“You’re kidding. Just now?”
Tomlinson tugged at his hair. “It was a freakin’ great white shark, man. Not a hammerhead. Biggest I’ve ever . . . Like, we’re talking longer than this boat. Almost as wide. You don’t get it? It was Dolly, the one that’s been hanging around eating boats and shit.” He draped a hand over the T-top and stood on one leg like a stork while he searched the surface. “She cruised past like a submarine. That’s what I thought it was at first—Julian in a high-tech Captain Nemomobile. You know, really truckin’ like it was going to ram us.”
“A submarine?” Ford had to smile.
“Hey, hermano, anything’s possible if you’ve got the dough-re-mi. But then I saw her dorsal fin and she went under. Like Hello, Dolly! smelled food, something tasty on the bottom. Smelled you, in other words. Man, I didn’t know whether to shit or wind my wristwatch, so I resorted to my old Boy Scout training. You didn’t hear my SOS?”
Impossible to play dumb after that. When Ford laughed, it was usually an inward chuckle, but this time he opened up, which nearly turned into a laughing jag. Between breaths, he spoke in fragments. “The look on your face when you . . . Oh my god. What a circus—the dog swimming in circles and you’re up here stomping grapes. That’s what it looked like; then . . . a submarine? Oh Geezus, this is too good . . .”
Tomlinson showed his impatience by storing dive gear and checking Pete’s water bucket, then banged a locker closed and waited for the biologist to regain his normal countenance, which was a blend of tolerance and mild skepticism.
Ford croaked out a few more gems before he finally calmed and said, “It wasn’t a shark, it was a killer whale. You didn’t hear the thing spout when it breached?”
“Whale? Man, I know the difference between . . .” Tomlinson paused to think. “The spouting, yeah, I thought it was a school of porpoise. I didn’t know there were killer whales in the Gulf. Not here anyway.”
“He’s a transient,” Ford said. “A male, probably, traveling alone. At first, I figured it was a false killer or a pilot whale, but then he cruised past close enough . . . Geezus, what a wake he threw.” He popped the dive computer free of its case. “Have a look.”
Tomlinson flipped through a couple of decent shots while Ford talked about what had happened down there in the dark, then said, “You know that video circulating around of the supposed great white? The blurry one. I was fairly certain from the rear edge of the dorsal, but I thought the same thing—no killer whales here—so I checked some of the journals. Only a small population lives in the Gulf, fewer than five hundred, spread between Texas and Mexico, and a few seen off Key West. They’re transients, as opposed to a resident population—a subspecies of killer whale that doesn’t breed with outsiders. Some believe that anyway. The dorsal fins are slightly different, and they’re more solitary.”
Ford got up, took a look around, then nodded at the little dive computer. “That’s my Christmas present to Fast Eddie. I drew his name, and those photos are better than anything else I can think of. There’s his proof it’s safe to dive. Mack will like them, too. You know, good for business; charter a boat and look for . . .” He lost the thread; went to the electronics suite and focused on the radar screen. Then turned east, shielding his eyes. “That’s Dan Futch in our new Maule,” he said and pointed to a speck on the horizon. “Don’t get pissed off, okay? There’s something I didn’t tell you. I would’ve, but kept waiting for you to ask why I brought the dog.”
Tomlinson thought, He doesn’t plan on returning, but replied, “So I’ll have company when I drive this monster-ass boat back to Sanibel. No need for me to ask—you forget my paranormal powers.”
That was always good for a smile, but this time it got a rare hoot of laughter. “You didn’t know I was leaving from here. Admit it.”
“Next stop, Mexico,” Tomlinson said. “Don’t worry. I know better than to ask questions. But there is one little thing I want to talk about.”
While Ford listened, he placed his passport on the console, then made a pile that included his billfold, keys to his truck, the metal ammo box, and an oversized envelope. When they were done discussing what Tomlinson wanted to discuss, he tapped the pile. “I want you to hang on to this stuff—until I get back, of course. The person I loaned my phone to will drop it at the lab in a day or two. And this”—he opened the ammo box—“we need to go over a few details now.”
