73
It was eight thirty in the morning, and out on the faded sunny South Florida concrete, the Beatles’ iconic song “Day Tripper” died down from the speaker above to be replaced by some driving steel drum Bahamian dance music.
For the twentieth time.
Gannon sipped on the dregs of his iced coffee as a yellow forklift loaded with pallets rumbled by on the quay.
They were in Fort Lauderdale now at the busy Port Everglades Harbor. The terminal they were sitting outside of was for a US-to-Bahamas daytrip high-speed ferry service called Raytrippers.
Gannon’s son, Declan, had taken it a few times because it was cheaper than flying and only a driver’s license was required to get through customs if you told them you weren’t staying overnight.
Gannon smiled as Ruby came out from the lounge inside and sat beside him.
Forty minutes after they had taken off she’d landed the plane as pretty as you please in a hayfield in a little town called Dalton, Georgia. Since then, they’d been heading stealthily south via local taxis.
“You must speak Bahamian by now. What do they keep saying?” said Ruby, who was dressed now in a maxi dress with a ridiculously garish sunset on it.
On their way south, they had stopped outside of Jacksonville and bought some beach stuff at a Dollar Store that didn’t have a camera out in front of it. With Gannon’s new madras shorts and a seagull T-shirt and floppy golf hat, they could have been a blue-collar couple doing a second honeymoon on the cheap.
“What do you mean?” Gannon said, thumbing his cheap sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “What does who keep saying?”
“In the song,” Ruby said, pointing at the speaker.
Gannon bopped his head to the steel drum rhythm, listening.
“Party in the backyard,” he said with a grin. “I tink, mon.”
Ruby smiled.
“Any word?” she said, checking her watch.
She was talking about Stick. He had headed down to Miami three hours before. In his younger days, Stick had worked on loan from the NYPD as an undercover with the Miami DEA, and he had gone down there to ask an old criminal informant for a favor.
“No, not yet,” Gannon said, glancing at his burner phone, “but don’t worry—he’ll make it.”
“You know,” Ruby said, looking at him intently. “I was thinking about what you did back in New York.”
“What do you mean?” Gannon said.
“How you got us out of the hotel, took down that agent and those other armed men. Opening the wall of the precinct? Not to mention your expert work with the wastepaper basket.”
Gannon laughed.
“So what about it?”
“What was it that you actually did in the NYPD?” Ruby said.
As Gannon opened his mouth, a huge cruise ship from the nearby Princess terminal let off its departure air horn. Just as it stopped, Stick came out of the terminal door behind them. He looked even more ridiculously touristy than they did in his surfer jam shorts, golf visor and yellow T-shirt that said California Dreaming on it.
“So did you get it?” Gannon said.
“Did I get it?” Stick said, flicking their new fake Florida driver’s licenses across the outdoor table’s white metal top like a blackjack dealer.
Gannon thumbed the waxy paper and looked back at the Walgreens picture of himself that had been taken this morning. He nodded, impressed.
“These are good, Stick. They look real,” he said.
“They are real, or so my guy claims,” he said. “There’s a guy in the DMV who he gets them from.”
“Even the DMV is corrupt, huh,” Ruby said. “Is nothing sacred?”
“How much? Five hundred apiece?” Gannon said.
“Six actually,” Stick said with a nod.
“I’ll pay you back when we get down to my house. Hope hundreds are okay,” Gannon said.
“Sure,” Stick said. “Hundreds are cool.”
“Or diamonds. We could do diamonds,” Gannon said.
“Diamonds? Hmm. I know the ladies like those things. Let me think about it,” Stick said.
“Wait, Jessica Roberts?” Ruby said, annoyed as she squinted at her license.
“What do you want?” Stick said. “You kinda look like Julia Roberts to me, so I went with it.”
“She was a movie star back in the olden days of the eighties,” Gannon explained.
“Duh,” Ruby said. “I’m thirty-five, Mike, not ten. Steel Magnolias, Mystic Pizza. I’ve heard of her. But Jessica? Ugh. Jessica?”
“Hey, you’re lucky. Look at my new name,” Gannon said, showing her his ID.
“Burt Clancy,” Ruby said. “Stick, really? Burt? That’s the worst name in the history of names.”
Stick suppressed a grin.
“What are you talking about? Burt is a tough name. It’s making a comeback,” he said.
“Oh, sure. What’s your new name?” Ruby said. “Let’s see it.”
He passed it over. She showed it to Gannon. He looked at it and laughed.
“Wow, you’re an idiot,” he said.
“Steven Van Damme?” she said.
“What?” Stick said with a smile. “I always wanted to have a real kick-ass name.”
74
The high-speed ferry left Fort Lauderdale at nine on the button and landed at a marina dock near Princess Beach in Freeport on Grand Bahama at a little before noon.
It was an uneventful crossing except for some choppy water as they came through the Gulf Stream. The seesawing of the ferry had woken Stick from where they’d been napping in one of the inside lounges and sent him green-faced into the bathroom.
