Next stop was the Venetian Pool, where he parked under a ficus tree and called Mendez’s house. “Say, how’s that bovine nut sack of yours holding up?”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Detective Andrew Yancy from Monroe County. Good news, sir: I found Natasha.” The name was embossed on the animal’s collar. “She was wandering the alleys like a dazed hooker, poor thing. Lucky I came along.”
“Are you nuts!”
“Don’t deny that you love this critter more than your wife. What’s your cell number, Johnny Boy?”
Yancy took an iPhone snapshot of the Siamese licking salmon juice off his fingertips. He texted the photo to Mendez along with a note: “She doesn’t seem to miss you.”
Mendez called right back and said, “You’re a sick hump, Yancy.”
“And you are a larcenous fuckstick. However, I need a favor—and you should view this as an opportunity to become an authentic Crime Stopper, partial atonement for all that money you embezzled.”
“What kinda favor? I’m retired, you asshole.”
“Yeah,” Yancy said, “but I bet you can still get me a police badge.”
“What happened to yours? Ha, don’t tell me you got canned again.”
“I guess Natasha and I will be taking a road trip.”
“Jesus, you need a badge like right now? All I got is my old one.”
“That’ll do, Johnny Boy. Put it in your mailbox, go back inside and stay there until you hear me honk three times. That means Empress Natasha is home. Try something stupid, like calling the real cops, and you’ll never lay eyes on your darling inbred feline again.”
“You hurt her, you’re a dead man.”
Yancy, who was allergic to cat dander, sneezed volcanically. “I’d never do anything to harm Natasha, preening diva though she is. What I would do, Johnny, is throw away her collar and leave her with some kindly souls I know who’d find her a good home with a higher class of human companions than you and Mrs. Mendez. Now go put the fucking badge in the mailbox.”
“Christ, gimme some time to look for the damn thing.”
“Twenty minutes,” Yancy said. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”
Fifteen
Neville was in no condition for romance, so he tried to break up with all three of his girlfriends on the same afternoon. Each of them said he was stupid and crazy and no damn good—yet they wouldn’t throw him out. Neville suspected that the women still clung to hope that he’d change his mind about the mountain of money he was refusing to accept for his family’s land. They harbored dreams that he would warm to the role of rich boyfriend.
He went snapper fishing near the submarine base and caught enough for dinner, breakfast and lunch. A friend who worked at the Lizard Cay bonefish lodge, which was closed for the summer, opened the kitchen and let Neville fry up his catch. That night he slept on his boat anchored off Green Beach, where he got soaked by a squall. Shortly before dawn he guzzled two lukewarm Kaliks and a quart of water. Then he waded ashore and hid among the remaining casuarinas, where he slapped mosquitoes and waited for his bladder to fill.
Unbeknownst to Neville, the white man Christopher had responded to the first incident of diesel contamination by equipping his earthmoving machines with locking fuel caps. Therefore the tank of the Cat 450E backhoe that Neville hoped to disable with beery urine was sealed from intrusion, and the spout lid held fast under a vigorous bashing. Soon Neville’s bloated gut began to ache, so he climbed to the cab, unbuttoned his fly and let loose on the gauge cluster. In his heart he understood it was an impotent gesture, the sturdy backhoe plainly engineered for all-weather operation.
In a drained state he stepped to the ground, where he was jumped by the fetus-eared security guard, who wordlessly began to pummel him. The goon’s name was Egg, or so Neville had been told by a boy cleaning conchs on the waterfront. Egg outweighed Neville by fifty pounds and his sweat smelled like fermented lobster. The weapon was a short aluminum bat of the type used by offshore charter mates to subdue billfish and tuna that are dragged aboard green. Neville flopped around in the freshly turned dirt, shielding his head and moaning at every blow. The man called Egg lugged him to the beach and kicked him into the water and walked away laughing. Neville remained on all fours in the sandy shallows until he vomited. It took all his strength to swim out to the boat and pull himself over the gunwale.