A seaplane, blue on white with white pontoons, buzzed them, then circled south and turned to land.
“Sure,” Tomlinson replied. “Anything you say. The only no in my vocabulary begins with a k.”
Ford’s Maule amphibious aircraft was a small four-seater designed to land damn near anywhere and equipped to make long hauls. Fully fueled, its four-cylinder turbo could cruise at 160 knots for more than six hundred nautical miles.
Crossing the Gulf of Mexico with a tailwind was a two-hour hop that Dan Futch, a veteran pilot, had made before—often clandestinely. That meant flying low, sometimes only a hundred feet off the water, so they took turns at the yoke to mitigate eyestrain. On a morning this calm, the Earth’s curvature blended with the sea’s waxen borders, so the altimeter played a role. To converse, they wore headphone transceivers and discussed all sorts of things, including how much fun Dan would have tonight alone in the luxury suite Ford had reserved beachfront, Playa del Carmen.
Thirty miles out, they raised the Yucatán Peninsula. Cumulus clouds marked shoals and jungle beaches, then an isolated bay south of Tulum where, more than a week ago, Ford had created a base camp. The resort was a few miles to the west, a strand of white beach and white buildings amid forest green. There was no parasail aloft today.
They descended almost to the water and decreased speed, Dan saying, “You don’t want me to do a flyover. Right?”
Ford shook his head. “Just a touch-and-go in case somebody sees us come in. Once we’re down, dump me and take off. You know, like you’re practicing landings. We’ll hook up tomorrow.”
No more questions from the pilot.
At tree level, he threaded a narrow opening into the Bay of Ascension and banked to port as Ford gave directions, then pointed to a ribbon of blue that guaranteed safe water. Pontoons made contact; the little Maule bucked and reared through a silver plume. They were down but still moving fast in a plane that was now a boat.
Ford had his gear ready in a buoyant, watertight bag. He opened the door but kept his headphones on. “See that rise where the tree line changes?”
Futch used the pedals to turn and reduced speed. A minute later, he hollered out the door, “You’re good to go, man. See you tomorrow.” He waited until his passenger had rolled free of the pontoons, then punched the throttle and went airborne again.
Ford watched from the water while he battled to get one fin, then the other, over his jungle boots. The Maule exited the opening at mangrove level, then banked north as if headed for Playa del Carmen.
When the plane was gone, Ford swam toward a hillock of palm trees, then into a winding creek where the Maya had quarried limestone.
• • •
This trip, he carried no satellite phone, no electronics of any kind. Too dangerous. Nor could he buy a boat. He couldn’t risk being recognized.
Winslow Shepherd was waiting for him nearby—or soon would be—at an unfinished condo that had eight floors. Their “meeting” was scheduled for five-thirty, a little before sunset.
Julian’s note had included this and other details, but nothing about his father’s condition. Presumably, Shepherd would be on crutches or in a wheelchair and he would have bodyguards as attendants—one of them David Abdel Cashmere.
This was an inference. The math professor, via Julian, had offered Ford two choices: step off the balcony on his own or allow himself to be pushed off.
Either way, poor old Winslow wants your head.
This was a line fro
m Julian’s note.
The note had included other directives as well.
What Ford had brought was the jungle hammock and a couple of MREs for food. He strung the hammock in the shade and climbed in to escape the bugs. While trying to get comfortable, he found the page from Tomlinson’s manuscript he’d left there more than a week ago. Nothing else to read, so he had a look. This time, the first paragraph grabbed his attention.
My inner voice tells me I have no worth beyond the kindness I show strangers. It claims I make clown faces, and have no power to escape the puppeteer’s strings . . .
Puppeteer . . . It was an odd word, a word seldom used in this age of electronic manipulation. But so what? Tomlinson was a master of the esoteric. Yet the word resonated and bounced around in Ford’s memory, looking for a match.
Puppeteer . . . ?
