Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  “Has she broken down?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so,” said Lucas. “She appears to be sitting calmly. Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Us,” he said.

  “She’s onto us?”

  He dropped the glasses from his eyes. “No. It looks like a predetermined thing. Stop at the top of Howe Key and look to see if anyone is following.”

  “You think she saw us?”

  He put the glasses up to his eyes again. “I don’t think she’s even looking. She’s just floating there. Her engine’s still running.”

  “Can she see us?” I asked.

  “Can you see her?”

  “Not without the field glasses.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have eagle vision either. Or binoculars.”

  He watched her for another few minutes and I looked at the water. It seemed pretty shallow .

  “We’re not going to run aground, are we?” I asked.

  “Nah,” said Lucas, not looking down. “The draft on this baby is less than three feet, so even if we run aground, we can jump in and push ourselves off.”

  “Comforting.”

  “Yeah,” said Lucas, as he dropped the glasses. “She’s off.”

  He lowered the throttle and edged forward out in the slightly deeper water. We lost view of Mandy, but Lucas didn’t seem too fussed by it. We motored slowly to the end of Howe Key, and then turned about and faced down a deeper channel that ran down the western side of Howe, and onward along Big Pine. But the deeper channel was clear. Not a single boat in view. Lucas hit the throttle hard and drove us forward, and I dropped into the seat I was standing before. Lucas gunned the boat for about a minute and we made more distance than I thought we would, and then just as quickly he pulled the throttle back and we lurched forward as the wake we had created came crashing into the rear of the speedboat and pushed us farther along, like a mini tsunami. As the boat came to rest I looked at Lucas, who scanned the water like a periscope, slowly rotating his body in position. I joined in, looking for the sight of the boat and sunhat. I saw nothing and came to a stop, looking at Lucas and he at me.

  “She’s disappeared,” I said.

  He thought for minute, not answering, his eyes doing little jumps as if he were doing a math problem in his head, and then he jumped to action and hit the throttle and spun the steering wheel around and the boat spun on a dime and headed back from whence we had come. We sped north again, then he pulled the throttle back and we stopped once more and he looked across at the top of Big Torch Key. There was no boat. He was watching the shore. I saw waves breaking. Two set of small breaks coming together at the point of the island.

  “See that?” asked Lucas.

  “Two wakes?” I guessed.

  “Right on,” he said, and we moved forward again, not so fast, this time pulling west between Big Torch Key and the uninhabited Water Key to the north. As we passed into more open water I picked up the glasses and looked around.

  “There,” said Lucas, without the aid of artificial optics. I followed his gaze, due west, and saw the boat and sun hat motoring away from us.

  “Yep, that’s her,” I said. Lucas didn’t speed up. Instead he slowed. We just sat in the water, the big motor bubbling away.

  “Are we planning on following?” I asked.

  “Give it a sec,” he said.

  I watched Mandy motor away. “What is that key she’s headed for?”

  “Raccoon Key, if memory serves.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Nothing.”

  I kept watching as Mandy neared the key, and then suddenly she pulled hard left and cut down and back on a southeasterly heading, bringing her due south of us. As she motored I lost her periodically behind several small unnamed keys. As Mandy headed below us Lucas began moving in that direction. There was a lot of shallow water between us, water that Mandy had purposely avoided, and a lot of small mangrove keys that one could easily hit. But Lucas kept it steady if not fast, his eyes locked to the water. There seemed to be some sort of channel, unmarked to my untrained eye, and I just hoped it didn’t end in a sandbank .

  I should have known better. Lucas guided us out into the wide channel that follows the western shoreline of Big Torch Key. I could see why he wasn’t in any hurry now, apart from safety, because the channel was wide and long and handsome and there was nowhere for Mandy to go that we wouldn’t see. Lucas let her become a small dot, able to be made out in the field glasses but not by the naked eye, which meant we were the same to her. She followed the channel all the way south past Ramrod Key and back under the Overseas Highway. As she reached the near open water at the south end of Ramrod Key, Lucas sped up so we made up our lost ground. He guided us across to the western edge of the channel, by Summerland Key, so we would be hard to spot against the background of the expensive waterfront homes there. I picked Mandy up in the glasses, and noted she seemed to have slowed again, but she wasn’t looking to spot a tail this time. She made a heading toward an island to the south of Ramrod Key.

