PILATE’S
KEY
Book Two in the John Pilate Mystery Series
J. ALEXANDER GREENWOOD
PILATE’S KEY
Book Two in the John Pilate Mystery Series
J. ALEXANDER GREENWOOD
Original Copyright © 2011 by J. Alexander Greenwood
Revised third edition Copyright © 2019 Caroline Street Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1797797212
All rights reserved. Published by Caroline Street Press. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Books by J. Alexander Greenwood
Pilate's Cross
Pilate's Cross: The Audiobook
Pilate's Key
Pilate's Ghost
Pilate's Blood
Pilate's 7
Pilate's Rose
Big Cabin & Dispatches from the West
(with Robert E. Trevathan)
Non-Fiction
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Dedicated to my longstanding (and long-suffering!) friends:
Brian Hutton, Mike Hulsey, and Scott Bartley.
In Memory of
Reverend Jeff Hamilton
A Fighter for Justice and Equality
1934-2019
CHAPTER ONE
A lifeless eyeball stared at Juan from the deck of the sloop. Juan looked away from the dead man’s face and focused on securing three diving belts to Yves Marchand’s nude body. Juan’s back ached, and he thought perhaps he had pulled a muscle tussling below decks with the Frenchman.
Rising to his feet, he groaned. The sloop deck pitched lightly in the calm waters off Duggan’s Key, but he still felt sick. Juan vomited, covering the mutely outraged body of Marchand with his partially digested lunch.
“Sorry, jefe,” Juan said. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and positioned himself between the cabin wall and Marchand. He dug his right heel into Marchand’s stiff right side and pushed. The body rocked up on its side until the pitching of the deck forced it to fall back. I’ll have to use my hands.
He crouched and put one hand on Marchand’s hip and another on his shoulder. He again felt the urge to retch when he glanced at the vacuous eye. The left eye was completely red; the socket was crushed by the blows from the ridiculous Trafalgar Victory Mallet that Juan had removed from the captain’s cabin wall just before Marchand came aboard.
A seagull called overhead. Juan trembled, inhaled, and pushed. Stiff with rigor mortis, Marchand’s body rode up on its side again. Only about three feet to the rail, Juan thought. He grunted and pushed again. Marchand’s body slid to the edge of the deck this time, his right side hanging overboard like a scarecrow improbably lost at sea. The head lolled, the face turned to Juan, and the right eye was impassive.
He grunted, scrubbed his face with the crook of his elbow, and dropped onto his butt. He put both feet on Marchand’s torso and pushed. The last thing he saw before the body splashed into the water was that horrible vacant right eye.
Juan made the sign of the cross and stumbled below deck.
In Marchand’s cabin, he found a bottle of cognac and drank a deep swig. The bare spot on the wall where the commemorative mallet had once hung seemed as obvious as a gaping hole in the hull.
“En la oscuridad, tu seras una luz para mi, oh protector de mi alma,” he said under his breath.
He spread out a map of the Keys on the captain’s table. A comical red X marked a spot north of Duggan’s Key, a lifeless sliver of sand about a mile long and a half-mile wide, lurking in obscurity several miles from the fishing and tourist-ridden sea-lanes. Even so, it would take some time to find what Marchand had hidden.
Time was something he didn’t have in abundance. Double-crossing Marchand had given him the upper hand, but now he had the burden of getting a crew together to find what Marchand had buried before the Bahamian did. Juan drank more cognac, then went to the head and washed his hands.
CHAPTER TWO
John Pilate peeled the length of flaking skin off his shoulder and held it up to the light. In his wafer-thin skin, he saw little interconnected islands, much like the outlines of the submerged coral reefs he’d observed from the plane on his descent into Key West. His shoulders stung, for he was unused to the blistering near-equatorial sun of America’s southernmost island; he had been careless with the sunscreen when he’d taken his first few drunken siestas on the beach at Zachary Taylor National Park.
He opened his fingers; the dead skin caught the wind like an errant sail and floated over the second-story deck rail of his friend Trevathan’s house. His eyes shifted from the space his skin occupied in midair to the ocean in the distance. Masts of ships in the harbor poked up to deck level like cattails on a riverbank. A biplane hummed overhead, towing a sign that read Plane Rides $75.
Pilate looked away from the mid-afternoon scene and back at the laptop computer on the desk. The cursor blinked, resting at the end of the same paragraph he’d rewritten eight times. He removed his new reading glasses (he had capitulated to that symptom of growing older when he realized he couldn’t read the computer screen without getting a headache from squinting) and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing hard to rid himself of the hangover.
He groaned and opened his eyes comically wide, as if he was willing them to pop out of their sockets, in an effort to wake up and focus on the task.
The task. He winced as if he had crunched ice on an abscessed tooth. The task at hand involved reliving the most traumatic events of his life, unless you include his divorce from Samantha. No, he reconsidered. Nearly getting killed after stumbling into a fifty-year-old mystery, in which he ended up killing a man in self-defense, was more traumatic than Sam walking out—just more traumatic though.
