I glanced at Angie. “Sounds fine.”
The Weeble nodded and his laptop beeped. I leaned forward and saw that he’d called up a map of Tampa on the screen. It morphed into a series of city grids, each growing tighter and tighter until a blinking dot I assumed was the Courtyard Marriott sat in the center of the screen and the lines around it filled with street names.
Any moment I expected to hear a tape-recorded voice tell me what my mission was.
“This tape will self-destruct in three seconds,” I said.
“What?” Angie said.
“Never mind.”
16
Harbor Island looked to be man-made and relatively new. It grew out of the older section of downtown, and we reached it by crossing a white bridge the length of a small bus. There were restaurants and several boutiques and a yacht basin that glittered gold in the sun. Everything seemed to be following a coral, Caribbean motif, lots of sandblasted whites and ivory stucco and crushed-shell walkways.
As we pulled up to the hotel, a pelican swooped in toward the windshield and both Angie and I ducked, but the freaky-looking bird caught a bit of wind and rode it in a low swoop onto the top of a piling by the dock.
“Friggin’ thing was huge,” Angie said.
“And awfully brown.”
“And very prehistoric-looking.”
“I don’t like them, either.”
“Good,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel silly.”
Mr. Cushing dropped us at the door and the bellmen took our bags and one said, “Right this way, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” even though we hadn’t introduced ourselves.
“I’ll meet you at your room at three,” the Weeble said.
“You bet,” I said.
We left him chatting with Mr. Cushing and followed our impossibly tanned bellboy to an elevator and up to our rooms.
The suites were enormous and looked down on Tampa Bay and the three bridges that intersected it, the milky green water sparkling under the sun and all of it so pretty and pristine and placid I wasn’t sure how long I could take it before I puked.
Angie came through the door that adjoined the suites and we stepped out onto the balcony and closed the sliding glass door behind us.
She’d changed from basic black city clothes into light-blue jeans and a white mesh tank top, and I tried to keep both my mind and my eyes off the way the tank top hugged her upper body so I could discuss the business at hand.
“How fast do you want to dump the Weeble?” I said.
“Now isn’t soon enough.” She leaned over the rail and puffed lightly on her cigarette.
“I don’t trust the room,” I said.
She shook her head. “Or the rental car.”
Sunlight streaked through her black hair and lit the chesnut highlights that had been hiding under all that darkness since last summer. Heat flushed her cheeks.
Maybe this place wasn’t so bad.
“Why’d Trevor put the pressure on all of a sudden?”
“The Weeble you mean?”
“And Cushing.” I waved my arm at the room behind me. “All this shit.”
She shrugged. “He’s getting frantic about Desiree.”
“Maybe.”
She turned and leaned back against the railing, the bay framing her, her face tilted to the sun. “Plus, you know how it is with rich guys.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Well, it’s like if you go out on a date with one—”
“Hang on, let me get a pen for this.”
She flicked her cigarette ash at me. “They’re always trying to impress you with how fast they can get the world to jump at a snap of their fingers, how every wish they think you have can be predicted and accommodated. So you go out and valet people open your car door, doormen open other doors, maître d’s pull out your chair, and the rich guy orders your meal for you. This is supposed to make you feel good, but it makes you feel enslaved instead, like you don’t have a mind of your own. Or,” she said, “a choice in the matter. Trevor probably wants us to feel that every one of his resources is at our disposal.”
“But you still don’t trust the room or the rental car.”
She shook her head. “He’s used to power. He’s probably not very good at trusting others to do what he’d do on his own if he were healthy. And once Jay went missing…”
“He wants to know our every move.”
“Exactly.”
I said, “I like the guy and all…”
“But too bad for him,” she agreed.
Mr. Cushing was standing by his Lexus out front when we stopped to look out the window from the mezzanine level. I’d gotten a look at the parking garage on the way in and saw that its exit came out the other side of the hotel and emptied onto a small street of boutiques. From where Cushing stood, he couldn’t see the exit or the small bridge that led off the island.
Our rental car was a light blue Dodge Stealth and had been rented from a place called Prestige Imports on Dale Mabry Boulevard. We found the car and drove it out of the lot and off Harbor Island.
Angie navigated from a map on her lap and we turned onto Kennedy Boulevard and then found Dale Mabry and drove north.
“Lotta pawnshops,” Angie said, looking out the window.
“And strip malls,” I said. “Half of them closed, half of them new.”
“Why don’t they just reopen the closed ones instead of building new ones?”
“It’s a mystery,” I said.
The Florida we’d seen until now had been the postcard Florida, it seemed—coral and mangroves and palm trees, glittering water and pelicans. But as we drove Dale Mabry for at least fifteen of the flattest miles I’ve ever driven, its eight lanes spread out wide and pointing infinitely through waves of rubbery heat at the overturned bowl of blue sky, I wondered if this wasn’t the real Florida.
