Blackwater Sound (11 page)

Sugarman took a turn. “This man is named Thorn, sir. He's not Dr. Truman. Bill Truman died some years back.”

“You don't have to yell. I'm not deaf. I hear just fine.”

The old man stepped past them, walking up the sloping yard toward the house. He lifted both arms and swung them toward the branches of the trees.

“Nice place you got here. Rustic and remote. Always did like the Keys.”

Thorn watched as he swung around and came marching back.

“Did I tell you, my name is Lawton Collins?”

The old man put out his hand.

Thorn smiled and took hold of the man's hand. It was dry and light, boneless in Thorn's grip.

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

“So, like I said, my friend Arnold drowned this afternoon. Do you know Arnold Peretti, the bookie?”

Thorn said no, he didn't.

“Well, anyway,” Lawton said, “it's not about gambling. It's all about this ray gun thing. You should know that in case something happens to me.”

“Ray gun,” Sugarman said. “What kind of ray gun?”

“That's what the kid wanted,” said Lawton. “He knew Arnold had it and he wanted it back. That's all I know. Oh, yeah, and there's another guy, he's in the Bahamas right now. He's involved in this somehow. That's what Arnold said. This other guy was some kind of friend of Arnold's. He's gone over to Marsh Harbor fishing for marlin. After I'm finished with you, I'm headed there. Give him a good old-fashioned third degree. I been over there a dozen times. It's a piece of cake getting across the Gulf Stream. Piece of angel food cake.”

The old man wobbled over to the pink buffalo and leaned against it.

Thorn went over to him and laid a hand on the old man's arm.

“You all right?”

“Oh, it hurt at first. I about passed out. But I'm mostly numbed up now.”

“You're injured?”

“What kind of doctor are you, anyway? It just so happens, I might need a stitch or two.”

“I'm not a doctor,” Thorn said. “But we can take you to the hospital if you're hurt.”

“No, sir. They'll find me at the hospital. You can bet on that. They have their ways, these people. No, siree. No hospitals.”

“What's wrong with you, Lawton?”

Lawton laid a hand on the buffalo's mane, gave it an inquisitive stroke.

“Look, son, you're second on the list. Arnold was first and we know what happened to him. After it happened and I'd had a minute to calm down, I was out there in the middle of Biscayne Bay, trying to work out what the hell to do next. That's when I found the list. Sitting there on the table in the salon. And I knew I had to investigate this thing. That's my profession, I investigate things.”

“You're a cop?”

“Retired,” he said. “My daughter Alexandra's the cop in the family these days. Like father, like daughter. She does crime scene photos. Not a real cop, but close. Me, I'm retired.”

“Maybe we should call your daughter. She's probably looking for you.”

“I'm retired, but to tell you the honest truth, I miss the police business. It might sound like bragging, but I think I still got a pretty good nose for crime.”

“What list are you talking about? This list I'm on.”

“Arnold was number one. You're number two. There's even a nautical chart or else I wouldn't have found you at all.”

“Could I see this list?”

“You don't look much like a doctor. You look like a ragamuffin.”

Sugarman chuckled.

“Though I realize things have changed. Wrestlers are all bad guys now. Nobody looks the way they're supposed to anymore.”

Lawton Collins reached into the pocket of his shorts and came out with a folded sheet of paper. He opened it and handed it to Thorn.

Thorn stepped over to the edge of the spotlight's beam and tipped the paper to the light. Sugar looked over his shoulder. It was a page torn from a standard nautical chart, showing Blackwater Sound and an arrow pointing to Thorn's land. In the upper corner of the page someone had printed:

1. ARNOLD
   
2. DR. WILLIAM TRUMAN (FT112)
   

At the bottom of the page was what looked like a bloody smudge.

Thorn handed the sheet to Sugarman, and he stepped into the light and studied the document. Sugar made a noise in his throat, looked at Thorn, then walked away into the dark, over toward the house, stood there a moment, then turned around and came back.

“What is it, Sugar?”

“Your license.”

“License?”

“FT112. That's your tag number.”

“You know my license number?”

“Hell, I been looking at that damn thing for twenty years. That tag's been expired forever.”

“What the hell?”

“If my memory serves, that plate was on the VW when Dr. Bill was still driving it,” Sugar said. “Some day you should probably get around to renewing the registration. That's what normal people do.”

Thorn stared out at the dark bay. Dull moonlight sheening its surface.

“What kind of person has to draw up a list to remember two names?”

“We're not dealing with a genius,” Sugar said. “But then it wouldn't be the first time I've run across a lawbreaker who was a little dim.”

