by Stuart Woods
“True enough,” Stone said. “There’s enough in that story for a novel. I’ll tell it to you when I’m drunker.”
“Speaking of drunk,” Spottswood said, “we’re all invited to a party on a yacht next to the club.”
“The traditional one?” Stone asked.
“She’s a 1937 Trumpy,” Spottswood said. “A member here, the local tennis pro, Chuck Chandler, just fi nished restoring her.”
“There’s that name again,” Stone said.
“Yeah, the Chuck Choke. He hasn’t lived it down yet.”
“Come on, let’s go see Chuck’s new boat,” Terry said. They walked out of the bar and around to the yacht; her name on the stern was Choke II. They stepped aboard into the large cockpit, which was filled with people drinking with both hands. A tall, deeply tanned man in his late thirties with sun-bleached hair made his way toward them, and Spottswood introduced them to Chuck Chandler. A pretty girl with a tray of champagne glasses came over and gave everybody one.
“She’s very beautiful,” Stone said to Chuck.
“Yes, she is,” Chuck replied, watching the girl walk away.
“I was referring to the yacht, but I can’t argue the point. She’s a Trumpy, I hear. The yacht, I mean.”
“Yep, 1937.”
“How’d you come by her?”
“I had a client at the Olde Island Tennis Club for some years, and he died last year. I had been helping him with the finish work on the restoration, and to my astonishment, he left her to me. She already had new engines and electronics, and her hull had been painted. All I really had to do to her was a hell of a lot of varnishing.”
“You did a very fine job,” Stone said, touching a bit of mahogany.
“How many coats?”
“Ten, and I’ll give her another coat every year. It’ll give me something to do in the summers, when business is slow.”
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“You know your varnishing, Chuck.”
“I had a lot of experience restoring her predecessor, a thirtytwo-foot one-off that I lived aboard. This one is forty-four feet, and, believe me, the extra room is going to come in handy.”
“May I see below?” Stone asked.
Chuck led him down the companionway and into the saloon. There was a built-in dining table and a galley tucked into a corner, a chart table and seating for eight or so.
“Gorgeous,” Stone said.
“There’s just the one cabin, aft,” Chuck said, pointing the way. Stone found a handsome stateroom, white and mahogany, with a nice head and shower and a double berth. “Perfect bachelor quarters,” he said. “How many of these were built?”
“She’s a custom job,” Chuck said, “the only one of her kind. She was in pretty bad shape when Jerry bought her. He replaced all the lower hull planking and then redid everything from the bottom up.”
“You’re a lucky man,” Stone said.
“That I am. If you’ll excuse me, I’d better check that my guests are drinking enough.”
“Sure.” Stone didn’t think they would need any encouragement. He walked back into the saloon and found a woman looking into the galley cabinets and fridge.
She glanced at him. “Hello,” she said. She was tall and slender, with blond hair. Late thirties, maybe.
“Good evening, doctor,” he replied.
She turned to face him and lifted an eyebrow. “Ah,” she said, “my former patient.”
Stone offered his hand. “My name is Stone Barrington. I’m afraid I wasn’t very appreciative of your kind efforts last evening. In my defense, I plead semiconsciousness.”
She shook his hand. “Yes, you were. I’m Annika Swenson.”
“I know; your card is in my pocket,” Stone said. “I had intended to call and thank you, but my day got busy.”
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“One shouldn’t be too busy in Key West,” she said.
“You have a point.”
“Annika!” a woman’s voice cried from the top of the companionway ladder. “We’re leaving.”
Annika turned. “Coming!” she called back. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Barrington,” she said. “I’m with some people.”
“I’m here for a few days,” Stone said. “May we have dinner?”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation.
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll call you, and we’ll arrange a time,” Stone said.
“Good night, then.”
He watched her climb the companionway ladder and enjoyed the view.
Dino was the next one down the ladder. “Was that the lady from last night?”
“It was,” Stone replied.
“You are the only guy I know who can meet a beautiful woman while lying on a sidewalk unconscious,” Dino replied. “Let’s go; dinnertime.”
They made their goodbyes to Chuck Chandler.
“You play tennis?” he asked Stone.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you come over to the club, and we’ll hit some balls.”
He handed Stone a card.
“If I get a moment free,” Stone said.
Tommy, Dino and Stone wandered back toward the yacht club, and as they reached the door, Stone saw Annika Swenson getting into a Mercedes convertible. She waved as she drove by.
“Not bad,” Tommy said.
“Yes,” Stone replied, “and I like the way she waved.”
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TH E T H R E E M E N ordered drinks and were given menus.
“Everything’s good,” Tommy said. “I especially like the beef.”
They ordered.
“Do you have a boat here, Tommy?”
“Yeah, a thirty-foot fiberglass bathtub, just big enough for my wife and me.”
“How is Rosie?” Dino asked.
“Unchanged,” Tommy replied. “Ornery as ever.”
“Tommy,” Stone said, “how are we going to find this Keating guy?”
“Well, I can’t put an APB out on him,” Tommy said. “It’s not like he’s committed a crime.”
“Did you print him while you had him?”
