow it was slow to fill the next words. “…Raffy, look, what a beautiful woman…”

“Absolutely,” agreed the young Cuban as he moved away from them to stand near the window, out of which he kept nervously looking.

Jack Peregrine raised himself with effort. His taped palms had the look of someone about to pull on boxing gloves. “Beautiful. You’re just gorgeous.”

Annie stepped aside so the slanted light didn’t strike her. She tried for irony but couldn’t keep sorrow from her voice. “So, Coach Ronny, what’s wrong with you? Are you ill or did somebody beat you up?”

He made an effort at a grin. “Like the Ringo Kid said, ‘There are some things a man just can’t run away from
.
’” Slowly he wriggled his fingers. “A man can try but some times he’s just not fast enough.”

“What happened to your hands?”

He held them out to her. “You should see the rest of me. Raffy saved the day.”

The Cuban returned to the bedside to corroborate. “He was lying there, blood everywhere, and I leaned down and he whispered, ‘Raffy!’”

“I thought I was
yelling
, ‘Raffy!’ If he hadn’t dragged me off the sidewalk and gotten me in here to Chamayra, I’d be dead.”

“Inevitable,” Raffy agreed.

“Or worse,” her father said. “I’d be in jail. Somebody across the street had watched these guys kicking me to the curb and called 911. We saw the squad car arrive.”

“We were hiding right out there by the dumpster, waiting for Chamayra to let us in before the bastards came back or your poor dad bled to death. The cops looked around but they didn’t see us.” Raffy kissed his cross then returned to the window where he banged his back ferociously against the wall. “Those bastard
s.o.b.
pingitas!
They would chainsaw the fingers off Elton John.”

Her father gestured at his friend’s bandage. “What happened to
your
hand?”

“Her dog bit me,” Raffy explained. “It’s okay. I can still play. She’s got your metal case, Jack. And she’s got the emerald. And she knows the codes.”

Jack smiled. “Good girl.” He nodded at the Cuban who excused himself; he’d keep watch by the door.

Annie arched her Colbert eyebrow at her father. “Even
s.o.b.s
have reasons for what they do…So, did ‘these guys’ have any particular reason to kill you?”

Jack smiled. “Ah, you were a skeptic before you could walk and you’re still a skeptic.”

She shook her head at him. “This isn’t skeptical; it’s a real question: Wouldn’t sitting in jail be preferable to being kicked to death?”

He shrugged, a frail version of his old nonchalant style. “For some people it’s heights, for some it’s rats, for me it’s jail. Sorry I skipped out on you in St. Louis but I couldn’t take the chance.”

“Hey.” She mimicked his shrug. “Nothing new.”

He moved in the bed as if adjusting to pain. “Thanks for bringing the
King
. Sorry I couldn’t fly with you.”

She told him the plane was now in the Hopper lot at the St. Louis airport. The engine had died on her while she was landing.

He murmured so quietly she had to bend over his pillow to hear him. “Thanks for trying.”

“You’re welcome. Thanks for the card at the Admirals Club. A little soupy.” She pulled the crumpled flowery To My Daughter birthday card from the flight jacket.

He shook his head, looking baffled. “I didn’t leave this at the Admirals Club.” He read it aloud. “‘Annie. Wrong to get you involved. Stay out of this. Go home. Love you.’ I didn’t write this. Who told you I did?”

“The receptionists at the Admirals Club. Well, they said an old woman brought it in and told them someone had asked her to leave it at the Admirals Club for me.”

He looked concerned. “An old woman?”

Annie let out a breath. “Don’t try. You know you wrote it. Who else?” She put the card in her purse.

Frowning, he insisted, “Does it sound like me?”

“How would I know?” She tossed his jacket on the bed. “Here’s your jacket. So is it mainly criminals who’re after you or mainly the Miami police or the St. Louis police or what?”

He sounded preoccupied, his thoughts still on the birthday card. “People get in a rut; they keep doing what they’re paid to do. Could be anything; happens to be me they’re after.”

She told him she’d just gotten an anonymous call from a woman, a warning to keep away from him.

He looked even more worried. “What do you mean? What did she say?”

“She asked me if I was Annie Goode from Emerald, and when I said I was in Miami, she said, ‘Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.’ Meanwhile, what is everybody doing with my new cell phone number anyhow? Where did you get it—Sam?”

“Yes,” he said. “Sam.”

“Well, please stop passing it around. Who is she, this woman that called?”

