Ghost Key (3 page)

Images of Bean and Marion replayed in her head. She didn’t understand any of what had happened tonight. But in her gut, she knew something was seriously wrong on the island and had been for weeks. If she were honest with herself—and how could she lie to herself any more after the scene in the bar tonight?—it wasn’t just what happened there.

In late January, two bodies had washed in with the tide and been discovered under a pier on Dock Street. Both victims had died of massive loss of blood.
Total
loss was more like it. She’d heard it called “bleed-out,” because that was literally what had happened to them—all the blood in their bodies had rushed from every orifice.

Kate shuddered to think of it.

“Murder, right here in River City,” some wag had joked, but it wasn’t funny.

The newspaper barely covered the mysterious deaths; it might be bad for tourism. The police department hadn’t investigated too deeply, either, at least not that she’d heard, and she wasn’t sure what had happened to the bodies. Were they still in the coroner’s office in Gainesville? Had they been identified?

Then there were the rumors whispered in the bar at night, locals remarking on the changes in their partners, neighbors. She hadn’t thought much about that until tonight. Or about how more and more homes were for sale. Even a lot of the weekender places on the salt marsh off Gulf Boulevard were for sale. She’d blamed the economy. Now she wasn’t at all sure.

The familiar cry of the hawk echoed through the air. Liberty swept down until she was just above Kate’s head, her wings flapping softly. Rocky had rescued the hawk last year, when he’d found her on the beach, a hook caught in her wing. Now she practically lived with them, perched either on the roof or the balcony railing. She flew with Rocky to school, to the animal rescue facility where he worked, and rarely strayed too far from them. She knew not to touch down on Kate’s shoulder unless it was padded but stayed close all the way to the houseboat.

As she was unlocking the door, Liberty screeched and shot away from her, flying fast at a tall man hurrying along the side of the house, through the low fog, toward her. Liberty dived at him, the man threw his arms up to cover his head, but she drove him to his knees. He yelled, “Get this goddamn bird away from me.”

Bean, it was Bean. Kate whistled for the hawk to back off and Liberty flew to the edge of the roof and perched there, ready to dive at Bean again. He got to his feet, brushing off his jeans. “You didn’t answer your cell, Kate.”

“It’s not on. I figured you’d be passed out on the floor in the bar, Bean.” The starlight was bright enough for her to see his face, those dark, shiny eyes glaring at her.
You’re not Bean.
She wanted to say it, but didn’t. To voice such a thing out loud might make it true.

His frown thrust his eyes closer together. “What’re you talking about?”

“Tequila straight up? Marion and her Skip and Go Nakeds?”

“I don’t drink,” he said. “You know that. You left me a big mess to clean up, Kate.”

What the hell
. Were they living in different realities? And given all that tequila he’d consumed, how could he even be standing, much less speaking? He appeared to be completely sober. Had she imagined everything? “You made the mess, you clean it up.”

“I pay you to clean up.”

“No, actually you pay me to tend bar and serve the customers, Bean.”

He combed his fingers back through his thick gray hair. “You’re putting me in an untenable position.”

“Me?”
Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her. “
You’re
the one who screwed the librarian on the barroom floor, in front of several dozen people.”

Now he looked completely confused, like some little kid who had robbed a candy store but didn’t remember doing it. Was that possible? That he didn’t
remember
? As incredible as that seemed, it was the only explanation. He blinked and his eyes returned to their normal color, a soft blue. The transformation shocked her. Kate stepped back, fear shuddering through her, the skin at the back of her neck tightening. Bean squeezed the bridge of his nose, shoulders twitching.

“I … well, that was a big mistake.”

A
mistake.
She could think of better words. Gross, disgusting, sordid.

“I suppose I, uh, have some apologies that are forthcoming for my behavior. You don’t know how lonely I’ve been since the divorce.”

Kate didn’t know what to say. But she suddenly wanted to put her arms around him, to console him as she had the night his divorce had become final, when he’d knocked at the door of her houseboat, bereft and inconsolable.

