He released her hand and waved vaguely at their plates. ‘Now let’s eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’
But before a distinctly flushed Stella could reply, or either of them had even lifted their forks from the table, the radio under the table crackled fully into life and curtailed their meal with unconditional finality.
33
He backed his cab into a space behind the hotel’s green-painted emergency generator that stood at the rear of the guests’ car park, ready for use if a hurricane or tropical storm brought down overhead power lines.
He parked on the far side of the big machine, so that nobody in the lodge or eating at the tables outside on the beach could see the car. Not that it really mattered; no one would be looking specifically for him yet, but it seemed the wise thing to do.
There was no guarantee he would see her and he had no intention of risking going into reception to ask for her by name. But it had occurred to him, as he was driving back home to collect his things, that he would pass Largo Lodge on the way. It was the dining hour and she might well be having her supper while watching the sunset.
It couldn’t hurt to take a look.
He took off his coat and tie and shoes and socks, and placed them in a neat pile on the back seat. Then he rolled his jeans up a couple of turns, and unbuttoned his shirt all the way down. Now he looked like any other vacationer wanting to get some sand between his toes and catch one of Florida’s legendary sunsets.
The parking lot’s black tarmac was still hot from the afternoon sun and burned the soles of his feet. It was a relief to reach the relatively cooler sand of the beach, where he immediately scanned the tables. About half were occupied, mostly by couples, but over to one side he could see a woman sitting on her own, her back to him. She was studying the menu.
He walked casually across to the nearest empty table to hers and sat down. After a moment or two he glanced over at the woman, who was now in profile.
It was her.
She was even more beautiful than in her picture, he thought. Stunning, in fact. She turned towards him as she cast around for a waiter. Extraordinary, almond-shaped eyes that glowed like soft lamps in her lightly tanned face, framed by dark hair that tumbled down to her shoulders. A stunning figure beneath a close-fitting cream silk blouse – not quite what you’d call voluptuous, but head-turning, for sure. She was in white cotton short-shorts and her long bare legs stretched out onto the beach, the toes of her slim feet wriggling slowly in the sand.
The thought of exactly what he was going to do with her, when the time came, made him slightly dizzy and his breath caught in his throat. He found himself wondering if her screams would sound different because she was English. As if to whet his appetite, he realised he was about to hear her voice as a waiter hurried to her table.
‘Good evening, ma’am, welcome back. Are you ready to order?’
‘Yes, hello again . . . I’d like to order for my friend as well, please. I’m expecting him in a few minutes. We’ll both have what we had last night – the steamed little-neck clams. And two glasses of Chardonnay as well, please.’
What an accent! She sounded like the Queen of England. He’d never heard such fucking cut-glass tones in his life, except in the movies. Did all English girls sound like that? He loved it.
The waiter was asking her if they’d like to try the house sundowners.
‘I’m awfully sorry . . . what’s a sundowner?’
The waiter laughed. ‘I think you’d call it a cocktail, ma’am.’
She laughed with him, showing perfect white teeth and the pinkest of tongues.
‘In that case, yes – you can bring two of those straight away. Lots of ice, please.’
He could sit here listening to her and watching her all evening but his instinct for self-preservation was nagging at him: it really was time to move.
Never mind. The next time he saw her, which would be as soon as the heat was off and things had calmed down, it would be just the two of them. Alone.
They’d have all the time in the world, then. He’d be very sure to arrange that.
He stood up and began walking back to his taxi. When he turned round at the edge of the beach for one last look at her, she had risen to her feet too and was walking away from him down to the ocean’s edge. The rays of the setting sun bounced and reflected off the rippling water and back-lit her breeze-blown hair with a shimmering halo.
Christ, she looks like an angel, he thought.
Which gave him a sudden idea of what to do with her when their time came.
It was something really cool.
And especially, exclusively, for her.
34
Lee grabbed the radio’s microphone.
‘Yes, sergeant, this is Agent Foster. Go ahead please.’
Lee looked across the table at Stella. ‘I think this could be it.’
The speaker hissed static for a few seconds before crackling to life again.
‘Pelican Cabs have just been on the phone, sir. They say one of their drivers has gone off the job and they can’t raise him on the radio. He was meant to pick up a woman at Cheeca Lodge, coupla hours back, and take her for her regular monthly appointment at her hairdresser’s down in Marathon Key but it was a no-show. Over.’
Lee pressed the mic’s transmit button. ‘Two hours?’ he barked. ‘Why have they taken this long to tell us? Over.’
‘Seems the fare was an old lady and when the cab didn’t show she figured it was her mistake and she’d gotten muddled; had the wrong day. It wasn’t until she got around to calling the cab company half an hour ago to check it out that they realised something was out of joint. Like I say, they’ve tried calling him up but no dice. They say he’s never done anything like this before, by the way. Usually as reliable as they come. Over.’
‘Does he fit profile? Over.’
The other man chuckled.
‘Like a glove, sir. He’s thirty-two, been a driver with them for nearly four years, so a lot of people on the island will have got to know him by sight, just like you said.
