Shark River (33 page)

When he swerved, I swerved with him, forcing him off onto the shoulder, then accelerated, driving down the middle of the road so he couldn’t pass again. I watched him charge up hard once more, until we were bumper to bumper, his expression contorted . . . and then I saw him lean and come up with something in his right hand.

A handgun.

That’s what I was waiting for. I put as much distance as I could between our two cars. I was doing close to eighty and about three car lengths ahead of him when I mashed the Toyota’s emergency brake to the floor. I felt the wheels lock, rubber screaming, and I turned the steering wheel a gentle quarter revolution to the right, which effectively pivoted the car 180 degrees—a “boot turn” in the language of combat drivers, taken from the days when bootleggers had to outrun the feds.

The driver of the Taurus did the only thing he possibly could to avoid hitting me—yanked the wheel of his car instinctively to the left, and I saw just the flash of his rear window and bumper as he went bouncing off the road and airborne through the guard rail, then into the canal, plowing a ton of water.

I stopped and backed until I was even with the Ford. It was floating trunk-high. I got out, using my car as a shield, then braced my right arm on the roof, the Sig Sauer pointed at the driver as he climbed out through the window.

He was shaken, his color not good. In Spanish, I yelled, “Show me your hands! Palms out!” Then: “Swim to this side. Now!”

He came climbing out on the bank with a water spaniel meekness. He was bigger than I’d expected. Younger, too. He had his hands over his head, trying not to slip in his soaked pants and leather shoes; he shook his head at me when I yelled, “Who sent you? Cordero?” thinking that if Cordero had sent him, I should shoot him, shoot him dead and leave him . . . then wondered if I could. Did I still have that dark and clinical little place in me that facilitated such extreme behavior?

But the man surprised me by saying in English, “No. Not Cordero. I don’t know who hired me. I swear!” Then his expression became perplexed. “Wait, you’re . . . you’re
him
. The man I was supposed to be following. How . . . how . . . why aren’t you in the truck?”

“I am. You’re just having a bad dream, that’s all.”

“I didn’t even see you back there.”

“That’s what you can expect to see when I’m tailing you.”

His voice was shaking now. “I don’t get it!”

“You’re about to. In the kneecap. Every time you refuse to answer a question, bang, I shoot you in the kneecap. First question: Why the hell are you following me?”

He reached for his back pocket, and I leaned toward him, weapon extended, glancing quickly to the left and right: no cars coming.

“
Don’t
. Don’t shoot me. Please. What they told me was, if I somehow screwed up, if you figured out what I was doing, I’m supposed to give you this.” He had his billfold out, and was taking a white note card from it.

“Who’s they? Who’re you working for?”

“My name’s Romano.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Okay, okay. I’m a private investigator from Lauderdale. Sometimes I do contractual work. For the government, for corporations, I’m not even sure who it was who hired me. It was all set up by phone. Here, maybe this will explain. I don’t even know what it says.”

I took the paper and saw that it was an envelope. I opened the envelope and read:

The typewritten note was signed HH.

Friend or foe referred to a common instructional exercise used by state department and Secret Service types. On any important security assignment, where one or more people may be targeted for assassination, friendly surveillance is assigned without the knowledge of the potential target. It may unknowingly be assigned by more than one agency, so the trick is to figure out who the good guys are and who the killers are.

I said to Romano, “So tell me what you’ve seen. Have you noticed any other people watching me? Following me?”

He nodded his head, eager to please. “Yesterday, for sure. Three men in a white Chrysler that was rented out of Miami International. I checked it out.”

“I was on the water most of the day yesterday.”

“I know. I saw them watching you through binoculars.”

“White or black? What color were they?”

“Two white, one a very light-colored black.”

I crumpled the note and stuck it in my pocket. Touched the auto-uncock lever of the Sig, turned and walked back toward my rental.

“You’re not going to go off and leave me, are you? My cell phone’s in there ruined, my billfold, all my clothes. What’m I going to do about my car?”

