The rub was the tryout had to be in the middle of the week, and Declan’s boss was a jerk and wouldn’t give him any time off. The kid was already living lean with three roommates in a town house in St. Pete and couldn’t risk losing his job, so he was up a creek.
When Gannon found out about all of this, he had felt bad for not having even a couple of grand for his son to pursue his dream. With the boat maintenance and his bills, he’d pretty much blown through his entire savings over the last year or so.
That was why he had gone out fishing with close to the last couple of hundred bucks to his name. He thought if he caught something big, he could sell it at the dock market and help out his son like a real father instead of a broke beach bum.
But all that was water under the bridge now, wasn’t it? Gannon thought.
He smiled.
He had him covered now.
And then some.
“This is...incredible!” Declan said. “But I thought you said you were broke. That the boat’s pump or whatever is on its last legs and that guy screwed you on the money he owes you for that three-day thing you did?”
“He paid me,” Gannon lied.
“No! Really? Really?”
“Yes. Really. You’re going. I got us covered. And if that ass, Larry, cans you, I’ll help you find another job. Call me crazy, but I think Tampa probably has more than one air-conditioning and refrigeration tech apprentice position somewhere. I just can’t believe your arm is back. That’s what’s really unbelievable,” Gannon said.
“You’re telling me,” Declan said. “I don’t even like talking about it, I’m so afraid it’ll crap out again. When will you get in?”
“Earliest flight I can get is Wednesday. I’ll meet you at the airport there in Tampa around five or so and then we’ll both get a flight to Phoenix.”
“But won’t that all cost a fortune? Especially last minute?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s how these things happen, son. We’re just going to go for it.”
Gannon smiled again as Declan laughed like an excited little kid.
He was still smiling, enjoying the moment, when he heard the sound from the front of the bungalow. It was the crackle of tires, the sound of a car slowly coming down his little remote cul-de-sac.
Gannon sat up, squinting. He wasn’t waiting on any visitors.
When he heard brakes, he stood and peeked all the way around the side of his concrete blockhouse. In the gap between his pickup and the house, he could see the front of a vehicle. It was a Jeep. A white-and-blue Jeep.
A familiar white-and-blue Jeep.
Gannon bit his lip, thinking quickly.
No, he thought.
No way. Calm yourself. It can’t be. No way. Not this quick.
“Dad, I’m going to pay you back. I promise. Every penny. Hey, you there?” his son said as Gannon glanced at the back of his pickup in the carport.
The Gator and the tanks were still up there in the bed. Dammit. Why the hell hadn’t he put them away?
“Dad? You there?” his son was saying when the doorbell rang.
“Um, bad connection, son. I’ll call you back,” Gannon said quickly as he hopped off the back porch.
19
“I’m right here, Sergeant Jeremy,” Gannon said to the uniformed cop as he was about to get back into his white-and-blue Bahama PD police Jeep. “Right here. No need to call up the SWAT team.”
Gannon smiled as he came out into his front yard through the carport, walking unhurriedly. He had undone another button on his shirt and had a fresh beer with him.
“Ah, so you are, Michael,” the cop said with a smile back as they shook.
As always, the muscular, handsome black man in his early sixties looked impeccable. His big general’s hat was squared neatly on his head and his white-and-blue police uniform shirt was crisp and highly starched.
Gannon had met Sergeant Jeremy three years before working for a small resort on Windermere Island. A tourist kid out sea kayaking had gone missing in the Atlantic, and he and Sergeant Jeremy had gone out in the Rambler looking for him.
For hours, they had scoured the entire treacherous rocky east shore. The kid had turned out not to have gone kayaking at all, thank goodness, but during the search, he and the good sergeant had commiserated on everything from fatherhood to eighties music to the current insane state of the world.
Sergeant Jeremy, who was a deacon at St. Anne’s up in Rock Sound, often roped Gannon into usher duty during his sporadic church attendance, and they sometimes played poker.
Gannon turned back, checking to see if the sergeant could notice the Gator and tanks back there in the bed of his pickup under the carport.
Maybe, maybe not, he thought.
“You’re here early for the poker game. Isn’t it at Teddy’s next week?” he said.
“No, no. It’s not a social visit, Michael. I was wondering if you might be able to help me. Did you hear about the accident?”
Gannon looked at him.
“Accident?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“I didn’t turn on the radio today. What’s up?”
“There was a plane crash in the water on the north side of Little Abaco last night. My son’s friend Alan in the coast guard got called in.”
“That’s terrible. Bad? Was it an airliner or something?”
“I don’t know. Probably not or it would be an even bigger deal. Lot of activity, though. I know you fish up around there sometimes. I thought maybe you might have seen or heard something.”
Gee, thanks for remembering, Gannon thought.
“That’s crazy. No. I didn’t see anything,” Gannon said.
“You did go fishing, though, yesterday, right? Like you usually do Mondays?”
Gannon looked at him. Sergeant Jeremy seemed cheery and laid-back as they came, but he was nobody’s fool. There wasn’t much in the island’s resorts—and even more so with the island’s residents—that happened without his knowledge. Especially on his beat in the lower southern part.
