Metro Girl

  “I have muscle.”

  “Do you work out?”

  “I take the escalator to get to the nosebleed seats at the Orioles games and then I jump up and down and scream my lungs out once in a while when they score.”

  “Strenuous.”

  “Damn straight.”

  Maria’s address book was lying on the table. I’d thumbed through the little book twice now and nothing significant had jumped out at me. Of course there’d have to be a notation that hit me over the head before a name seemed significant. It would have to read Riccardo Mattes, Cuban mafia hit man for me to figure it out. Because I didn’t have anything better to do, I ran through the book again. Delores Daily, Francine DeVincent, Divetown…

  The lightbulb went on in my head. “Here’s something,” I said. “Maria was obsessed with diving. Now Maria has disappeared. Her charts have disappeared. Your boat has disappeared. What else does she need?”

  “Dive equipment,” Hooker said.

  “Did you have dive equipment on your boat?”

  “No. I tried diving a couple years ago, but it wasn’t my thing.”

  “The roommate didn’t say anything about dive equipment. And it’s sort of bulky, right? The roommate would have seen it.”

  “I’m not an expert, but when I was diving I had a buoyancy compensator vest, some tanks, a regulator, flippers, a light, a compass, a bunch of gauges.”

  “So where’s her dive equipment?”

  Hooker pulled a folded sticky note out of his pocket and punched a number into his cell phone.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s the roommate’s phone number.”

  “You got her phone number?”

  “Hey, she gave it to me. She forced it on me.”

  I did an eye roll.

  “I can’t help it. I’m a hunk of burning love,” Hooker said. “Women like me. Most women, anyway. Except for you. I get a lot of phone numbers. Sometimes they write them on their underwear.”

  “Eeeuw.”

  “It’s not that bad. It’s a variation of the bakery thing,” Hooker said.

  He connected with the roommate, did some preliminary flirting, and asked about the dive equipment.

  “Maria has dive equipment,” Hooker said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “It’s in a storage locker in the apartment building. And it’s still there. The roommate keeps her bike in the locker. She used the bike this morning, and she remembers seeing the dive equipment.”

  “So maybe this isn’t about diving.”

  “Or maybe Maria and Bill knew someone was after them, and they only had time to get the charts. You can always buy more dive equipment.”

  I saw Hooker’s eyes focus beyond my shoulder, and I turned to find a man smiling at us. He was nicely dressed in a black shirt and black slacks. His hair was slicked back. His face was perfectly tanned. His teeth were shockingly white and precisely even. Full veneers I was guessing. I was pretty sure it was the guy from the diner and the club. And maybe he was the guy Melvin saw coming out of Bill’s apartment.

  “Sam Hooker,” he said. “I’m a fan. This is a real pleasure.”

  “Nice to see you,” Hooker said.

  “And this is Miss Barnaby, if I’m not mistaken?”

  Hotshot NASCAR drivers are recognized all the time. Claims adjusters are rarely recognized. Actually, we’re never recognized. And I was okay-looking, but I wasn’t Julia Roberts. So being approached by a total stranger who knew my name (and maybe had been following me) was disconcerting.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “And my name isn’t important. What’s important is that you pay attention, because I like watching Hooker drive, and I’d hate to see that end.”

  “And?” Hooker asked.

  “And I’m going to have to take steps if you continue to look for Maria Raffles. My employer is also looking for her, and you’re muddying the water.”

  “My brother—”

  “Your brother made a bad decision, and there’s nothing you can do now to help him. Go home. Go back to your job. Forget your brother.”

  “Who’s your employer?” Hooker asked.

  The guy in black dismissed the question with a small humorless smile. “I’m the one you need to worry about. I’m the one who will pull the trigger.”

  “Or hold the knife?” Hooker said.

  He gave his head a slight shake. “That wasn’t my work. That was clumsy. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give a warning like this, but like I said, I enjoy watching you drive. Take my advice. Both of you. Go home.”

  And he turned and left.

  Hooker and I watched him walk away, past the pool, disappearing into the dark shadows of the taproom and beyond.