“We didn’t get that far. I ran his name, though, and he has no record.”
“Keating has checked out of his hotel, and the desk clerk said he thought he was living on a boat.”
“Any description of the boat?”
“No.”
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“Good luck on finding it, then.”
“Yeah, we spent most of the day looking in Key West Bight,” Dino said.
“Well, that’s the most likely place for a visiting boat to be, but not the only place. They could be anchored almost anywhere, and there’s also Stock Island, of course.”
“Where’s Stock Island?” Stone asked.
“It’s the next key up,” Tommy explained. “Stock Island is sort of a suburb of Key West. It has all the stuff they can’t shoehorn onto this island—hospital, jail, trash dump, lower-cost housing and trailer parks, golf course—and a couple of marinas. It’s worth a shot; Peninsula is the big marina.”
“I think we’re wasting our time without the name of the boat,” Dino said. “It’s like looking for a visitor to New York without an address.”
“You got a point,” Tommy agreed.
“Also, Keating is shy,” Dino said. “He doesn’t want to be found.”
“Yeah,” Stone said, “a skip tracer found him in Miami, and he left town. He’s likelier to get shyer after his encounter with me.”
“Sounds like he’s on the lam,” Tommy said.
“From his father,” Stone replied. “Bad blood there.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “at least you know what he looks like. His girlfriend, too.”
“Not really,” Stone said. “I didn’t take a good look at her, and I’m not sure I’d recognize her on the street.”<
br />
“You can always sit down with the phone book and start calling hotels,” Tommy pointed out.
“That won’t help us if he’s living on a boat,” Stone said. “The desk clerk at his hotel said that a lot of boaters check in for a couple of nights to get a decent shower and have their laundry done.”
“We talked to Charley Boggs,” Dino said. “He denied all knowledge of Keating, said he’d never seen him until they were all busted.”
“How bad an actor is Boggs?” Stone asked.
“He’s got a couple of drug busts, but nothing ever came of them.”
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“And why would a clean-cut rich boy with a trust fund be hanging out with a drug dealer?”
“Thrills, maybe,” Tommy offered. “Do you know how big a trust fund?”
“The old man described it as ‘a nice little trust fund,’ but who knows what that means.”
“Maybe our boy Evan has dreams of bigger, easier money,” Dino said. “He wouldn’t be the first rich kid to go down for dealing.”
“Trouble his,” Stone said, “we don’t know anything about this kid—who his friends are, how he earned a living in the past.”
“His old man couldn’t help with that?” Tommy asked. Stone shook his head. “Apparently, they haven’t spoken since the guy was in college, and that was some years ago.”
Tommy sighed. “Dealing with criminals is a lot easier,” he said.
“They have accomplices and parole offi cers, people you can talk to when you’re looking for them. Rich kids just have drug dealers and maître d’s.” Tommy’s face brightened. “Wait a minute. Your boy had a table booked at Antonia’s, an Italian restaurant on Duval, the night we arrested him.”
“So?” Dino asked.
Tommy was already pushing buttons on his cell phone. “Hi, it’s Lieutenant Tommy Sculley, Key West PD. The night before last you had a reservation for an Evan Keating; did you get a phone number for him?” Tommy scribbled something in his notebook. “Thanks,” he said, then he hung up. He ripped the sheet from his notebook and handed it to Stone. “Your boy has a cell phone number, 917 area code.”
“Can your computers track cell phone numbers?” Stone asked.
“They can.”
“Do me a favor, Tommy. Ask your office to wait until late tonight and see if you can locate the phone. That might tell us where Evan Keating is laying his curly head at night.”
Tommy made the call.
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STON E A N D D IN O were breakfasting on their front porch when Stone’s cell phone vibrated. He flipped it open. “Hello?”
“It’s Tommy.”
“Good morning.”
“And to you. We got an overnight hit on Evan Keating’s cell phone.”
“Hallelujah! Where’s he staying?”
“Well, you were right, he’s on a boat.”
“Which marina?”
“No marina; he’s anchored out at the reef.”
“Let me put you on speaker, so Dino can hear this.” Stone pressed the button. “Go.”
“Key West has the only coral reef left in the continental United States. Everybody goes out there to snorkel and scuba, so a lot of moorings have been put down, to keep people from tearing up the coral with anchors. That’s where we picked up Keating’s cell phone, around two A.M.”
“Great, I’ll go out there and visit him.”
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“Hang on. We’re not getting his phone now, not at the reef or anywhere else.”
“Maybe he’s charging the thing. He could still be there.”
“So are a lot of other people. How are we going to know which boat?”
“Have you got coordinates?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how accurate they are. If you like, I’ll take you out there. How about we meet at the yacht club in an hour?
The boat’s name is Rosie, and she’s visible from the front door of the club.”
“You’re on,” Stone said. “See you then.” He hung up.
“Stone,” Dino said, “here’s a thought: You’ve got the guy’s cell phone number; why don’t you just call him up and talk to him?”
“I thought of that; he’d just hang up in my face, and he might stop using the cell phone or change his number, and we’d have no way at all to trace him.”