Standing in line at the deck rail to get off, Gannon searched around nervously until he turned and saw the Donegal Rambler waiting at the other end of the dock behind them. He waved back to Little Jorge standing in the stern.
“More boating now. Oh, and a smaller one now, too. Super,” Stick said as they got off and headed down the dock toward the Rambler.
“All gassed up, stocked and ready to go, Captain Mike,” Little Jorge said as they stepped aboard. “You said we were in a hurry, so I grabbed you guys lunch. Should we just get going, then?”
“You took the words out of my mouth,” Gannon said, untying the line and giving Little Jorge a high five.
Tourists were already being tugged around on banana boats out in front of the pink-and-white stucco hotels as the Rambler pulled out of the marina. When they’d cleared the bay, they went dead southeast with the throttle open.
They put Great Harbour Cay and the Berry Islands behind them and kept going out into the open water. It was a gorgeous day, temperature in the low 70s and hardly any wind.
At around five, Ruby came up into the flying bridge, where Gannon had just relieved Little Jorge. She had her hair pulled back and her sunglasses on and was smiling as the breeze ripped at her maxi dress.
“How’s Stick doing?” he said.
“He’s asleep.”
Gannon laughed.
“Hey, good news,” he said. “I saw the weather report. It’s going to be a crystal clear night tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ruby said.
Gannon smiled.
“For our cruise, remember? You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
Ruby laughed. She looked out at the water through the rushing wind.
“What do you think is going to happen, Mike? I mean, this is a level of nuts never seen before. The FBI is making people disappear? Killing reporters and cops? That’s hard to even say, let alone believe. I mean, is it even possible to straighten this out?”
Gannon looked at her, looked out at the water.
“Anything can be straightened out,” he said.
“Do you really think so?”
“Anything,” Gannon said.
“You’re unbelievable,” Ruby said.
“How so?”
“How the hell are you so confident?”
Gannon shrugged.
“I don’t know. Good genes? A happy upbringing in the home?”
Ruby laughed.
“You know, I almost believe you.”
“Believe what?”
“That you’re not shitting bricks, too.”
It was Gannon’s turn to laugh. Then he pointed out through the breeze.
“Hey, look,” he said.
There was an island, faint in the hazy blue up ahead.
“You see there? That’s Pimlico Island. That’s at the tip of Eleuthera,” Gannon said.
“Home?” Ruby said, smiling.
“Yep,” Gannon said, smiling back. “We’re almost home.”
75
Instead of going straight to his berth in Davis Head, Gannon had Little Jorge go a few miles farther south down the beach on the island’s Caribbean side.
The dock they finally chugged in toward was very old and had several missing boards. It belonged to a place called the Ocean School that was just a two-and-a-half-mile walk to Gannon’s house.
“Are you sure you want to go in alone?” Ruby said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “You guys go back up with Little Jorge to Davis Head and get some dinner. I’ll come up to get you in my truck after.”
“No, really, Mike. Why don’t I come with you? Hell, why don’t we all just go?” Ruby said.
Gannon looked up at her from where he was throwing a couple of things into a knapsack. She’d gotten some sun on the crossing, her skin glowing. He remembered holding her hand as they ran through the cold dirty subway what seemed like a lifetime ago. And how cute she looked in the headset she’d put on in the prop plane.
Pretty Woman, he thought.
“No, Jessica,” he said. “I got this.”
“But,” she said.
“No buts. You head to dinner. Naval orders,” Gannon said.
“Wait,” Ruby said. “I thought I gave those.”
“Only in the US,” Gannon said, holding up a finger. “We’re in the Bahamas now. You heard Little Jorge, right? I’m the captain down here.”
Gannon watched until they made the wide turn in the water before he came in off the beach toward a cluster of low one-story buildings. A gypsy cab came around a bend as he came out of the school’s driveway onto Sherman Highway. It was dark enough now to notice the glow of its brake lights as it slowed. But Gannon waved it on, and its brake lights went off, and it kept going.
When he got to his cul-de-sac, the first thing Gannon did was to go off into the brush. He reached into his bag and stood scrutinizing his house and the other three of his neighbors’ houses with binoculars.
Two of the bungalows belonged to American families that only sporadically came down and were often deserted. The last of his neighbors was a cranky retired Canadian doctor who was usually around, but he’d gone back to Toronto to take care of a sick relative two months before.
Gannon knew he was probably just being paranoid as he scanned the front and side of his house. He didn’t think it was possible for them to catch up with him this quickly.
But then again, he hadn’t known they could track people through the NYC subway in real time either.
He came farther down his street in the twilight and stopped beside one of the absentee neighbors’ houses and stood looking at his place. At the dark windows. It was a very nice evening. There was a rose-gold quality to the evening light.
There were no vehicles except for his truck. Everything seemed in order.
“Okay,” he said and took a breath and came out of the shadowed brush.
He closed the final couple of hundred feet and hurried across his front yard and keyed open his door. He stood for a moment, looking at the dark inside. He sniffed at the air.