I said, “You’re asking my advice? Okay. Get in there and start bailing. And watch out for gators. You’re entering the food chain, pal, and not exactly on the top rung.”

I got back in my little white Toyota and drove away.

 

 

 

T
omlinson said, “I thought you had to work in the lab, now here you are driving a rental car. You have some weird little crevices in that brain of yours, my friend. You make some odd behavioral choices.” Then: “The old town’s changed, hasn’t it?”

Yep. Mango, what was left of the original, had certainly changed. Mango had once been a tiny clearing in a massive plain of marl and swamp. It was a collection of houses and docks on a weak curvature of mud flat that created a harbor, and the harbor curved away toward the charcoal gloom of Ten Thousand Islands, mangrove keys all in a maze, joined by water and shadow. They separated Florida’s mainland from the Gulf of Mexico. Florida Bay was to the south, Key West seventy miles beyond, and nothing, neither house nor road, between.

Before these obvious changes, it wasn’t a town, really. Not even a village. Mango used to be what was once known as a fish camp. It was a mangrove outpost: a row of peeling houses with rusted tin roofs built haphazardly, their impermanence uncontested, as if it were just a matter of time before a hurricane came and swept them away, or until roots and vines grew up through the floors, out the windows, and covered them.

Drive the winding mudflat road through seven or eight miles of swamp where the tide comes right up and floods across, then around a curve beneath coconut palms. Mango Bay rises out of the mangroves to the right. The village is on the left: streetlamps and houses on a low ridge of Indian mounds that face the water. The houses sit on squat pilings, the shell road separating them from the bay. There were also five houses built in the shallows, joined by individual boardwalks leading to the shore. They reminded me of my place on Sanibel.

Tucker had owned all those stilthouses at one time—fish shacks, he called them, but they were in much better shape now. In fact, all of Mango looked to be in better shape . . . modernized, anyway. The houses had been rebuilt, remodeled, repaired, and all of them had been painted or sided with aluminum, in Caribbean pastel colors, conch pink and coral and blue. Even the little store had been reopened, Homer’s Sundries—only now it was a Circle K with a big plastic sign, cars parked in the shell lot, cars moving up and down the street. There looked to be a half-dozen new duplexes, too, all waterfront; a lot of money was being invested, with more being built down the shoreline, judging from the crane and cement trucks, all the construction noise in the distance. A busy place. Modern Florida had finally found Mango.

To Tomlinson, I said, “Yep. It certainly has changed. Except for this place.”

Meaning Tuck’s ranch house, the last house at the end of the road, built on the highest mound—a low gray shack with a tin roof and a sand yard cloaked by trees and Spanish moss. A fallen-down barn out back: hay and a couple of stalls; a little room with a cot and a hot plate—Joseph Egret’s room, Tuck had called it.

I’d found Ransom and Tomlinson on the porch, waiting for the caretaker to come unlock the place.

Tomlinson was standing, looking out at the new houses, at the convenience store and a passing cement truck while Ransom moved from window to window, looking in. “The contrast,” he said. “Tupperware America and mudflat Florida. Obscene, man. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. You should never let them change this place. Ever.”

I was impatient to leave, find out what Tuck had left—if anything—and get going, back to my lab. I said, “That’s entirely up to Ransom.” I watched her big, slow smile when I added, “This is her house now. Whatever she wants to do with it.”

 

 

Silence has a museum quality in a house vacated by death. The wooden floors amplified the sound of our shoes as we walked inside; the grandfather clock made its familiar metronome noise from the corner near the fireplace.

Similarities to a museum didn’t end there.

The man with the keys, John Dunn, told us, “Captain Gatrell wanted the house to stay just the way he left it. I think I mentioned that to you on the phone, Doctor Ford. Just after your uncle’s death? So that’s exactly what our owners’ association has made every effort to do. Keep the place in good repair without changing the look of it. We owe him a great debt of gratitude. Captain Gatrell changed our lives. We’ve tried to honor his wishes to the letter.”