“Okay, it was just a thought.”
They finished breakfast and headed for the Key West Yacht Club.
R OS I E TU R N E D O U T to be just as Tommy had described her: a fat, 30-foot fiberglass bathtub, with engines, a cabin and a fl ying bridge up top.
Tommy welcomed them aboard; the engines were already running.
“Tell me something,” Stone said. “If we all went up to the fl y-bridge, would this thing turn upside down?”
Tommy laughed. “It looks that way, but she’s well ballasted.”
He edged out of the boat’s berth and began running along the east side of Garrison Bight, not far off the Roosevelt Boulevard sidewalk.
“There’s a little channel here with six feet or so,” Tommy said. “All 43
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that open water to starboard is not navigable by anything more boisterous than a kayak; too shallow.”
They picked up some channel markers and headed out of the bight, then under the bridge and into more open water. Five minutes later they were running at 25 knots, and Tommy pointed to their destination on his electronic chart plotter. “Keating’s phone was right about there,” he said.
They ran on for another twenty minutes, then Tommy began to slow down. “See those boats out there?” he asked, pointing.
“Yep,” Stone replied.
“That’s roughly where we got the location of the phone.” He slowed down further as they approached the moored boats. There were a dozen or so, all but one powerboats.
“Let’s get a close look,” Stone said.
“Okay, we’ll check every boat.”
Tommy’s cell phone rang. “Yeah? You’re sure? Where? Thanks, keep me posted.” He hung up. “We’re wasting our time out here.”
Tommy turned back toward Key West and pushed the throttle forward.
“Why?” Stone asked.
“Because they just got another beep about a minute long from back behind us. Looks like Keating’s boat is heading back to Key West. It also looks like Keating is using his cell phone only to make calls. When he finishes, he turns it off.”
“Shit,” Stone said. “You think he’s on to us?”
“Nah, but he’s sure being careful. If he was on to us he’d just buy a throwaway phone at the supermarket.”
“Okay.”
“I’d sure like to know what kind of boat that is,” Tommy said. “It’s very odd for a boat to be spending the night out at the reef. I mean, I suppose a guy might go out there to have a few drinks and get laid, then feel too drunk to drive home, but it’s not a usual thing to have a boat out there at two in the morning.”
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“Maybe he’s meeting somebody out there,” Dino said.
“A drug delivery? That’s possible, I suppose, but the Coast Guard might notice two boats out together and take a look. Halfway up the Keys there are two balloons moored to cables that are fi fteen thousand feet long. They run them up and use down-facing radar to catch smugglers who are flying low in airplanes or doing odd stuff in boats. I think two boats out at the reef in the middle of the night might draw their attention, but probably not one boat.”
“Let’s make a pass at Key West Bight,” Stone said. “Maybe we’ll see the boat.”
“Okay.” Tommy ran past the cruise ship docks and the waterfront hotels and slowed as he passed the breakwater.
“Nothing but boats,” Dino said. “I think it’s too much to expect to get lucky doing this.”
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p; “You’re right, Dino,” Stone said, looking around. “We’re just wasting Tommy’s fuel. Why don’t you let me fill up your boat on my expense account, Tommy?”
“Okay,” Tommy said, aiming at the fuel dock. They spent twenty minutes there filling the tanks, then headed back toward Garrison Bight and the yacht club.
Once Rosie was secured in her berth, they went into the club to get a sandwich and a beer.
“Stone,” Dino said, “how much longer is your law fi rm going to let you loiter in Key West before they pull the plug?”
“I don’t know,” Stone replied, “but I’m surprised Bill Eggers hasn’t already been on the horn.”
Stone’s cell phone vibrated.
“Hello?”
“It’s Eggers.”
“Speak of the devil.”
“Give me a report.”
Stone put aside his sandwich and spent five minutes bringing Eggers up to date.
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“You mean you’re on an island that’s four by five miles, you’ve already spotted this guy once, and now you can’t fi nd him?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Stone said. “It would be nice if you would call his old man and get me some background on the guy—
how he makes a living, who his best friends are, anything that would give me a lead. This is a lot harder than you think.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” Eggers said. “I’ll call you when I know more, and I’ll expect you to know more by then.” Eggers hung up.
“Is he pissed off?” Dino asked.
“No more than usual.”
“You didn’t tell him about the cell phone.”
“That would just have raised his expectations,” Stone said, picking up his sandwich again.
“So what are we going to do this afternoon?” Dino asked. “We’re sort of out of leads.”
Stone brightened. “Tennis, anyone?”
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THE O LD E I SL A N D Tennis Club was on the tourist map, next to and part of the Casa Marina Hotel, the first big tourist draw to Key West, built by the Standard Oil and railroad magnate Henry Flagler. Stone and Dino called Chuck Chandler, then dressed and drove over. They found Chuck in the pro shop.
“Hey, guys,” Chuck said. “You want to go hit some balls? That’ll give me a chance to look at your game.”
Stone and Dino had played together before. Stone had the better serve and stroke, and Dino was good at the net. Chuck stood back and hit against the two of them. After a few minutes, Chuck said,