“What I think,” Lawton said, “this punk kid had two jobs. When he was done with Arnold, he was going to commandeer this boat, come down here, and take you out. What he didn't bargain for was running into an old goat like me.”

“How'd you get away from him?”

“Knocked the little turd overboard. Rammed Arnold's yacht into a seawall and sent that kid flying.”

“You're lucky you didn't sink.”

“I'm a lucky guy,” Lawton said. “Always have been. I'm Irish.”

He stroked the buffalo's big face.

“You got a gun, son? Some way to protect yourself?”

“No,” Thorn said. “I'm unarmed.”

Lawton moaned softly, his face tightening into a sudden grimace.

“You okay, Lawton?”

“Little twinge is all.”

“Let's have a look.”

“It's nothing,” he said. “A scratch.”

“Show us,” Thorn said.

Lawton Collins huffed, then executed a military about-face and lifted his shirt, presenting his back to Thorn. And there, buried in the love-handle at his waist, its wicked glitter catching the edge of the spotlight, was the long, narrow handle of a knife. A wide swipe of blood had leaked from the puncture wound and had dried along his beltline.

“Christ, we gotta get him to the hospital, Thorn.”

“No hospitals,” Lawton said. “They'll find me in a hospital.”

“Who'll find you, Lawton? Who did this?”

“That young punk. I don't know his name. That's why I gotta go to the Bahamas, talk to this guy down there. Get in his face, ask him some questions. He's the logical next step in my investigation.”

“What guy in the Bahamas, Lawton?”

The old man dropped his shirt tail and turned around. He rested his weight against the buffalo.

“Man by the name of Braswell. He's down there marlin fishing.”

Thorn turned slowly and looked at Sugarman.

Sugar said, “Would that be A. J. Braswell, by any chance?”

“You know him?”

Sugarman shook his head at Thorn.

“Good God, Thorn, how the hell do you do it?”

“It's the magnet on my back. Big goddamn magnet.”

“You sure you haven't seen him?”

“Not for weeks, Alex. He doesn't come in here that much anymore.”

Alexandra eased her grip on the phone. Across the room a Toyota commercial played on the black-and-white TV, just a minute remaining till the eleven o'clock news. Alex wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt, running shoes. After work she'd unpinned her black hair and it was loose, draping across her shoulders. An inch behind her eyes, a headache clanged. She tapped her foot, every nerve burning. As taut as a sprinter in the blocks, waiting for the starting pistol to fire, waiting and waiting.

“You tried Captain's Tavern? He used to hang out there.”

“They haven't seen him either,” Alex said.

“How about Fox's?”

“Fox's, Duffy's, Gil's Piano Bar. No one's seen him.”

“You been busy.”

Benny Stuart had been one of Lawton's closest friends. They'd partnered on the streets when Lawton first started out. And for the next twenty years they'd orbited the same cop bars, regularly lifting a few brews after work. Not a serious drinker, Lawton might still consider one of those old places a safe haven.

Benny said, “Hey, how about Mikey's out in Sweetwater?”

“It's Cuban now. They haven't seen an Anglo in months.”

“Well, that's the whole list, Alex. Sorry. Wish I could help.”

“Thanks anyway, Benny. Sorry to call you so late.”

“I was up,” he said. “So he's lost, huh?”

“Lost, yeah. I guess you could call it that.”

“You try that place he goes in the daytime, what is it, a nursing home?”

“Harbor House,” Alex said. “Yeah, I tried there. And I called all his lady friends. No one's heard from him.”

“Does he remember phone numbers?”

“Some of the time, yeah. He's got all my numbers in his wallet.”

“Well, he'll turn up. And when he does, tell him I asked about him. He can find me at Captain's Tavern from six to nine most weekdays. Tell him to stop in, we'll shoot the shit. Tuesday is still lobster night. Great food. Our old bartender, Jeff, still works there.”

“I'll tell him, Benny. Thanks.”

She clicked off. Holding the portable phone in her lap, she sat down on the foot of her father's bed and watched the old Sylvania perched on the cherry dresser, the same TV set Lawton and Grace Collins had shared all their married life. The commercials had ended and the lead story was still the crash of Flight 570. The female pilot still in a coma. A couple more survivors had died. Then they moved on to the double homicide of Charlie Harrison and Brandy Perkins. Alex listened, tapping her foot, as the slender blonde stood just beyond the alleyway and described the ghastly scene. In less than three
minutes she managed to get three or four facts wrong, then after a little byplay with the anchor about the tragedy of losing such a dedicated young journalist, they cut to the third piece. The TV people were calling it “Mayhem at Sea.” One passenger dead, one other missing, while the captain of the vessel was sought by Miami Police and the U.S. Coast Guard.