The task. It also involved a deadline and a hefty advance that he would have to return if he didn’t turn in the book on time. Pilate couldn’t believe he had been commissioned to write a book about the murders, intrigue, and bizarre happenings at the bucolic little Midwestern college town of Cross. Nevertheless, who was he to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth?
He had battled the machinations of the turgid Jack Lindstrom and won. He had beaten the life-sized chess game of manipulative sociopath Derek Krall. He had brought a friend to his senses and to justice. He had earned the respect and help of his boss, Trevathan. In fact, he was staying in Trevathan’s house, and the old man would meet him there for fishing and a little “decompression time” in just a few weeks.
Pilate had also put his doppelganger, the caustic alter-ego Simon, in a bottle—a medicine bottle. At that point, the taunting imaginary “friend” had disappeared into the ether.
And then there was Kate, whom he had fallen in love with. Kate was a beautiful single mother, and for years, she’d managed to keep her he
art out of sight. Back in Cross Township, Pilate literally wouldn’t have survived without her. More important than her beauty and toughness, though, was her deep understanding of him—and being understanding is key when it comes to loving John Pilate.
Key. As in Key West, the place Pilate chose to write the book about the mystery of Cross College. He had been there only once before with his ex-wife Samantha, when they kipped in Key West for a few days before they married. Poor as church mice, they ate sparingly to leave room in their meager budget for alcohol and nights on the town. They stayed in a retro-looking motel called The Blue Marlin.
Pilate loved Key West. He devoured the seedy, shopworn mysteriousness of its structures. He adored the curious mixture of New Orleans, Miami Beach, and Savannah. The locals were stories unto themselves: Most were refugees, running from something that haunted them until there was no land left. When their flight ended at the southernmost tip of the United States, the only way they could continue would have been to swim in the ocean or a bottle.
Pilate wondered if he was there to write a book in peace or if he, too, was running to the end of the land, escaping the ghosts that haunted him.
Shit. Ghosts. Hell with ghosts. I have Kate.
Like some kind of love-stricken teenage girl with an empty journal page beckoning her, Pilate had written a pathetic list of pros and cons about Kate:
Kate wants to be with me. Pro. She wants to make love with me. Pro. And share her life and home. Pro…
Kate also wants to get married. (Predictably) con.
He needed time to think, he told her, to write the book, to get his head together and gain perspective. Though the shotgun wounds from his battle with Ollie Olafson had mostly healed, his nerves had not.
Sure, Pilate was back on the meds, and his imaginary pal Simon was banished to a padded prison constructed of antidepressants, but it was all happening so damn fast—too damn fast. It had been only six weeks since the events that nearly killed him, and by God, he needed some time to get himself right in the head.
His visits with Dr. Sandburg in Key West had been helpful. The good doctor was a friend of a friend of Trevathan’s, so Pilate managed to get in to see him a few times to discuss his “issues.” Trevathan figured Pilate had post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that wasn’t entirely out of the question.
Pilate fingered a cheap black cigarette lighter and reluctantly lit a Marlboro 25. He planned to quit after the book was finished. He drummed his fingers on the small deck near the keyboard of the laptop and glanced at the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. His bathing suit hung from the bathroom showerhead, where he’d left it to dry after yesterday’s beach outing. Glancing at it, Pilate seriously considered chucking the grueling writing for the day in exchange for another refreshing, salty dip in the sea. Maybe Smathers Beach this time.
He decided the beaches mostly sucked where he was. Rumor had it that the sand on Key West beaches was brought in on barges from the Caribbean. The snorkeling was average and relatively cool this time of year; but compared to Cross College’s cold temperatures and occasional bouts of snow, eighty-one degrees was positively balmy.
Yeah, I’ll go out to Smathers. It was farther away from the main drag of Duval Street, closer to the airport, and a little less inundated with tourists.
He inhaled the cigarette smoke again. The laptop screensaver popped on, a black and white photo of Kate and her daughter Kara, taken a few weeks before he met them. Kate’s face smiled, but her eyes didn’t; instead, what lingered there was the loss of her husband.
That changed in the weeks after the Cross College incident. Kate’s eyes smiled when she traded gazes with Pilate. He’d seen those smiling eyes flicker a week earlier, when he told her he needed time alone.
“I understand, John,” she said. “It makes sense.”
He didn’t believe her. When they kissed goodbye, there was something missing—or if not missing, at least withdrawn. Yes, Kate had taken her heart back. No stranger to loss, she wouldn’t aid and abet more theft.
“I’ll be back,” Pilate said, his hand in hers.
“I know,” she said, squeezing his hand, then gently taking it away and folding her arms. “Don’t be gone too long.” Her eyes were dark and wet.
