Blackwater Sound (9 page)

“Hey, come on, Johnny. You're not like this. You're no gangster.
You're a rich kid, runs his father's fishing yacht, keeps the reels filled with line, the drag set right. That's who you are. You're my grandson, my sweet little boy. Not some thug out of the movies.”

Johnny's smile hardened. He set the rod in the holder and drew out the knife.

“You been fucking with my family, Arnold. We don't stand still for that.”

Arnold felt his legs freezing up. The time to jump was past.

“Am I right? You been fucking with the family, Arnold?”

Arnold raised a hand. “It's not like that, Johnny. I swear it's not.”

Johnny moved across the six feet of deck quicker than seemed possible. He grabbed Arnold's right wrist, and held it in his iron grip.

“Sooner or later, always comes a time,” Johnny said. “Castellano whacks Gambino, Gotti clips Castellano. It's how it happens, the baton pass, old man, one generation stepping up, taking over. That's what time it is here. So no more yapping. You'll just stand there and take your medicine, and learn to like it.”

“Stop it, son. This isn't you. This isn't who you are. You're a good kid.”

“You don't know me, Arnold.”

“Sure I do. I knew you since the day you were born. Held you in my lap, changed your fucking diapers, kid. You're a good boy. You're not like this.”

Johnny's eyes lost their focus for a moment. Working out this problem. Not the brightest bulb. Not somebody you'd send alone to do a job unless you were spread thin and there was no one else. Arnold watched as the boy's eyes cleared. And his grip tightened. He twisted Arnold's arm back against his elbow joint. The air blew out of the old man's lungs.

“You should always keep live bait aboard your boat, old man. You never know when you might need to catch your supper. Live bait, that's the number-one rule of the sea.”

Johnny wrenched Arnold around and bent his hand toward the wooden step plate on the starboard gunwale. He pressed Arnold's
palm flat to the step plate and laid the edge of the blade against the base of his little finger.

“Johnny! No.”

Lawton slowed the boat and said, “Hey, you. What's going on down there? What're you up to?”

Johnny eased his face close to Arnold's. Holding him in that arm lock.

“Johnny,” Arnold said. “You can't do this to your own flesh and blood.”

“What flesh and blood? You're not my granddad anymore. My granddad wouldn't betray his own family. You lost your union card, old man. My sister and my dad, that's my family.”

“Johnny, I'm pleading with you.”

“Sorry, Gramps. Your time's come.”

He gave Arnold a sad smile, then leaned into his work, pressing down with all his weight, and sliced through the first knuckle of Arnold's little finger.

The old man howled and dropped to his knees. A cold spike hammered through his heart and he collapsed against the transom. He was still conscious, but the daylight was thickening to a yellow haze. Blood spilled onto the deck.

“Jesus, Granddad. You got some porky digits on you.”

Johnny held up the finger and grimaced as he curled the sharp point of the hook through the meat. Then he opened the bail on the reel, whipped the rod back, and cast the plug of flesh out into the wake. He put the rod in the holder on the arm of the fighting chair and watched the finger skip across the bay.

“Now I got your full attention, Arnold, I want to know where you put it, that thing you stole from my family.”

Hunched against the transom, Arnold was trying to draw a breath. He pressed the stump of his finger against his thigh and a jolt of current ripped through him.

He opened his mouth to speak but found no air to fill his words. Johnny was letting out line, trolling with Arnold's little finger.

“And the second thing is,” Johnny said, lifting his head, looking off like he was struggling to summon up his orders, “I want to hear the name of every asshole you been sharing our private affairs with. And once I hear that, we'll get onto our main business. Baton pass time.”

 

Lawton Collins could see it wasn't right, the things happening on the deck behind him. He could see the old man getting cut. The old man with white hair and a thick neck. Blood spilling on his yellow shirt. Lawton knew the thing on the deck below was all wrong, probably illegal. But the problem was, he wasn't sure whose side he was on.

He tried to remember these men's names. That was always the place to start. The name led to the other things. That was what worked in the past. Once you remembered their names, the other things started to flow back.