  “He was a little creepy,” Hooker said.

  “I told you I was being followed by some guy with slicked-back hair who dressed in black! Maybe we should turn this over to the police.”

  “I thought you were worried about your brother’s involvement.”

  “That was before someone threatened to shoot us.”

  Bob Balfour met us at Bill’s apartment. Balfour was plainclothes Miami PD. He was in his early thirties, and he reminded me of a golden retriever. He had brown retriever eyes, and sandy blond retriever hair and a pleasant retriever personality. He was easy to talk to, and easy to look at, but if I’d had a choice I would have preferred a cop who reminded me of a Doberman. When I called the police I’d hoped to get a cop who could corner a rat and snatch it out of its hiding place.

  Balfour looked around Bill’s apartment and wrote in his little cop notebook. He listened carefully when I told him about the guy in black. He looked slightly disbelieving when I told him about Puke Face. He took down Bill’s neighbor’s name for possible future interrogation.

  I told him about Maria surfing bomb sites. He included this in his notes. He asked if I thought she was a terrorist. I said no.

  He said Bill would be added to Missing Persons. He said I should call him if I was threatened again. He suggested I follow the hit man’s advice and go home. He asked Hooker what he thought about the restrictor plates NASCAR was imposing on the cars. And he left.

  “Sort of unsatisfying,” I said.

  “Cops are like that. They have their own way of working.”

  “Mysterious.”

  “Yeah. Are you going home?”

  “No. I’m going to keep bumbling along, looking for Bill. Let’s check out some dive shops.”

  We drove back to Hooker’s building and stood in front of the bank of elevators. Hooker pushed the up button, and I refused to crack my knuckles or faint or burst into tears. It’s just a stupid elevator, for crying out loud, I told myself.

  Hooker looked at me and grinned. “You really do hate elevators. You didn’t blink when that guy threatened to kill us, but you’re breaking into a sweat over this elevator.”

  The doors opened, Hooker stepped in and held the door, waiting for me.

  I was thinking, get in the elevator, but my feet weren’t moving.

  Hooker reached out and grabbed me and pulled me into the elevator. He hit the button for the thirty-second floor, and I inadvertently whimpered. The doors closed, and he pulled me to him and kissed me. His tongue touched mine, and I think I whimpered again. And then the elevator doors opened.

  “Do you want to go up and down a couple more times?” Hooker asked.

  “No!” I jumped out of the elevator.

  He slung an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward his condo. “Do you have any more irrational fears? Snakes? Spiders? Monkeys? Fear of eating pizza? Fear of making love to NASCAR drivers?”

  “The NASCAR fear and the monkey fear might be redundant,” I said.

  Hooker unlocked his door, stepped in, and looked around. “Everything looks okay,” he said. “I was worried I was going to find it had been destroyed. Every place we go into lately has been searched at least twice.” He got a phone book and turned to the div
e shop advertisements. “You’re going to call,” he said. “People are more willing to give information out to women. And besides, you’re getting good at lying.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Tell them your roommate called and asked you to pick up a regulator, but you don’t know anything about diving, and she didn’t say what kind of regulator. Ask if they know her, and they remember what she bought.”

  There were two dive shops in South Beach, a couple in Miami and one in Coral Gables. I called all of them. The store that was listed in Maria’s book, Divetown, remembered her but hadn’t seen her in weeks. The others had no knowledge of her.

  “Maybe we’re looking too close,” Hooker said. “If they were running from someone, they might have stopped under way. Like in the Keys.”

  I got a hit on the second try. Scuba Dooba in Key West. Maria and Bill had been in on Wednesday.

  “Hold a regulator for me,” I said. “I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were in the garage, arguing over cars and driving.

  “We should take the Mini,” I said. “The shooter with the slicked-back hair probably knows your car.”

  “Fine,” Hooker said, “but I’m driving.”

  “No way. It’s my brother’s car. I’m driving.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the man.”

