Rebel Island (8 page)

“Never seen it before. Why?”

A new red duffel bag in the middle of grimy bait buckets and tackle boxes and mildewed coils of rope. It was packed full, and what bothered me most were the shapes pressed against the canvas, like the bag was filled with bricks.

I unzipped the top. Cash—twenties and fifties, all neatly bundled.

“Whoa,” Chase breathed. “How much—”

“Quick estimate? About twenty thousand.”

“Dude. What’s it doing sitting out here?”

“Good question.” I fingered the old airline tag on the shoulder strap. It was an address different from Rebel Island, someplace in Corpus Christi. But I recognized the name. “Christopher Stowall,” I said.

Chase swore. “That little turd. Stowall stashed this cash here? How the hell—”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But twenty thousand…It’s time I searched his room. I should’ve done that before.”

“Yeah,” Chase said. “If there’s more money in there we can, like, split it fifty-fifty.”

I stared at him.

“What?” he said defensively.

I turned and studied the fishing boat—the only way off the island. In the choppy water, the reflection from my flashlight beam looked like a fire. Like flames in the window of a burning house.

“Chase,” I said, already regretting what I was about to do. “I need your help with one more thing.”

14

Lane could still feel the impression of her wedding band, a
month after she had thrown it into the sea. She massaged her fingers, trying to get rid of the cold and tightness.

Garrett placed his hand on hers. “Hey, it’s gonna be all right.”

She studied his face. He was unlike any man she’d ever known, and not just because he was an amputee. She’d gotten over that, because he seemed so completely comfortable without legs. He sat in his wheelchair like it was a throne—a source of power. He wasn’t attractive in any conventional way. His teeth were crooked and his gray-brown hair was a rat’s nest. He had a potbelly and didn’t seem to care much whether or not his Jimmy Buffett T-shirt had margarita stains on it. But he had nice eyes—surf green, full of humor and warmth. He smelled like patchouli and wood smoke. She liked the roughness of his hands and his gravelly voice.

“Things haven’t been all right for me for a long time,” she said.

“Hell, you don’t know my brother,” Garrett told her. “He’s gotten me out of worse shit than this. I’m telling you, if there’s a killer here, Tres’ll find him.”

If there’s a killer here.

A wave of guilt surged through her. She kept thinking the burden would get easier, but every day, month after month, it just got worse. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the dead man’s face. He had smiled as she served him lunch. She remembered the knife, freshly sharpened for cutting apples…

“You know what you need?” Garrett asked.

Lane forced herself back to the present. “What?”

“A tropical vacation in my room.”

In spite of herself, she smiled. “I’m not sure I know you that well.”

“Trust me,” Garrett said. “You’ll find out plenty.”

His room was strangely personal for a hotel room. The walls
were decorated with posters of the Caribbean and the Florida Keys. They reminded Lane of Chris and how much he loved beaches, but she kept that to herself. On the dresser, Garrett had set up a full bar—rum, tequila and triple sec, glasses, a blender, a bucket of ice. He’d hung different-colored Hawaiian shirts on the shuttered windows. Music played from a little battery-operated stereo: Jamaican steel drums and guitar. A dozen votive candles flickered on Fiestaware saucers.

“It looks like you live here,” she noticed.

“My favorite room. I come here a few times a year. Alex lets me keep it the way I like.”

He mixed tequila and lime juice and triple sec over ice in a carafe, stirred it and poured. “Margarita of the gods. No salt. Cuervo white. Mexican triple sec. My brother disagrees with me about every ingredient. Thinks I’m a damn cretin.”

“You sound proud.”

“Of pissing off my brother? Hell, yes.
Salud!
”

The warmth of the alcohol knit into Lane’s limbs. She sat in a wicker chair, facing Garrett. She listened to the Caribbean music and the rain outside.

“Earlier you were talking like you admire your brother,” she said.

Garrett sipped his drink. A droplet of margarita gleamed in his beard. “Sure, I admire him. I still like to irritate him. You got siblings?”

Lane shook her head.

“Then you wouldn’t understand, but that’s cool. I want you to take a vacation.”

“Garrett—”

He held up a finger. “No problems. No hang-ups. Imagine those windows are open. You’re looking out at clear blue sky and a calm sea. Listen to the music. Drink your drink and relax.”

Lane tried. She liked the feeling of Garrett sitting near her, confident and calm. Then she remembered the night in the woods, her right eye swollen shut where Bobby had hit her. Her whole body ached. They dragged their burden into the woods wrapped in stained blue sheets.

“You’re crying,” Garrett said.

“I’m sorry.”

Garrett’s eyebrows furrowed. “What did that bastard husband do to you?”

Before she could answer, she heard voices in the hall.

“—can’t believe you did that,” Markie was complaining.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Chase protested. “I’m telling you, Navarre forced me. He’s a damn—”

“Shut up,” Markie hissed as they passed the room, probably noticing that the door was open. The sound of their footsteps faded down the hall.

