“Close enough,” Pilate said.
“What?”
“Nothing. So anyway, did you hear the shot?”
“No, but the next-door neighbors did, the Harrels,” she said. “They weren’t sure what it was at first. Finally called police after they knocked on Jack’s door and nobody answered.”
“Did they go over to check right after?” Pilate asked.
Gina shook her head. “No. They called first, but when no one answered the phone, they put some clothes on, ran over there, and knocked a few minutes later.”
“So it was a good fifteen minutes or so before they checked?” Pilate said, looking intently at Gina.
“Well…” She looked uncomfortable, as if she was mulling her answer over very carefully before speaking it. “I guess so. They called the police when nobody answered. They left town this morning—too much to deal with.”
“Hell yeah,” Taters said.
“Anyway, Jack’s wife will have to settle all this out, I guess,” Gina said, “but we haven’t seen her, the poor thing.”
“Right,” Pilate said.
“Right,” Taters repeated. “Well, we better shove off, Pete. Gina came over here to let me know the property managers will call the cops if we don’t get out of here, since we don’t own the place.”
“Of course,” Pilate said. “Thank you, Gina.” Pilate hopped on the boat as Taters untied the bowline. “Oh, Gina? One more thing…”
She looked at Pilate expectantly.
“Has anyone seen the loud drunk guy or the dingy since this happened?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” she said. “George and some of our neighbors were talking about it, wondering who the guy was. He didn’t look like anybody we know, and we’ve never seen that dingy before or since either.”
“Thanks again, Gina,” he said. “Sorry if we upset you.”
“No problem,” she said. “Thanks for the beer, and I’m sorry I had to be the one to break the news to you about your friend Jack.”
Pilate nodded with gratitude, and Taters gave a saluting gesture as he maneuvered the TenFortyEZ away from the dock and back into the bay.
“Peter?” Pilate asked.
“Best I could come up with at the time,” Taters said, gunning the V8s and heading for open water. “Coulda used Dick, ya know.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Pilate said.
“Anyhoo, did you get whatever it was you were looking for?”
“Yes and no,” Pilate said, “but I will say this. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have Jack shit.”
“Jack shit is a commodity that this world has in entirely too much abundance. That’s the Taters Malley Theory on that,” he said. “You’re welcome. And what do you mean by ‘yes and no’?”
“Well, I came here for some answers, but I’m leaving with more questions,” Pilate explained.
Without looking away from the horizon, Taters held out a Modelo for Pilate.
“Now, you wanna fill me in on what this whole thing is about?”
Pilate took the beer and drank half of it down in nearly one gulp before saying another word.
CHAPTER TEN
After nearly four hours, the lights of Key West were in view.
“Thar she blows!” Taters said.
Pilate nodded.
“Another twenty or so, and we’ll throttle down a bit and bring her in,” he said, absentmindedly running a hand across his scruffy chin, then throwing his straw hat on the seat cushion beside him.
“Okay,” Pilate said.
“I have a feeling your book just got a little more interesting, didn’t it?”
“You could say that,” he said.
“Not only do you survive all kinds of nefarious bullshit in the smallest town in the world,” Taters said, “but then you come here to write a book about it and find out one of the major players in the game offed himself just 250 miles north. That about cover it?”
“Almost,” Pilate said.
“Easy, John,” Simon said. “The whole world doesn’t need to know what you’re thinking or what you’re up to.”
“It all sounds pretty damn suspicious, if you ask me,” Taters said.
“How so?”
Taters turned from the wheel, his face a mass of exasperation in the glow of the instrument panel. “Come on, Pilate. Doesn’t that suicide look the least bit fishy to you?”
Pilate shrugged. He felt queasy—maybe a little seasick, but it could have been something else. “I did some reading online once about something called the ‘suicide impulse.’ An academic study examined attempted suicides in a major American city, and the researchers found that in about a quarter of those who tried it, the time between making the decision to kill themselves and actually attempting it was something like five minutes or less. It was an impulse, and a bridge or whatever was there as a convenient way to go. Maybe Lindstrom had a suicide impulse and couldn’t get through those five minutes.”
“Even you don’t sound convinced by your own goddamn words. Come on! The guy shows up out on bail, his reputation in tatters, and most likely looking at serious jail time. He’s usually Captain Ego/Mr. Gregarious, but this time, he’s some kind of recluse, spending all his time by himself, except to step out and help a drunk guy out of his dingy? Gimme a break.”
“So what are you saying?” Pilate said.
“Hey, I’m just a washed-up CPA-turned-sea captain, but I’m thinking this guy may not be dead. Besides, if his suicide was an impulse, like those coats in the research lab would have you believe, why did it look so carefully planned? A shotgun ain’t the same thing as a bridge. I think he might have made a friend nobody knew about, and if he did, I’m pretty sure that friend is now missing a face.”
“You think Jack Lindstrom is still alive.” Pilate said, more of a statement than a question.
“You think Jack Lindstrom is still alive?” Trevathan practically shouted over the phone.
“I think it’s a real possibility,” Pilate said.
“John, you need to calm down,” Trevathan said. “That would be just…well, just too bizarre and ridiculous.”