The next morning, despite a fear of flying, he caught a plane to Nassau and went shopping for an attorney. None of those who met him would initiate a lawsuit without a retainer, which Neville couldn’t afford. They seemed disappointed to learn he wasn’t seeking any monetary compensation, only the return of family real estate that had been lawfully sold by his half-sister. The prevailing opinion was that he stood virtually no chance of winning in court.
Neville stayed overnight with a nephew who wanted to take him to the Atlantis resort for a big time, but Neville declined. He was sore and unsteady after the beating by Egg. When his nephew asked what was wrong, Neville said he’d gotten into a fight over a girl.
“Oh mon, did you hot get broke?”
“No, suh.”
“Because I know plenny women kin fix dot.”
“I’m okay,” said Neville.
The following day he bought a pair of sunglasses at the Straw Market and rode the mail boat back to Andros.
Yancy breezed through Immigration and Customs in Nassau. All he carried through the checkpoints was his duffel and a Sage fly-rod tube that falsely announced him as a free-spending American sportsman, always a welcome breed. He took a taxi to the general aviation terminal and told a handsome woman behind the counter he was looking for a pilot friend. “This is what he’s flying,” Yancy said, and showed her a picture of the white Caravan. He’d printed it out from the flight-tracker website. “I was told to meet him here.”
“Are you sure, sir? That plane left a couple hours ago.”
“No way. He was supposed to take me fishing!”
“They went to Lizard Cay,” the woman said. “Same as usual.”
“That sonofabitch. He promised to wait for me.”
“There’s usually a three o’clock flight on Tropical. I’ll give you the phone number.”
Yancy smiled. “Darling, you just saved my vacation.”
It was from his father that he’d gotten not only his passion for fishing but also a love of small planes. Every year the park service would conduct aerial counts of eagle nests in the Everglades, and after turning eighteen Yancy was allowed to ride with his dad and the pilot in the government Beechcraft. He always brought his own binoculars.
While he waited for his flight Rosa called to say that she’d FedExed to Key West police the slug from the gun that killed Gomez O’Peele. Yancy was confident that ballistics tests would prove it was the same .357 used on Charles Phinney. Rosa hadn’t provided the details of the doctor’s death to the detectives.
“But I’ll have to tell them what I know,” she added, “if the bullets match.”
Yancy apologized for putting her in a dicey situation. She said she was a big girl and she knew the ropes. He asked if any news reporters had called the medical examiner’s office to inquire about the severed arm in the golf bag.
“Well, we might have lucked out,” she said.
“I like this ‘we’ business.”
“The man to thank would be the late, great Dawkins Brophy. The same night the grave robbers stole Stripling’s arm, Mr. Brophy—”
“I thought Brophy was his first name.”
“Whatever, Andrew. It’s not even my case,” Rosa said. “Anyway, the same night our severed limb reappeared, Mr. Dawkins Brophy—or Brophy Dawkins—washed down three Ecstasy tabs with a half pint of Bombay gin. Then he went racing through Government Cut on a turbocharged WaveRunner until he drove full speed into the stern of the Duchess of the Caribbean, killing himself and his date, a Belorussian lingerie model whose name I can’t possibly pronounce.”
“In other w
ords, splat.”
“Big-time splat.”
“Damn,” Yancy said.
Brophy Dawkins was a burly country-music star whose hit single was “Jesus Don’t Speak Jihad,” a defiant post-9/11 anthem. The Duchess of the Caribbean was one of the world’s largest passenger cruise ships.
“It was a collision only in the sense that a june bug collides with a Buick,” Rosa said. “Mr. Dawkins was decapitated and, consequently, his remains weren’t fully recovered for a day or so due to tidal factors. Since then the media have taken an interest, Andrew. Rabid would be one way to describe it.”
“Rule one: A celebrity head always trumps an anonymous arm.”
“Sick but true,” said Rosa. “Can I ask you something? I’ve been thinking about this Andros trip.”
“I’ll buy you a ticket. Please come.”
“No, listen. Say you track down the murderous wife and her boyfriend—then what? You can’t make a legal arrest over there. And the Bahamian cops won’t do it without U.S. extradition papers, which you don’t have in your possession because those documents don’t freaking exist. The risk-reward ratio seems low, Andrew.”