Garrett drained his margarita. “My brother must be back. I’d better check on him.”

“Why?” Suddenly Lane didn’t want to leave the room. She didn’t want to go out there and face the others.

“Tres is always where the trouble is,” Garrett said. “And I want to find out what’s happening.”

He put down his glass and held out his hand.

Tentatively, she took it. He gave her fingers a squeeze.

“We’ll continue the vacation later,” he promised. “For now, let’s go see what crap my little brother has gotten himself into.”

15

I was standing at Chris Stowall’s dresser, going through his
underwear drawer, when Garrett and Lane Sanford came in. I was about halfway through searching. So far I’d come up with nothing except underwear, and I was kind of wishing I’d worn latex gloves.

When I told Garrett what had happened at the boathouse, he arched his eyebrows. “You did
what
?”

“I scuttled the boat.”

“Hold up, hold up.” Garrett looked at Lane for moral support, then back at me. “You sank Alex’s fishing boat. Forty thousand dollars’ worth of fishing boat. And you just—”

“Opened the bilge valve and sank it,” I agreed. “Now, are you going to help me search or not?”

Garrett shoved the underwear drawer closed so fast I almost lost my fingers. “ARE YOU NUTS?”

I counted to ten, trying to contain the impulse to tip him out of his wheelchair.

To my surprise, Lane interceded. “Garrett, Tres is right.”

Garrett scowled at her. “Say what?”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “We can’t let the killer off the island. He’ll hurt more people. Right now he’s trapped here. We have to keep it that way until we can contact the police.” She glanced up at me. “That is why you did it…yes?”

“Yes,” I said. I decided it was time to revise my estimation of Lane Sanford.

“Whatever, little bro,” Garrett grumbled. “You’re gonna be in deep crap with Alex.” He nodded grudgingly toward the dresser. “What the hell are you looking for, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Something to explain the cash in the duffel bag.”

“What cash?”

I told him about the twenty grand, which was now locked in the hotel’s office, thanks to Jose and Imelda. I couldn’t tell whether the news surprised Lane or not.

“Damn,” Garrett said. “Find one more bag like that, and you can pay Alex back for his boat.”

I decided to ignore him. Being his brother, I’d had lots of practice.

“Lane,” I said, “is there anything you can tell me about Chris? Anything that would help?”

“I’ve known Chris since high school. He’s a good person. He’s not a killer.”

“But?”

She twisted the silver ring on her finger. “It isn’t like him to disappear like this. He wouldn’t do that. Something is wrong.”

“He invited you here for the weekend, to get away from—”

“Yes.” Her tone was clear: now was not the time to bring up her ex-husband.

“Chris didn’t mention Marshal Longoria?” I asked. “Didn’t make any comment to you about why he was here?”

She shook her head, but she was holding back. I could feel it as clearly as the storm outside. I glanced at Garrett, hoping he would help me out.

He took her hand protectively. “Come on, Lane. It’s getting late. And, little bro, if you find anything else valuable—like more money or the keys to a Porsche or something—you might want to give me dibs on it before you destroy it, okay?”

I turned Chris’s room inside out. I didn’t learn much. His
stuff smelled of salt water and suntan lotion. He wore size 32 jeans. He liked extra-large cotton T-shirts. He had a picture of Waikiki Beach taped on his dresser mirror. There was a surfboard behind his closet door. Next to his bed was a guitar case—nothing inside but a Yamaha acoustic and the lyrics to an old Nirvana song on a piece of crumpled notebook paper.

No weapons. No duffel bags full of money. I found no evidence that he’d been packing. The closet was full of clothes. His toiletries were all there.

In all, it seemed to be the room of a fairly simple guy who liked to surf and had taken a job that allowed him the time to do it.

Too simple. Almost always, there was something interesting to be found in anyone’s personal space…I called it the jalapeño factor. You had to have that little slice of spice on the nacho.

I sat on Chris’s bed and pondered that. Outside, the storm intensified. Wind battered the walls. The plywood on the window bowed in and out with a hollow popping noise.

Had I checked the bed?

I knelt down and I slipped my hand between the mattress and the box springs. My fingers brushed against a book, and I brought out Chris Stowall’s diary.

I was about midway through reading it—far enough to
realize I had trouble on my hands—when the college guys burst into the bedroom, Ty followed by Chase and Markie.

The good news was that Ty had found his gun. The bad news was he was pointing it at me.

“You bastard,” he said. “You wrecked the boat?”

“Ty, put the gun down.”

Now that his friends had caught up with him, they didn’t seem to know what to do. They had their hands out, crouching like they were about to catch a ball.

“Dude,” Chase said, “I tried to explain—”

“Shut up!” Ty said. “You
helped
him. You told me I could leave in fifteen minutes!”

