Bone Key (3 page)

Finally, he ducked down and reached quickly to snatch the tumbled flashlight. In the instant that he jerked himself back out of sight, he saw something odd…what had seemed like a pair of arms dangling down from the grate above. He inched one eye out past the corner of the roughly chiseled wall and stole another glance.

The man’s hand dangled down, the pistol no longer held there. And what he had taken for a second arm was not that at all, he realized, as he stepped out into the open, sloshing shin-deep toward the sight.

The man’s eyes were still open but frozen now, his cheek flattened against one cross member, his tongue squeezed out like a tiny pink flag of surrender. A section of the roof had broken loose and toppled down on him, Ainsley realized.

Had crushed him against the grate like the roach he was. A splintered shard of planking had plunged through his back and burst out of his chest where his heart would have been, if he’d had one. But there had been no such organ there, could not have been, as far as Ainsley was concerned. And whatever was that dark stuff dripping from the end of the shattered plank, you wouldn’t even call it blood.

***

The old man awakened then, spared the reliving of what had happened next; and for that much, he was grateful. Ainsley knew that he had been dreaming, but he woke with a shudder nonetheless, for it was as much a memory as a dream, every bit of it being true. Though he had survived, it brought him no great pleasure to recall just how, as it brought him little cheer to recall the events at all.

The dream, or living memory, had come upon him before, at certain times in his life when great change loomed ahead. He had relived the events the night before the first of his sons had been born, and again the night before his son’s son had been born, and also the night that his great-grandson, Dequarius, had come into this world.

The old man might have been relieved if he could assume that the dream was an omen of good things to come, but he had also relived those events the night that his own June Anna had died, which put the lie to good-omen foolishness, yes indeed.

What struck him when he awoke this morning, breathing hard, sweat soaking his nightshirt as briny as those nightmare waves, was how few possibilities there were, when it came to portents at least. If the dream was a harbinger of his own death, it hardly seemed worth the trouble. He was old and worn and expected to die, himself not least among those who did the expecting. His wife was gone, his two sons likewise, his grandson alive, but who knew where.

That left among the possibilities his great-grandson, a boy for whom no sane man could hold high hopes. And yet still, the old man loved him. Which is why he sat on the edge of his bed and trembled in the tropical dawn, pondering those events so long ago…all the while praying that it could not be a curse he’d brought upon them all, but just an old man’s stubborn memory that came and went at random, that calamity no more loomed above this island now than that which chance might bring.

The wail of distant sirens broke Ainsley Spencer’s reverie, and he glanced around his tidy bedroom to reassure himself of what was real, then forced himself up from his bed, willing the vision of the dead man’s sightless stare from his mind. That had been then, and this was now, he told himself.

What a man might remember was one thing, but the events themselves belonged to the past. And even if he felt a certain responsibility for what had happened, it was far too late to change things now. Events that had happened once could not happen again.

His concerns should be with what could be managed, he reminded himself. Take this day in hand and do with it well.

Indeed, he thought as the sirens wailed. He would go check on his great-grandson now, though he already feared what he was likely to find.

Chapter Two

Key West

The Present Day

“How come she didn’t bring you the cork?” Russell Straight said to John Deal.

“That’s only when you buy the whole bottle,” Deal said, lifting his glass of red.

Russell, who’d ordered a beer, nodded thoughtfully. He had his eyes on the receding backside of their cocktail waitress. She was tall and deeply tanned, with blond hair that just tickled the collar of the parrot-print Hawaiian shirt that the Pier House staff wore. She had the shirt untucked, and the khaki shorts were standard-issue unisex, but certain virtues were impossible to disguise. Deal didn’t blame Russell for staring. He was staring himself, starting to feel the different pulse of life as it was lived in Margaritaville.

Deal, who’d inherited what was left of DealCo Construction from his late father, had come down from Miami to Key West to see a man about a job, as it were. Though it was summer and well ahead of the serious tourist season, which wouldn’t kick into high gear for months, the island paradise at the end of the American road—all one mile by four miles of it—was hardly sleepy.