Was there a hint of something? Cologne? Or was he just being paranoid?
He was still standing there, still wondering, when quick as a weasel, a man with a gun popped his head around the side of the house at the carport.
He was a heavily muscled black man in a blue Hawaiian shirt and silver mirrored aviator sunglasses. The gun looked like a .45. The squarish silencer on the business end of it was pointed directly at his face.
“Go on in, friend,” the man said in his American voice.
He smiled, showing very white teeth, as he tilted his head and the gun at the door.
“I insist,” he said.
76
Gannon stood there frozen in the evening twilight as the man in sunglasses stepped up onto his front yard path behind the gun. He was about six foot three, in his early thirties, trim-waisted as an athlete, moving easily.
Through the heavy thumps of his heart in his ears, Gannon turned and looked through the dim doorway.
How stupid could you be? he thought.
The guy stopped three feet away.
“What are you? Hard of hearing?”
Gannon looked at him.
Run? he thought with desperation. Fight?
Gannon looked back at his dark doorway. He definitely did not want to go in there.
Still not moving his feet, he glanced back at Sunglasses, his vision tunneling in on the steel of the .45 in his hand as the guy thumbed back the hammer with a loud click.
“You hear me now? Get in that house or I’ll blow your brains out,” he said.
He had thought he’d been prepared for something like this, but now that it was right here before him, moving too quickly for him to get a handle on it, he realized he had thought 100 percent absolutely wrong.
Gannon finally took a step forward toward the door. As he did it, he suddenly felt exhausted, his body heavy and slow and weak, as if he were slogging through wet mud.
No, it wasn’t mud, he realized from a distant memory.
It was sand, he thought, as he stepped over his threshold into his house.
It was wet sand and then a voice from long ago violently yelled in his head, “Get in the game, puke! You even think about checking out, I will personally drown your damn scrawny ass in this surf!”
The memory evaporated with the heavy thunk of the door closing behind him.
77
There were two more men inside of his house sitting in his living room.
They were both lean and clean-cut and wearing business attire.
They actually looked the way FBI agents were supposed to look, Gannon thought. In their crisp khakis and polos and Top-Siders, they could have been a couple of finance guys down to the islands for a corporate conference.
The one sitting in his leather recliner was older and taller and completely bald. There was a crackle of plastic as he reached into the bag of shelled peanuts that was in his lap. He had stolen them from his cupboard, Gannon realized.
As Gannon watched, the man cracked one of the peanuts open and picked out the nut and let the cracked shells spill from his palm almost playfully to the floor. He must have been doing this for some time because the Spanish tile between his size-thirteen new boat shoes was completely littered with shells.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Mystery Man,” the bald agent said, cracking open another peanut and licking it out of his palm.
“Mike, I’m FBI deputy assistant director Reyland,” the bald man said with a grin after he had chewed and swallowed. “And on the couch over there is FBI special agent Emerson.”
Emerson gave him a wave from the couch. He was dark-haired and younger and metro preppy. There was an open Apple laptop on the couch beside him.
Gannon looked back at the bald man. Then he looked back at Sunglasses, at the large bore of his Smith & Wesson trained three feet from his face.
“You’re not an easy man to catch up to,” Reyland said. “And we’d love to ask you a few questions. How are you doing this fine evening?”
Gannon watched as Reyland slapped bits of peanut shell off the lap of his slacks. After he was done, he smiled broadly as he crossed his long legs and placed his big hands onto the ends of the chair’s armrests. He settled back and raised his bald head high with a relaxed, ready-to-be-amused expression on his face. A king on a throne ready for the jester’s performance.
“Cat got your tongue?” Emerson said.
“Can I help you?” Gannon finally said.
“Oh, you’ve helped enough, I think, haven’t you, Mike?” Reyland said. “First by taking what didn’t belong to you. Then by killing our friends. Or maybe we have the wrong house? Tell me, you weren’t around Lexington Avenue this week, were you? With a gun in your hand? Killing four US federal law enforcement agents?”
Gannon looked down as a flash of the inside of the Escalade suddenly came to him. The reek of cordite and smoke and the three men shot to pieces with their blood splatter up on all the shattered windows.
He shook the memory away as he put a knuckle to his lip as if he were trying to remember.
“Around what time would this have been?” he said.
Reyland smiled.
“Oh, around seven Friday last.”
“Oh, yeah, now that you mention it,” Gannon said after a pause. “As a matter of fact, I was out on Lexington that night. But I didn’t shoot any law enforcement people.”
“Is that right?” Emerson said. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” Gannon said, looking at him. “That night I was only killing reporter-murdering scumbags.”
Reyland smiled even wider. He had nice clean white teeth. Dimples.
“Funny,” he said, swiveling to and fro in his chair. “Now for something not so funny. Agent Emerson, if you would do the honors.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Emerson said, smiling as he stood in his razor-creased khakis. He walked past the small kitchen into Gannon’s back bedroom. A moment later when he came back out, he was dragging something heavy.
Stop at Nothing Page 19