He was by the water, eating cold lasagna, when it finally came to him. Julian had used the word to describe his father. No . . . his psychiatrist, the one he’d framed for pedophilia.
Ford tried to recall the exact usage. Something about Julian’s shrink being a lying puppeteer and not particularly smart, so he’d cut the strings by planting photos on the shrink’s computer. Maybe Julian hadn’t used the phrase cutting the strings, but that was the result.
It was an interesting coincidence, but only as a mind game.
He had a lot to do before his appointment.
It was a four-mile swim and slog to the resort without a boat, but only a few hundred yards to the place where he’d hidden the stand-up paddleboard—if it was still there.
It was. He sloshed the board clean with water, hopped up, and paddled back to camp.
In a place like this, the best disguise was to look like a tourist who couldn’t tolerate the sun. An hour later, he paddled past the resort with a towel draped over his head and wearing a ball cap to hold the towel in place. Strapped to the front of the board was his gear bag, which might have contained a picnic lunch.
It did not.
The building where he was to meet Shepherd was a concrete shell a mile up the beach. A bulldozer and construction junk were scattered around a bare five-acre lot, far removed from the resort’s plush landscaping and cameras. There was no beach here, just rocks and mud, until they trucked in sand. No people either, not even workers, which suggested the company had run out of money. It wasn’t unusual in third-world boom areas.
He paddled past the building into an area shielded from slow ocean rollers by a stretch of coral, some of it exposed by the falling tide. Among propeller scars and junk, a purple rivulet threaded the shoals into a miniature cenote about the size of the Captiva Blue Hole. The water was deep and clear, but the surface was a slow whirlpool of Styrofoam and garbage that had been snared by the current as well as a host of mindless moon jellies and one massive Portuguese man-of-war.
Ford drifted over the hole, then paddled toward a field of coconut palms that adjoined the construction acreage.
It was an old copra plantation. The trees were eighty feet tall, neatly spaced, each capped with an umbrella of feathery green. On the ground, split coconuts had been laid out on racks to dry. There was a fire pit, too, for extracting oil, but it didn’t look like it had been used for a while. He waded ashore, hid the board among the trees, and carried his bag toward the concrete shell that might or might not one day be a condominium.
The eighth floor was an unfinished clone of Winslow Shepherd’s building at the resort. There were two suites. Both faced the sea. No doors or windows or balcony railings, just bare concrete walls and a concrete stairway with rebar protruding like bone.
From the foyer, Ford looked down—a seventy-foot drop to a floor littered with junk. The stairway was an ascending series of switchbacks. Banisters had been installed on the lower three, metal balusters on the fourth, but that’s all.
He wondered, How the hell can a man on crutches, or in a wheelchair, make it up those stairs?
In the elevator well was the answer. Far below was a steel platform attached to cables and, presumably, a power source. It made sense. Workmen had to move materials somehow, the heavy stuff—what was left of it anyway. On the bottom floor he’d seen only a stack of drywall and a stack of something else under a tarp, but he hadn’t bothered to look.
He would.
First, though, he went out onto the balcony of the suite closest to the copra plantation. Below, dump trucks had piled a mountain of sand that would be used to create the beach. The retired math professor would not choose sand as a landing spot for a man he wanted to watch die.
No, the adjoining suite would be Shepherd’s choice for tonight’s event. Preparations hadn’t started, but a Honda generator, floor lamps, an Igloo awaiting ice, and a stack of folding chairs told him this was the place.
Shepherd or Julian, or both, had invited guests.
No rail on the eighth-floor balcony here either. Ford went to the edge and looked down on the remains of a concrete seawall that bristled with barnacles. He stepped back, took a breath, then peered over once again. For a queasy instant, KAT’s body was sprawled there; her face, from the photos, bloody, contorted, teeth displaced. He imagined weightlessness, falling, the shattering impact, and how it would feel to survive for a few minutes and try to crawl away.
That was enough. He was done with it. If he went off that balcony, it would not be because he went peacefully.