“Everyone needs a project.”
“Soon as I hang up, know what I’m Googling? Three words: ‘Nassau bail bondsmen.’ ”
“Come on, girl, have some faith.”
In the olden days Claspers smuggled weed and later cocaine. He never got busted though he didn’t stay rich for long. Now the shit was coming in on freight trucks across the Mexican border, or by air from Haiti, where Claspers refused to fly. But after four thousand hours in the cockpit, on and off the books, he could still find lawful work. The Bahama Islands he knew well, from Bimini to the Exumas. These days in small planes he delivered wealthy tourists and expats to some of the same bleached airstrips upon which he’d once landed overloaded DC-6s at night, guided only by automobile headlights.
As a legitimate aviator Claspers was doing okay—not gangbusters, but he made enough money to cover the rent on his duplex, a car payment, child support and weekly visits to a club in Lauderdale called Marbles, where a bartender one-third his age pretended to be interested in him. Claspers didn’t mind being strung along. The bartender had stellar fake boobs and a quick sense of humor. He considered telling her about his years as a big-time smuggler, but he doubted it would improve his odds of getting laid. Once upon a time, sure, absolutely—but hers was a generation that grew up on homegrown or Humboldt and thought Panama Red was a merlot. Claspers suspected the young bartender would have been more impressed to meet a guy who worked for Apple, or maybe a professional skateboarder. He overtipped her anyway, because it brought back memories that made him feel good.
Lately Claspers had been piloting for a shady duck named Christopher Grunion, who disliked the formalities of the U.S. Customs service. Sometimes Grunion asked Claspers for clandestine transport between Andros Island and the lower Florida Keys. For these high-risk endeavors Claspers was decently compensated—not doper-league pay, but enough to sustain his loyalty. A secondary enticement was the opportunity to dust off his outlaw moves.
The aircraft leased by Grunion was a Cessna floatplane, a ten-seat Caravan that cruised at 160 knots. From Andros—either Congo Town or Lizard Cay—Claspers would steer a southeast course toward the Ragged Islands until reaching a singular quadrant where the seas belonged to the Bahamas while the airspace belonged to Cuba. Basically it was a neutral zone for law enforcement, and that’s where Claspers would drop to four hundred feet, below radar, and swing sharply back across the Florida straits. Coming in low over the waves was the only way to cross undetected, because on Cudjoe Key the U.S. government tethered a famed surveillance blimp known as Fat Albert, which had been effectively used by the DEA to bust some of Claspers’s colleagues in the aerial import trade.
Christopher Grunion seldom spoke during these flights. Often he appeared to doze with his forehead pressed against the window, causing Claspers to wonder if he was loaded, drunk or possibly ill. The girlfriend, Eve, was a nervous chatterbox who spewed questions. Are we still in the Bahamas? What’s that island down there? How fast are we going? Do we have enough fuel? What’re you gonna do if the Coast Guard spots us? Her yammering made Claspers long for the days when he flew the starry tropics in solitude, accompanied only by silent herbal tonnage and a terse Hispanic voice on the headset.
Bringing in the Caravan required a stretch of calm water, typically on the leeward side of an island. Daylight was also helpful, particularly during lobster season when the channels and bays of the Keys were clotted with small buoys that could tear up the floats and ruin a perfectly fine landing, even flip the aircraft. Once they safely touched down, Eve would call a taxi to come fetch her and Grunion. Then the two of them would inflate the rubber raft they always brought as cargo (along with a small outboard engine), and from the plane they would putt-putt to shore.
Claspers thought the well-fed couple might benefit from rowing, although Grunion would need to shed the orange weather poncho that he always wore. Surely he sweltered like a pig beneath the plastic pullover; Claspers figured he kept it on because of some weird phobia or unsightly medical disorder. A pilot friend of Claspers’s had been morbidly afraid of centipedes and refused to remove his heavy woolen socks, even while bathing. Eventually the poor bastard ended up on crutches, grounded. Later a photograph of his ravaged feet was featured in an illustrated atlas of fungal infections.
