King Tide

by A. J. Stewart

  “Pilates is a crime now?”

  “It’s a crime the way I do it. But you did it in a little space behind the ballroom. Near the staff stairs. The door near the boutiques goes up there. Just near where you walked out of shot on the video. And from that little area on the mezzanine you can go through the ballroom and down the south emergency stairs without being seen.”

  “You are really clutching at straws.”

  “I often do. But you get enough straws you can build a palapa hut, and that’s the best place to sit after a hard day’s work. Which Ron and I did in the gym, putting up shutters with no help from you or Paul. I bet when we left the gym you were right behind that door to the stairs, waiting for us to go. And when we do you go back into the gym. Maybe you convince Paul to lift, or maybe he’s in the rack already because I goaded him into it .

  “I figure he’s got the safety bars in place. He’s a lifter, he has a process. But you offer to spot for him. Maybe you’re talking about making a deal with him. He thinks he owns you, so he says fine, spot me. But a spotter stands at the head of the bench. From there it takes just a little push to knock the safety bars out of their hole in the rack. If he’s lifted the weight up, you could knock the safety bars out on each side before he knew it. And he’d have to push the weight back up into the racks to get out from under it. Plenty of time for you to push against him. Plus gravity and three hundred pounds on your side.”

  “Like Shania said, you’re certifiable.”

  “On many levels, but not the one you’re on. See, you had to push down with your palms. You know the weight will come down on his chest if it falls straight, so you drive it back toward yourself, right onto his neck. And you push until he’s dead. Then you take a gym towel and you wipe down each of the safety bars and hide them behind the barbell racks. That will make it look like Paul was stupid and didn’t use them, or at best didn’t know they were there. Then you wiped down the bar that crushed Paul. And then you left.”

  I waited to hear something from Deshawn but he said nothing. In the circumstances it was the smart play. Most people who open their mouths to police just get themselves in trouble. Especially when they’re guilty. But Shania spoke.

  “This is all ridiculous,” she said. “You are slandering a good man. Tell him, Deshawn.”

  But Deshawn went with silence. Shania looked at him and then at me.

  “He might have gotten away with it too. But for one slip. Deshawn knows how weights work. He knows that Paul would be gripping the crosshatched section of the bar, where there would be no prints left. So he knew that his palm prints would be on the smooth section of the bar. He wiped them down. But he forgot something. When you press down with force on a bar, you don’t naturally do it with an open hand. You grip it. You wrap your hands around it. So you wiped the top of the bar where your palms were, Deshawn. But you forgot the underside, probably because Paul was under there, dead. You left eight perfect fingerprints under the bar.”

  Deshawn dropped away from Ronzoni’s hands. He wasn’t making a break for it. He looked deflated. Shania spun around to him.

  “That’s not right. Say it’s not right, Deshawn. Tell him.”

  But Deshawn didn’t tell me. He looked at Shania. What I saw was shame. Not shame in what he had done to Paul. I got the feeling he was going to find a way to live with that. But shame that he had let Shania down. The knight had fallen from his steed.

  “He was going to come after you,” he said. “Don’t you see? I’m not rich. Not like a professional tennis player. He’d want more. It was inevitable. He said if he couldn’t get what he wanted from me he’d get it from you. He’d take you down. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “But . . . My dad?”

  Deshawn dropped his eyes. He couldn’t look at her. I didn’t blame him.

  “I’d do anything for him. I’d do anything for you.”

  “You did,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The rain stopped within the hour. It took ten more hours to get out of the hotel. The lake around The Mornington showed no signs of abating, but eventually it did. I was gone before then. The Palm Beach PD arrived in a rubber dinghy, puttering along the streets like it was Venice. Ronzoni had locked Deshawn and Sam in separate utility rooms. They couldn’t go anywhere. Hotel doors could be used in prisons, except they don’t let enough light in, and that’s against the charter of human rights, or some such. With hurricane shutters on the windows the rooms were safer than the city lockup. Ronzoni collected them one at a time and deposited them in the dinghy, one officer at the rear working the throttle, one behind the prisoners, Ronzoni at the front, facing back. He was back in his suit and looked like Ronzoni again.

  He sealed the gym and the hot tub hut with police crime tape, and then he asked if I wanted him to come back for me and I told him not to bother. The officers said despite the work on Flagler Bridge the city had been able to open it, and although they weren’t yet letting folks back onto the island, it was the best route off it. I told them I’d give it a shot. I watched Ronzoni putter away, the clouds breaking and the sun beaming down to warm the water like a bain marie . He glanced across the parking lot and saw his car with the palm tree sticking out the windshield. He stood in the small boat and looked back at me and yelled something but I was too far away to hear it. It made me smile anyway.

  The coast guard came for the remaining guests. Rosaria the maid and Chef Dean went with them. Neville and Emery remained on board like the captain and executive officer of a sinking vessel. The evidence and the bodies would be collected the following day in a Florida National Guard Humvee.

  I left my borrowed linen suit on the bed in my room and reclaimed my laundered shirt and shorts. My SUV had clung tight to the embankment around the hotel, and despite a good deal of water running through it, it started the first time. I threw up some thanks for Detroit. Cassandra rode out on my back. Ron waded out with their luggage. Cassandra demanded to be taken home to their apartment. I was confident it would still be there, but I wasn’t sure what kind of shape it would be in. The gardens were a lake and the subterranean parking lot was subaqueous. The elevators were out of action and the doorman was MIA, but Ron said the stairs would be fine. I tried to convince them to get off the island but Cassandra was having none of it.