Outsmarting Julian required preparation. He did a careful search of the balcony’s deck and walls. Holes for some of the fixtures and the railing had been drilled. They might be useful, depending on what was under the tarp on the bottom floor.
Each wall was buttressed by an outside beam connected at roof level. What he needed was a place to hide a weapon that couldn’t be easily found. Was there space enough above the beams? To find out, he turned his back to the rocks below, slid his heels to the precipice, and wedged a shoulder against the wall. Then had to stand on tiptoes, reach around, and explore with his fingers.
Geezus. There had to be a better place.
There wasn’t.
Finally, he looked for hidden cameras. There were none.
Good.
What Ford had known from the start was this: the personal secrets of his friends at Dinkin’s Bay would not die with him. Only Julian Solo’s death could guarantee that. The man was a malevolent narcissist, by the diagnosis of his own psychiatrist. Disease made him predictable. Julian did only what pleased him, or increased his power over others, and what Julian wanted, truly wanted, was to see for himself what happened on this balcony tonight.
Ford was counting on it. If he was wrong, he was better off jumping now.
It was two-fifteen p.m. Not much time left to prepare. He went down the stairs in a hurry to see if there was anything useful under the tarp. Too fast for someone with tactical training and who was aware that small mistakes get people killed. As he leaped to skip the last step, his ankle was snared by a trip wire. It sprawled him onto the concrete below, where he rolled and then looked up.
David Cashmere was there, a knife in his hand and already wearing his executioner’s hood.
Tomlinson watched the seaplane take off and bank west, its fuselage blue and white in the wash of a rising sun. It wasn’t quite seven-thirty; nothing left to do here, all alone thirty miles from land, yet he lingered.
Julian Solo was out here, too, he believed. Maybe not close but somewhere. His powers of distant viewing were a tad rusty, and never a hundred percent accurate, but pretty damn good when he kicked his sentient radar into overdrive.
“Stop moving around,” he told the dog. “I’m trying to get into the zone.”
Another Bock breakfast beer seemed to help. He carried it to the bow and let his nose become a dowsing rod like old-time spiritualists had used to find water. A quarter turn to the north . . . a turn to the west, then a correctional turn to the southwe
st, put him on a sensory beam that felt about right. But there were no ships out there on the horizon when he opened his eyes.
“That doesn’t mean diddly-squat,” he told the dog. “Line of sight from sea level is only a couple of miles. Less then twelve, even for one of those big oceangoing mothers that like to run down sailboats when they get the chance.”
He went to the electronics suite and switched on the radar. The little seaplane was a blip, flying crazy low, and already twenty miles away. To the northeast, a couple of fast-moving vessels were off Boca Grande, and several more to the east. But nothing to the southwest—not within twenty-four miles, the radar’s max range.
Hmm . . .
“I’ve been wrong before,” he said, “but I’m not wrong this time. It’s a sort of fizzy feeling I get where the brain stem connects to my medulla. Trust me, Julian will be here, but later. Around sunset, give or take. Or tomorrow night. He’s an international criminal. They’re like cockroaches. They hate the light.”
A little after nine, Tomlinson dropped an orange marker buoy. Fifteen minutes later, he hauled anchor and cruised around for a while looking for the killer whale, then pointed the boat toward Sanibel. When cell reception was good enough, he called Ava and left a message. He tried again after he’d cleared the causeway but had to be satisfied with her lukewarm text response:
Feeling better, will call in few days.
Woodring Point was only a couple of miles ahead, then the entrance into Dinkin’s Bay.
Play it fast and cool, he reminded himself. Don’t use the channel; run the flats straight to the lab.
He didn’t want to have to answer the question, “Where’s Doc?”
• • •
No need to worry about questions. Half the Dinkin’s Bay population was clustered around a truck labeled TAMPA BAY FREIGHT, when he arrived, and a box the size of a refrigerator. By the time he got the boat moored, and the dog fed, and fish in a dozen aquariums, too, the box had been opened, but Mack, Figgy, Rhonda, and several others were still outside the marina office, ogling what the box had contained.
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