Last evening, for instance, he and Russell, his newly promoted construction superintendent, had idled away part of the cocktail hour walking along the seawall at the Malory Docks, the city’s tour-boat port, elbowing their way through a crowd of easily a couple of thousand who’d come down for the ritual viewing of the sun’s fiery plunge into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the mixture of heat and humidity that had combined to form a bank of thunderheads off to the west, obscuring the fabled sunset, there’d been no dearth of gawkers for the fire-eaters, jugglers, mimes, and bygone-era folksingers providing their own brand of entertainment at the steely water’s edge.

The number of tourists had simply been reduced to the very nearly tolerable, Deal thought, glancing around the crowded bar. He had promised himself that he’d never join that weary chorus who loved to tell newcomers how much better it had been “back in the old days,” before the swank hotels of the eighties, or before the highway in the thirties, or before Henry Flagler built his railroad at the turn of the twentieth century, when you could only get to the town by boat.

There had always been better days, Deal thought, anywhere you went. But even with Duval Street turned into one big market and high-profile restaurateurs turning cottages into Cafés See and Be Seen on every corner, Key West was still unique, a tropical island plopped down in the middle of the Gulf Stream a hundred miles from mainland Florida, enough of its original down-at-the-heels, Casablanca-like charm intact to beat the daylights out of a pleasure trip to Des Moines, or, worse, someplace like Orlando. In Orlando, they had pirate
shows
. In Key West, you could still find actual pirates.

Russell, meantime, had wrenched his gaze from the tawny waitress and turned to Deal, mulling his lesson on corkage. “I hang around with you long enough,” he said, “I’ll learn all sorts of civilized stuff.”

“Anything’s possible.” Deal shrugged. He’d shifted his gaze to something else.

From where they sat, on the second floor of the upscale but aggressively laid-back hotel, there was a good view of the harbor channel and the sunset sky beyond. Cloud banks lit up in boiling pinks and shades of lavender and teal, shorebirds twisting and diving in the foreground, a couple of sailboats thrown in for good measure…poor Turner, who’d done so well with England’s sunsets…he’d just been born in the wrong place, Deal thought.

“I never figured you for a wine drinker,” Russell persisted. It was easier to talk, now that the steel band on the open-air porch had packed it in. Their raucous syncopation had been replaced by piped-in piano Muzak. “Anybody’d look at you, they’d say there’s a beer drinker and a half.”

Deal paused, his glass halfway to his mouth. In truth, he’d been at the checkout counter of Sunset Corners up in Miami, a case of light beer in his cart, when he’d started down this other path. Iron Mike, one of the owners of the package store, caught a glance at what Deal purported to buy and insisted there was a less painful way to drop a few pounds. Mike talked, Deal listened, and the light beer had gone back on the shelf, replaced by a case of Merlot and a pamphlet-sized book on how to shed a few pounds without losing your mind.

The rest had been history, Deal mused, staring down at his glass. A more expensive history. He tasted the wine, then tried another sip. Maybe he
should
have asked for the cork, he thought. “I like beer,” he said to Russell. “But then I went on this diet.”

“For what?” Russell said. “You’re not fat.”

“Compared to whom?” Deal said, looking at Russell, who was wearing a T-shirt with a lifeguard emblem on its chest. He’d bought it earlier in the day at one of the tourist shops on Duval, an XXL that stretched over his massive chest and biceps like spandex.

“Basically, you’re not supposed to drink,” Deal continued, “but the guy who wrote the book said you could have a glass of red wine once in a while.”

“Once in a while?” Russell lifted an eyebrow. They’d been in town two days now, doing little besides wait. Then again, for the amount of money that might come the way of DealCo Construction, a bit of waiting behooved him.

