I walked around beside her, knelt, and lifted the lid of the box, allowing her to see the contents. Inside was a sealed manila envelope.
I spoke softly. “You want me to open it?”
She lifted it out of the box, stared at it, and then shook her head. The only writing on the outside of the envelope was a date thirteen years in the past.
She clutched the envelope to her chest and stared nervously around the room. It was the first time I’d seen a crack in her tough exterior. I sat opposite her. “We have time.”
She laid it flat across her lap. Touching it gently. Tracing the numbers. Finally, she looked at me and shook her head. “I’ll wait.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
We walked out of the bank and stood on the boardwalk. Staring around. Gone Fiction floated alongside. Calling to me. The look on Ellie’s face said she was wondering what to do next. Stoically, she took off my Rolex and held it out to me. As if I’d fulfilled my end of our bargain and our time had come to an end. She spoke without looking at me. “Thank you.”
I wasn’t about to just let her walk off, but I couldn’t make her stay. I had to make it seem as though the idea were hers. “Give me an hour. I’ll get you to the airport. Fly you back to school or—” I pointed at the envelope. “Wherever.”
Summer nodded in agreement, then lowered her arm. I had a feeling Ellie was short on money, which explained why she considered my option. She pressed the envelope to her chest with crossed arms. She stared west, then down at the boat. Then at me. Finally, she nodded and climbed down, taking her seat on the bench in the stern.
I cast off the lines and followed my map, trying not to pay attention to the hair standing up on my neck.
We drove south, the engine turning at less than a thousand rpm’s for the better part of an hour. Given their wealth and influence, the folks in South Florida have swayed their representatives to declare most of the IC in their area as a no-wake zone. It deters fast-boat traffic, which means most people who want to go fast opt for the unregulated Atlantic. I understood the reasoning. Without the restrictions, you’d have go-fast boats scorching down the ditch at over a hundred miles per hour and kids dying on jet skis all the time. If you want to go fast, take it out in the ocean. But given the steady thirty-knot wind currently blowing out of the northeast, we were stuck idling down the IC at a snail’s pace.
We turned farther south into Lake Worth, with Peanut Island and Lake Worth Inlet just off our bow. We passed under the Blue Heron Boulevard Bridge, where the water on our port side was dangerously low. As in shin deep. During the daytime, this half-mile-square area would be log-jammed with two hundred boats and a thousand people. Locals call it the Low Tide Bar, because at low tide it’s where the locals go to drink. It’s one of the most popular places in this part of the world where the kids come out to play and show off their toys—the living, the sculpted, the siliconed, and the motorized.
We passed the Port of Palm Beach and soon saw the headlights of cars moving slowly north and south along North Flagler Drive and beneath the Flagler Memorial Bridge and A1A. On our port side was one of the wealthiest zip codes on the planet. Palm Beach proper. It’s the home of The Breakers and Mar-a-Lago. Folks over there don’t mess around. They have their own police force and their own speed limits, and you’ve never seen immaculate landscaping until you’ve driven North County Road. Landscape companies are interviewed and vetted for the unique opportunity to pick up blades of grass by hand.
With the Royal Park Bridge overhead and Palm Beach Atlantic University on our starboard side, we began running parallel to Everglades Island and Worth Avenue off our port side. Everglades Island is a smaller man-made island attached by a single road to the intracoastal side of Palm Beach. The only road runs due north and south and splits the island down the middle. Ginormous single homes sit on either side. The entire island might contain fifty homes. It’s an exclusive situation inside an exclusive situation. Sort of like a gated community within a gated community—situated on an island that juts off an island.
Google Maps led me to a massive compound of a house on the southern tip of Everglades Island. I turned 180 degrees north and tied up at a deserted, unlit, and unwelcoming dock capable of harboring an eighty- to hundred-foot yacht, plus several slips for tenders that were also empty.
Despite the daylight, motion lights flicked on the moment I stepped foot on the dock. Ground-level lights lit up the marble walk to the house, which was fifteen thousand square feet and stretched even wider with two wings that looked to be two or three thousand square feet each. The entire thing was surrounded by a ten-foot wall covered in some sort of flowering vine. And maybe fifty cameras.