The reporter was tall with wild, curly hair blown wilder by the late-night sea breeze. He was positioned on the beach near Rickenbacker Causeway, near the same spot where that afternoon Alex had waded into the water. With the smugly amused tone they reserved for the more outlandish stories, the reporter summarized the facts the police had released so far. According to an eyewitness who'd been windsurfing in the area, the boat was traveling at a high rate of speed and in an erratic manner for over a mile. Two men were thought to have been thrown overboard as the yacht rammed at least three channel markers and the seawall along the Intracoastal Waterway, and finally slammed the structure of the Rickenbacker Causeway itself.

The reporter paused to invite the eyewitness forward and the camera angle widened to include the wiry young man. His name was Tim Corash. He was shaggy-haired and wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and he seemed confused, squinting into the television lights, not sure where to make eye contact.

“Well, I mean, it looked like the captain or pilot or whatever you call it, he was trying to throw those guys off.”

“Intentionally knock them off the boat?”

The young man looked at the reporter, then back at the camera. “Well, yeah, that's how it seemed.”

“Is it possible he might simply have lost control of the vessel?”

“Maybe. But to me, it looked like he was steering that way on purpose.”

“Did you get a good look at this man who was piloting the boat?”

“An old guy. White hair, he was kind of short. He was coming right for me at one point, but you know, I was on a good tack with
a solid breeze, so I was out of the way in time. I still got a pretty good view of him. He had this crazy look like he was high on something.”

They filled the screen with the photo of Lawton Collins, a snapshot Alex had provided the TV stations late in the afternoon. It was a few years old but still caught his present-day features. Intense blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, the unruly mane of white hair. Alex had taken the snapshot one afternoon at a picnic for the Police Benevolent Association. A sunny day with lots of beer and hot dogs and children and silly games. Being among old friends all afternoon had cheered Lawton, but still when she looked at the image on the screen she saw the desolate traces of melancholy that had taken root there after Grace's death. From the day of her funeral, he'd never been the same. Grace and Lawton were childhood sweethearts—a sixty-year romance. Losing her had hastened Lawton's decline, put a dull glaze where once there'd been such sparkle. Although an array of medications and herbal remedies had slowed the process somewhat, giving him lucid stretches, still, the deterioration seemed inexorable, as each day more of his memories moved just beyond his grasp.

The reporter thanked the windsurfer, then turned back to the camera and began to summarize the highlights of the story. According to the county medical examiner, the drowning victim had sustained broken bones and other serious injuries before being thrown into the bay and may have been unconscious when he entered the water. He was identified as Arnold Peretti, a longtime Miami resident with ties to organized crime. The yacht was registered to Mr. Peretti and was dubbed
You Bet Your Ass
, no doubt a reference to Mr. Peretti's alleged association with the underworld. The second man thrown overboard remained unidentified.

When he finished, the newsman handed off to the studio and the evening anchor bounced it back with another question.

“So is Mr. Collins a suspect in these deaths?”

“Well, right now, Willie, he's just being sought for questioning and for leaving the scene of an accident. If anyone has information
concerning either the whereabouts of the fifty-five-foot Bertram sportfisherman or of Lawton Collins, you are asked to notify either Miami police or Crime Stoppers immediately. We've also been informed that Mr. Collins, who is a retired City of Miami police officer, suffers from occasional memory lapses, so he might appear to be dazed or bewildered.”

“Is he considered dangerous, Andy?”

“Willie, at this time, the police aren't using those words. But as I've reported, one man has died and one other is missing, and since Mr. Collins has not yet come forward to explain his role in the events, it appears at this moment that he is the main target of an intense police investigation. So I suppose it would be safe to say that anyone spotting Mr. Collins should proceed with extreme caution.”

They flashed Lawton's photo one more time. Shuddering with rage, Alex reached out and snapped off the TV. As usual the news guys were pumping up the volume, wringing every last drop of melodrama they could from the situation. Managing to turn a frail old man into a desperado. If Lawton happened to see the TV news, it would only drive him deeper into hiding.

Taking careful sips of air, Alex tried for a moment to ease the pounding in her skull, but it was no use. Heart working double-time, veins about to rupture.

She stood up and began to roam his bedroom, searching again for any hint of whom Lawton might have called or where he might have fled, anything at all that might get him back.