He kept shaking his head softly against the pillow. “No idea. What did she sound like?”

Annie thought a moment. “…Like cigarettes in a black and white movie.”

“Ah,” he said. Then he shook his head.

The hospital room had nothing personal in it. She opened its closet but there was nothing inside, no clothes, no suitcase. Walking to the foot of his bed, she told him, “Talk. Here I am. What do you want?”

He grinned wanly at her. “So you found the courier case?”

Yes, she’d found the courier case in the panel in the rear of the
King of the Sky
; it was back at the hotel. What was in it?

He said matter-of-factly, “A sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary.”

Her eyebrow lifted. “Sure.”

“Remember, I used to tell you about her.
La Reina Coronada del Mar
?”

“Sure.” She gestured in Raffy’s direction. “I guess that’s why you and Raffy bought that Cessna Amphibian plane for your company La Reina. So you could go visit the Queen in Cuba. By the way, that Cessna’s registration number, N678ST, is part of your password.”

Jack gave her the smile that as a little girl she had worked so hard to earn; the reason she would try to get all the numbers right, win the prize, the A-plus. “How’d you find that out?”

“A friend in the
FBI
.” She studied him a while. “Can you really even fly a plane?”

“I love to fly.” Quietly he quoted, “‘To a skylark, the earth is scornful.’ Have I got that right?” He pressed his fingers at his temple. “Terrible when you can’t remember the poetry you loved. Remember when we used to—”

She interrupted him, holding up a warning hand. “Where’s your Cessna now?”

“In Key West, parked in a lot at the Key West airport.” He rubbed at his bandages. “On hold.”

“Repossessed?”

“Sort of. You know Key West?”

Annie had both trained and taught at Naval Air Station Key West on Boca Chica. She’d even led a practice mission to “bomb” the Marquesas “Patricia” Target, a hulking shipwreck just west of that base. Was that what he wanted, she asked, for her to fly the Cessna somewhere for him?

“Exactly right,” he told her.

Raffy inserted himself into the conversation, lifting his thin shoulders to Annie in supplication. “We need help. Even if Jack had his hands, which he does not, there is unfortunately now a new problem. The police are watching the Cessna like foxes.”

She looked at her father’s bandaged palms; it was true that piloting wouldn’t be easy with those injuries. Moreover, his face looked blanched, his lips thinned by pain. Was it the beating he’d suffered or had she been wrong to doubt that he was dying of cancer? “Is there a doctor I can talk to here?”

“The best time’s in the morning.” He gestured at his bruised face and made an effort at the old lovely grin. “A mess, huh? I had some…” He rubbed his forearms against the sides of his head. “Some treatments.”

“What kind of treatments?”

Raffy pulled her aside. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Her father nodded. “Result is, I can’t remember things. Isn’t that something? I used to be able to recite whole scenes, whole acts.”

“
Hamlet
, start to finish more or less,” testified Raffy.

Her father reached under his pillow and took out a small envelope. From it he shook out two large rectangular green stones. They looked to be cut like the emerald she’d brought with her. Impatiently he gestured at her and spilled them into her palm. “They go in the Queen of the Sea’s crown, okay? Believe me, they were a bitch to recover. But that’s what I get for burying bones.”

Oddly enough, she immediately knew what he meant. “You hid one of these emeralds in the cockpit of the Lindbergh plane in the airport,” she told him. “You hid one in the bathroom at the Royal Coach. You had to go to St. Louis to get both.” They were statements, not questions.

He stared at her, slowly smiled the old smile that she didn’t consciously remember but that her muscles knew and echoed. “You were always so damn smart,” he said. “I’ve sold the Queen. I said I was leaving you a million dollars.” He laughed. “I am. More.”

Raffy glared at his friend, surprised and not entirely pleased. Jack shrugged. It seemed to be a whole conversation, the look between them.

Annie shook her head. “I don’t want a million dollars. I don’t want anything from you.” She dropped the green stones on the bed tray.

Surprisingly the young Cuban took her hand and brought it to his lips. “Wisdom from
Lear
, Annie. Goneril and Regan? Let us grant those two daughters were 100 percent right. Their papa was not an easy man. Lear had serious—” He searched around the room for a word. “Insufficiencies. But in the end, why couldn’t Goneril and Regan show him a little kindness? Like Cordelia did. She didn’t take his kingdom from him, and frankly your papa shouldn’t exactly give away money he doesn’t exactly have, but what did it cost Cordelia to be nice? Nothing.”

