Shark River (38 page)

Edgar Cordero was a few inches shorter than me. He had a pocked face beneath carefully sculpted hair. He stood close enough that I could smell the cologne he wore and the metallic stink of nicotine. He stood there, face up, his eyes boring into mine as if we were two boxers at a weigh-in, and then he touched the knife to my cheek . . . then placed the blade on the top of my left ear. He was probably expecting me to flinch, but I didn’t flinch because I knew there was no escaping what he was going to do.

I heard him say, “You attacked my son from behind, like a dog, and now he will never walk again.”

Feeling the strange and eerie calm of total resignation, I replied, “Sometimes the only way to catch a coward is from behind.”

I watched the man’s face go momentarily blank . . . then contort with rage as, behind him, Ransom yelled, “Don’t you hurt my brother!” and she lunged toward me . . . me feeling a searing pain in my ear as Edgar began to saw with the knife . . . and then I heard one booming gunshot... then a second gunshot as Ransom dropped to the sand.

Then, oddly and without reason, Cordero was on the ground near her, screaming, swearing in Spanish and holding his neck, which was gushing blood. Pumpkin-head was down, too. Motionless. He’d flung the Uzi far from him before burying his face in black sand.

What the hell had happened?

Goatee was suddenly in front of me, waving the pistol in my direction as he backed away toward the boats, yelling in Spanish, “What is doing this? Who is
there
?” but then he spoke no more as his head seemed to vaporize in a scarlet mist, his legs managing two more steps before his body collapsed near the water.

A microsecond later, I heard a third booming gunshot, the sound arriving long after the heavy grain cartridge, and I turned just in time to see a puff of smoke drift out of a royal palm canopy that had to be a half mile away.

“Doc, she’s bleeding!” Tomlinson was on his feet, kneeling over Ransom, who had her face covered with her hands. There was lots of blood there and she wasn’t moving.

I rushed to help, feeling a surreal and shuddering grief, but then she did move as Tomlinson lifted her, and Ransom stood shakily, hand still holding her bleeding nose. She was wide-eyed, trembling with shock, looking at Cordero who was now silent, eyes empty, staring at the sky, dead. Then she considered the other two faceless corpses before she touched fingers to her sacred beads and whispered, “God strike them dead, just like I pray for Him to do. It happened, my brother, it really happened. Don’t be telling me no more about what ain’t magic!”

In the distance, I could see a tiny figure dressed in ninja black climbing down the trunk of the palm. He had to be using climbing hooks and a belt from the way he moved. He was descending pretty fast.

I turned and said to Tomlinson, “Get in their boat and go.
Now.
They made you abandon the boat you rented, right?”

Not looking at me, looking at the dead men, he was shaking his head. “No, they got in our boat. Ours was a little bigger and seemed newer, so after they stopped us, they climbed aboard. I didn’t know who the hell they were.”

I said, “Perfect. Then get out of here. Fast! Go straight to the marina, get in the truck and drive back to Sanibel. And Ransom?” When she turned to me, I touched my hands to her shoulders and I hugged her close, patting her back, the only brotherly comfort I could offer. I whispered into her ear, “Promise me something. Don’t say a word to anyone about what happened here. Ever. Will you promise?”

The frightened and bewildered expression on her face changed slowly to resolve. It was good to see, a verification of something strong and important. She said to me, “Not talkin’ about this is what God already telling me to do.”

I helped them get the boat off the beach, aware that the figure dressed in black was getting closer, ever closer. I kept telling them they had to hurry. I meant it. If they saw him, found out who it was, he would have to kill them. That’s just the way it worked.

When Tomlinson and Ransom were safe, almost to the horizon, I turned and faced a man my size; a man in black nylon pants and a Navy watch sweater exactly like my own; a man wearing a black ski mask and carrying a Remington 700 sniper rifle with a cannon-sized Star-Tron Mark scope that I knew all too well.

“They’re gone?”

I told him, “Yeah.”

He looked at the three corpses before he looked at me. “I had to rush the first shot. Your long-haired pal was in my line of fire. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted to pop him, too. But why should I do your work for you?”

I said, “Nope, no way, you’re wrong. It’s no one’s job anymore. We have an agreement.” When he didn’t respond, I added, “Remember?”

He was standing over Edgar Cordero. I listened to him tell me that he was sorry he’d had to use me as bait, but it was the only way to isolate the Colombian, get him on neutral turf, before he said, “Throat shot.”

I felt like knocking the man on his ass, he’d cut it so close. Not that I knew he’d be there. I didn’t. Then I watched him strip off his mask and hold out his hand to me as he said, “You’re only the third or fourth Negotiator I’ve met. It’s an honor.”

I shook his hand, so much adrenaline in me that I was beginning to feel weak. I said, “You mean the third or fourth outside your own teammates, of course.”

He smiled. Said, “Very insightful,” as he nudged Cordero’s corpse with the toe of his worn jungle boot. “This sick bastard would’ve found a way to kill Lindsey. It’s the way he was. It’s what he did. He’d gotten her scent and he hated me. Kill your enemy’s children, his signature. He’d’ve never quit.”

Then Hal Harrington reached into his pocket and handed me a handkerchief. “That’s a nasty little cut you’ve got there on your ear.”

I began to daub blood from the side of my face as he added, “The kind of guys my daughter usually dates, they’ve got tattoos and piercings, not scars.”

 

 

 

W
e buried the three of them in the sand behind the dune where Harrington had hidden his rubber inflatable boat. We used our entrenching tools and buried the dead men deep. We spoke little, said less. I wanted no words nor exchange of information to be associated with the memory of dragging corpses and shoveling sand onto them.