There was the old man down there and there was a young one. He had long blond hair and looked like a punk. Though these days, it wasn't easy to tell. He could be a rock star or own a restaurant, be a CEO. Hell, these days everyone was trying hard as they could to look like a criminal.

The old man gripped his bloody hand. Pressing it against his shirt. His glasses had come off and were lying on the deck. Lawton kept the boat going along the channel, glancing behind him to check on the activities down below.

He thought the old man looked familiar. The other one didn't. He'd never seen him before. He was pretty sure of that. He was usually good with names. Names and faces, that was his strength. But this old guy's name was hanging out there in the mist, in the half light. A name he knew. A name he'd said a hundred times. He knew that guy, that much he was sure of. He looked at him and something felt good inside him, warm and easy.

And that's all he needed. The old guy had to be a friend. He didn't
need to know the guy's name. All he needed to know was that the guy was his friend and this punk was cutting him.

Lawton swung the wheel hard and the Bertram swerved toward a piling that marked the Intracoastal Waterway. The old man sprawled onto his back and stared up at Lawton. The kid with the bloody knife and topless sombrero rode the lurch of the boat like it hadn't happened. An old hand on deck.

Aiming the point of the bow for the piling, Lawton pressed the throttle forward, then swerved at the last second so they took a glancing blow. Still, it banged Lawton's ribs against the chrome rail and nearly knocked him off the flybridge.

Behind him the marker pole was bent cockeyed and another boat coming up the channel cut hard to starboard to get out of Lawton's path. The old man with the bloody hand was crouched in the corner, his back against the transom. He was grimacing at Lawton. The old man he recognized but couldn't name. And the punk, the one in the sombrero, had vanished. Lawton was looking back into the wake to find him, when the kid's blond hair and stupid hat appeared on the ladder. The guy was peering up at Lawton, using one hand to hold the ladder, the other gripping his knife.

Lawton spun the wheel all the way to starboard, accelerating again, heading for the seawall. Ram it hard, sink the goddamn boat if he had to. Anything to shake the bastard loose from that ladder. The baby-faced kid with a dull smile, coming up that ladder one step, then the next, then the next, till his face was even with the flybridge deck.

Lawton swung around and aimed a kick at the boy's teeth, but the boy ducked to the side in time. Lawton tried another kick and missed again. Down on the deck, the old man was on his feet. The old man's name was starting to appear out of the fog. He watched it take shape a letter at a time. And then there it was. Of course, Arnold, old Arnold Peretti. Now he remembered. The bookie. His fishing buddy from way back.

Arnold was up on his feet, clawing at the blond boy's ankles, trying to drag him down, slinging blood across the deck.

Lawton turned back to the wheel and saw the seawall coming up fast. Rocks along the bank, boulders big enough to gash a serious hole in that Bertram's hull. Lawton mashed the throttles flat, milking the last trickle of power. Roaring at the seawall. Going to shake that bastard loose. Sink the goddamn boat if he had to. Arnold had plenty enough money to buy another one. No problem there.

Lawton Collins snatched the end of the red coiled line attached to the kill switch, and snapped the free end to his belt loop. Now if he was thrown overboard, the kill switch would activate and the boat would shut down and no one would be able to get it started unless they pulled him out of the water first.

Lawton pressed hard on the throttle. That yacht was turbocharged, a hotdog of a boat, a drag racer. Tuned that way so it could fly from one fishing spot to another. They had to be doing over forty knots.

Sitting on the seawall, a young black man with a cane fishing pole lifted his head and saw the Bertram and he looked at it for a couple of seconds, then he dropped his rod and scrambled to his feet and screamed at Lawton. Then the man swung around and galloped through the tall grass of the vacant lot. Another hundred yards, that's all it was before they'd crash.

The boy in the sombrero was kicking his leg at Arnold Peretti, and he must've got Arnold in the face because Lawton saw the boy grin and the old bookie stumble backwards, lose his balance, and grab for the outriggers. He missed them by a few inches, then staggered to his left and smacked into the gunwale and tumbled headfirst over the side.

A second later the kid was on the last step of the ladder, drawing back his knife, looking up, and for the first time seeing where they were headed, how close they were to crashing. The kid cocked his knife, took aim at Lawton's back and that's when Lawton swung the wheel hard to port, slammed the gears into reverse and held on for all he was worth.