‘His name is John Henry Woods. Lives right here in the Key. We’ve got men going to his home address now and we’ve put out an all-car alert with the registration of the cab he was in, and his own private car, too, a Dodge Dart. Over.’
‘Have the guys on the roadblocks been informed? Over.’
‘Like I said, sir, it’s an all-car alert. We’ve got men at the cab company getting photo ID of the guy from their records. We’ll photocopy it here and get copies out as soon as we can. Over.’
‘That’s terrific work, sergeant – great going. Right, I’m coming straight in to co-ordinate everything from here on in. Meantime, call the TV stations in Miami and give them everything we’ve got. You can name a John Henry Woods of Key Largo as our prime suspect. Say we’ll get photos of him to them inside a coupla hours. And organise a press conference at headquarters for’ – he checked his watch – ‘an hour from now. Seven-thirty. I’ll be with you in ten minutes, max. Over and out.’
He stood up and grinned at Stella – whose face was suffused with relief – with a mixture of triumph and admiration.
‘What was that you were saying to me just now about thinking maybe you got this all wrong? Jesus Christ, Stella, you’re a goddamned witch.’ He leaned forward impulsively and kissed her full on the lips.
Startled, she momentarily tried to pull back, but almost at once she instead found herself beginning to respond. The kiss gradually lost its urgency and became a gentler, more tender exchange. Eventually, they slowly drew apart and stared at each other.
‘Tell me I don’t have to apologise for doing that,’ he said at last, putting the back of one hand up to her cheek and stroking it.
She smiled at him. ‘Hmm . . . I’m not sure . . . do you always kiss members of your team when they’ve done something to win your approval?’
He laughed. ‘There’s a first time for everything and believe me, that was a firs
t.’ He hesitated. ‘Listen, Stella . . . I wish I didn’t have to—’
She took his hand from her face and brushed his fingers with her lips.
‘I know. You’ve got to go. Call me when you can.’
‘I will.’
He hefted the radio up from the sand and turned to leave.
‘With any luck, it’ll be to tell you we’ve got our hands on the son of a bitch. He can’t have got far.’
‘Let’s hope so. Remember, Lee, he’s clever as a fox and slippery as an eel.’
‘Yeah, well, so am I, Stella. We’ll get him.’
35
The owner and crew of the breaker’s yard had gone home for their supper more than an hour ago and the place was deserted. The chain-link gates were ajar – who was going to steal cars headed for the crusher? – and he punched them open simply by driving at them. A few scratches and dents to his beloved Dart hardly mattered now. He promised himself one day he’d get another.
He drove slowly along the lines of deceased sedans, pickups and the occasional rusted shell of a van until he found a gap big enough to accommodate the Dart, driving it in as far as he could go, its front fender wedged hard up against the wreck in the next line in front of him.
He took a screwdriver from the glove box and managed to squeeze his body out into the narrow gap between his car and a totalled Chevrolet, working his way to the rear of the Dart and getting to work on the licence plate. In a couple of minutes he had it off and shoved it under the crumpled, rotting Chevy.
Next, he popped the trunk and took out the bag he’d rapidly packed back at his house – the house he’d probably never see again.
He checked the hold-all, not that he could go back now for anything he’d forgotten. The cops would be there anytime soon, once they realised he’d done a duck-dive. He’d left the company’s cab parked openly on the street; there was no point in hiding it. Anyway, he wanted them to focus on looking for the Dart.
Everything he reckoned he’d need seemed to be safely in the black canvas bag. His stash of money – a couple of grand, maybe a little more; it’d last him a few months if he was careful – plus all the usual stuff a guy needed for a spur-of-the-moment vacation. He rummaged for the most important item of all, his heart beginning to thump a little faster as, at first, his groping fingers failed to find it.
Then they touched the plastic bottle and he sighed with relief as he tugged it out. Of course it was there; he’d packed it not fifteen minutes before. He told himself to stop being a jerk.
He shoved the bottle back and zipped the hold-all shut again, slammed the trunk lid down and stepped out onto the cindered track he’d just driven down.
This was good. The Dart was at least four feet deeper into the line of wrecks than the ruined cars on either side of it. Unless you inspected this spot closely – and why would anyone do that? – his car was for all practical purposes invisible. Unless he caught a very unlucky break it would be many days before anyone paid the slightest attention to it. All the same, he picked up some handfuls of dirt and dust and smeared them across the lid of the trunk. Then he stomped down as hard as he could on the rear fender until it was sagging at a drunken angle toward the ground. As an afterthought, he picked up a chunk of shapeless metal lying nearby and smashed it repeatedly through the rear window. Now his car appeared as ruined and forlorn as its neighbours.
He walked back towards the yard’s entrance. Next stop, a dark little bar he knew of three or four minutes’ walk away. It would take him five minutes to do what he needed to there, and then he’d be on his way.
He knew exactly what he was going to steal to replace his beloved Dart. He’d swung by the spot on his way to the breaker’s yard and of course, it was there as usual, waiting patiently for its owner – a snow-bird and his family who wouldn’t fly down south from their home in Richmond, Virginia until the week after Thanksgiving, still almost two months away. The guy hadn’t been behind the wheel of the thing since Easter.