Compartmentalization—something I’m very good at. Harrington had to be pretty good at it, too, and for obvious reasons.

Then we had our own private little ceremony. I tossed driftwood on the fire until it blazed. Got a couple of beers off the ice. We had a good talk, an enlightening talk. Discussed things and events that we both knew we could never discuss again. Ever.

At one point, he said to me, “What I’m seriously considering doing is going back to my home state and running for political office. The way this nation’s going, we need to get involved and stay involved.”

I told him that I found the idea of any of us going into politics unlikely.

He said to me, “Are you kidding? You didn’t know? A few years back, one of us ran for a governorship and won. We’re already into politics.”

I said, “Him?” and then a name.

Harrington was nodding. “Exactly.”

I stood there and listened to him laugh as he told me that he thought a cell phone that played the theme from
The Lone Ranger
was a nice touch. He laughed some more when he told me how he’d set up Cordero, fed him information about me, where I was, where I’d be. Charged him top dollar, too, as an anonymous informant. Made him send cash money to a post office box in Cartagena, and Cordero had paid it gladly, excited to be getting such excellent and dependable intelligence.

Then Harrington and I exchanged files. From a plastic sack, from my skiff, I handed him a thick folder labeled OPERATION PHOENIX, and another with the words DIRECCION: BLANCA MANAGUA written on the cover in red felt-tip pen.

I watched him leaf through all those papers before dropping them into the fire.

I took the book-sized dossier on me, the only one in existence—according to Harrington, anyway—and tossed it into the fire. I watched the pages burn and curl, the ink producing colors different from those in the flames from the driftwood; colors not so bright or pure.

Then I said to him, “What about Tomlinson? We
do
have an agreement.”

From his backpack, Harrington handed me a sheaf of legal-size paper. Said, “This exonerates him. Just like you asked. It’s based on the actual investigative report on the bombing at Coronado, but I had a few things changed here and there. It lays the blame on an entirely different group. Not Tomlinson’s. According to this, he had absolutely nothing to do with it. Legally and officially.”

As I read through the documents, Harrington added, “But he
is
guilty, you know. He probably played more of a role than either one of us realizes. You’re the one who decided to let him live—why not let him live with the truth? Johnny Garvin was one of us, for Christ’s sake. He was a friend of yours.”

I neatened the papers with my hands before sliding them into my own backpack. I looked out at the Gulf: it was a little breezy but not bad. It’d be a nice run back to Everglades. “It was a long time ago and he’s suffered enough,” I told Harrington. “You keep forgetting something. Tomlinson’s my friend, too.”

 

 

 

O
n a sleepy, summer-hot March afternoon, I trundled the pretty lady in her lacy red thong bikini around a forgotten curve of beach on Fernandez Bay, Cat Island, in the outer Bahamas. There, amid the sound of gulls and wind, I spread blankets in the sun while she hunted around for a shady place to stow our picnic lunch and cooler full of Kalik beer.

The sky was Bahamian turquoise. The bay silver. Cliffs behind us, copper.

Then I watched as she reached into her oversized straw purse, handed me a little brown bottle, shook her hair down long and blond, and she demanded of me, “Oil, you big lummox. I need sunscreen on all the hard-to-reach spots. But just the public places, not the private. We’ve promised to be on our best behavior, and so far, so good.”

“I know, I know,” I said, “and it hasn’t been easy.”

“Think of it as preventative medicine. Like you’re a doctor. The oil, I’m talking about. I’ve been in snow country, remember, and neither of us wants me too burned to tour the island with your sister’s junkanoo band tonight.”

I said, “She’s not my sister,” as I watched the lady arch her back, hand searching up between her own shoulder blades, and then her bikini top made an elastic popping noise . . . and hung there momentarily before it dropped at my feet.

I was shaking my head. “Wait a minute. That’s not fair. It really isn’t. Plus, if someone comes around those rocks and sees us, they’re going to get entirely the wrong idea.”

“Sees us?” The woman laughed as she knelt, then made a purring feels-good sound as she lay belly-down on the blanket. “Who’s gonna see us? Surely, you don’t mean Tomlinson and Ransom. You didn’t hear the noises coming from their cabana when we left? It was the same noise they were making all night long. Every time I woke up, anyway. They’re going to be too tired to walk the beach. Probably too
sore
to walk the beach.”

Two weeks earlier, back at Dinkin’s Bay, I’d given Tomlinson the investigator’s report exonerating him from the Coronado bombing. Told him it had been provided to me by friends who had to remain anonymous. As he read it, and he began to weep, I’d turned and walked away.

I told the lady now, “I think he’s making up for lost time. Trying his best, anyway.”

“Or celebrating,” she said. “I don’t blame them, either. A trip like this, they’ve got every reason to celebrate.”

That was uncontestably true.

 

 

The note Tuck wrote to me, the one in the bottle, ink on leather, read:

The directions that followed were detailed.

Even so, our first few days on Cat Island had not been without difficulties. The first thing I had to deal with was convincing Ransom that we needed to make peace with Izzy and Clare.

“Them two Rastamonsters?” she’d sputtered, “I’d sooner befriend a couple poison snakes. They always treat me so dirty, man. Call me a fat cow and worse before I decided to take my own body back.”

Forgiveness, I told her—talk to Tomlinson about the importance of forgiveness. Plus, there was another consideration, too: If she didn’t make up with Izzy and Clare, they could swear out papers and have the magistrate arrest her.