“I know this guy,” Lt. Romano said.

He peered over Alexandra Collins's shoulder as she videotaped the body, then gently raised the camera to record the alley, the overturned garbage cans, moving in on the young woman, her long blond hair tangled with candy wrappers and gummy with blood. Early thirties for the guy, while the young woman was maybe late twenties. The male was wearing khaki trousers, a blue button-down shirt. The woman's outfit was also casual but classier. Green silk blouse, designer jeans. Paying big bucks to look laid-back.

There were three bullet holes in the man's chest, two more in his forehead. Somebody making damn sure. Very damn sure.

Alexandra eased down the alley, zooming in on the man's wounds, holding there, then slowly zooming out and lifting the camera to show the narrow space between those two warehouses, a freeway for
rats. The remains of a cardboard refrigerator box lay on its side down below the fire escape stairs. An army blanket and some fast-food boxes spilling out of the opening. Someone's campsite.

Then Alexandra slid her viewfinder to the right and taped the young woman. She was on her back, staring up at the narrow slot of sky. A blue heavenly day. Her arms were flung out to her sides as if she were about to embrace her lover, lowering himself above her. She had a smile.

Alex didn't see many of those on the people she recorded. Usually it was some kind of grimace, scowling at the pain and unfairness of it all. Every once in a while she saw a flash of serenity on their lips, blessed relief as they fled this mortal plane, abandoned their hungering and impossible search for money or cocaine or love. Lots of grimaces, but hardly ever a smile.

This one was small, just a Mona Lisa hint, as if some big secret had broken into view at the moment of death. One bullet hole in her temple, a second in her left breast. Her shirt had been ripped open by the killer or some passerby, exposing the shapely contour of her bosom, the bullet hole centered perfectly in her nipple as though her killer hadn't been able to draw his aim away from that beautiful target.

But that wasn't Alexandra's concern. Speculating about motives or indulging in suspicions was for the detectives. She was merely an ID technician, a crime scene jock specializing in photography. Her only issues were with light and shadows, keeping her hands steady so she could document the stark authenticity of the moment. She didn't care what explosion of emotion put this handsome couple in this narrow alley. She didn't care how these two young people had wound up together. It was Alexandra's job to remain detached, float above the scene, a single all-seeing eye. Occupied only with the exposure settings on her thirty-five-millimeter or the Sony recorder, framing each shot, slow panning, lingering on their facial expressions, trying in her way to do justice to these people who had only Alexandra Collins to speak their last words, send their dying signals to the world. That's
how she thought of it, those final looks and gestures were like notes in bottles, quick desperate communiqués frozen on their faces and in the arrangements of their bodies and their clothes—a last message flung out into the departing tide.

Alexandra was thirty-one years old and had been doing this work for a decade. A third of the way to retirement, wearing the same cheap blue jumpsuit for eight hours every day, the same routine back at the office as she processed her film and precisely organized the photos or videotape. A job that could be grueling and soul-draining, though she couldn't imagine finding work that suited her better. Walking down these narrow alleys, or into the stifling, lurid apartments, or the spacious mansions of the grotesquely rich and freshly dead, always with the prickle of excitement, always the fresh rush, absorbing these places, these limp bodies, taking her pictures, bleak documents, graphic and obscene. For much of her eight-hour shift she did just this, circling corpses, staying vigilant, heedful of every angle, every item. The hairbrush on the dresser, the slash of lipstick on the mirror, an overturned bottle of perfume. You never knew which seemingly insignificant detail was going to pay off.

And she always took her shots quietly, with a reverential hush. The other officers chattered in the background, making their jokes, planning their after-hours drinking, but Alexandra Collins stayed quiet, always with that deep ache of awe. Recording one after another of these grim scenes.

“Yeah, yeah,” Romano said. “This is the smart-ass who's always nosing around the department, stopping people in the hall, chatting 'em up, trying to wheedle some dirt. Same fucker who wrote that piece on Karen Curtis over in vice. About her and that nineteen-year-old stud going to that sex club. You remember that, Alex, two, three years back. Got Curtis relieved of duty. Just a little friendly hanky-panky with the hot-oil and rubber-sheet crowd and bang, that's the end of her career. Busted for debauchery.”