He nodded, threw his bag in the car, and drove down the snowy road to the airport 100 miles away.
A blast from a boat horn in the harbor snapped him back to today.
Pilate hit the space bar, and the photo disappeared from his screen, temporarily taking the memories right along with it.
He started a new paragraph.
“So I was four, and a neighbor had caught something in a trap,” Pilate said, sitting comfortably back on a leather sofa, so soft he thought he would fall asleep if left unattended. “The neighbor had thrown the trap—creature included—outside his fence. Why, I have no idea.”
“Go on,” the man said, his eyes crinkled in amusement and curiosity while he made notes on a small pad atop a lap desk.
“Well, I’m four years old, right? I don’t know shit from shinola, as my late grandpa would say,” Pilate said, his hands clasped together in his lap. His fingers were tightly intertwined, turning white at the knuckles. “So I toddled over to the creature and see that it’s still moving a little, and I can distinctly remember saying—”
“What a dumb kid am I!” a voice rang in Pilate’s head. He swatted it away mentally.
“You were saying?” coaxed Dr. Sandburg. “What did four-year-old John say?”
“Johnny. I said, ‘Oh what a cute little bird,’” Pilate said, looking away from Sandburg and his intimidating psychiatrist’s notes. Pilate’s voice softened. “I thought it was a bird.”
“In a trap?”
“Yes. It was caught in a large varmint trap,” Pilate said.
“But it wasn’t a bird?”
“No. Being the dumb kid I was, I didn’t find out till I reached down to pet it,” Pilate said. “It bit me…hard. It even drew blood, and oh, how I screamed!”
“Oh my,” Sandburg said, putting his pen down on his lap desk. “What was it?”
“A rat,” Pilate said. “I had put out my little hand to comfort a rat that I thought was a bird, and the thing bit me. My grandpa came out and grabbed the rat and shook it off my hand because its tooth was stuck in my little middle finger.” Pilate held up his middle finger to the window in a casually intentional “fuck you” gesture.
“What do you think of that experience?”
“Well, that wasn’t all of it,” Pilate said, putting his middle finger down and clasping his sweaty hands together again.
“Go on.”
“They rushed me to the hospital. Why do they say that, Doc? Rushed? I mean, in an emergency, do you ever saunter to the hospital? Take your time?”
Sandburg looked at Pilate indulgently. “You have a point.” He smiled.
“Well, they get me to the hospital, and my mom and Grandpa are freaking out. Well, Mom mostly, but who could blame her? Dad’s at work. So they say I have to take rabies shots, in the belly.”
“Ouch,” Sandburg said, his eyes widening.
“Tell me about it,” Pilate said. “I don’t remember much about it and could be confabulating a lot of this, but the story goes that I passed out as soon as they started the first series. Turns out I had a reaction to the shots. I wasn’t able to tolerate the rabies vaccines, so if I indeed had been bitten by a rabid rat, I was going to be a dead little boy.”
“Terrible,” he said.
“All because I wanted to comfort an injured creature,” Pilate said. “Do you think that’s affected the way I view people?”
“Hmm. What do you think?” he asked, arching an eyebrow and taking up his pen again.
“I think I learned right then and there that when you stick your hand out to help, you’re likely going to draw back a bloody stump, so to speak.”
“Tough lesson to learn at age four,” Sandburg said.
“Yeah
,” Pilate said, his eyes moist.
The doctor held up a box of Kleenex. “Here ya go.”
Pilate sniffled and took a couple of tissues. “I don’t know why it upsets me so much,” he said. “I guess it’s because I haven’t really talked to anybody about it before.”
“What upsets you about it?”
“I don’t know,” Pilate said.
“Is it because you learned a tough lesson?”
Pilate blew his nose and looked at his hands a moment. “I think what bothers me most is thinking about that little boy.”
“You?”
“Right. Here’s this sweet little guy, with big brown eyes, a loving and trustworthy kid, and this happens and just ruins it for him. That bothers me,” Pilate said.
“It’s a pretty heavy thing to say this single event changed you completely,” he said. “Could it be that it was part of a series of events or incidents that hurt that little boy, and this one is merely the touchstone for those negative things?”
“Not sure what you mean,” Pilate said, looking up at the doctor’s bald head and the collection of autographed baseballs on the shelf behind him. “Touchstone?”
“Well, is it legitimate to consider that perhaps you had some stuff in your childhood that caused you to be who you are?”
“I thought you were Jungian?”
“Mostly, but that doesn’t mean I completely rule out childhood trauma. There could be something here,” he said. “You tell me you have an ‘imaginary friend’ who has been around at times of stress in your life. You tell me he’s often negative, though that negativity is of comfort sometimes. You’ve seen three different psychiatrists, and all have said you’re not schizophrenic, bipolar, or mentally ill, other than your bouts with clinical depression and the more routine dysthymia, something you’ve probably lived with your entire life, even unknowingly.”
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