But he had.
And he had the ignition keys right here, snug in the back pocket of his jeans.
36
‘He’s gone to ground.’
Lee’s voice, down the phone to Stella, was calm and unflurried, she thought. The voice of experience.
His roadblocks at both ends of Key Largo were still firmly in place, and would be so for the foreseeable. But they had yet to pull over the Dodge Dart they were looking for (although several young male drivers of the same model had enjoyed some close personal attention in recent hours).
It was past eleven now, and all the local late-night news shows had led with the story. On the networks it was high on the running order too, mostly going out as the second or third item.
Stella, lying on her bed with the television on, interrupted him.
‘Hang on, Lee – WBFS are about to run it again. I missed it earlier – let me watch this.’
‘OK, Stella, I’ll watch it too. Call you back.’
She reached for the remote control box on her bed. It had taken her a while to work out what the thing actually was, and she had been astonished to discover that she could change channels, or adjust the sound, or brightness, without going near the television itself.
Now she pressed the volume button, and the newscaster’s voice boomed out of the set.
‘A suspect in the Keys killings has been named at last. State police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation late tonight jointly named 32-year-old local cab driver, John Henry Woods, as prime suspect in the brutal slayings of four young women in recent weeks. All of them lived, and died, in Key Largo.’
A black-and-white full-face photo, probably lifted from Woods’s driving licence, was flashed onto the screen. Stella sat a little straighter against her pillows, full of curiosity. This was the man she had apparently successfully profiled, on such slender evidence.
She knew from her academic work that these monsters rarely, if ever, looked the part, and at first sight the face that stared out at her from the television seemed no exception to the rule.
The newscaster was saying that Woods had brown hair, but it looked pretty mousy to her, even in monochrome. Similarly the eyes, also described as brown, appeared as if they might be a watered-down shade of the colour.
No one ever looked remotely like their normal self in formal, official photographs like this; Stella knew that. Indeed, her own passport photo was, to her eyes, the quintessential portrait of a near-imbecile.
But all the same . . . there was an ephemeral quality here, flickering just beneath the surface. It reminded her of something, something elusive she couldn’t quite grasp. The newscaster’s stentorian words seemed to fade away as she stared at John Henry Woods’s neutral features and blank, expressionless eyes. He seemed . . . she strained to hear what the instinctive part of her mind was trying to whisper to her . . . he seemed to be . . .
The phone rang again and she snatched up the receiver. ‘Lee? Hang on, just let me turn the volume down on the television . . . OK, go ahead.’
‘Great coverage, huh? This really oughta help some. A few more of these teleshots, plus tomorrow morning’s papers, and believe me, we’ll—’
Something in her mind softly clicked into focus.
‘He’s mocking us, Lee.’
‘What? What’s that, Stella?’
‘He’s mocking us. He’s mocking the whole world. Oh my God, the ego of the man! Couldn’t you see it in his face just now?’
There was a distinct pause at the other end.
‘Stella, have you been at the mini-bar?’
She laughed, despite herself.
‘No, of course not . . . look, Lee, I realise I must sound like some kind of ghastly fake stage medium, but I mean it. I know it’s totally unscientific, but . . . remember what you were saying on the beach earlier about trusting one’s instincts? How they’re really based on experience? Mine are trying to speak to me now. Oh, I wish I could explain this properly . . .’ Suddenly she snapped her fi
ngers.
‘Of course. Those pictures of the Nazis. Their official party photos, I mean. You can practically see the malevolence in the faces of some of the leading Party members – Himmler, Heydrich, Hess – their photos reek of arrogance and conceit. I felt exactly the same about our man just then. He’d composed his features for an official photograph, but just like those gangsters in uniform, he couldn’t hide his inherent arrogance.’
Now it was Lee who laughed. ‘Well, forgive me, Stella, but we kinda deduced that about the guy already, now, didn’t we?’
She nodded to herself, plunged back deep in thought. ‘Yes, of course, but that’s only part of what I’m trying to say. There’s something else.’
After a long silence he spoke. ‘Stella? You’re not saying anything. You still there?’
‘Just a minute, Lee. There’s something else! Dammit, what the hell is it? Something else about that face . . .’
‘Take your time, Stella. I’ve learned to trust your instincts.’
Next moment sudden realisation flooded through her like white light and she gasped in shock.
‘I’ve seen him! I’VE SEEN HIM!’
‘What? Where? When? How can you be certain it was—’
‘I’ve seen him twice, Lee! The first time on the day I was driven down from Miami. We passed a taxi that’d been pulled over by a police car with its roof-lights flashing and everything. The officer was talking to the driver and he was facing me – the cab driver, I mean. It was him, Lee! I’m certain of it. I remember saying to my driver that I got the impression the man was trying not to laugh, which I thought was really odd under the circumstances. Exactly the expression he’s wearing in that photo.’
Lee whistled. ‘Jesus, Stella, that’s some coincidence, if you’re right.’
The Way You Look Tonight Page 14