“I suppose they think I have something of theirs,” he said, drinking more of the coffee and whiskey.
“Thanks, Captain Obvious.” Buster just stared back at Pilate. “Got any, uh, more specific notions?”
Pilate shrugged.
“You think they had anything to do with that grisly murder over at the Hog’s Snout?” Buster said, waggling his gray eyebrows.
“I don’t know,” Pilate said.
“You do know what I’m talking about, right? You were there. Gave a police report and everything.”
“Yes, of course.”
“So you know somebody killed that Juan Valdez guy for a reason, and that you were seen talking with him before somebody slit his throat, right? Surely you realize you were there when the last bit of blood trickled out of the man’s neck.”
“Yes, Buster. That’s correct.”
“Okay, then here’s the deal,” he said, pouring more whiskey in Pilate’s mug. “They think Juan passed something to you that night, and they want it back.”
“Okay,” Pilate said.
“So fess up. What legacy did the dead man pass on to you?”
“An ashtray. I needed an ashtray, and he gave me one,” Pilate said, lighting a cigarette.
“That shit’ll kill you,” Buster said.
“Smoking? I know. I’m trying to quit.”
“No. I’m not talking about the fucking cigarettes. I’m talking about getting mixed up in this pirate mess,” Buster said, his face a mask of irritation.
“Pirate mess?”
“You know what I think? I think you somehow made it out of a tricky situation a few months ago by the skin of your ass, and now you’re a cocky son-of-a-bitch who thinks he can get involved in this shit without getting himself killed.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he said. “Trev said you were a cocky, whiny little shit when he first met you, but he gained a lot of respect when he saw how you handled that crap back there in Cross. Unfortunately, I think it went to your head, buddy.”
Pilate rose slowly from his chair and pointed to his face. “You know what went to my head? About thirty pieces of buckshot.”
“Real funny.”
“Well, I’m not laughing,” Pilate said, his voice rising. “Now, I appreciate your help tonight—and even your whiskey—but I’m not gonna sit here and take a brow-beating from the cops and some old, out-of-work fart.”
Buster stood, slipping the flask in his pocket. “Okay, John. I figure I did what I promised Trev I would do. Right now, the local PD is picking gnat shit out of pepper, but they’re gonna figure all this out. When they do, or if you come to your senses and decide you need some help, call me.” He flipped a card on the table.
“Thank you, Mr. Campbell,” Pilate said, calming himself.
“Buster. That’s what friends call me,” he said, heading for the front door.
“So we’re friends now?”
“Any friend of Trev’s,” he said. He pointed to the broken window. “Say, by the way, I’d get that looked after first thing.”
Pilate nodded. “Thanks. I will. Before you go, what are you going to tell Trevathan?”
“Just that I met you, that you’re in some sort of situation, and that you’re apparently cooperating with the authorities.”
“Okay, thanks,” Pilate said.
“Sure thing,” Buster said, opening the door. He nodded his head in the direction of the .45. “John, I’d sleep with that thing under my pillow if I were you,” he said, “preferably loaded.”
Pilate pushed a large, heavy bookshelf in front of the window. It blocked entry and would certainly awaken him if intruders tried again.
He managed to get three hours or so of sleep before leaving to meet Taters at the TenFortyEZ. Sunrise was still a half-hour away when he left the house, constantly looking over his shoulder for the men who had threatened his life earlier.
“You look like shit,” Taters said when Pilate stepped aboard. He was holding a steaming mug of coffee.
“No doubt,” Pilate said.
“Rough night?”
“Yep.”
“The little lady with the handcuffs again?” Taters said, snickering.
“You could say that,” he said. “You ready?”
“Just waiting on you.”
Past the harbor, Taters glanced over at a dour Pilate, who was fervently smoking his cigarette.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You don’t look okay to me,” he said.
“I said I’m fine,” Pilate said, sucking down another toxic breath. “Just got a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?” Taters called over his shoulder as he corrected the steering.
“Life and death,” Pilate called back over the engines.