“I remember.”

“That's him,” Romano said. “The shit apparently stuck his nose too far into something this time.”

“Charlie Harrison,” Alex said.

“Yeah, that's his name. Writes for the
Miami Weekly
.”

“Wrote,” she said, moving down the alley, getting a couple of footprints, flat-soled shoes with tiny creases, like boat shoes, made to grip slippery decks. The boat shoe killer, that's what Charlie Harrison would tag him. The yachtsman assassin, something like that, smug and self-conscious, trivializing the horror of it. One of the things that seemed to come so easily to journalists.

Alexandra would have to take the shoe impressions later, make sure none of the detectives stumbled into that area close to the side of the corrugated aluminum warehouse.

Romano squatted down beside the girl. For the last month he'd been on a diet, cutting back on his doughnuts and coffee, down to only a fifth of rum a night, although it hadn't worked worth a damn. He was still fifty pounds overweight, and his face was always flushed and the scalp showing through his thinning white hair fired up to a bright crimson at the least upward bump in his blood pressure.

“I don't recognize the hotty,” he said. He tugged her shirt back across her breast. Gruff Dan Romano, the prude. “Could be it's his mistress. Like maybe Charlie's wife is spying on him, finally catches him with the broad, and she goes ballistic, like in a literal sense. Takes them both out. Bing, bang, bong.”

“Maybe.”

“Which would make it the third one of those in the last week. Jealous rage. If I can't have you, no one can. Man, I'm getting sick of that shit. You know, Alex, my personal creed when it comes to being rejected by women—if I can't have you, then fine, to hell with you.”

Alexandra switched off the sound on the video recorder. It would be too distracting later as she was reviewing the scene to hear all this irrelevant byplay.

“They were shot somewhere else, dumped here.” She motioned at the twin set of parallel grooves in the mud where the victims' heels had dragged. One of the girl's leather sandals lay ten feet away at the opening of the alley. “You would've noticed eventually.”

Romano stood up and coughed. He reached into his breast pocket, got his pack, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, took a quick, deep drag, then immediately stubbed it out on the side of his silver Zippo. He put the dead cigarette in his jacket pocket, which was bulging with its brothers.

“Harrison is the same guy did that piece on the Gator football team. A couple years ago, maybe three. Some female alumnae sneaking into the locker room before games, sticking hundred-dollar bills down some random jockstraps. Hell, that one article got three assistant coaches fired, half their offensive line thrown off the team. Wrecked Florida's season. Put them on probation. So my guess is, our man Charlie was a guy without too many friends. A professional asshole like that, you want to know where to look for someone with a motive to kill him, you flip open the phone book, close your eyes, and put your finger on a name.”

The other detectives had arrived and were talking and smoking at the end of the alley. Billy McCabe, a young patrolman, looped the yellow crime scene tape from one gutter drainpipe to another, blocking off the far end of the alley. The white City of Miami crime scene van pulled up behind a couple of the green-and-white patrol cars, and Stanley Fitzhugh, the other ID tech working the day shift, got out, followed by their new crime scene trainee, a young black woman named Lisa Roberts.

“Reinforcements,” Alex said.

Romano lit another cigarette, took a quick hit, then stubbed it out on the Zippo. He went through close to three packs a day like that. Dan's way of cutting back. He liked to call it “going warm turkey.”

“Maybe I'm crazy,” he said, “but sometimes I find myself longing for the bad old days. Cocaine cowboys running amok, Marielito
ex-cons killing each other off. Five homicides before midnight, running our asses all over town fast as we could just to stay even. Stretched so thin, Christ, we were in a hyper-drive the entire shift. All that
café Cubano
, all that adrenaline. Now look at us, we got our feet up on the desk half the day, we finally get out to a scene and we got so many extra personnel we're walking all over each other.”

“That's sick, Dan.”

“It is?”

“Nostalgic for a higher murder rate? Yeah, I think we could call that an unhealthy view.”