Deal shrugged again, a gesture he’d picked up from his erstwhile partner Vernon Driscoll. Driscoll, an ex-Miami homicide detective and now point man for D&D Investigative Services (Deal was the second D, an otherwise silent participant), could shrug in a hundred different ways, Deal had learned, each move with a slightly different meaning, everything from “Right you are,” to “You are a wiseass, but I am going to wait at least thirty seconds before I take you apart.” For the taciturn Driscoll, the shrug was a way of life. Deal was just beginning to appreciate the simple elegance of the gesture.

“This guy say how big of a glass?” Russell asked.

Deal shook his head. “Why do you think I went with his diet?”

Russell nodded. “I was on a diet once,” he said, taking a swallow of his beer. His hand was so big you could hardly see the bottle.

“Please,” Deal said. It was the kind of banter that seemed to spring up in Key West, born of tropical malaise, he supposed. What the hell, he thought. He’d been busting his buns in Miami—he deserved a bit of downtime in paradise.

“The prison diet was what they called it,” Russell said, unfazed. “How it worked, they fixed everything so it tasted like crap.”

Deal smiled again. “You lost weight, huh?”

“I turned sideways, I was like a crack in the wall.”

Deal shook his head. “How much do you weigh right now, Russell?”

Russell pursed his lips. “Two-forty maybe. Maybe two-fifty.”

“You wish,” Deal said. “And you’re how tall?”

“Six-three. Is this a job interview?”

“You already work for me,” Deal said mildly.

“I ain’t going on no diet,” Russell said. “You might as well leave this right where it is.”

“I was just curious,” Deal said.

“What you are is miserable, and looking for company,” Russell said. “Get that fat-ass cop to go on a diet with you. He could stand to drop some poundage.”

Deal laughed. When it came to an argument, about even the slightest things, Russell could be as tenacious as Vernon Driscoll. Maybe it was something that perpetrators and cops had in common, Deal thought.

Russell’s gaze had wandered back to the waitress, who was bent over a nearby table, reaching for an empty. Deal glanced at his watch. “Stone said seven o’clock, right?”

“Was his
secretary
who said it,” Russell answered. “I already told you. Far as I know there isn’t any Franklin Stone.”

“Oh, there is a Franklin Stone, all right,” Deal said. “And there is
only
one.” Flamboyant Franklin Stone, the man who’d invited Deal to Key West, owned a majority interest in the hotel where they were staying, as well as a goodly portion of the commercial real estate on the island.

Russell Straight made a noise in his throat that sounded like a rhino rooting something distasteful out of its muck pool. “I don’t know why you brought me down here,” he said. “Sit around and do nothing. That’s what a cop is good for. You should have brought Driscoll along.”

“He’s got work of his own,” Deal said. “I thought you might like to see Key West.”

“Can I get you something else?” It was the waitress, smiling down at Russell.

Russell smiled back, then checked the beer in his hand. “Another one of these.”

The waitress smiled. “Got it,” she said, then glanced at Deal, who shook his head.

“I think she likes the cut of your jib,” Deal said, as the waitress walked away.

“There’s women everywhere,” Russell observed, unimpressed. “I got to go to the can.”

He unfolded himself from the chair and started across the room, weaving gracefully through the tightly packed tables, despite his size. Big, good-looking guy with his shaved head and chiseled upper body, you might take him for a professional athlete, Deal supposed. After all, his older brother had been, before he’d fallen in with the wrong people, anyway.

Deal had seen Leon Straight when he’d played for the Dolphins, Leon taking out the whole side of an opposing line Sunday after Sunday, before he’d gotten hurt and gotten into painkillers and things beyond. Later, Deal had seen Leon take on a helicopter full of killers and nearly win—he might have won, in fact, if the copter’s shattered rotor blade hadn’t happened to cut him in half.

He had finished his wine now, and when he glanced around for their waitress, realized that he was the only one left in the section. He waited a few more moments, watching the sun-struck clouds go from pink to purple, before he stood and moved to the bar.