“Huh,” Taters muttered. He whistled through his teeth for a while, drinking periodic sips of coffee from a no-spill mug that read The Captain Gleefully Accepts Hand-Jobs.
Pilate stewed a while longer in silence; Simon was apparently still asleep. Finally, he grunted and went below for a cup of coffee. “Don’t you have any damn sugar?” he called up from the stairs of the galley.
“I drink coffee, damn it, not brown sugar water,” Taters said. “And don’t smoke that god-dang cigarette below.”
Pilate leaned against the bulkhead.
“You’re a ‘Shane’s dead’ kinda guy, aren’t you?” Taters said, turning back to Pilate. He had one eye on the wheel and another on his charter client.
“What?” Pilate said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know, Shane. Alan Ladd.”
“Jack Palance?” Pilate nodded. “My dad loves that movie.”
“So, am I right?” Taters asked.
“About what?”
“Are you a ‘Shane’s dead’ guy or a ‘Shane’s alive’ guy?”
“Oh, I get it,” Pilate said. “He’s dead. He rode right past the cemetery. That says it all.”
“We’re all whistling past the graveyard,” Taters offered.
“Don’t mix your idioms,” Pilate said. “Shane is dead—body is picked over by the carrion crows and vultures.”
“Jesus, man,” Taters said. “Your daddy feel that way too?”
“No,” Pilate said. “He thinks Shane lived. But why? To do what? He did what he was supposed to do and went on his way—maybe to a better place.”
“So, poor little Brandon De Wilde is just sitting there waiting for Shane?”
“We’re all waiting for Shane, Taters,” Pilate said. “He isn’t real. Never was and never will be.”
“That’s messed up, man,” he said.
“It’s life,” Pilate said.
“From what I heard, you were Shane—to a little girl and more than a few others back in that small town.”
Pilate looked up. “Now that’s messed up,” he said, raising his voice. “I wasn’t Shane or the Lone Ranger or John Wayne or any other damn hero. I was just a stupid, nosy guy stuck in an impossible situation, doing his best to keep himself and his friends alive. That’s all I ever was.”
“Sounds like Shane to me,” Taters said.
“Your coffee stinks,” Pilate said, throwing it overboard.
“Is that little girl calling you back?” He laughed and mocked in the voice of a little girl, “Pilate! Come back, Pi-late!”
“You picked a bad morning to screw with me, man,” Pilate said, lighting a cigarette.
“Sorry,” Taters said. “Meant no harm.”
Pilate crossed his arms. A giant ball formed in his throat, as if he were going to burst into tears. He breathed in and out a few times.
“No harm done,” Pilate said. “Like I said, rough night.”
“Besides, Alan Ladd was only five-six,” Taters said. “You’re at least five-eleven.”
Pilate laughed. “I need more of that shitty coffee of yours.”
Kate sat up, sleepless in the feather bed of her cottage in Cross Township. The aroma
of kernels from the corn stove wafted from the living room downstairs. Kara was asleep in her room, clutching her favorite stuffed animal—a giraffe she called “Buddy,” a gift she’d received from her late father more than six years ago.
Kate’s insomnia was, as of late, typically brought on by her worries about John’s safety, though less so after she sat in on Trevathan’s call to his friend Buster, the former cop. For the moment at least, she was reassured that John would be safe.
This time, her sleeplessness was rooted in something else.
Kate’s sleep patterns had been unusual since the incidents a few months prior, and they’d grown worse over the past three weeks. Of course, “incidents” was a wholly ineffective word for the events that redefined who she was. Those so-called incidents knocked her off the dreary path she had trod in the years since her husband’s murder.
John Pilate had stumbled into her life the same way he had inadvertently stumbled into the decades-old conspiracy that nearly had them all taking their last breaths. Before he arrived in town, Kate had managed to bide her time, waiting until she and Kara could leave Cross forever. She no more wanted a new lover than John wanted to become a nationally known (albeit reluctant) hero.