“I know, but think about it,” Pilate said. “He has the brains, the tenacity, the cunning—”
“Did you really just say ‘cunning’? My God, John! This isn’t television,” Trevathan said, the weariness in his voice penetrating the phone. “These kinds of things just don’t happen. As devious as he was, he just didn’t have the horses for a thing like that.”
Pilate breathed heavily in and out for a moment before answering. “Okay, yeah. Maybe you’re right. It does sound crazy, now that I think about it.” Pilate spun the pink poker chip on its edge on the coffee table before him.
“John, just write the book, submit it to the publisher, and make your money,” Trevathan said by way of advice. “Hell, I thought your biggest mental problem would be ‘going bamboo’, but you’re sitting up there wringing mystery juice out of a bar rag. I’ll be up there in a few weeks, along with Kate and Kara. We’ll get out on my boat. Boats are fun and a great way to clear your head. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, real fun.”
Pilate turned the poker chip over in his hands for moment then took it out to look at it again. It was clay, like most casino chips, approximately three centimeters in diameter and three-tenths of a centimeter thick, pink, with a label pasted in the center that read PARADISE ISLAND CASINO BAHAMAS $2.50. Pilate flipped the chip like a coin, though there was no use calling it because it had no heads or tails, per se; it was the same on both sides.
“Hmm…” Simon said. “Imagine that.”
“What?” Pilate said aloud. He was alone, so his conversations with his doppelganger wouldn’t be heard by anyone but the rat lingering between his ears.
“Well, it could be said that you and I are different sides of the same coin,” Simon mused.
“Don’t remind me,” Pilate said, leaning back on Trevathan’s worn-out leather sofa and propping his feet on
the coffee table.
“But there is something different about us.”
“Yeah, yeah. For instance, I’m real and you’re decidedly not,” Pilate said, absently palming the chip, then making it dance across the knuckles of his right hand.
“You really haven’t changed much, have you, John?” Simon said, sighing.
“You know, the interesting part is that I don’t see you anymore,” Pilate said. “I only hear you. I’m not sure if that means I’m getting better and you’re on your way out of my life or—”
“Or you’re merely schizophrenic? Crazy? Straitjacket material?”
“You know as well as I do that we’ve been down that road already, my friend,” Pilate said. “Diagnosis? Simple clinical depressive episodes followed by acute dysthymia. Dr. Sandburg even went so far to say as you are a figment of my imagination.”
“Sandburg? That quack?” Simon scoffed.
“Back to the poker chip,” Pilate said, letting it rest in his left palm.
“Look at it carefully,” Simon offered. “And as far as that diagnosis, you might be careful before you start assigning labels to things.”
“I’ve been doing that for days, you jackass, and…” Pilate stopped himself. “Wait a minute!” Pilate rubbed his thumb across the chip. “Label? This poker chip has a label where the inlay goes. It’s cheap, like a sticker—something you’d have in your man cave at home to play with the boys. It’s not the kind of thing a casino should be using for the real exchange of money.”
“Ever see an actual casino—a professional house—use chips with labels so cheap and obvious? No way! They print their logos and value information onto an inlay that is molded directly on the chip so it can’t be easily copied. Labels are—”
“Small time!” Pilate rushed to the kitchen, rifled through the drawers, and found a butter knife. He took the knife to the coffee table and placed it beside the chip. Pilate bolted upstairs to his writing desk, snagged his reading glasses, and ran back to the coffee table and the chip, patiently awaiting its surgery. He was suddenly aware that he needed to pee, but he managed to tell his bladder to take a backseat for the time being and began carefully scraping the edge of the label.
“Careful, John. Don’t screw this up,” Simon said. “We both know how you get when the chips are down sometimes.”
“Shut up, Simon,” Pilate said, ignoring the voice’s pun. He gently turned up the edge of the label. “It’s on here pretty good—stuck tight.”
After five minutes of careful scraping, the label started to lift.
He slipped his reading glasses on to take a look at it. “Oh wow,” Pilate said.
A final stroke of the butter knife removed the label whole and revealed a tiny pocket inside the poker chip. Carefully laying aside the label, he upended the chip into his palm. A nearly weightless tiny black square with gray writing lay in his palm. With the help of his trusty reading glasses, he was able to decipher it: Sony M2 1GB
“Well, John, it looks like you have some piece of electronic equipment there,” Simon said, snickering. “I’ve seen one before, but I’ve no memory what it’s used for.”
A memory chip of some sort, John thought. He held it up to the light. “Something on this chip is so valuable or so dangerous that a guy got himself killed over it, and he felt the need to plant it on me at the Hog’s Snout.”
“Lucky you,” Simon said.
Pilate placed the memory chip on the coffee table beside the shell of the poker chip. His forehead broke out in sweat, and a trickle beaded from his armpit down his side. Pilate ran to the bathroom and vomited. His body, wracked with dry heaves, expelled little. He rose to the basin and ran cold water, splashed his face, and looked in the mirror. The reflection revealed a familiar face behind him.
Simon leaned against the opaque door of the shower stall. “Me again! See…you can still see me, as long as you have suitable motivation.”