Chapter 27
Beer, wine, and liquor bottles lay scattered across the lawn, sparkling like discarded rubies, emeralds, and diamonds in the bright sunlight. The once-meticulous landscape had been trampled in random places in what looked like the mob movements of a herd of animals wearing high heels. Exotic bushes and shrubs had been broken off near the roots, and forty or fifty rosebushes had been broken at dirt level by one or more golf clubs. I know this because someone had emptied an entire bag of clubs, each shaft broken in half, and left them scattered like pick-up sticks among the dead and decapitated roses.
The remains of an enormous bonfire smoldered in the middle of the grass. Odd pieces of wood and debris lay half burned in a circle around the epicenter where the fire once consumed its contents. Absent their pedestals, several naked marble statues rested quietly on the floor of the pool, each striking some strange and no longer erotic pose made even more ridiculous by the green-tinted water. Four dented and evidently empty beer kegs pivoted about the pool’s surface like bumper cars. At least, I guessed they were empty given the ease with which they floated. Lying on its side in the deep end, which according to the tile at water level read twelve feet, was what looked like a BMW motorcycle.
Across the pool deck, every manner of shirt, pants, dress, shoe, sock, underwear, bra, and any other item of clothing once worn by someone lay crumpled where it had been removed. The grill in the outdoor kitchen still smoldered with the charred remains of something. Steak, maybe. Hard to tell. It was ready to eat a few days ago. The eight ceiling fans were each missing at least one blade. Some two. Most were still spinning, wobbling wildly. Five television screens flashed some sort of input problem. Two of the screens had cracked when someone threw a bottle—which now lay in shards on the ground—at them. One of the grills, possibly a smoker of some sort, had been moved to the pool, turned on its side, and appeared to be the ramp Evel Knievel had used to submerge the BMW.
As Summer, Ellie, and I carefully made our way up the walkway from the dock, movement to my left caught my eye. Camouflaged against the backdrop of what was once a Japanese garden now lying in ruins, I spotted a huge lizard, at least six feet long, leashed to a palm tree. Yes, six feet. And leashed.
Closer to the house, more movement caught my eye. A monkey, also leashed, had climbed into the gazebo, but fighting the tether, he’d inadvertently wrapped himself tightly around one of the two-by-sixes. Afraid, he continued to pull wildly against the cord and emitted an ear-piercing shriek when we appeared on the pool deck. Not wanting him to choke, I cut the end of the leash, loosing him. Sensing himself free, he made a final chirp, circled the pool, ran over to the lizard, pounced on it, smacked it in the face six or eight times, and then climbed the ten-foot retaining wall and disappeared, dragging his leash, never to be seen again.
I would have slid open the sliding-glass door, but it was missing. Not broken. Not cracked. Not sitting oddly canted on its runner. But missing. Completely gone. We stepped into the house where we were met by a blizzard of cold air blowing from the vents—which immediately escaped out the several missing doors and windows. If the outside of the house was trashed, the inside defied the laws of architecture and engineering.
The interior had once been supported by a colonnade of eight large wood
en columns—three of which were now missing, exposing Volkswagen-size holes in the ceiling. A fourth lay at an odd angle with an ax stuck into its side. Two Gone with the Wind–style staircases led up to the second and third stories. One of the staircases was totally gone. The shape of the intact staircase helped me recognize the odd pieces of wood circling the ashes of the bonfire.
Both of the faucets in the kitchen were running at full go, which normally would have just meant a waste of water. But given that the drains had been stopped up, the floor of the recessed kitchen was flooded in six inches of water. Summer was about to step in and turn off the faucets when I touched her arm and showed her the myriad of electronics and wires now submerged in water. I walked into the utility room, opened one of several breaker boxes, and flipped everything off. Free from the possibility of electrocution, Summer turned off the faucets. The eerie quiet allowed us to hear water running elsewhere in the house. Probably upstairs.