Now, though, things were different. Leaving Cross was not so urgent, as long as she could be there with John, but she could feel him pulling away. She wondered if their love was nothing more than heightened emotions resulting from almost being killed. Is our love real or an artificial reaction to wildly unusual events? she had to ask herself, and she was no longer sure of the answer.
She was in a car wreck in college when her then-boyfriend Rick—who would later become her husband and make her a widow—drove too fast on a gravel back road. He took a turn too fast, and his ridiculous Ford Maverick fishtailed and rolled over twice into a ditch, narrowly missing a telephone pole. Neither was injured beyond a few bruises and minor contusions. When they made it back to Rick’s apartment, they couldn’t get their clothes off fast enough. Her orgasm that night was the most intense of her life; surviving a near-death experience made sex that much sweeter.
Is my love for John Pilate just another rendition of that? Just the lustful afterglow of a near-death experience? Is it all artificial? Even true love fades after a while. The intense sexual exploratory phase naturally wears out. It’s either replaced by affection and a desire for the lover’s companionship, or it dies out completely and the relationship sours.
Kate rolled over on her side and closed her eyes.
Somewhere in the fog of her dreams, she and John had survived a car wreck on a deserted gravel road. When they made it back to her house, there was no furious lovemaking, no physical rush from their brush with death—only a smiling Jack Lindstrom, sitting beside the corn stove with a shotgun.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You’re going to want to really hammer it,” Pilate said.
“What?”
“Well, let’s just say I think we will definitely be followed this time,” he said.
“Explain,” Taters said as he started the engines.
Pilate untied the lines and hopped aboard. He poured a mug of coffee from the thermos and explained the events of the night before as they idled out of the dock and into the harbor.
“Great,” Taters said. “So the bad guys are on to you, the cops are suspicious, and there’s a P.I. sniffing around? Please tell me you didn’t forget my gun.”
Pilate took the gun from his duffel and placed it in the cubby beside the boat controls. “Safety’s on,” he said. “Want to turn back?”
Taters goosed the throttle. “Nope,” he said. “We’re already up to our balls in this shit, and I’ll be damned if I don’t find out what this is all about before I quit.”
“I appreciate that, man,” Pilate said.
“You do know that if you get me killed, your balls will be fed to the fish in Jordan’s aquarium, right?”
“She’ll have to get in line, I suspect,” Pilate said.
The pair zigzagged for an hour or so, careful not to pick up any tails—or so they told themselves. When they arrived at the map coordinates, the sun was high and the waters clear and brilliant.
Taters turned off the engines and dropped a small aluminum anchor into the blue. “Depth finder says we’re right over that coral outcrop you saw last time, I’m pretty sure,” Taters said, donning his straw hat.
“Good. I’m going to try to snorkel one more time before we go for the SCUBA. What do you think?” Pilate asked.
“I think you should go for it. In the meantime, I’ll get the tanks ready in case you can’t see,” he said, dropping the ladder over the starboard side. “You want to wear this weight belt? It’ll help you regulate your buoyancy so you’re not fighting it the whole time you’re under, trying to get a look around. It’s only about ten pounds, and you can leave it if it’s too much for you when you need to come back up. I can retrieve it with the SCUBA.”
“Okay, thanks.” Pilate put on the belt and adjusted it. He prepared his mask and snorkel, laid his fins on the deck rail, and lowered himself in the azure water.
Taters handed him the fins. “The sun’s giving you a lot more than it did the other day,” he said, handing Pilate a flashlight, “but here’s some extra help. This light is LED—230 lumens, a solid beam. You shouldn’t have any trouble seeing through the nooks and crannies of that coral. Just twist it to turn it on and off.”
Pilate nodded, slipped the wristband of the light over his hand, then put on his fins. He kicked back from the TenFortyEZ and took in a few deep breaths before diving under the surface.
Pilate kept his kicks languid so as not to tire himself out too soon. The weight belt was an immense help, as was the bright sunlight.