“Ty, listen to the storm,” I said. “You couldn’t have gone anywhere. The wind’s already too strong.”

I didn’t try to stand. I didn’t look at the gun. I kept my eyes on Ty’s, because I knew that was the best way to keep him from firing at me. Not a great way, mind you, but the best.

“You sank the boat.” Ty’s voice trembled. “You trapped me in this place with…with a goddamn killer. I’m gonna—”

That’s when Markie hit him on the back of the head. Ty crumpled and Chase tried to catch him without much luck. Ty landed facedown on the carpet between the dresser and the bed. Markie pounced on the pistol. I checked Ty’s head. He’d been hit in just the right spot to knock him out—directly behind the ear.

I looked up at Markie. “Sap your friends often?”

He opened his fist and showed it to me. “Sorry, dude. No choice.”

“You always carry a roll of quarters?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “You never know.”

Ty moaned.

“Find him a place to lie down,” I told them. “Not in here. And get him some ice.”

“Guess I messed up,” Chase murmured, “telling him about the boat.”

Markie snorted. “You guys are whacked, wrecking the only way off the island.”

“The killer may have been planning to use the boat,” I said. “I don’t want him to have options.”

Markie studied me. “Dude, you ever hear about cornering wild animals?”

Once the guys had dragged Ty away, I finished reading
Chris Stowall’s journal. He wasn’t a prolific diarist. The entries were sometimes six months apart. Then he would write daily for a week. Then he’d lose interest again. He wrote about wave conditions. He made plans to move to Hawaii, where he’d apparently been once before on spring break. He had dreams of taking some girl named Amy there. They’d start a surf shop. At the bottom of the entry, he wrote:
I wish it was Lane.

No explanation.

He made some vague references to a brother, whom he affectionately called “the psycho.” He drew pictures of seagulls and guitars. He wrote lines that might’ve been song lyrics. They were pretty bad.

He also talked a lot about Alex Huff, and how much they hated each other. According to Chris, Alex went on drinking binges about once a month. If there were guests on the island, Chris would have to scramble to keep Alex out of sight. Sometimes Alex left the island for days at a time and wouldn’t tell anyone where he was going. When he was drunk, he’d get paranoid. He’d accuse Chris of snooping around his room, embezzling the hotel’s money.

I’d quit,
Chris wrote,
except I owe the bastard. I’m scared what he might do if I left. Maybe one more time, and I’ll have enough to get out of here.

I read that last line several times. I didn’t like it.

The final entry seemed to contradict the earlier one. It was dated last April. It read:
He wants to sell the hotel. He thinks he can just walk away. He can’t do this to me.

In the middle of the diary, stuck between two pages, was a folded printout of an email. The date was May 5, exactly one month ago. The sender was a U.S. Marshal named Berry. I knew him vaguely. He was a higher-up in the West Texas District, based in San Antonio. Roughly speaking, he was Jesse Longoria’s boss. The only time I’d met Berry, we’d discussed a deal to get a client of mine into the witness protection program.

The printout read:

We can talk, but it has to be in person. Specify a time and place.

Below that, apparently clipped from the email to which Berry was responding:

At least twelve names. Payments. Instructions. Enough to put my employers in jail for a long time. But I need ABSOLUTE assurance. Any leak, broken promise or hint of betrayal, and I vanish.

I was still sitting on Chris’s bed, staring at his picture of Waikiki Beach, when Alex came in and yelled, “You did WHAT to my boat?”

I didn’t so much placate him as wear him down. He was too
drunk and tired to do much more than yell and complain and throw Chris’s clothing around.

“Damn it,” he muttered at last. He sank on the bed and buried his head in his hands. “That’s it. That’s just about everything gone now.”

I felt no satisfaction at his misery. As much as I’d begrudged him buying Rebel Island, I knew he’d be facing hundreds of thousands in repairs, assuming we weathered the storm at all. He had his life savings tied up in this hotel.

I thought about Chris Stowall’s diary, his descriptions of Alex’s drunken paranoia.
I’m afraid what he might do if I left.

“Alex, when we first got here you wanted to ask a favor. What was it?”

He laughed—a broken, unhappy sound. “Doesn’t matter now. I was going to ask you to help me convince Garrett.”

“Of what?”

“I’m selling the island. Or I
was,
before this storm.”

“Selling the island? You’ve wanted to own this island since—”

“I know.” He stared at the boarded-up window. “I used to believe in this place. Now…I don’t know, Tres. It’s falling apart. This was my last weekend for guests. I have a couple of potential buyers. Thing is…I’d rather you and Garrett have it.”

“What? The island?”

He nodded. “I thought Eli would’ve liked that. The idea of you guys keeping it running. You could do better than I did.”

It seemed unnecessary to point out just how crazy that idea was. How could Alex think we’d have the money? How could he think I’d want Rebel Island? Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little honored.