  “What the heck does that have to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know. It was all I could come up with. Come on, give me a break and let me drive. I’ve never driven one of these little things. Besides, I know the roads.”

  Knowing the roads got him a couple points. “Okay,” I said, “but don’t expect to always drive.”

  Hooker took the bridge out of South Beach, and I kept my eyes on the road behind us, watching to see that we weren’t followed. Hard to do while we were in the multilane tangle of roads going through the city. Easy to do once we got out of the greater Miami area and traffic thinned.

  Florida is flat, flat, flat. As far as I can see, the highest point in Florida could very well be a sanitary landfill. You don’t notice the flatness so much when you’re in a city like Miami. The planted palms, the flashy buildings, the waterways, the beautiful people, the expensive cars, and international influences add interest to the cityscape. As you leave the city and Route 1 dips south to Florida City and Key Largo, the tedium of the landscape becomes painfully apparent. The natural vegetation is scrubby, and the towns of south Dade County are small and unmemorable, hardly noticed in the relentless stream of strip malls lining the road.

  The Mini engine hummed in my head and the concrete moving toward me was hypnotic. Thank God Hooker was driving because I was barely able to keep my eyes open. It turns out Hooker is unflappable in traffic and tireless on the open road. Not much of a surprise since he is, after all, NASCAR Guy.

  I became more alert when we got to the bridge to Key Largo. Florida has never held much interest for me…with the exception of the Keys. The Keys conjured images of Ernest Hemingway. And the ecosystem was unique and as foreign to downtown Baltimore as I could possibly get. I know all this because I watch the Travel Channel.

  We passed through Largo and began skimming along on bridges that felt inches above the water, hopping key to key. Plantation Key, Islamorada, Fiesta Key. The sun was setting and the sky was washed in Day-Glo flamingo pink broken by magenta slashes of cloud. The roadsides were cluttered with fried-food shacks, real-estate offices, Froggy’s Gym, some chain restaurants, gift shops specializing in trinkets made from shells imported from Taiwan, gas stations, and convenience stores tucked into small strip malls.

  We motored through Marathon, over the Seven Mile Bridge, through Little Torch Key. It was dark when we got to Key West. It was a weekend, and Key West was packed with tourists. The tourists clogged the sidewalks and streets. Lots of overweight men in brown socks and sandals and baggy khaki shorts. Lots of overweight women wearing T-shirts that advertised bars, bait shops, their status as grandmothers, ice cream, motorcycles, Key West, and beer. Restaurants were lit, their tables spilling onto sidewalks. Shops were open selling local art and Jimmy Buffet everything. Vendors hawked T-shirts. Ernest Hemingway look-alikes offered themselves up on street corners. Ten dollars and you can have your picture taken with Ernest Hemingway.

  “I thought it would be a little more…island,” I said.

  “Honey, this is island. If Ernest was alive today, he’d be living in South Beach doing the clubs.”

  “I don’t see a lot of hotels. Are we going to be able to get a room?”

  “I know a guy, Richard Vana, who has a house here. We can crash there overnight.”

  Hooker turned down a side street, away from the crush of tourists. He drove two blocks and pulled into a driveway. We were in a pocket of small elaborate Victorian houses and plantation-shuttered island bungalows that were lost in shadow, tucked back from the narrow street behind tiny yards filled with exotic flowering bushes and trees.

  I took my bag and followed Hooker to the house. It was a single-story bungalow. Hard to see the color in the dark, but it looked like it might be yellow with white trim. The air was heavy with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and roses. No lights on inside the house.

  “It looks like your friend isn’t home,” I said to Hooker.

  “He’s never here. A couple weeks out of the year. I called before we left Miami and asked if we could use his house.” Hooker ran his hand above the doorjamb and came up with a key. “One of the advantages to driving NASCAR. You meet a lot of interesting people. This guy has a boat I can borrow, too…if we need a boat.” Hooker opened the door and switched on the foyer light.

  The house wasn’t big, but it was comfy. Furniture was rattan and overstuffed. Colors were crimson, yellow, and white. Floors were cherry.