He looked around and saw that Taters had brought them right back on the spot where they were before—almost perfectly so. The long, narrow coral outcrop he had spied before was a mere twenty or thirty feet from the surface. In the daylight, it looked more like smooth stone than coral, approximately twenty feet long in a rough torpedo shape.
Pilate’s lungs pleaded for him to surface. He kicked upward, doing his best to stay vertical and not get washed too far away from the outcrop.
When he broke the surface, he saw nothing. The boat was gone, and only the sun shined on the water. “What the…?” Pilate said, spitting the snorkel out of his mouth.
“Anything?” Taters said from over Pilate’s shoulder.
Pilate spun around to see Taters on the rear deck of the TenFortyEZ, a mere thirty feet away. “Not sure,” Pilate said, relieved. “Going back.”
Taters nodded and turned back to the SCUBA gear.
Pilate plugged the snorkel back in his mouth, filled his lungs, and dived. He swam within ten feet of the outcrop and twisted the flashlight to turn it on. To his surprise, the beam cut through the murk at the bottom, illuminating the outcrop.
“John, that’s not a rock,” Simon said.
Pilate kicked to hold his position, shining the light up and down the length of the outcrop. It was a long, narrow tube, clearly made of a smooth material—perhaps fiberglass or aluminum. It was covered with some sort of camouflage netting.
“A crashed plane?” Simon guessed. “Amelia Earhart? No, wait…that was in the Pacific. Perhaps it’s the Lost Patrol. No, wait… aliens got them—“
Pilate told Simon to shut up. Whatever it was, it was definitely manmade—not coral or rock—and unless someone knew specifically where to look for it, they would never find it.
Pilate swam back to the surface, paddled to the boat, and handed his fins to Taters.
Taters helped him scramble up the side. “Well?”
Pilate stripped off the weight belt, mask, and snorkel, then handed the flashlight to Taters. “You need to go look at it,” he said.
“All right. Let me get my SCUBA gear on, and—“
“We need to hurry,” Pilate said.
“Okay, okay,” Taters said. “Help me with the tank.�
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Taters was underwater for what Pilate felt was an unbearable length of time before he surfaced and swam back.
He took the regulator out of his mouth and handed his fins up to Pilate. “We’ve discovered a Bigfoot!” Taters said, letting out an enormous whoop.
“What the hell does that mean?” Pilate said. “Bigfoot?”
“Bigfoot is a name the Coast Guard gave to semi-submersible craft and narco subs back in the day before they were certain they existed,” Taters said. “Kinda like the real Bigfoot—and Sasquatch is real, by the way.”
“Narco subs?”
“Drug smuggling, amigo. These little beauties bring coke up from Colombia to Mexico and the States. They’re mini subs—tough to find, and if necessary, easy to scuttle. This one looks intact. It could have been sunk on purpose, but I don’t see any damage. Maybe it’s packed with coke,” he said. “I’m sure it is. Otherwise, these guys wouldn’t be looking for it.”
“Well, shit, what do we do?”
“Well…” Taters picked up the binoculars and scanned the horizon. “Did anybody breeze by or fly over while I was under?”
Pilate shook his head.
“Then I think we best get our butts back to Key West and figure out a way to let the Coast Guard know about this without getting our names involved,” he said.
“You mean report it anonymously?”
He nodded. “John, they’re going to want to know how we found this.”
“We were fishing,” Pilate said.
“Yeah, but I’d say your recent run-ins with the law would raise some eyebrows.”
“True. So what now?”
“Let’s head back,” he said. “We can weigh anchor and stow that SCUBA gear. So far, we’re ahead of the bad guys.”
The pair cruised for half an hour on a circuitous course. They took turns at the wheel, drinking Modelo and keeping their thoughts to themselves.
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“Have a look.” Taters pointed eastward and handed the binoculars to Pilate.
Pilate looked through the glasses and saw a large craft bearing down on them. It was at least the size of the TenFortyEZ and cutting through the water like a razor through tissue paper. Pilate made out three figures behind the windscreen. “I think we’re going to need a bigger boat,” Pilate said.
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