James Swain - Midnight Rambler

“What's that?” we both asked.

“The man who runs the dry dock is not on good terms with Perez. They have had words many times. I was surprised he got Perez's boat out so quickly.”

A good ole boy named Clyde ran the dry dock. Clyde had issues with dark skin and foreign accents. I took off running toward the dry dock, knowing what Perez and Skell must have done to persuade Clyde to get Perez's boat.

The dry dock was a blue-and-gold manufactured aluminum building designed like an airplane hangar. Inside, powerboats rested on steel-framed bunks stacked one atop the other, right up to the vaulted ceiling. A portable hydraulic lift, used to move the boats, sat in the corner as I entered. Normally, Clyde sat in a beach chair beside the lift, listening to country and western music while spitting tobacco juice on the ground.

Clyde's chair was empty, and his radio was turned off. I looked around the building for a sign of where he might have gone. The building did not have air-conditioning, and the air hung hot and still. Buster had disappeared, and I could hear him whining and scratching on wood. I followed the sound to a storage closet in the back.

“Good dog,” I said.

I pulled open the heavy sliding door. Sunlight filled the closet's interior, and I saw a sunburned man lying on the floor, holding his stomach with both hands and moaning. A large stain covered the bottom of his denim shirt.

“Clyde?”

“Don't hurt me,” he begged.

“It's Jack Carpenter. Where you hit?”

“That bastard Perez shot me in the stomach,” Clyde said.

Linderman entered the building. I called him over, and we pulled Clyde out of the closet by his ankles. Linderman started to tend to Clyde's wound while I dialed 911.

“Jack, he's okay,” Linderman said.

“How can he be okay?”

Linderman tossed me a pint metal flask that he'd pulled from Clyde's pants. The flask had a bullet hole in it. Holding it to my nose, I smelled rum. I saw Clyde tenderly rub his stomach.

“Lucky you,” I said.

Linderman called the Broward office of the FBI and asked for a cutter to be sent to the mouth of the canal leading out of Tugboat Louie's. The FBI, which was responsible for handling criminal investigations in waters twelve miles off shore, kept a high-speed cutter and crew on twenty-four-hour alert in nearby Port Everglades. It was the best chance we had of finding Perez's boat.

Linderman and I walked outside the hangar and waited for the cutter to arrive. Kumar came down the dock and pulled me into the hangar's cool shade.

“Jack, will you please tell me what's going on?”

Normally, it was best to say nothing during an investigation. But Kumar was my friend, and I couldn't keep him in the dark.

“The man you saw with Perez was Simon Skell, the Midnight Rambler. The woman was kidnapped. They're going to take her out and throw her overboard.”

“And I let him get away,” Kumar said.

“You did everything you could,” I said.

“No, I did not. There is something I did not tell your FBI friend.”

“What's that?”

“Over the past six months, Perez took his boat out many times, always when it was late at night. Several employees saw him and thought it was suspicious.”

“How many times did Perez do this?”

“Six or seven.”

“Did you see him do this?”

“Once. There was a ferocious storm. I watched from my office window. Perez took a sack from his van, and carried it down to his boat. It looked heavy.”

I thought back to the empty coolers I'd seen in Perez's shed. For the past six months he'd been coming here, taking his boat out, and dumping the bodies.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

Kumar's shoulders sagged, and he walked back to the bar muttering under his breath. I knew that his inability to stop Perez would weigh on him for a long time.

Fifteen agonizing minutes later, the FBI cutter motored up to Tugboat Louie's, and the captain jumped onto the dock. He was in his fifties and fair-skinned, the sunblock on his face as bright as war paint. He explained that his vessel had just completed a sweep of the waters both north and south of us and had not spotted Perez's boat.

“The ocean's choppy, and there's a small craft advisory in effect until later tonight,” the captain said. “My guess is, Perez is hiding in the mangroves. When it's clear, he'll dump his victim. It would help our search if we could get a description of his boat.”

Clyde stepped forward. He'd put on a fresh shirt and seemed eager to put the incident with the flask behind him. He described Perez's boat to the captain. When he was finished, the captain made him start over. It was an old interrogator's trick, and Clyde's description became more detailed the second time, right down to the bad paint job and sputtering Honda engine.

“Anything you'd like to add?” the captain asked when Clyde was done.

“The Hispanic in the boat has a death wish,” I said.

“That's good to know,” the captain said.

He jumped on the cutter and motored away. I stood on the dock and watched, the sound of the cutter's engines reverberating across the marina.

“What do we do now?” I asked Linderman.

“We wait,” Linderman said.

“I'm not good at waiting,” I said.

Linderman slapped me on the back. He reminded me of a Little League coach I'd had who liked to slap his players on the back when the team was getting trounced.

“Keep the faith, Jack,” he said.

We walked down the dock to Tugboat Louie's bar. On the way, I counted the steps. There were exactly 120. It was a number I would never forget: 120 steps from my office was the boat used to dispose of the women I'd spent six months looking for.

God was cruel.

“I need some coffee,” Linderman said.

We went inside the bar. The cops' presence had cleared the place out, and Robert Palmer's “Addicted to Love” blasted the empty room. We took a pair of stools and waited to be served. My sense of helplessness would not go away. I needed to do something, or I would start pulling my hair out and make everyone around me crazy.

Buster sat by my feet. He was panting, and I scratched behind his ears. I'd read that this calmed dogs down and wondered if it would have the same effect on me. Right now, I was willing to give just about anything a try.

“Jack, Jack!” a familiar voice rang out.

I lifted my eyes. Kumar stood at the bottom of the stairwell behind the bar, motioning excitedly to me.

“What's up?” I asked.

“I have figured out where they are taking the lady,” Kumar said.

The scrape of my stool was enough to make Buster jump.

“You did? How?”

“I used a nautical chart,” Kumar said. “Come upstairs, and I'll show you.”

We followed Kumar upstairs to his office. A large nautical chart hung on the wall behind his desk. It was for boaters and showed the shoreline, minimum and maximum water depths, and aids and hazards to navigation for Broward County. Grabbing a pencil, Kumar began drawing lines on the chart.

“Here is what I'm thinking,” Kumar said. “The engine on Perez's boat is less than a hundred horsepower, and not very strong. Even in calm seas, he can't go far without fear of capsizing. More than likely, he'll stay close to the shoreline to dump the lady. He'll probably pick a deep area that can be found on a fisherman's map, or a chart like this one.”

“Do fish like deep areas?” Linderman asked.

“Oh, yes,” Kumar said. “They are safe places for them to breed.”

Kumar drew three lines across the nautical chart. Each started at his marina and went down the canal to the ocean. Reaching the ocean, the lines veered off in different directions. One went north, one south, and one due east. None went very far.