  “There are two guest bedrooms down the hall to the right,” Hooker said. “Take whichever one you want. They’re both pretty much the same.” He dropped his bag, wandered into the kitchen, and stuck his head in the refrigerator. “We’ve got Corona and Cristal champagne and diet cola. I’m going for the Corona. What would you like?”

  “Corona. Looks like you know your way around the house.”

  “Yeah. I probably spend more time here than Rich. I like the Keys.”

  “Do you like it better here than South Beach?”

  He took a long pull on his Corona. “Not better. I guess it depends on my mood. If I had a house here it wouldn’t be Key West. It would be on one of the quieter Keys to the north. I like the fishing. I’m not crazy about the hordes of tourists. There are a lot of NASCAR fans here, and once I get recognized on the street I have to worry about a mob scene. I don’t get much attention in South Beach. I’m low on the celebrity watch list there.”

  “Richard Vana sounds familiar.”

  Hooker slouched onto the couch in front of the television and remoted it on. “He’s a baseball player. Houston.”

  My cell phone chirped, and I had a moment of terror, debating answering, worried it was my mother. But then I thought it could also be Bill, and I wouldn’t want to miss that call.

  It turned out it wasn’t my mother, and it wasn’t Bill. It was Rosa.

  “Where are you?” Rosa asked. “I have to see you. I went back to talk to Felicia. And we asked around the neighborhood. Does anybody know anything? And they tell us to go to crazy Armond. Armond came to this country when they opened the prisons in Cuba and sent those people here to Miami. Armond says he was in the prison with Maria’s father, and Armond says Juan would sometimes talk about the diving. And then he showed me on a map where Juan would like to dive.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “I have no names. The names aren’t the same. But I have this little map Armond drew for us. I need to give you the map.”

  “Hooker and I are in Key West.”

  “What are you doing in Key West? Never mind. We’ll bring you the map. We’ll leave here early in the morning. Make sure you have your phone
on. I’ll call you when we get there.” And Rosa hung up.

  I rolled out of bed and followed my nose to the kitchen where Hooker had coffee brewing. He was dressed in wrinkled board shorts and a T-shirt that advertised motor oil. His hair was uncombed and his feet were bare. He looked very island, and I hated to admit it, but he also looked sexy…in an unkempt, fashion-disaster slob kind of way.

  “We have coffee and creamer,” Hooker said. “The only other food in the house is some microwave popcorn. Usually I have wasabi peas and beer nuts for breakfast when I stay here, but we ate them last night.”

  I poured myself a mug of coffee and added two packets of creamer. “Do you think that guy with the slicked-back hair was for real yesterday?”

  “Yeah. I think he was for real. I think the night watchman was really dead. I think Maria Raffles is really screwed up. And I think your brother is an even bigger moron than I am when it comes to women.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think Maria and your brother are trying to bring something up from Cuban waters.”

  “Don’t say that out loud. I don’t want to hear that! Americans aren’t supposed to go to Cuba. Cuba is closed to American citizens.”

  “There are a lot of people who think we’ll resume relations with Cuba in the near future, and it’ll create economic havoc for south Florida. The island is only one hundred and sixty-five miles from Miami. Ninety miles from Key West. It could steal away a lot of tourism and manufacturing dollars. I know a guy who’s brokering a land deal for future development.”

  “Isn’t that risky?”

  “Sure, but I guess you weigh the risk against the potential payoff.”

  “I’d think it was impossible for an American to make that sort of deal.”

  “Apparently there are ways if you know the right people.”

  I took my coffee into the shower with me, and a half hour later Hooker and I were ready to roll. The streets were much less crowded. It wasn’t quite 8 AM and the shops were closed. A few bars were open, serving breakfast. We got breakfast burritos to go and ate them as we made our way to the docks. A giant cruise ship sat offshore. In a couple hours it would dump thousands of people into Key West, and Key West would be like the old lady in the shoe who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. Personally, I didn’t think it would be such a bad thing to divert some of the cruise ships to Cuba.