The bartender, a tall guy with a mustache and the look of a guy who could play a part on a cop show in Hawaii, poured him a generous refill. “You want me to start a tab?” the guy asked.

Deal glanced at the table where he’d been sitting. “I thought we had one going.”

The guy followed Deal’s gaze, then tapped a finger to the side of his head as he realized. “Right. Denise.” The guy gave Deal a look that might have suggested apology. “She closed her shift,” he said. He turned and found a ticket on the counter behind him, made a note, then moved off as a waitress working the other side of the room hurried toward the service station with an order.

Deal saw there was a guy in a white dinner jacket behind a baby grand at the far end of the lounge, and he realized for the first time that what he had taken for Muzak was live. The guy, in his late fifties, was wearing a jet-black hairpiece that looked as much a part of him as a coonskin cap would have. He finished an energetic rendition of “Greensleeves,” raising his hands in a flourish to a scattering of applause from the tables.

The Pier House crowd seemed a bit older and more coiffed than Deal remembered from his last visit, but that had been a while ago. He and Janice hadn’t been married long. They’d run down from Miami on the spur of the moment, stayed three days right here at the Pier House, hardly got out of bed. But that had been another life, he thought.

He sensed someone sliding onto a stool next to him and turned to see a decidedly un-coiffed black kid in baggy painter’s jeans and a loose-fitting basketball jersey settling in, propping his elbows on the bar. “How you doin’?” the kid said, jittering on his seat. When he nodded, Deal saw the handle of a comb planted in his luxuriant Afro.

Deal nodded back and reached for his wine.

“You diggin’ this freak at the piano?”

Deal glanced over. The kid was a little older than Deal had first thought—in his mid-twenties, maybe—but his slight build and wide-eyed gaze belied his age. His skin was light coffee-colored, and a scattering of freckles dotted his fine facial features. He might have been a Caymaner, Deal thought, but there was no trace of the Brit in his accent. “You missed the steel band, I’m afraid. If that’s who you came to see.”

The kid shook his head, then licked his lips nervously. “What it is, I came to talk to you.”

Deal looked at him. Out on the sidewalks you might be approached by some scrubbed and polished young man or woman who wanted to dragoon you into some resort’s time-share presentation. Somehow, this one didn’t seem the type. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying,” he told the kid.

“You’re Deal, right?” the kid said, both his feet pedaling the rail of his stool.

Deal glanced around, as if there might be someone sitting behind him. Could the kid have said something else? That sort of thing had happened before, given the circumstances: Deal me in, deal me out, let’s make a deal.

“The builder,” the kid continued, his voice insistent.

So much for mistakes, Deal thought. “That’s me,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Deal stared. “If you’re looking for work…”

The kid shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “I found something.” He glanced around, then reached suddenly for Deal’s arm. Deal felt his wineglass slip, then go over with a crash on the bar.

The bartender whirled from the service station, glancing in the direction of the sound. Then his gaze landed on the kid at Deal’s side.

“Sonofabitch!” Deal heard the bartender exclaim as he started toward them.

“I’ll catch you later,” the kid said, his eyes wide. He was off his stool and out the door of the lounge in an instant.

Deal turned back to the onrushing bartender, who had caught himself by the edge of the polished countertop. His wild gaze suggested he was ready to vault the bar and follow after the vanished kid.

“Little bastard!” the bartender said.

“What is it?” Deal said, shaking his head in wonder.

“I ought to break his neck,” the bartender grumbled. He picked up a rag, began to mop at the spilled wine.

“It was an accident,” Deal said, picking up the stem of his shattered glass.

“That’s not it,” the bartender said. “The little shit goes around trying to sell phony coins he claims came up from the
Atocha
.” Deal gave him a nod to show he understood. The
Atocha
was the famed seventeenth-century wreck salvaged by Mel Fisher, diver and himself a legendary Keys character. In the twenty years since the ship’s treasure trove had first been opened, a healthy underground trade had developed in the merchandising of its supposed artifacts, most of them worthless counterfeits.