From the utility room behind the kitchen, I opened a door into the eight-car garage. Two bays were empty, while six cars filled what remained. Two Porsches, a Range Rover, a McLaren, a Bentley, and a Dodge diesel pickup of the 2500 class. Parked in its own outcove was one untouched BMW motorcycle that looked to be twin to the one Knievel took swimming. All of the tires of each vehicle were flat, including the bikes hanging on the wall, save the truck and the motorcycle.
Returning inside the house, Summer and Ellie followed in dumbstruck amazement at the wreckage inflicted upon a once-beautiful home. At the amount of money wasted and the stupidity exhibited. I stood on the staircase and surveyed the landscape, guessing that the house had suffered several hundred thousand dollars of damage.
On the second floor, I counted ten bedrooms. There had evidently been a pillow fight because a million down feathers covered the floor, furniture, and return-air vents. There had also been a paintball war—all the mattresses and box springs had been extracted from the beds and leaned on their sides along the halls, creating a maze of protecting walls now covered in fifty thousand neon pink, red, green, and yellow splotches. Many of the doors had either been ripped off their hinges or had the pins removed, adding to the maze. Similar to the pool deck, clothing and bottles littered the floor.
On the third floor, which once housed the exercise room and theater, someone had greased the marble hallway with some type of oil or Crisco. At the far end, they’d piled empty bottles like bowling pins. I’m not sure what they’d used for a ball unless it was their bodies, which might explain the oil. Although I’m not sure anything could explain anything about this chaos other than extreme and prolonged hallucinogenic drug use by a lot of people.
The fourth floor housed a library and office. It had fared best with only minor violence, which suggested that drunk and high people had tired of walking up stairs. I was about to return downstairs when Summer pointed at a ladder that led out of the library and into what looked like a crow’s nest. We climbed the ladder and found a bedroom, bathroom, and small kitchen. Maybe a mother-in-law suite, although I couldn’t imagine someone of any age climbing all those stairs on a regular basis. That was until Ellie opened a door to reveal an elevator shaft. I say “shaft” because the elevator itself had been freed from its cable and now lay four floors below in a mangled heap.
Trying to make sense of all this, and staring out the glass toward the dock below, I noticed a helicopter pad atop the dock house. Minus a helicopter. Looking at the mayhem around me and the absence of a helicopter, I guessed this party had taken place prior to the party at the cabin in the Everglades. I figured they’d trashed this place, hopped in the helicopter, and flown west. My guess now was that they’d flown south.
We three were still standing with our jaws open when we heard the sound. A thud.
Turning toward the noise, I saw spewing steam and heard the sound of running water from the bathroom, so I followed both. They led me to a large tub. The walls of the entire bathroom were made of glass blocks, giving warped yet spectacular and unobstructed 360-degree views of the Intracoastal to the west and the Atlantic to the east. Surrounding the tub and scattered on the floor lay thirty or forty plastic bags that, according to the labels, once held twenty pounds of ice each. I could only imagine that the ice was used to fill the tub, but the tub was empty. Moving around it, I stepped into the walk-in shower, which poured steam—it doubled as a steam bath. Umpteen stainless steel taps, all of which were currently spewing, filled the room with steam. Someone’s personal car wash. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
Staring at the oddity before me, I heard the thud again. A second time. But this time it sounded thinner. More metallic.
Handing Summer my phone, I walked into the steam and through the waterfall and car wash of a dozen or more showerheads shooting cold, pressurized water toward the floor. Hot steam and cold water didn’t make sense. Kneeling, I crawled across the floor of the shower, which drained via four drain holes. Reaching the fourth drain on my hands and knees and unable to see six inches in front of me, I reached toward the wall. But my hand didn’t touch the wall.
I moved my hand slightly, “reading” the surface. The texture was smooth, then coarse, then stringy, then soft.
Then it moved.
I crawled closer and found the bare foot of what looked to be a woman. Unable to make sense of anything given the barrage of water and steam, I moved my hand to her wrist but couldn’t find a pulse, so I traveled up her torso to her neck and carotid artery. The pulse was faint. I sank my arms below her legs and her head. Standing, I lifted her limp body and returned through the fog. When I appeared carrying a naked and limp female frame, both Summer and Ellie sucked in a breath of air and covered their mouths. I glanced quickly at the girl in my arms. Late teens, dark hair, dark circles beneath her eyes, a splattering of tattoos, needle holes at the crease of her elbow, skinny, deathly white, with a trail of vomit caked to her mouth and neck.