  “I think she’s stopping,” I said, passing the glasses to Lucas.

  He looked through them and spotted her. “You’re right. There’s a jetty out there.”

  “What is that key?”

  “It’s a private island, I think. You can rent it.” He dropped the glasses from his eyes and looked at me. “Well, not you, but someone could. Someone rich. Someone like your man Alec.”

  I wasn’t sure that Alec was that rich. Not if my dots were connecting as I thought.

  “She’s stopping there. Tying up.”

  He handed me the glasses and held the boat in place. Mandy was tiny in my view, but I saw her walk along a long dock, onto the island, which was surrounded by mangroves and palmetto, and then return with a cart, like a large version of a kid’s Radio Flyer. She loaded the cart with the stores from the boat, and then pulled them away. Lucas motored us closer to Summerland Key, and I took a quick look at the houses near us. They were generally large, and generally newer, and reminded me of the waterfront homes back on Singer Island. I wondered if there was an ugly duckling among them, a holdout against the development, the kind of place that made their neighbors cringe. I hoped so.

  I watched Mandy make a second run with the cart. No one else appeared to help her. Then she retreated beyond the foliage, to a house of considerable size. I could see a second story above the tree line that must have offered quite a view. I kept watching the vacant dock as Lucas pulled into the man-made channel that cut into Summerland Key. There were a series of boat docks on the channel leading up to big houses. The dock at the first house was empty, the boat perhaps out for the day. Lucas pulled up to it, killed the motor and tied us up.

  “Wait here,” he said, and he dashed off toward the house above us. I watched the empty dock across the water on Mandy’s private island, and in a few minutes, Lucas returned.

  “Any movement?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. No one’s home,” he said, nodding to the house. “Let’s go.”

  He grabbed a cooler from below the foredeck and stepped up onto the dock. I followed, field glasses in hand. We waltzed across the crushed shell and coral yard, to a patio set under some palm trees. He dropped the cooler on the ground and took a chair. The palms swayed in the breeze, making the warm day very pleasant. I took a seat and checked the dock through the field glasses and saw no movement.

  “What if the owners come home?” I asked.

  Lucas shrugged. “There’s a lot of mail in the mailbox, so . . .”

  “But what if they do?”

  “We were given the wrong address. We’re not breaking in.”

  So we spent the rest of the afternoon in the shade, with a killer view, sharing cold cans of cream soda that Lucas said reminded him of growing up in Australia. We took turns watching the dock on the private island, but nothing stirred. Deep into the afternoon Lucas produced meatloaf sandwiches, which we devoured
. He really came prepared.

  “So this Mandy, Ron’s ex, she was having the affair with Will?” asked Lucas.

  “Aha.”

  “And they met at the yacht club?”

  “Aha.”

  “So it’s possible, maybe even likely, that she knew Alec.”

  “Possible.”

  “And it’s equally possible that she figured Will wasn’t going to leave his wife for her, if you’re right about their arrangement.”

  “I don’t think he was, no.”

  “So she could have conspired with Alec to kill Will,” Lucas said.

  “Maybe. But for what motive?”

  “Being scorned isn’t enough?”

  “Might explain her motive, but it doesn’t explain his.”

  “Maybe they were in love.”

  “Mandy’s version of love involves more money than Alec has, even if he is boosting expensive cars.”

  “So if she’s involved there’s more money out there, somewhere. ”

  “There is. And it rests with the second man.”

  “The second man?” asked Lucas.

  “Your theory. Alec was the first man, we now know that Mandy is the third man, and the person who delivered the second man to Stiltsville. That second man is out there.”

