Salazar hesitated. “Once we get there, what exactly is the plan?”
“Get that goddamn flashlight out of my face.” Murdock’s eyelids were swollen and purple. Too much sun, too much beer. It worried Salazar; he wanted his partner to be sharp.
“The plan is simple,” Murdock said. “We arrive with bells on—sirens, lights, the works. We yell for Stranahan to come out with his hands up. Go ahead with the whole bit—serve the warrant, do the Miranda, all that shit. Then we shoot him like he was trying to get away.”
“Do we cuff him first?”
“Now, how would that look? No, we don’t cuff him first. Jesus Christ.” Murdock spit into the water. He’d been spitting all afternoon. Salazar hoped this wasn’t a new habit.
Murdock said, “See, Joe, we shoot him in the back. That way it looks like he’s running away. Then we get on this boat radio, if one of us can figure out how to use the goddamn thing, and call for air rescue.”
“Which’ll take forever to get here.”
“Exactly. But then we’re covered, procedure-wise.”
It sounded like a solid plan, with only one serious variable. Joe Salazar decided to put the variable out of his mind. He stowed the flashlight, reclaimed his post at the wheel of the police boat and steered a true course for Old Rhodes Key.
A straight line through open seas. No sweat.
THE channel that leads from the ocean to the cut of Old Rhodes Key is called Caesar Creek. It is deep and fairly broad, and well charted with visible markers. For this Joe Salazar was profoundly thankful. Having mastered the balky throttle, he guided the Aquasport in at half-speed, with John Murdock standing (or trying to) in the bow. Murdock cupped his hands around his eyes to block the peripheral light; he was peering at the island, searching for signs of Mick Stranahan. Two hundred yards from the mouth of the cut, Salazar killed the engine and joined his chubby partner on the front of the boat.
“There he is!” Murdock’s breathing was raspy, excited.
Salazar squinted into the night. “Yeah, Johnny, sitting under that light on the dock.”
They could see the lantern and, in its white penumbra, the figure of a man with his legs hanging over the planks. The figure wore a baseball cap, a tan jacket, and long pants. From the angle of the cap, the man’s head appeared to be down, chin resting on his chest.
“Dumb fuckwad’s asleep.” Murdock’s laugh was high and brittle. He already had his pistol out.
“Then I guess we better do it,” Salazar said.
“By all means.” Murdock dropped to a crouch.
They had tested the blue lights and siren on the way down, so Salazar knew where the switches were. He flipped them simultaneously, then turned the ignition key. As the Evinrude growled to life, Salazar put all his weight to the throttle.
Gun in hand, John Murdock clung awkwardly to the bow rail as the Aquasport planed off and raced toward the narrow inlet. The wind spiked Murdock’s hair and flattened his cheeks. His teeth were bared in a wolfish expression that might have passed for a grin.
As the boat got closer, Joe Salazar expected Mick Stranahan to wake up at any moment and look in their direction—but the man didn’t move.
A half mile away, sitting on a milk crate under some trees, Christina Marks heard the police siren. With a shiver she closed her eyes and waited for the sound of gunfire.
THEY could have come one of several ways. The most likely was the oceanside route, following Caesar Creek into the slender fork between tiny Hurricane Key and Old Rhodes. This was the easiest way to Cartwright’s dock.
But a westward approach, out of Biscayne Bay, would leave more options and offer more cover. They could come around Adams Key, or circle the Rubicons and sneak through the grassy flats behind Totten. But that would be a tricky and perilous passage, almost unthinkable for someone who had never made the trip.
Not at night, Stranahan decided, not these guys.
He had gambled that they would come by the ocean.
In the water he had carried only the knife and the spool. Four times he made the swim between Old Rhodes and Hurricane Key; not a long swim, but enervating against a strong current. After pulling himself up on Cartwright’s dock for the last time, Stranahan had rubbed the cold ache from his legs and arms. It had taken a long time to catch his breath.
Then he pulled on some dry clothes, got the .38 that Luis Córdova had loaned him, and sat down to wait.