Then I looked at her face.
It was not Angel. But it was one of the girls we’d seen on video.
I turned to Summer and spoke as we descended the stairs. “Dial 911 now. Put them on speakerphone.”
Summer dialed.
They answered as we reached the fourth floor. “911. What’s your emergency?”
The only way this girl would make it was if they landed LifeFlight on the lawn outside and airlifted her to a hospital. Absent that, she was dead. The lady on the other end of the phone received dozens if not hundreds of calls a day. Each claiming the end of the world. To take the burden of decision off of her, the authority to call in a helicopter had been left to first responders once they’d assessed the situation. Although there were situations where the operator, based on his or her knowledge and experience, could override that protocol given what he or she was hearing from the caller.
Knowing all this, I threw everything at her I could think of that might be even remotely true to register on the trauma scale, which I hoped would trigger a LifeFlight takeoff. “This is Murphy Shepherd. I work for the US government. I’ve got a white female, possibly late teens, limited pulse, shows signs of near drowning with possible hypoxia or altered mental status. Also possible overdose with hemodynamic or neurologic instability, currently exhibiting uncontrolled seizures with possible respiratory failure requiring ventilation. I need LifeFlight on the lawn of this house like five minutes ago or this girl won’t make it.”
She was quiet for two seconds while I heard typing. “Sir, can you give me an exact location?” the operator asked calmly.
I responded with the longitude and latitude GPS coordinates I’d taken off the video signatures we’d stolen from the boat.
She paused. I knew first responders were en route, but I also knew she was deliberating sending LifeFlight. I spoke softly. “Ma’am, I know your protocol. And I know you don’t know me. This girl will die if you don’t send the bird. If you want to save her life, send it.”
I heard fingers on a keyboard typing at the speed of hummingbird
wings. “Is it possible to move her to an open area, maybe the backyard, driveway, or someplace out of interference from overheard wires?”
“Not necessary. There’s a helipad atop the dock house.”
“LifeFlight is on the way. ETA four minutes.”
This girl didn’t have four minutes. I turned to Ellie and nodded at Gone Fiction. “Inside the head, that red bag you were using for a pillow. Get it.”
Ellie ran to the boat and returned with my medic bag. I rifled through the medicines, finding two that I needed. One nasal spray. One injection. Both were naloxone HCL. An opioid inhibitor. I sprayed each nostril, then injected her. The bad news was that I couldn’t find a pulse, so I ripped open the AED, turned it on, attached the pads to her chest, told Summer and Ellie to stand clear, and shocked her. After her body convulsed, rising nearly a foot off the ground, I administered CPR. Compressions. Breaths. Compressions. Breaths. When she didn’t respond, I shocked her again. Alternating CPR. Then again. After the third shock, her eyes flittered. She sucked in part of a breath and a pulse registered in her carotid.
I laid the girl in the grass. Her body was vomiting again. I say “her body” because she wasn’t conscious enough to know it. I turned her head sideways and attempted to clear her airway so she wouldn’t aspirate the contents of her stomach. In the distance I heard sirens. Then I heard the signature whop-whop of a helicopter. This girl was suffering drug and alcohol poisoning on a level I’d seldom if ever seen. It was possible she’d already suffered brain damage, and I had no idea if she’d ever open her eyes again. Given the limited open ground, I turned to Summer and Ellie and said, “You two should get inside.”
As the helicopter hovered and then began to descend to the pad, churning up pieces of debris like a whirlwind, they ran inside. The helicopter touched down, and before the paramedics had time to exit and assess her, I carried her up the dock house steps and to the rear-opening door of the bird and slid her onto the stretcher, which they were in the process of removing. Observing the girl’s condition, one paramedic listened to me while the second, a woman, climbed back inside and began working on her. In the fifteen seconds it took to inform the paramedic, the woman had inserted an IV, shot something directly into the girl’s heart, and intubated her, giving her oxygen.
The Water Keeper Page 19