One wall was covered with photos, black-and-whites mainly, some from his war years, Lawton kneeling in profile in his uniform with a German castle in the background. There were courting pictures with Lawton and Grace standing beside various automobiles in suits and hats decades out of fashion, and another with Lawton in his cop's uniform posing at parade rest, and one of him wearing madras Bermudas and a long-billed hat, holding up a wahoo he'd caught down in the Keys with one of his old buddies. Then there was the one of Lawton and Alexandra on the beach up in the Panhandle. Alex was
ten years old, sunburned and happy, crouched behind the four-foot-high sand castle she'd labored on all summer vacation. Lawton clowned behind her with Alexandra's red pail balanced upside down on his head, while he saluted the camera with the matching shovel Alex had used to construct her fortress.

On the other wall his bookcase was full of knickknacks, old beer steins and some wood carvings he'd done in his youth, mostly fish and a few fanciful creatures of his own design. His holster from the Miami PD lay next to a couple of framed citations for excellence on the job. On a middle shelf was a collection of trinkets Alex had given him for birthdays and Christmases over the years. A brass trout rising from a brass pond she'd found in an antique store. Some bottles of fancy cologne he'd never opened. A mahogany plaque she'd made in high school shop that said
TO THE WORLD'S COOLEST DAD
. And from her one summer at camp, there was a lanyard she'd woven in shades of blue to match his police uniform. In the last few months Lawton began asking her to remind him of the stories behind the knickknacks. And she would dutifully repeat the same things over and over while he stood with a vague smile as if listening to some bedtime story he never grew tired of.

The only book on the shelves was a tattered paperback he'd discovered at Harbor House a month or two earlier and had gotten permission to bring home.
The Secrets of Houdini
. She picked it up, paged through it, examining some of the ink sketches.

Lawton had taken to studying the book for hours at a time. He'd all but abandoned television, which suited Alex just fine. Sitting in his favorite recliner in the living room with a yellow legal pad on his lap, he meticulously copied the pen-and-ink drawings from the book. Houdini's never-before-revealed methods for extricating himself from iron boxes, straitjackets, and submerged packing cases. Lawton had no interest in the card tricks or mind reading or the sleight of hand deceptions. He focused entirely on the escape techniques. As if by analyzing some of the great magician's stratagems, Lawton might dis
cover a way to wriggle free of the bondage that was tightening around his own life.

It crushed her heart to watch him practicing with such grim patience, using an old pair of handcuffs he'd carried for thirty years on the job. Locking them on his wrists, then repeatedly whacking the steel manacles against the edge of a marble bookend, trying to find the exact place on the steel cuffs that would spring open the mechanism. In a month's time Lawton had managed to duplicate Houdini's handcuff escape only once, releasing the catch with a single sharp rap. But that one success lifted his spirits so dramatically that Alexandra had given up trying to steer him away from this new fascination.

She set the book back on the shelf and walked into his bathroom. She stared at her image in the mirror, mouth tense, eyes haggard. For the hundredth time she cursed herself for being so goddamned negligent as to let a man like Arnold Peretti take charge of her dad. A man whose ties to the criminal world had obviously caught up with him. Some botched business deal, some vendetta or unpaid debt had placed her father in the line of fire. She was sure of it. And when the violence began, Lawton was panic-stricken. The tottering pedestal on which he managed to hold his fragile balance had collapsed beneath him. And now there was no way to guess what shape his terror was taking. Which direction he was headed, what logic was guiding his decisions.

A search of the nighttime waters was out of the question. At dawn the Coast Guard boats and helicopters would begin to sweep Biscayne Bay, starting from his last known location. By then, in a vessel as fast as Peretti's, Lawton could be anywhere from east of the Bahamas to midway into the Gulf. He could be as far away as Jacksonville, or holed up in one of the thousand marinas dotting the coast. Or it was equally possible that he had docked the boat somewhere in South Florida, then wandered off, searching for his way home.

With the phone in one hand, Alex touched a finger to the bristles
of his shaving brush. And as the first tears she'd allowed herself stung her eyes, the front doorbell rang.

She gasped, whirled around, bumped her shoulder against the doorway, then rushed down the hall to the front door. Wiping her eyes, she caught a glimpse of white hair through the eye-level window and tore open the door.

“Got anything to drink?” Dan Romano said. “I mean drink-drink. The real stuff. 'Cause I'm off duty.”

Beside him was a tall, dark-haired man who was giving Alexandra a pained smile, as if to apologize for Dan's lack of grace.

She leaned out the doorway and glanced behind them. No one.

“Did you find him?”

“Not yet, not yet.” Dan stepped past her into the house. “Whiskey if you've got it. But rum'll do.”

“You haven't heard anything?”

“Nothing.” Then he gestured at the other man and said, “Wingo, introduce yourself. This is Alexandra Collins.”

The tall man nodded with that same embarrassed half smile. He shut the door behind him and stepped into the foyer. He wore khaki slacks and a white polo shirt. His arms were deeply tanned.