THE spool in Stranahan’s duffel had contained five hundred yards of a thin plastic monofilament. The line was calibrated to a tensile strength of one hundred twenty pounds, for it was designed to withstand the deep-water surges of giant marlin and bluefin tuna. It was the strongest fishing line manufactured in the world, tournament quality. For further advantage it was lightly tinted a charcoal gray, which made it practically invisible underwater.
Even out of the water, the line was sometimes impossible to see.
At night, for instance. Stretched across a mangrove creek.
Undoubtedly John Murdock never saw it.
He was squatting toadlike on the front of the boat, training his .357 at the figure on the dock as they made their approach. Under Joe Salazar’s hand, the Aquasport was moving at exactly forty-two miles per hour.
Mick Stranahan had strung three taut vectors between the islands. The lines were fastened to the trunks of trees and crossed the water at varying heights. The lowest of the lines was snapped immediately by the bow of the speeding police boat. The other two garroted John Murdock in the belly and the neck, respectively.
Joe Salazar, in the bewildering final millisecond of his life, watched his partner thrown backward, bug-eyed and gurgling, smashed to the deck by unseen hands. Then the same spectral claw seized Salazar by the throat, chopped him off his feet, bounced his overripe skull off the howling Evinrude and twanged him directly into the creek.
The noise made by the fishing line when it snapped on Joe Salazar’s neck was very much like that of a gunshot.
Christina Marks ran all the way back to Cartwright’s dock. Along the way she dropped the Coleman lantern, hissing, on some rocks. But she kept running. When she got there, Caesar Creek was black and calm. She saw no boat, no sign of intruders.
On the dock, the familiar figure of a man in a baseball cap slouched beneath another lantern, this one glowing brightly.
“Mick, what happened?”
Then Christina realized that it wasn’t a man at all, but a scarecrow wearing Stranahan’s poplin jacket and long corduroys. The body of the scarecrow was stuffed with palm leaves and dried seaweed. The head was a green coconut. The baseball cap fit like a charm.
CHAPTER 24
THE Aquasport wedged itself deep in the mangroves on Totten Key. The engine was dead, but the prop was still twirling when Mick Stranahan got there. Barefoot, he monkeyed through the slick rubbery branches until he could see over the side of the battered boat. In his right hand he held Luis Córdova’s .38.
He didn’t need it. Detective John Murdock wasn’t dead, but he would be soon. He lay motionless on the deck, his knees drawn up in pain. Blackish blood oozed from his nose. Only one eye was open, rhythmically illuminated by the strobing blue police light. Cracked but still flashing, the light dangled from a nest of loose wires on the console. It looked like a fancy electric Christmas ornament.
Stranahan felt his stomach shrink to a knot. He put the pistol in his jeans and swung his legs over the gunwale. “John?”
Murdock’s eye blinked, and he grunted weakly.
Stranahan said, “Try to take it easy.” Like the guy had a choice. “One quick question, I’ve got to ask. You fellows were going to kill me, weren’t you?”
“Damn right,” rasped the dying detective.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I can’t believe you’re still sore about Judge Goomer.”
Murdock managed a bloody grin and said, “You dumb fuckwad.”
Stranahan leaned forward and brushed a horsefly off Murdock’s forehead.
“But if it wasn’t revenge for the judge, then why pull something like this?” Silence gave him the answer. “Don’t tell me somebody paid you.”
Murdock nodded, or tried. His neck wasn’t working so well; it looked about twice as long as it was supposed to be.
Stranahan said, “You took money for this? From who?”
“Eat me,” Murdock replied.
“It was probably the doctor,” Stranahan speculated. “Or a go-between. That would make more sense.”
Murdock’s reply came out as a dank rattle. Mick Stranahan sighed. Queasiness at the sight of Murdock had given way to emotional exhaustion.
“John, it’s some kind of city, isn’t it? All I wanted out here was some peace and solitude. I was through with all this crap.”