“Not funny, “ Pilate said, his breathing ragged. “Shit! They saw me,” he said. “Jesus! They know I was there. That’s why they broke in here. They were looking for this goddamn chip!”
Simon nodded and crossed his arms. “Well, looks like you’re playing the game whether you signed up or not, old boy.”
“I just don’t get how they knew to look here,” he said.
“Think about it,” Simon said. “You went in that bloody bathroom. You made a statement to the cops. You may as well have stripped naked, painted your ass blue, and run down the streets saying, ‘I saw everything!’”
Pilate nodded and heaved into the sink. He spat out a trickle of bile.
“There may be some good news here,” Simon said. “They have already been here once and didn’t find anything.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t even get upstairs. Somebody spooked ‘em,” Pilate said, drinking from the faucet, swirling the water around his mouth, then spitting it out in the sink.
“True. You’re screwed.”
“Not helpful,” Pilate said.
“How the hell do you keep ending up in these kinds of messes?” Simon mocked. “You have such a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and to make matters worse, then you’re usually wrong in your approach to solving the problem.”
“It’s a gift,” Pilate said.
“Like a rat’s tooth in your finger.”
A loud knock on the door startled him.
When Pilate looked up, Simon was gone. He washed his face, dried it on an old washcloth, and hurriedly ran down and slipped the butter knife under the sofa cushion. He dropped the memory chip, poker chip, and the label in a cracked fisherman’s Toby jug on a curio shelf beside the door. “Who is it?” he called.
“Me,” a female voice called back.
He ran a hand through his hair and opened the door, expecting to see his latest lover. “Kay! How have you—”
“Hello John,” said the brown-eyed, dishwater-blonde-haired woman standing in the doorway, looking like she was smuggling a beach ball under her blouse.
“Sam? What the hell are you doing here?” Pilate said, shuddering inwardly and suddenly overcome with the urge to black out.
“Hello to you too,” she said. She rose on her toes to look over Pilate’s shoulder into the room. “Are you going to leave a woman with a baby bump standing out in the heat, or did it occur to you to invite her in for a cuppa?”
“Don’t look at me,” Simon said.
Pilate locked eyes with his ex-wife, registering her delight in his discomfort. “Uh, sure,” he said hesitantly. “Come on in, but I’ll warn you ahead of time that this place isn’t mine, so you can’t get your hands on it.”
“Nice,” she said, waddling past him. She hadn’t gained much weight other than her belly, and he was sure it was yet another reason for other women to hate her.
“I don’t have any tea,” he said, closing the door. “Lost my taste for it.”
“That’s okay.” She groaned and lowered herself onto the sofa.
“Water?”
“That would be lovely,” she said, applying a coat of Chapstick and adjusting a cushion behind her back.
Pilate broke the ice out of its tray into a bowl in the sink, scooped up a few cubes, and added water from the tap to a spotted glass. When he returned from the galley kitchen, he found Samantha on her feet, looking at the shelf with the Toby jug. “Here,” he said.
She turned and fell back gently on the sofa, then accepted the glass. She sipped the water and held the glass with both hands on her belly. “You just going to stand there and stare at me?”
“Well, yes, I guess I am,” he said. “You cut your hair short. You look like Domino Harvey with your hair like that.”
“Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey? That’s not so bad. Oh, fuck the palaver. John, sit down,” she said.
He acceded to her request and plopped his rump down on the arm of Trevathan’s recliner.
“So, you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.
Pilat
e pointed at her belly as if someone had left a mess on the carpet. “That’s not mine.”
She looked at him for a moment, arching an eyebrow right on cue with a boat horn echoing from the harbor. “How can you be so sure?”
“Let me think…uh, because, for starters, we haven’t had sex in the past nine months,” he said.
“Au contraire, mon frère,” she said, barely able to contain her accusatory glee. “We did.”
Shit. Pilate remembered there was one last, pitiable session with her before it completely fell apart. He had begged her to go to counseling “at least a few times” before they called it quits, and that stupid counselor had urged that the couple have a regular “date night”—like a coat of kids glue on a vase broken into a million pieces. Pilate had enthusiastically jumped at the chance; unfortunately for him, Samantha had already made up her mind.
“Date night? How stupid,” Simon said with a laugh like a wheezing old dog.
The night had begun with a strained dinner on neutral ground: a tapas restaurant that had no connection for either Samantha or Pilate. Samantha and Pilate downed several sangrias, a liquid firewall against the tension and anger.
Thanks to the sangria—and maybe their familiarity with one another or their heated emotions—the night ended with the pair screwing like teenagers in the back of her car in a parking lot. The next day, he was promptly served divorce papers. Within a month, he was unemployed, smack dab in the middle of a hurricane of full-scale clinical depression.
“Date night?” his voice betrayed his desperation.
She nodded. “That night was almost exactly thirty-four weeks ago.”
“You flew here at thirty-four weeks?”
“Well, you wouldn’t take my calls, so—”
“Oh my God! I can’t believe you,” he interrupted, standing and looking out the bay window with his hands on his hips. “You impossibly ridiculous bitch.”
“Now, now. Is that any way to talk to the mother of your child?”
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