Dan rubbed his chin and took a meditative look up at the sky, as if struggling to see the error of his ways. She could see some smart-ass remark forming on his lips when his cell phone squawked. He glanced back at Alex and shrugged. “Hey, I'm just saying the job used to be more stimulating when those idiots were shooting up the town. Now it's all this pathetic back-alley shit. Boyfriends shooting girlfriends. The glamour days are long gone.”

He scowled at the dead couple, then plucked the phone out of the leather holster on his belt, listened for a second or two, then said, “Yeah, yeah, I got it. Northeast side of Rickenbacker Causeway. Yeah, yeah, we're rolling.”

He clicked off, put the cell phone away, and shook his head at Alex.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “Murder rate just took a bump.”

“One dead, maybe more. They're waiting for us before they haul the body out of the bay.”

Alex sighed, lifted her video camera and switched it on, and took a last look through the lens at the young woman with the bullet through her breast, running the camera up and down her body, then panning carefully left and right.

“Floaters,” Dan said. “Jesus, I hate floaters.”

“New or old?”

“Fresh,” he said. “Some kind of boating accident.”

Alex lingered on Charlie Harrison's scowling face. A bitterly impatient look, as if he'd just gotten the juiciest scoop of his career and now was forced to deal with this annoying interruption before he could rush it into print.

“You about through?”

She switched off the video recorder and capped the lens.

“Sure,” she said. “Let me brief Fitzhugh, and I'll follow you over there.”

Dan fingered his pack of Marlboros, debating another quick hit.

“Hey,” he said. “Wasn't your dad going out on a boat today?”

Alex raised her eyes and studied Romano for several seconds.

“You had to say that, didn't you? You had to go and say that.”

 

The body was twenty yards offshore of Rickenbacker Causeway. A Canadian family picnicking in the shade of a coconut palm had spotted it and called police. Now the young Canadian father was taking snapshots, angling around behind the cops to get a better view of the body rising and falling in the light chop. His two blond daughters and blond wife stayed on their picnic blanket, staring off at the distant city skyline.

Dan Romano had gone down to the shoreline to talk to the cops while Alexandra stayed in her van to use her cell phone. She dialed her dad's number twice more, but got only the “customer is unavailable” message. She snapped the phone shut and sat there a moment longer, looking out at the glare of blue water. Either Lawton had switched off his phone or he and Arnold were out in the Gulf Stream by now, beyond cell range. That had to be it. Had to be.

Nine days out of ten at this hour Lawton Collins could be found at Harbor House, an adult care facility out in Kendall. Basket weaving, a rousing game of checkers, a light aerobic workout, a fairly nutritious lunch followed by a nap. The staff-to-client ratio was good,
the facility was clean, and they didn't allow the patrons to languish in front of the television all day. Lawton enjoyed the place, mainly because he was the darling of half a dozen different widows who vied for his attention with a constant onslaught of cookies and pies. Much to Alexandra's relief, every morning he showered and shaved, doused himself with Aqua Velva, and got dressed without any prompting.

For a couple of years now Lawton had been taking a day off from Harbor House twice a month for an excursion with Arnold Peretti. Fishing mostly, or sometimes just cruising around the bay, having a couple of beers, reminiscing. Now and then Arnold drove them up to Gulfstream to bet the daily double. Arnold and Lawton had been friends since before Alex was born, and he was one of only a few of her father's buddies who hadn't deserted him when he started his decline. The fact that Arnold Peretti had spent his entire professional life as a bookie only mildly disturbed Alex. His friendship with Lawton had given her dad a boost that Alexandra, as hard as she tried, hadn't been able to accomplish.

Alex zipped the phone back in her purse and got out of the van. She unloaded the video camera from the rear and hoisted it on her shoulder and began to tape the scene as she slogged through the thick sand down to the shoreline. A sweep from south to north to place the scene in context, from the arching Rickenbacker Causeway, to the skyscrapers of downtown Miami, and finally the rainbow-tinted high-rise condos along Brickell. As Alexandra worked forward to the water's edge, the cops made way for her. She taped the two Miami PD divers in their wetsuits wading into the shallow water. No tanks, no masks, no flippers, sloshing out to the waist-deep water where the body floated face down. She couldn't tell much about how he was dressed, but she saw he had white hair.