“Yep. I went out in the morning as usual. But I actually didn’t go out that far. I tried my spot off Governor’s Harbour first and got a hit. It was a white marlin, but it went under the bow and the damn line broke my radio antenna. So I stayed in close to shore here at home.”
Sergeant Jeremy tapped a finger against his lip. Then he smiled.
“Any extra fresh swordfish you’d like to share with your good friend?”
Gannon took a hit of his beer and wiped at his mouth with his fingers.
“No. Sorry, friend,” he said, swiping his hand on his shorts. “None for me either. After all that, the big nasty son of a gun spit the hook five feet from the boat. You should have seen this thing.”
“Ah, yes. The one that got away. Big as my Jeep, was it?”
“No way,” Gannon said with another smile. “Way bigger.”
Jeremy looked at him. Then looked down his little street.
Gannon looked with him at the palm fronds waving there in the breeze.
“Was that Little Jorge with you?” Sergeant Jeremy said with an eye roll.
As he usually did, Gannon grinned as he thought about his young, somewhat sketchy first mate.
“No,” Gannon said, squinting. “First mate Little Jorge is still...on vacation.”
“Vacation? A young man of leisure. Very interesting.”
“Anything else I can do for you?” Gannon said. “I’d offer you a beer, but with you being on duty and all, I wouldn’t want to insult you.”
“Always thinking of others, Michael, aren’t you? That’s probably why I like you so much,” Sergeant Jeremy said after he closed his door. “Shall I expect to see you Sunday? It’s my turn for the sermon. It’s called ‘God Has a Mission for You.’ I’ll even keep it under
half an hour this time, I promise.”
“Deacon,” Gannon said, blessing himself as he backed for his house, “to be present on such an auspicious occasion, I will do my level best.”
20
The too-bright cement windowless room Emerson led coast guard rescue diver Stephen Vance into was in the basement of the base’s power plant building.
Used as an emergency brig, the walk-in closet-sized room had raw cement block walls and a threadbare linoleum floor that was a pale institutional green. The curtain blocking off the cell’s back corner toilet was opaque and yellowing at the plastic edges and seemed in several spots to be coated in black mold.
Beside it in the room were only four other items: a folding table, two folding chairs and a little mirror on the wall opposite the door.
Perfect, Reyland thought, watching through the peep show one-way glass. The toilet curtain especially. Just atrocious.
Reyland smiled at the haughty expression on Emerson’s face as the two of them sat. He always loved watching the way suspects became instantly intimidated by Emerson’s six-foot-tall height and dark-haired preppy good looks. He had played varsity lacrosse at Boston College, and his resting countenance was still one of pure big-man-on-campus arrogance. The men in the unit actually called him Prep School behind his back.
Emerson had confided to Reyland at the last Christmas party that he could have joined a Wall Street bank like his brother but had chosen the Bureau instead on purpose. In his junior year, he had read a book about the way homicide cops did interrogations, how they were legally allowed to screw with and to bully people, and he finally realized what he wanted to do with his life.
He had drunkenly told Reyland that what he loved most about his job was the back-and-forth of grinding down a subject until he made him, as Emerson put it, “his soft sweet little bitch.”
Reyland smiled as he watched Emerson take out a laptop and clack it down and fold it open with slow ceremony onto the table.
Though he was smart enough never to admit it out loud, that was Reyland’s favorite part of the job, too.
“Hi, Stephen,” Emerson said as he pulled in his chair. “My name is Agent Emerson. Can I call you Steve?”
“No,” the little diver said, getting huffy straight off. “You can address me as Petty Officer Third Class Stephen Vance.”
Emerson sighed.
“That’s not the way you want to play this. This is no big deal. Just some questions for my report, and we’re done.”
“No big deal?” the diver said. “Why have I been separated from my crew? What the hell do you want from me? I wrote out an incident report of my dive in detail for my commanding officer. Read it. I got nothing more for you or anyone. Bringing me into this disgusting pit. Is this Nazi crap supposed to scare me or something?”
Emerson sighed again.
“All right. Fine,” Emerson said as he stood and gracefully crossed the room.
He even moved like he had money, Reyland thought. Tan in his crisp khakis and polo shirt, he could have been a country-club golf pro.
“Have it your way,” Emerson said as he casually knocked on the cell door.
“What do you mean? You’re acting like I’m not cooperating?” the diver said, getting a little nervous now. “I cooperated. Just read my report.”
“Oh, I’ve read it. Don’t you worry about that,” Emerson said, smiling, as there was a sound of approaching steps out in the hallway.
“Take off your shirt, please,” Emerson said, as there was a loud knock on the door.
“What?” Steve the diver said, screeching back the chair as he stood.
“You heard me. Take off your shirt,” Emerson said, unlocking the door. “For your polygraph.”
Reyland stifled a laugh at the lie. You didn’t have to take off the subject’s shirt. Emerson was just brilliant. He really did love this. It was personal with him. You could tell. You couldn’t fake being this sadistic.