  “How much is this boat worth, the one the other guy was building for Will?”

  “Drew Keck? Maybe quarter of a million. Not a retirement fund, at least not at Mandy’s level.”

  “But he had some kind of deal with the dead guy’s wife?”

  “Celia? She and Drew were certainly up to something when I saw them at the yacht club.”

  Lucas nodded. “Could she have been paying him to kill her husband?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. But she can’t access the life insurance for years, if ever, without a body. She said it herself: if she wanted her husband dead for the money, a body would have been found.”

  “Maybe Drew messed up, did it wrong. But he’s definitely disappeared?”

  “Seems so. Hasn’t been seen at the boatyards or at the yacht club.”

  “So he might be on that island.” Lucas nodded across the water. “Regardless, whoever’s on that island, they’re all equally responsible for Lenny,” said Lucas.

  “Yes.” I thought about that for a moment, and then I thought about Deputy Castle. “Given what we know, the right thing to do would be to call the cops.”

  Lucas held up his phone. “I got no coverage,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Me either.”

  “Well, that’s settled,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  WITH THE FALLING sun more or less behind us, we motored in silhouette toward the resort on Little Palm Key. The sound of laughter and sundowner drinks floated easily across the water. I thought of Longboard Kelly’s, which made me think of Lenny, which made me feel down. Then I thought of Ron, and how he didn’t yet know that his ex-wife, whom he didn’t want thinking ill of him, had set him up and sent him down the river. That thought made me mad.

  From Little Palm Resort we headed due north, and Lucas hit a button and raised the propeller up so it wouldn’t hit the bottom, and he pushed us up onto the sand on Picnic Island. It was an uninhabited key that was used by day-trippers, all of whom had headed home for beers and barbecues. We climbed through the brush and sat back from the beach on the other side of the small key and watched the empty dock on Mandy’s private island. We sat there until well after dark, the house we were watching doused in light. Lucas used that light as our navigation beacon, and we got back in the boat and headed out without running lights. He took us on a wide berth, east of our target island, and then north until we brushed the south tip of Little Torch Key. We came down toward Mandy's island from the north, on the opposite side to the dock. There were two buildings that we had scoped from a distance, one at center, one east of center of the island. We landed on the opposite end, Lucas using small pulses to guide the boat toward the mangrove-lined shore. There was no beach or landing site on this side, so he turned the engine off and edged into the mangroves. I jumped up onto the bow and pulled us farther in until the boat didn’t want to go in anymore, and I tied us up. Lucas went below and came out with a couple flashlights, and, I suspected, his handgun. I checked that mine were in place, and then stood aside as Lucas climbed off the bow and onto the mangroves. He slowly slipped his feet into the shallow water, and began picking his way through.

  Fortunately the mangroves were only a few feet deep, and it took us about five minutes to weave our way through the maze of boughs and thick leaves. We stepped onto the coral and limestone that made the island, and pushed through heavy foliage until we reached a clearing. The open space extended through the middle of the island, at the far end of which we could see the lights of the house hidden behind more strategically placed trees. In the foreground of the house was the other building, perhaps some kind of outbuilding, dark to our eyes.

  “We’ll check the outbuilding first,” said Lucas. “Then do a wide reccie of the big house.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “You armed?” he asked.

  I nodded again.

  “All right then. Our main objective is to learn the position of any bogies.”

  “What?”

  “Look for people. We know there’s one for sure, Mandy. But there could be three. Alec and Drew might also be here. And we don’t assume that’s all.”

  Lucas nodded definitively and marched out, along the edge of the cleared land. He kept his flashlight off, the moon providing sufficient ambient light to see the terrain. We reached the backside of the first building quickly. It was smaller than the house but still quite large. A boardwalk ran between the two buildings. As I reached the first building I realized that it was also a house, up on stilts to offer the best views and protect against a storm surge during a hurricane. We made our way quietly around it, but it appeared uninhabited. There were no lights on at all, and the house lacked that organic vibe that inhabited properties had. I noted a third building that we hadn’t noticed before, away from the others. I tapped Lucas and pointed at it.