Annie snorted. “Raffy, Cordelia gets strangled to death.”

His chocolate-sweet eyes dilated, his mouth fell open. “She does? Her own sisters kill her?”

“By then I think her sisters are already dead themselves.”

He looked distressed. “I’m only in Act Four. Cordelia dies?”

“And Lear and the Fool die too. Everybody dies in the end.”

“Ah me ah me ah me.” Mournfully the slender Cuban slipped through the door into the hall and closed it behind him.

To Annie the moment felt hallucinogenic. Rafael Rook’s dissonant musings, her father’s presence in her life again, the thrust of their conversation. Everything was too removed from the ordinary to assimilate, too incongruous with the routines that for decades had organized her orderly days. She felt as if she were being asked to converse in an alien language in a foreign place she’d been told she had once visited but of which she had only the most dreamlike recollections.

Walking over to the small smudged hospital window, she looked out, trying to orient herself. It was dusk; long shadows poured over the lawn. Golden Days patients still sat outside in their chairs, most of them sleeping. She turned back to her father. “Coming to see you, I had a strange run-in with a couple out on the lawn there.”

“A strange run-in?”

She described her encounter outside. “And here’s what’s weird. Long time ago I met Georgette Nickerson’s aunt Ruth. This woman on the lawn brought Ruth back to me so…” She thought back to how she’d felt. “…so
intensely
. Is there any reason Ruthie Nickerson would show up here to visit you?”

Jack’s mouth tightened, but so slightly that if he hadn’t given her early lessons in looking for such signs, she wouldn’t have seen it. “Who?” he asked.

“Ruthie, from next door in Emerald, George Nickerson’s sister, remember him? You may not have heard. George died of a heart attack, long time ago, before I came to Emerald, before you left me at Pilgrim’s Rest.”

His bandaged fingers moved lightly over the green jewels. “Sam told me George died. She said our mother scared him to death when she hammered his store window.” He pulled himself up on the pillows. “George scared easily.”

“I wondered if maybe you were…I don’t know…involved with Ruthie.”

He said “involved” would be an exaggeration. “For a little while I had a crush on her. It wasn’t particularly reciprocated.”

She persisted. “Could she have been this woman I saw here today?”

He kept frowning. “Ruthie Nickerson?”

“Yes,” she repeated impatiently. “Georgette’s aunt. Georgette and I are good friends. Best friends.”

He stared at her. “That’s nice. George would have liked that.” It was disconcerting to hear him talk so familiarly about Georgette’s father. He asked her when she’d met Ruthie.

“At Pilgrim’s Rest. Long time ago. She was visiting Sam one evening. Only that once. The Nickersons didn’t keep up with her. I remember Georgette’s mother Kim really didn’t like her. But I’ve seen a painting she’s in with Georgette’s dad. And photos. This woman today—”

He shook his head firmly. “Ruthie Nickerson? Not possible.”

“She just looked so familiar. This woman drove up with a gray-haired man in a Mercedes. It was like they were headed inside here, then all of a sudden they turned around and drove off.”

On his elbows, her father pulled himself up even higher and tried to look out the small window. “Who drove off?”

“Raffy knew them. He said the man was Feliz Diaz.”

Urgently, Jack called out in a louder voice than she’d heard him use before. “Raffy! Raffy!”

The Cuban quickly slipped back inside the room, sliding the door closed. “Keep your voice down!”

“Diaz was here and you didn’t tell me?”

Raffy gently pressed Jack’s shoulders back on the pillow. “I took care of it, Jack. I didn’t want you to worry. He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

Raffy stroked his friend’s arm. “It was really clever. I take Annie’s phone. I quick call the driver—I know him from the band days, good cornet player—and I tell him to get Diaz on the phone pronto pronto. He does and I tell Diaz it’s me and I’ve got the Queen for him.” Raffy nodded proudly. “That’s right. I tell Diaz you’re hiding out on the Keys but I know where you left the Queen. I tell him I’ll sell you out for fifteen grand, cash. I made it a big number. I say I’m at the Hyatt in West Palm and that’s where the Queen is and if he brings me the cash tonight at eight, I’ll give the statue to him. He bought it 300 percent. He thinks he got a bum steer, whoever told him you were staying at Golden Days. So he drives off and never knows you’re here. Pretty smart, huh?”