  “This is my home. And we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  I drove at walking pace out onto the South County Road, and gradually made my way onto Flagler Memorial Bridge. The water was still high and moving quickly but it had lost its gray pallor and twinkled in the midday sun like a mischievous child.

  I stopped by Longboard’s. There was a pond in the courtyard, and the surfboard that was attached to the back fence had come loose and was floating around on the water, looking for a way back out to the ocean. The palapa was gone. The bar underneath had been soaked. The indoor bar looked bashed but not beaten. I stood in calf-deep water and took it in and was thankful that Ron wasn’t there to see it. It would have brought a tear to his eye. Mick was stoic as usual.

  “Look,” he said. He pulled one of the beer taps and the amber liquid flowed out onto the bar and mixed with the water on the ground. There were no glasses to be had, but the sight of flowing beer made Mick smile. I didn’t. I couldn’t say why. Sure I was sad that half of Longboard’s had been blown away, but it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. We would clean up and Mick would rebuild and life would move on. It always did.

  “I’ll drop by tomorrow. We’ll get her shipshape,” I told Mick.

  He nodded his thanks and then turned and waded into the darkness of the bar.

  I drove Route 1 home. It was a mess. There was debris everywhere. Homes with no roofs, roofs with no homes. A donut truck was lying on its side opposite the Good Samaritan Medical Center. It took a long time to get to Singer Island but moving slowly felt appropriate. Funeral processions rarely get booked for speeding. By the time I got onto Blue Heron Boulevard the sun was out
and steam was rising from the wet ground. The houses on the Intracoastal looked mostly in good condition. Lawns were a mess but homes were new and built to code. Some of the houses further from the water weren’t so lucky. There were a few flattened here and there, bug-proof cages had collapsed into swimming pools. People were already sweeping the debris from the stores and restaurants along the beach .

  My place looked like it was in one piece. It was a single-story rancher surrounded by two-story McMansions, and I figured the McMansions had taken the brunt of the wind. The sandbags at the front had held and let only minimal water through. I pulled up into the driveway and stopped. I didn’t get out for longer than was necessary. I wasn’t ready. And then I got out anyway.

  The back of the house wasn’t so lucky. The Intracoastal had made itself at home. Many of the sandbags had been picked up and deposited inside, through the sliding door that was supposed to be hurricane-proof. No doubt the manufacturer had a caveat about raging water. The shag carpet inside was like a mangy dog. The sunken living room had become a sort of indoor hot tub, and that thought made my mind flash back through the previous night to confirm if it had actually happened as I remembered it. I figured it could be worse. I could be Deshawn or Sam. I wasn’t convinced they were evil people. A case could be made for the opposite to be true. But when good people do evil deeds they no longer hold the right to claim to be good. No doubt their defense counsel would suggest they were the victims in all this. Paul Zidane and Carly Pastinak weren’t around to argue different, so I wondered if their voices would be heard at all.

  I felt at a loose end. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay. There was much work to be done, but I hadn’t the faintest idea where to start, or if I even had the heart to try. I didn’t want to howl or scream or wail, but I didn’t want to stay silent. The world had turned upside down on me, and I wasn’t sure what it would take to right it again.

  And then I knew. I turned from my sorry-looking living room toward the mass of dead sandbags outside and I saw the answer. The answer to everything. Whatever questions I had, whatever questions were raised, the answer would lie there somewhere. She was in a gray t-shirt with FDLE emblazoned across the front, and long blue shorts. I don’t know what she had on her feet because they were under water, but she leaned on one leg with her hands on her hips.

  “Nice place you got here,” Danielle said.

  I nodded. “It’s a unique fixer-upper opportunity.”

  She smiled. It was a perfect smile. Not flawless. It was lopsided, just a little, turned up more on the right than the left, but it was perfect to me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Governor called a state of emergency. We’re here to help.”

  I waded out of the living room and onto the sandbagged patio. She looked freshly showered and smelled like jasmine.

  “You’re here to help with what?” I asked.

  She smiled again.

  “Anything you need.”

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  Also by AJ Stewart

  Miami Jones series

  Stiff Arm Steal

  Offside Trap

  High Lie

  Dead Fast

  Crash Tack

  Deep Rough

  King Tide

  No Right Turn

  Three Strikes *

  Jacques Fontaine/John Flynn series

  The Compound *

  The Final Tour

  Burned Bridges

  One for One

  * Three Strikes and The Compound are only available to members of AJ Stewart’s readers’ crew. Click here for details .

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Marianne Fox for the editorial support.

  To the betas—especially Carole, Wayne, Andy, Celeste, Bob, Debbie, Peter, Colin and Jim—I am in your debt.

  As always, any and all errors and omissions are mine, especially but not limited to running around in a hurricane wearing nothing but a poncho. That’s a real lack of planning, that is.

  About the Author

  A.J. Stewart is the author of the USA Today bestselling Miami Jones Florida mystery series and the John Flynn thriller series.

  He has lived and worked in Australia, Japan, UK, Norway, and South Africa, as well as San Francisco, Connecticut and of course Florida. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his two favorite people, his wife and son.

  AJ is working on a screenplay that he never plans to produce, but it gives him something to talk about at parties in LA.

  You can find AJ online at

  www.ajstewartbooks.com

  Jacaranda Drive Publishing

  Los Angeles, California

  www.jacarandadrive.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover artwork by Streetlight Graphics

  ISBN-10: 1-945741-03-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945741-03-6

  Copyright © 2017 by A.J. Stewart

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author.