Angie was right about the pawnshops and I was right about the strip malls. There was at least one of each per block. And then there were bars with cleverly subtle names like Hooters and Melons and Cheeks broken up by fast-food drive-through places and even drive-through liquor stores for the drunk on the go. Pocking the landscape within all this were several trailer parks and trailer park dealerships and more used car lots than I’d ever seen on the Lynnway Automile.
Angie tugged at her waist. “Jesus, these jeans are hot.”
“Take ’em off then.”
She reached over and turned on the air conditioning, hit the switch on the console between our seats and the power windows rolled up.
“How’s that?” she said.
“I still like my suggestion better.”
“You don’t like the Stealth?” Eddie, the rental agent, seemed confused. “Everyone likes the Stealth.”
“I’m sure they do,” Angie said. “But we’re looking for something a little less conspicuous.”
“Wow,” Eddie said as another rental agent came in off the lot through the sliding glass doors behind him. “Hey, Don, they don’t like the Stealth.”
Don screwed up his sunburned face and looked at us like we’d just beamed down from Jupiter. “Don’t like the Stealth? Everyone likes the Stealth.”
“So we’ve heard,” I said. “But it doesn’t quite fit our purposes.”
“Well what y’all looking for—an Edsel?” Don said.
Eddie loved that one. He slapped his hand on the counter and he and Don made noises I can only describe as hee-hawing.
“What we all are looking for,” Angie said, “is something like that green Celica you have in the parking lot.”
“The convertible?” Eddie said.
“Sure ’nuff,” Angie said.
We took the car as is, even though it needed a wash and gas. We told Don and Eddie we were in a rush, and they seemed even more confused by that than our desire to trade in the Stealth.
“A rush?” Don said, as he checked our driver’s license information against that on the original rental agreement Mr. Cus
hing had filled out.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s when you have places to go in a hurry.”
Surprisingly, he didn’t ask me what “hurry” meant. He just shrugged and tossed me the keys.
We stopped at a restaurant called the Crab Shack to pore over the map and figure out a plan.
“This shrimp is unbelievable,” Angie said.
“So’s this crab,” I said. “Try some.”
“Trade.”
We did, and her shrimp was indeed succulent.
“And cheap,” Angie said.
The place was literally a shack of clapboard and old piling wood, the tables pocked and scarred, the food served on paper plates, our plastic pitcher of beer poured into waxed paper cups. But the food, better than most seafood I’d ever had in Boston, cost about a fourth of what I was used to paying.
We sat on the back patio, in the shade, overlooking a swamp of sea grass and beige water that ended about fifty yards away at the back of, yep, a strip mall. A white bird with legs as long as Angie’s and a neck to match landed on the patio railing and looked down at our food.
“Jesus,” Angie said. “What the hell is that?”
“That’s an egret,” I said. “It’s harmless.”
“How do you know what it is?”
“National Geographic.”
“Oh. You’re sure it’s harmless?”
“Ange,” I said.
She shuddered. “So I’m not a nature girl. Sue me.”
The egret jumped off the rail and landed by my elbow, its thin head up by my shoulder.
“Christ,” Angie said.
I picked up a crab leg and flung it out over the rail and the egret’s wing hit my ear as it took off over the rail and dove for the water.
“Great,” Angie said. “Now you’ve encouraged it.”
I picked up my plate and cup. “Come on.”
We went inside and studied the map as the egret returned and stared at us through the glass. Once we had a pretty good idea where we were going, we folded up the map, and finished our food.
“You think she’s alive?” Angie said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“And Jay,” she said. “You think he came here after her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me either. We don’t know much, do we?”
I watched as the egret craned its long neck to get a better look at me through the glass.
“No,” I said. “But we’re quick studies.”
17
No one we talked to at the Courtyard Marriott recognized Jeff Price or Desiree from the photos we showed them. They were pretty sure about it, too, if only because the Weeble and Mr. Cushing had shown them the same photographs half an hour before we arrived. The Weeble, smarmy little bastard that he was, had even left a note for us with the Marriott concierge requesting our presence in the Harbor Hotel bar at eight.
We tried a few more hotels in the same area, got nothing but blank stares, and returned to Harbor Island.
“This isn’t our town,” Angie said as we rode the elevator down from our rooms to the bar.
“Nope.”
“And it drives me crazy. It’s useless our even being here. We don’t know who to talk to, we don’t have any contacts, we don’t have any friends. All we can do is walk around like idiots showing everyone these stupid photographs. I mean, duh.”
“Duh?” I said.
“Duh,” she repeated.
“Oh,” I said, “duh. I get it. For a minute there I thought you were just saying duh.”
“Shut up, Patrick.” She walked off the elevator and I followed her into the bar.
She was right. We were useless here. The lead was useless. To fly fourteen hundred miles simply because Jeff Price’s credit card had been used at a hotel over two weeks ago was moronic.