What an asset.
He was a master.
“Sorry, buddy. That’s not happening. I want my CO in here right now,” Vance said.
But he was already sweating. You could see it on his brow. See it shining on his upper lip.
Vance jumped, knocking over the folding chair as the door burst open and Ruiz and Shepard came in with the equipment. Huge Shepard with his ever-present aviator sunglasses was especially intimidating in the tight confines of the concrete room.
“Take off your shirt, please,” Emerson said again. “Or we will do it for you.”
A minute later, the young diver sat shirtless and small on the folding chair. Ruiz put on the blood pressure cuff while Shepard put the two bands called pneumographs around his narrow chest.
Emerson himself attached the galvanometer’s two finger straps to the pointer finger of the diver’s left hand. He stood looming over him, almost on top of him. Like a daddy putting a bandage on his kid’s boo-boo.
“What’s this? Some kind of LGBT thing?” he said to the diver, pointing at a thin band of gold on his pinkie as Ruiz and Shepard left.
“It was my mother’s wedding band,” the diver said. “She died when I was small.”
“Take it off,” Emerson said. “No jewelry for the test.
“Thank you very much,” Emerson said brightly when the diver finally dropped it in his outstretched waiting palm.
Bravo, Emerson, Reyland thought proudly. Skin-on-skin contact, violation of the subject’s personal space, forced removal of precious items.
Textbook.
Emerson slowly and meticulously attached all the leads to a little black box that was then connected with a USB cord to his laptop. He turned the laptop’s screen around so Vance could see it.
“Pay attention. This is important,” Emerson said. “See these? These four moving lines? The upper two are respiratory rate and electrodermal, and these bottom ones are for your blood pressure. These instruments monitor your vitals. Your breathing, your pulse, your blood pressure, your perspiration, and any slight movements of an arm or a leg.
“Now, before we get started, I want you to read something,” Emerson said, taking a laminated card out of his pants pocket.
“Do you understand what this document says?” Emerson said after a minute as the diver stared down at the card. “It basically says that if you lie to me during this polygraph examination—if any of your vitals indicate falsehood—you will not just be subject to court-martial, you will be guilty of obstruction of justice, a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison.”
“What?”
“Every time you lie, it will be a felony, Steve. Do you understand, Steve? Every falsehood you tell is a year in Leavenworth.”
“But you can’t do this! You can’t do this! It’s illegal. Please!” the diver said.
“Not only can I do this,” Emerson said, turning the laptop back around, “I have to, Steve. It’s my job.”
21
Reyland left after the first hour when the diver began to stutter uncontrollably.
It was a humid night outside in the open shipyard, but there was a nice breeze off the darkly gleaming Caribbean. It was steak night in the officers’ mess hall, and there was a pleasant, happy, summer vacation kind of smell of charcoal from the grills.
From the mess, he grabbed a tray and a plate of sirloin and mashed potatoes and took it upstairs to the office space above the mess that they were using as a staging area.
Reyland was sitting at a conference table, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee with Ruiz, when Emerson came in two hours later. They waited for the interrogator to hit the head and come out and crack a Diet Coke from the fridge.
“So what’s the story?” Reyland said.
Emerson put down the soda.
“My first read is that he didn’t take it. He doesn’t know about the missing money.
”
“But?” Reyland said, looking at Emerson’s clouded face.
“He has a secret,” Emerson said. “It’s something about the video.”
“The video? We got that off Martin first thing,” Ruiz said.
“Yes. But there’s something there about him handing it over. Every time the video comes up, there’s a hiccup. Tiny but there.”
Reyland sat up.
“That’s the most important thing of all,” he said. “Containing and burying the inside of that plane. A video getting out is beyond comprehension.”
“I know,” said Emerson.
“So bear down,” Reyland said.
“What do you think I’ve been doing, boss? He’s digging in. The little prick is actually tougher than I first thought.”
“Short and spunky. Terrific,” Ruiz said, taking a quarter out of his pocket.
“So you’re thinking he might have made a personal copy of the video or something?” Reyland said.
“Maybe,” Emerson said with a nod.
“Do you have his phone?” Ruiz said.
“Yes. It’s an iPhone, but he won’t give me the passcode,” Emerson said. “Little Porky Pig was adamant about that. Told me to go f-f-f-screw myself.”
Reyland blew out a breath. Here he was thinking they’d have some smooth sailing and now this. He looked over at Ruiz, who nodded. They’d already been going over worst-case scenario contingents concerning the diver.
The B plan was drastic and had its own downsides and risks. But this whole situation was about as desperate as it got.
“Okay, Emerson. Good job,” Reyland said. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”
“What? You don’t want me to try some more?”
“No. Don’t worry about it. You’ve done your part. We’ll leave him to Ruiz and his men.”
Emerson had a disappointed look on his face as he picked up his soda and left.
“So if the diver doesn’t know where the money is, where is it?” Reyland said.
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