Murdock gave a hateful moan, but Stranahan needed to talk. “Here I’m minding my own business, feeding the fish, not bothering a soul, when some guy shows up to murder me. At my very own house, John, in the middle of the bay! All because some goddamn doctor thinks I’m going to break open a case that’s so old it’s mildewed.”
The dying Murdock seemed hypnotized by the flashing blue light. It was ticking much faster than his own heart. One of the detective’s hands began to crawl like an addled blue crab, tracking circles on the blood-slickened deck.
Stranahan said, “I know it hurts, John, but there’s nothing I can do.”
In a slack voice Murdock said, “Fuck you, shithead.” Then his eye closed for the last time.
MICK Stranahan and Christina Marks were waiting when Luis Córdova pulled up to the dock at nine sharp the next morning.
“Where to?” he asked Stranahan.
“I’d like to go back to my house, Luis.”
“Not me,” said Christina Marks. “Take me to Key Biscayne. The marina is fine.”
Stranahan said, “I guess that means you still don’t want to marry me.”
“Not in a million years,” Christina said. “Not in your wildest dreams.”
Stranahan turned to Luis Córdova. “She didn’t get much sleep. The accommodations were a bit too . . . rustic.”
“I understand,” said the marine patrolman. “But, otherwise, a quiet night?”
“Fairly quiet,” Stranahan said.
The morning was sunny and cool. The bay had a light washboard ripple that made the patrol boat seem to fly. As they passed the Ragged Keys, Stranahan nudged Luis Córdova and pointed to the white-blue sky. “Choppers!” he shouted over the engine noise. Christina Marks saw them, too: three Coast Guard rescue helicopters, chugging south at a thousand feet.
Without glancing from the wheel, Luis Córdova said, “There’s a boat overdue from Crandon. Two cops.”
“No shit?”
“They found a body this morning floating off Broad Creek. Homicide man named Salazar.”
“What happened?”
“Drowned,” yelled Luis Córdova. “Who knows how.”
Christina Marks listened to the two men going back and forth. She wasn’t sure how much Luis Córdova knew, but it was more than Stranahan would ever tell her. She felt angry and insulted and left out.
When they arrived at the stilt house, Stranahan took out the Smith .38 and returned it to Luis. The marine patrolman was relieved to see that it had not been fired.
Stranahan hoisted two of the duffel bags and hopped off the patrol boat.
From the dock he said, “Take care, Chris.” He wanted to say more, but it was the wrong time. She was still fuming about last night, furious because he wouldn’t tell her what had happened. She had kicked the coconut head off the scarecrow, that’s how mad she had gotten. It was at that moment he’d asked her to marry him. Her reply had been succinct, to say the least.
Now she turned away coldly and said to Luis Córdova: “Can we get going, please.”
Stranahan waved them off and trudged up the steps to inspect the looted house. The first thing he saw on the floor was the big marlin head; the tape on the fractured bill had been torn off in the fall. Stranahan stepped over the stuffed fish and went to the bedroom to check for the shotgun. It was still wedged up in the box spring where he had hidden it.
The whole place was a mess all right, depressing but not irreparable. Stranahan was glad, in a way, to have such a large chore ahead of him. Take his mind off Murdock and Salazar and Old Rhodes Key. And Christina Marks, too.
She was the first woman he had loved who had ever said no to marriage. It was quite a feeling.
LUIS Córdova came back to the stilt house as Mick Stranahan was finishing lunch. There was a burly new passenger on the boat: Sergeant Al García.
Stranahan greeted them at the door and said, “Two Cubans with guns is never good news.”
Luis Córdova said, “Al is working the dead cops.”
“Cops plural?” Stranahan’s eyebrows arched.
García sat down heavily on one of the barstools. “Yeah, we found Johnny Murdock inside the boat. The boat was up in a frigging tree.”
“Where?” Stranahan asked impassively.
“Not far from where you and your lady friend went camping last night.” García patted his pockets and cursed. He was out of cigars. He took out a pack of Camels and lit one halfheartedly. He glanced up at the beakless marlin hanging from a new nail on the wall.
Luis Córdova said, “I told Al about how I gave you a lift down to the island after your house got trashed.”