  “This vacant?” I whispered about the house above us.

  Lucas nodded. “Caretaker’s property. I’m guessing Mandy and Co. didn’t want them around.” We stepped gingerly up the stairs to the deck. Lucas moved like a ballerina. I wasn’t quite so stealthy so I moved slower, and Lucas had done a sweep of the wraparound deck before I got to the top. We peered in through the windows and saw nothing. We didn’t want to use flashlights this close to the main house, and the moonlight only did so much, but it was evident no one was home. Lucas tried the door but it was locked, so we retreated back down the stairs. He pointed with his hand at the smaller building. We slowly moved out to it. It too was on stilts, but it clearly wasn’t a house. It hummed like a nuclear power plant. I suspected a backup generator. We walked around it, the far side right against the encroaching foliage, like at the warehouse Alec had shipped his cars from. We got to the steps and Lucas pointed in under the structure. It had been walled in to create a room, but it wasn’t watertight by any standard. Perhaps where they kept their water toys. There was a standard indoor knob, like on a bedroom door. Lucas pulled a thin screwdriver from his pocket. It was the kind of thing used when working with small electronic components and and it slid into the hole in the knob and flicked the mechanism open easily. The lock was clearly designed to keep wildlife out rather than anything with a high school diploma, and Lucas opened the door and stepped in. I followed and pulled the door closed. It was pitch-black after the full moonlight, and we both flicked our flashlights on.

  The room was a storage space. There was some heavy-duty gardening equipment, and the room smelled of gasoline. A collection of cans—paint and pesticide—lined the base of one wall. There was a tarpaulin thrown haphazardly across one side of the room. There were no beach toys, no noodles or boogie boards, no discarded umbrellas. Lucas
moved to the back and prodded at something like a deflated weather balloon. It was orange, and tossed aside like a used but never repacked parachute.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Hard to say in this light. Some kind of ducky, or life raft maybe.” He shook his head and turned away. “Nothing,” he whispered, as he moved back to the door. His light swept the room one more time. “What was that?” he asked, jogging his light across the tarpaulin.

  “Nothing, I don’t think,” I said, but I stepped to it and grabbed a corner and threw the tarpaulin back. It was heavy canvas, like an old Boy Scouts’ tent, and it folded over itself with a thud. I played my light over the space and just stood there, transfixed. Lucas saw and stepped over and stopped by my shoulder.

  “That fella’s dead,” said Lucas.

  “You think?”

  “Years of training, mate. Trust me, a bullet hole in your head will do it, most times. ”

  I glanced at him, his ragged features ghoulish in the half-light. He looked at me and smiled.

  “You know that guy?” he asked.

  I looked down again at the body. I didn’t need to. His face was covered in a thick layer of dried blood, like a mask, but the hair was a giveaway. As were the clothes. He looked like a Ralph Lauren ad, crumpled in the mail, dropped in a puddle, and then shot through the back of the head.

  “That’s Alec Meechan.”

  I threw the tarpaulin back over Alec. I didn’t feel like I owed him any sort of dignity, but I didn’t want to keep looking at him, and I couldn’t take my eyes away.

  “So they’re one down,” said Lucas, like it was a mathematical equation, more than a human life. “Still keep your wits about you. Your man has an MO.”

  “What MO?”

  “He likes to shoot people from behind.”

  I glanced at the tarpaulin under which lay Alec Meechan, with a large hole in his forehead, the exit wound from having been shot from behind. And I thought about Lenny, two shots to the back. And I thought about the discarded raft in the storage room. And about happier times, Amy Artiz’s photo of the smiling but tired crew about to leave Nassau on Toxic Ass . And I thought about the boat that arrived home, the smiles wiped from the crew's faces. And it all clicked into place.