Стюарт Вудс - Contraband

Stone cast her off. “At forty knots, you’ll be there in an hour and a half. We’re berthed next to the old submarine base. There’s a sign.” He tossed her duffel down to her; she started the engines and Todd pushed her off. She turned for the entrance to the lagoon, and shortly she was in open water, cruising around the fort, headed east.

An hour and a half later Max tied up near Breeze ’s berth, where it would be plainly visible to Stone’s crew, tossed her duffel up onto the stone pier, and climbed the ladder. To her surprise, an unmarked KWPD car was idling there, its windows up to keep the air-conditioning in. A window slid down, and Tommy Scully waved her over.

She climbed into the front passenger seat, tossing her duffel into the rear. “I thought you had the flu,” she said.

“I got over it,” Tommy replied, “when I heard the words ‘homicide attempt.’”

“Don’t exhale,” Max said.

Tommy got the car rolling. “What’s the matter, didn’t you get your flu shot?”

“Yes.”

“So did I,” Tommy replied. Tommy was in his sixties and would already have retired if he hadn’t loved the work so much. Originally a detective in the NYPD, he had come to Key West years before and had quickly risen to chief of detectives. He gave that up at retirement age, to make room for a younger man, and here he was, still working cases.

Max was glad.

They drove to Key West Hospital, a modern facility on Stock Island, one island up the Keys. They flashed brass and were let into the emergency room, where a young resident and a nurse were examining an EKG from an older man on the table.

“The good news,” the resident said, “is your chest pains were not caused by a heart attack.”

“It’s my gallbladder, isn’t it?” the man said.

“I concur with your diagnosis. We’ll get you over to radiology and get a scan, just to be sure.” He beckoned to an orderly and gave him instructions for radiology, then turned to the detectives.

“Sorry for the delay. He’ll be gone for at least half an hour, and we don’t have another immediate case. You’ll want to know what happened.”

“Please,” Max said. “This is Detective Tommy Scully, and I’m Detective Max Crowley. Start at the beginning.”

“I’m Dr. Keith Barron and this is Julie Harmon. We were, ah...”

“I got an alarm from my patient, Mr. Dix,” Julie said, interrupting. “I checked on him and found that he had freed a hand — he was restrained to keep him from turning over in the night and injuring himself with a broken rib — and had yanked out his IV. He said somebody had tried to kill him.”

“Why did he yank the IV?” Max asked.

“He said another nurse had come into his room, took a big hypodermic from a case, filled it with a fluid, then injected it into his IV bag, telling him it was for his pain and to help him sleep. Then she left.”

“Why did he think the nurse was trying to kill him?”

“He said he used to be a junkie and knows about needles and such, and that the hypo was too big for the job.”

“May we speak to the other nurse?” Max asked.

“There was no other nurse on this floor,” Julie replied.

“And you kept the IV bag and gave it to the cop?”

“Correct.”

Max turned to Tommy. “Any word on the tox report?”

Tommy shook his head.

“From what direction did you approach his room?”

“From this direction,” Julie said, pointing. “One floor up.”

“What’s in the other direction?”

“A dead end with an emergency exit to a fire escape. If you open the door a loud bell rings. We heard nothing.”

“Let’s have a look at it,” Max said. She followed Julie upstairs and down the hall, where the nurse reached for the doorknob.

“Don’t touch it,” Max said. “Let me.” She opened the door carefully, but no bell sounded. She examined the hinged edge and found a wire that had been cut. “Let’s get a team up here to take prints,” she said to Tommy, who nodded silently, then made a call.

“Now let’s talk to Al Dix,” Max said.

Dix’s bed was raised, pointing him at the door. “Hi, Dixie,” Max said. He was about fifty, with an abundance of thick gray hair.

“Hi, Max,” Dix replied in a normal voice, if a bit softer. “Nice to see you sober.”

Max laughed. “I’m nearly always sober.”

“Nobody at the Lame Duck is ‘nearly always sober.’”

“You have a point. I hear you had a visitor last night. Can you describe her?”

“Taller than you, shortish dark hair, slender, nice tits, dressed in blue scrubs.”

“I don’t suppose she introduced herself.”

“Nope, and she wasn’t wearing an ID badge like Julie’s.” He nodded toward the nurse.

“She wasn’t ours,” Julie said. “Nobody on duty matches that description.”

“I’ve seen her before,” Dix said.

Max’s eyes widened. “Oh? Where?”

“At the Lame Duck,” he said. “Where else? Everybody goes there. You go there. Not him, though.” He nodded toward Tommy.

“I’m sorry, this is Detective Scully.”

“I know who he is,” Dix said. “He just doesn’t go to the Duck.”

Tommy shrugged. “I got a wife who doesn’t like noisy places. They got security cameras there?”

“Yes,” Max and Dix said simultaneously.

“Then that’s our next stop,” Tommy said.

“We’re not finished here,” Max said.

Max pulled a chair up to Dix’s bed. “Are you comfortable, Dixie?”

“As long as I don’t laugh,” Dix replied. “Don’t say anything funny.”

“Tell me about the airplane.”

“I know a lot of airplanes. Which one?”

“The one you dumped into the lagoon at Fort Jefferson two days ago,” she said.

Dix looked blank. “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t dump airplanes into lagoons.”

“You were landing a Cessna 206 with a broken pontoon and ended up on the bottom.”

“You’re losing it, Max,” he said.

“Nope. I’ll show you the airplane when you’re laughing again.”

“All I remember is being loaded onto a chopper.”

“I was there. I loaded you.”

“I thought I was going crazy.”

“Let’s start earlier that day.”

“Okay, how early?”

“Where’d you have breakfast?”

“At the Lame Duck, where I have breakfast every day.”

“What did you eat?”

“Scrambled eggs and bacon, like every day.”

“See anybody you knew there?”

“Sure. There’s a regular breakfast crowd.”

“Anybody offer you some work?”

“Work?”

“Flying an airplane, Dixie. It’s what you do.”

“Nope.”

“Who owns a Cessna 206 out at the airport?”

Dix thought about it. “Nobody. I once ferried a 206 to Lauderdale that got weathered in, and the owner had to fly home commercial and abandon the airplane.”

“Remember his name?”

“Her name... Edna... Edna something. It was five or six years ago, and I only saw her once, when I landed at Lauderdale and got paid. Nice lady, in her late sixties. She’d be in her seventies now.”

“Okay, let’s forget Edna for a moment. Let’s go back to the Lame Duck at breakfast time.”

“Okay.”

“What did you do after breakfast?”

Dix took a breath to answer, then stopped. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure?”

“I mean I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what you did all day two days ago?”

“I remember being put on the chopper, then I passed out and woke up here. I asked what was going on, but nobody had any answers.”

“Dixie, what we’ve got here is a light case of temporary amnesia,” Max said. “Happens sometimes when you fetch a blow to the head. It’ll come back to you eventually.” She placed her card on the bedside table. “Call me when it does. That’s my cell number.”