Bean jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. A muscle ticked under his eye, and his mouth moved out of synch when he spoke again. “I came here to fire you, Kate. But I … can’t do it.” Those words came out as a gasp, almost a plea. “Too much history with our families.”

Now he sounded like the Bean she’d known for years. “I’ll come in early tomorrow and help you clean up. I’m going to bed, Bean. I suggest you do the same.”

It seemed that his face collapsed, caved in, gave way to some sort of excessive gravity that caused the corners of his mouth to plunge, that made his eyes water. His arms jerked upward, as if to embrace her. The hawk didn’t like it and dived at him, shrieking with alarm. But she didn’t attack. She was just warning him. Bean’s eyes held Kate’s, and for the briefest moment, she slipped an arm around his shoulders and in a gentle voice said, “The loneliness gets easier to deal with as time goes on, Bean.”

“I hope so.”

Then he backed away, his head jerking to the right, the left, as though his neck were screwed crookedly on his shoulders and he was struggling to adjust it.

Kate watched him, shaken by the change in him, by what had happened, by what he’d said, the way his eyes changed colors, by all of it. Liberty pursued him back toward the front of the house and didn’t return until he’d driven away. The hawk took up her position on the houseboat roof and Kate unlocked the door and slipped quickly inside.

She locked the door, leaned against it. Then she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and slid to the floor, a sob rising in her throat as she struggled against a terror she couldn’t define.

March 10–14

Two

HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA

Nick Sanchez had the uneasy feeling that his life was about to take a radical turn into unexplored country. The feeling wasn’t specific, and given the nature of his work, every day was a trek into unexplored country. But it felt personal.

Even as he pounded out the last two miles of four along his jogging route, his golden retriever dashing along ahead of him, an eerie sensation spread across the pit of his stomach, as if he’d eaten something that disagreed with him. The scent of citrus from the grove of orange and grapefruit trees on his right, a fragrance he usually enjoyed, seemed cloying, excessive. He glanced at the canal on his left, the water level low because of the drought, and saw only peril. When Jessie bounded down the banks, he called her back. She gave him one of those dog looks that said,
Lighten up, dude,
but after that stayed close to his side.

The late afternoon sun spilled across the fields on the other side of the canal—tomatoes, strawberries, papayas, mango trees, everything transformed to a soft, shimmering gold. From here, it didn’t look as if it were all withering in the unseasonal heat. But he could almost smell the parched plants screaming for rain, the dryness rising from the ground itself, almost smell it drifting in the air over Homestead and the surrounding countryside as though it were as permanent as the sky. The dryness reminded Sanchez of his childhood in Miami’s Little Havana, the stink of scorched linen, burned
arepas,
black beans sucked dry and sticking to the bottom of a pan because his mother was too drunk to tend to anything.

His mother had died last year of liver and heart complications, a sixty-five-year-old gringa from North Carolina who never should have married his Cuban father. She had hated Little Havana, South Florida, and most everything in Cuban culture. Stranger in a strange land, that was his mother. Although she’d been emotionally absent for much of his childhood because of her alcoholism, they had been close.

Sanchez felt her around sometimes, heard her quick, impatient footsteps in his hallway, knew that she had fussed with stuff in his house. When he had mentioned this to his father, Emilio had gone ballistic, and accused Sanchez of subscribing to the same superstitious bullshit that afflicted so many Cubans, the belief that the dead could actually communicate with the living. Now he and his father rarely spoke.

His old man, pushing seventy-five, lived alone in the tiny house where Sanchez had been born. Sanchez’s older sister, Nicole, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Miami, and her biologist husband, Carlos, lived eight miles from him and oversaw his care. Sanchez paid for the bulk of Emilio’s expenses—a private nurse who came in three times a week to make sure he was taking his meds; a full-time housekeeper who purchased his groceries, cooked, and kept the house in order; a gardener; and a driver who took him to and from his domino games in a Little Havana park every afternoon. Sanchez’s only condition was that he didn’t have to see his father except for an obligatory weekly visit, when he basically made sure that everyone he paid was doing his or her job.