They had succeeded. The place looked like Tuck had just walked down the street to buy chewing tobacco. In other words, the house was a mess. Clothes thrown on the floor, a couple of his prized cowboy hats hanging from the antlers of a mounted deer head. Dishes in the sink, books he’d been reading spread-eagle around the room, spit cups everywhere, but the big brass spittoon by his rocker, at least, had been cleaned. Bullet holes in the walls, too. Several. And a big, hand-painted sign nailed to a rafter:

Dunn cleared his throat and chuckled to cover what might have been embarrassment. “Your uncle seemed to think . . . or have the belief that he had such a strong spirit that he . . . I mean, his ghost . . . no, his spirit, let’s say. That his spirit would return to this house once he’d passed, so he wanted it ready to use and just the way he liked it after he died. Particularly the spit cups. He said he’d never had enough spit cups.”

I had a vague recollection of John Dunn. Tuck had met him and several other men and women who lived in some gigantic trailer park off the Tamiami Trail. Somehow, Tuck had recruited them to move to Mango and help him fix it up, for which they received options to buy up some of Tucker’s properties.

Ransom seemed delighted with the prospect of Tuck’s ghost still hanging around. “That my daddy,” she said, touching the Santería beads she wore. “He a good man, so he have a good spirit. Someone to watch over me if’n I decide to live here. What you think, Mister Tommy?”

Tomlinson was looking toward the ceiling, hands on hips, considering it. After a few moments, he said, “Definitely. He’s here. Tucker Gatrell is definitely here. He has not left the building. If you want, we can hold a séance some night, invite him back, and let the old gentleman speak through me. After all those shock treatments I had, I’m a hell of a good medium.”

I said, “Another time. When you’ve rounded up a couple of space aliens, too. Mister Dunn? Isn’t there something you’re supposed to give us?” Trying to hurry things along.

There was. It was another letter from Tuck, written on the familiar yellow paper, sealed in an envelope. Before he handed the envelope to me, though, he said, “Captain Gatrell’s personal letter to me was very clear on this point. I am supposed to confirm that your sister is with you.” He looked at Ransom, puzzled. “Your half-sister, I guess.”

“She’s my cousin, not my sister, but you can see from the photographs on the wall, she’s the one Tuck meant.”

There were lots of pictures, some framed, some just tacked to the rough wood walls. There were a couple of me, and several of Ransom. She never looked much older than in her teens. Another one I’d never seen was a photo of Tuck and Joseph Egret, a horse in the background. Tuck was wearing his favorite gray roper’s hat, Joe a blue wind ribbon to hold his long hair. Another element in the Gatrell Museum.

Dunn had stepped to the wall, looking through his bifocals from one of the photos then back to Ransom. He smiled. “Young lady, you are a very beautiful woman. Handsome, I think that describes you even more accurately, and in a very feminine way. One of the most handsome women I think I’ve ever seen. I mean that.”

Ransom did something similar to a curtsey. “And you a very nice-looking white gentleman. Got a nice little butt on you, Mister Dunn.”

The woman had a great gift for making male friends very quickly. Dunn had to be in his late seventies, but he was suddenly doing his best to look and sound younger. He made a waving motion with his hands. “What the hell, I think we can dispense with any more ridiculous red tape. I look in your face and I trust you—and it is a lovely face, so sweet and angelic—but there is one other thing your father—” He seemed to remember I was still there. “—that your uncle also wanted me to ask you. Is there any third party forcing you to come here? I have a feeling there could be that possibility.”

Did he mean Tomlinson?

I said, “This is a good friend of mine. In fact, I think you two met a few years back.”

“Actually, I was thinking of a couple of other people, no one that’s here. A few days ago, a couple of black men—” He glanced at Ransom. “Sorry. Two
African
-American men came here asking about Captain Gatrell, where he lived, did his relatives ever come to visit his old house. Captain Gatrell once told me personally to keep my eyes open for . . . well, for men matching that description.”