But the Weeble didn’t agree. We found him in the bar, sitting at a window overlooking the bay, an abnormally blue concoction filling the daiquiri glass in front of him. The pink plastic stirrer in his glass was carved at the top into the shape of a flamingo. The table itself was nestled in between two plastic palm trees. The waitresses wore white shirts tied off just below their breasts and black Lycra biking shorts so tight they left no doubt as to the existence (or lack thereof) of a panty line.
Ah, paradise. All that was missing was Julio Iglesias. And I had a feeling he was on his way.
“It’s not fruitless,” the Weeble said.
“You talking about your drink or this trip?” Angie said.
“Both.” He worked his nose around the flamingo and sipped the drink, wiped at the blue mustache left behind with his napkin. “Tomorrow, we’ll split up and canvass all the hotels and motels in Tampa.”
“And once we run out?”
He reached for the bowl of macadamia nuts in front of him. “We try all the ones in St. Petersburg.”
And so it was.
For three days, we canvassed Tampa, then St. Petersburg. And we discovered that parts of both weren’t as clichéd as Harbor Island had led us to believe or as ugly as our drive down Dale Mabry. The Hyde Park section of Tampa and the Old Northeast section of St. Pete were actually quite attractive, with cobblestone streets and old southern houses with wraparound porches and gnarled, ancient banyan trees providing canopies of shade. The beaches in St. Pete, too, if you could ignore all the crotchety blue-hairs and sweaty redneck bikers, were gorgeous.
So we found something to like.
But we didn’t find Jeff Price or Desiree or Jay Becker.
And the cost of our paranoia, if that’s what it was, was becoming tiring, too. Each night we parked the Celica in a different spot, and each morning we checked it for tracking devices and found none. We never bothered looking for bugs because the car was a convertible and whatever conversations we had in it would be drowned out by the wind, the radio, or a combination of the two.
Still, it felt odd to be so aware of the watchful eyes and ears of others, almost as if we might be trapped in a movie everyone was watching except us.
The third day, Angie went down by the hotel pool to reread everything in our case file and I took the phone out onto the balcony, checked it for bugs, and called Richie Colgan at the city desk of the Boston Tribune.
He answered the phone, heard my voice, and put me on hold. Some pal, I swear.
Six stories below, Angie stood by her chaise lounge and stripped off her gray shorts and white T-shirt to reveal the black bikini underneath.
I tried not to watch. I really did. But I’m weak. And a guy.
“What’re you doing?” Richie said.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“Watching my partner squirt sunblock on her legs.”
“Bullshit.”
“I wish,” I said.
“She know you’re watching?”
“You kidding?”
At that moment, Angie turned her head and looked up at the balcony.
“I’ve just been busted,” I said.
“You’re dead.”
Even from this distance, though, I could see her smile. Her face stayed tilted toward mine for a moment, then she shook her head gently and turned back to the business at hand and rubbed the oil into her calves.
“Christ,” I said, “it is way too hot in this state.”
“Where are you?”
I told him.
“Well, I got some news,” he said.
“Pray tell.”
“Grief Release, Incorporated, filed suit against the Trib.”
I leaned back in my chair. “You published a story already?”
“No,” he said. “That’s the point. My inquiries, such as they’ve been, have been extremely discreet. There’s no way they could’ve known I was onto them.”
“But they do.”
“Yeah. And they aren’t fucking around, either. They’re taking us into federal court for invasion of privacy, interstate theft—”
“Interstate?” I said.
“Sure. A lot of their clients don’t necessarily live in the Bay State. They got files on those discs for clients from across the Northeast and Midwest. Technically, Angie stole information that crossed state lines.”
“That’s a fine line,” I said.
“Of course it is. And they still have to prove I have the discs and a whole lot of other shit, but they must have a judge in their pocket because at ten this morning my publisher got an injunction slapped on him prohibiting the publication of any article on Grief Release which can be directly linked to information found only on those discs.”
“Well, then you got them,” I said.
“How so?”
“They can’t prove what’s on those discs if they don’t have them. And even if they have everything backed up on a hard drive, they can’t prove that what’s on the hard drive is necessarily what’s on those discs. Right?”
“Exactly. But that’s the beauty of the injunction. We can’t prove that what we intend to publish doesn’t come from those discs. Unless we’re stupid enough to produce them, of course, in which case they’re useless anyway.”
“Catch-twenty-two.”
“Bingo.”
“Still,” I said, “this sounds like a smokescreen, Rich. If they can’t prove you have the discs or that you even know about them, then sooner or later, some judge is going to say they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.”
“But we have to find that judge,” Richie said. “Which means filing appeals, maybe going to a federal superior court. Which takes time. Meanwhile, I have to run around and independently substantiate everything on those discs by using other sources. They’re eating up a clock on us, Patrick. That’s what they’re doing. And they’re succeeding.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. And I also don’t know how they got onto me so quick. Who’d you tell?”
“No one.”
“Bullshit.”
“Richie,” I said, “I didn’t even tell my client.”
“Who is your client, by the way?”
“Rich,” I said, “come on.”