Claspers enjoyed sneaking in and out of the States, but much of his flying for Grunion was routine, Andros to Nassau and back. Grunion was breaking ground on an upscale tourist resort at Lizard Cay, so Claspers would bring in architects, designers, contractors, bulldozer mechanics and even the real estate agents to whom Grunion was pitching his project. About once a week Eve would ride the seaplane to Miami but there was no cowboy stuff—it was straight into Opa-locka or Tamiami, strictly legal, her passport open and ready for stamping. Claspers looked forward to those trips because he got some time to go home and chill. Nassau wasn’t hard duty, either, though he always blew too much cash at the clubs and casinos.
The toughest part of the Andros gig was cooling his heels for days at a time, waiting for Grunion or his girlfriend to call with a flight in mind. Rocky Town was the nearest settlement to the construction site, and there wasn’t much to do except eat conch, drink rum and ruminate about growing old with a prostate the size of a toadstool. Marley and the Wailers were all over the radio, yet even that got stale after a while.
Grunion and the woman were renting a house on the ocean but not once had they invited Claspers for lunch or even a cocktail. He would have hired one of the local kids to take him snorkeling or grouper fishing except that Grunion insisted he hang within fifteen minutes of the plane, which stayed chocked on the tarmac at what they called Moxey’s airfield.
That’s where Claspers was, drinking a flat Fresca, when the late afternoon flight from Nassau landed. Three Bahamian women got off lugging shopping bags and next came a rangy guy in his late thirties, early forties. He was carrying a duffel and a fly-rod tube. Claspers knew he was American because of his tan; the Brits and Canadians were white as milk when they stepped off the planes and pink as shrimp when they left. The American paused on the apron to look at the Caravan; then he ambled up to Claspers and asked, “Do you know who owns that seaplane?”
“Private charter.”
“Too bad,” the American said. “I want to fly down and wade the Water Cays. I was looking for someone to take me.”
Claspers told him not to get his hopes up, because there weren’t many floatplanes for charter. “Wish I could help, but I’m stuck here.”
“So you’re the pilot.”
“That’s me.”
The American held out his hand. “My name’s Andrew.”
“I’m K. J. Claspers.”
“You got time for a drink?”
Claspers said thanks anyway but he had to work. “I gotta do a run for the boss.”
&nb
sp; A dented blue van pulled up and Grunion’s hired man got out. He was a dome-headed hulk with shriveled-looking ears. They called him Egg but the name on his papers was Ecclestone. He wore a bleached white T-shirt that by contrast made his skin shine like onyx.
“Let’s go, mon,” he said to Claspers.
“In a minute.” Claspers wasn’t afraid of Egg and he didn’t care much for him. The guy was your basic pea-brained muscle, straight from central casting. Claspers said, “I gotta take a leak. Go wait by the plane.”
Egg sneered and headed across the baking tarmac toward the Caravan.
The American said, “That’s some boss.”
Claspers snorted. “Not him, no way—he’s just the help. Poor baby’s got a toothache so I’ve gotta take him to a dentist in Nassau. Talk about the glamour life.”
The pilot went to the restroom and propped himself at the only urinal, where he spritzed and dribbled for what seemed like an eternity. A doctor back home had prescribed some heavy-duty pills but half the time Claspers forgot to take them. Maybe if that hot bartender at Marbles ever gave him a real shot, he’d get with the program and tend to his plumbing.
Claspers wanted to ask the man with the fly rod why he’d come to the island during the hottest, deadest time of summer, when the bonefish lodges were closed. It was rare to see tourist anglers so late in the season, and even more uncommon for one to arrive alone. Typically they fished in pairs to split the cost of chartering a skiff.
When Claspers emerged from the head, he tugged down the bill of his cap against the glare of the sun. He looked around and there was Egg, sitting truculently on one of the airplane’s pontoons.
The American was gone.
Sixteen
Evan Shook was surprised to see a muddy Toyota parked out front. The Oklahoma tag didn’t make sense; the Lipscombs had said they were from Virginia. Plus they weren’t supposed to arrive for another forty-five minutes.