Stranahan wasn’t upset. If asked, Luis would tell the truth about what he saw, what he knew for a fact. Most likely he had already told García about loaning the two detectives a map of the bay. Nothing strange about that.
“You hear anything funny last night?” Al García asked. “By the way, where’s the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Stranahan said.
“What about last night?”
“A boat went by about eleven. Maybe a little later. Sounded like an outboard. What the hell happened, Al—somebody do these guys?”
García was puffing hard on the cigarette, and blowing circles of smoke, like he did with his stogies. “Way it looks,” he said, “they were going wide open. Missed the channel completely.”
“You said the boat was in a tree.”
“That’s how fast the bozos were going. Way it looks, Salazar got thrown, hit his head. He drowned right away but the tide took him south.”
“Broad Creek,” Luis Córdova said. “A mullet man found the body.”
García went on: “Murdock stayed in the boat, but it didn’t save him. We’re talking major head trauma. The medical examiner thinks a mangrove branch or something snapped his neck. Same with Salazar. Figures it happened when they hit the trees.
“Wide open?”
Luis Córdova said, “The throttle was all the way down. You got to be nuts to run that creek wide open at night.”
“Or amazingly stupid,” Stranahan said. “Let me guess who they were looking for.”
García nodded. “You’re on some roll, Mick. A regular archangel of death, you are. First your ex, now Murdock and Salazar. I’m noticing that bad things happen to people who fuck with you. Seems to be a pattern going way back.”
Stranahan said, “I can’t help it these jerks don’t know how to drive a boat.”
Luis Córdova said, “It was an accident, that’s all.”
“I just find it interesting,” said Al García. “Maybe the word is ironic, I don’t know. Anyway, you’re right, Mick. The two boys were coming to pay you a visit. They kept it real quiet around the shop, too. I can only guess why.” He reached in his jacket and took out a soggy white piece of paper. The paper was folded three times, pamphlet sized.
García showed it to Stranahan. “We found this in Salazar’s back pocket.”
Stranahan knew what it was. He’d seen a thousand just like it. The word warrant was still legible in the standard judicial calligraphy. As he handed it back to García, Stranahan wondered whether he was about to be arrested.
“What is this?” he asked. r />
“Garbage,” García replied. He crumpled the sodden document in his right hand and lobbed it out a window into the water.
Stranahan smiled. “You liked the videotape.”
“Obviously,” said the detective.
AT the Holiday Inn where they got a room, Maggie Gonzalez was going through the yellow pages column by column, telling Chemo which plastic surgeons were good enough to finish the dermabrasion treatments on his face; some of the names were new to her, but others she remembered from her nursing days. Chemo was stooped in front of the bathroom mirror, picking laconically at the patches left on his chin by Dr. Rudy Graveline.
Out of the side of his mouth, Chemo said, “Fucker’s not returning my calls.”
“It’s early,” Maggie said. “Rudy sleeps late on his day off.”
“I want to see some cash. Today.”
“Don’t worry.”
“The sooner I get the money, the sooner I can take care of this.” Meaning his skin. In the mirror, Chemo could see Maggie’s expression—at least, as much of it as the bandages revealed—and something that resembled genuine sympathy in her eyes. Not pity, sympathy.
She was the first woman who had ever looked at him that way. Certainly she seemed sincere about helping him find a new plastic surgeon. Chemo thought: She’s either a truly devoted nurse or a sneaky little actress.
Maggie ripped a page of physicians from the phone book and said offhandedly, “How much are we hitting him for?”
“A million dollars,” Chemo said. His sluglike lips quivered into a smile. “You said he’s loaded.”
“Yeah, he’s also cheap.”
“A minute ago you said don’t worry.”
“Oh, he’ll pay. Rudy’s cheap, but he’s also a coward. All I’m saying is, he’ll try to play coy at first. That’s his style.”
“Coy?” Chemo thought: What in the fuck is she talking about? “I wouldn’t know about coy,” he said. “I got a Weed Whacker strapped to my arm.”