His old man knew that Sanchez worked for some ultrasecretive government agency that utilized his psychic ability and paid him enough that he could afford these expenses. But he’d never been able to reconcile the fact that Sanchez could see what he could not and had been able to do so since before he learned to walk. The one time Sanchez had tried to explain his job—that his mind reached out to view distant locations and people, usually based on geographic coordinates or random numbers—his father had exploded with laughter.
Eres un loco, Nico
.

You’re a crazy, Nick.

Yeah.
Bad memory, he thought, and stopped to gulp water from his aluminum bottle. He poured some into the plastic cup he carried for Jessie on his daily runs and she lapped it up. It apparently wasn’t enough and she trotted down the bank to drink from the canal. Sanchez, still unable to shake his unease, hurried after her like a fretful parent.

The bank sloped steeply; the stones and dirt were loose, and he stumbled over something and lost his balance. Sanchez pitched forward, lost his grip on his water bottle, and landed hard on his hands and knees a foot behind Jessie, startling her. Her head turned and she didn’t see what Sanchez did, a water moccasin whipping toward her through the water. Sanchez scrambled to his feet, threw his arms around her, and pulled her out of the way seconds before the snake struck the spot where she’d been standing. He grabbed hold of her collar and they ran back up the hill.

At the top, Sanchez dropped to his knees and doubled over, panting as hard as she was. She nudged him with her nose, then licked his face and hands until he slung an arm around her neck and pressed his forehead to hers. “You scared the shit outta me, girl.”

She whined and pawed the ground.

“The run is over for the day, Jess.” He pushed to his feet and walked over to the edge of the canal, Jessie trotting along behind him. He could see his bottle down there near the water, the aluminum glinting in the light. The snake wasn’t in sight. “Stay, Jessie. Please. There’s still water in that bottle and we’ve got a two-mile walk back to the car. Stay.”

She sat down and didn’t move as Sanchez started down the bank again, anxiously scanning the ground and the canal for the snake. He wondered if it was the cause of his earlier unease. The bite of a water moccasin could be fatal if not treated immediately. Losing Jessie, a stray he’d found two days after his mother’s death, would definitely hurl him into an emotional tailspin, but he suspected it didn’t qualify as a radical turn in life. He decided the snake was a warning. But about what?

He snatched up the water bottle and hurried back up the bank, where Jessie waited, tail wagging. They shared the remainder of the water and headed back toward the car. During the walk, Sanchez obsessed about the possible significance of the close call with the snake. He obsessed about every enigma he encountered, his brain chewing away at it until he found an answer. His mother used to comment on it, Nicole kidded him about it. But he couldn’t help it. Some mysteries begged for answers.

The most obvious meaning was danger to someone he loved. Right now, his love life was a joke. The woman he’d been involved with during his first year of grad school at the University of Florida, the woman he’d thought he was going to marry, had walked out on him the same day his mother had died, February 13 of last year. He’d dated a few women since then, mostly women he met through his boss. But the moment they learned he was a remote viewer, they were only interested in getting readings from him. Sanchez invariably explained that he didn’t give personal psychic readings, that his ability didn’t work like that. But it didn’t matter. These women hounded him until he simply stopped calling.

Family? Just his sister, brother-in-law, and his father. Maybe the snake portended danger to one of them? Or to Jessie? None of that felt right.

If he interpreted the incident like a dream, then in Jungian psychology, his major and grad school study, a snake represented both fertility and power, healing, spiritual activities, and what was hidden in the unconscious. Given the nature of remote viewing, which dealt with everything that was hidden, he supposed the snake incident could point to danger through his work. But in the sixteen months Sanchez had worked for ISIS, he’d never encountered physical danger, only psychic risk.

A few months after he’d been hired, Bob Delaney, his boss and monitor, gave him a target that turned out to be on the international space station. Sanchez remembered peering out a window and seeing the sunlit Earth swirling below him, its oceans and land masses crisply visible. Vertigo gripped him and he bolted from the viewing, puking. Maybe the snake portended something like that.