Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Gentry hesitated, then said, “Well, what the hell. Come on in. Watch that first step, there’s a crack . . .”

Gentry took them through the house, across a burnt-orange shag carpet to what he called a Florida room, a screened-in porch that looked out over a narrow strip of grass to the near-identical Florida room on the house on the street behind them. A knee-high refrigerator was set under a countertop, and Gentry asked, “Beer, Diet Coke, lemonade?”

Lucas, keeping it congenial, took a Diet Coke and Bob went for the lemonade. Gentry popped open a beer for himself, and he asked, again, when they were all sitting down, “What’d I do?”

“Is there a wife around somewhere? A girlfriend?” Bob asked.

“Wife. She’s down at Dinner Key—that’s a marina—with a couple of friends.”

Lucas said, “What you did, is, you stopped in at the Baily Hotel in Miami Beach a few months back to have a beer. You had a little talk with a dope dealer . . .”

Gentry held up a hand. “Nothing illegal about a beer,” he said. “I don’t deal dope, no way, shape, or form. I’m well out of all that. The bad old days.”

Lucas said, “Okay, but this guy knew you, and you got to talking about that Coast Guard shooting up in Lauderdale. You told him the diver on the boat was a woman. We’d like to know where you heard that.”

Gentry was sitting on an old-fashioned glider that creaked, eek-eek, eek-eek , as he rocked it with his toes. He leaned back into a cushion and closed his eyes, and after a moment he said, “That fuckin’ Morris.”

“Who?” Lucas asked. In his own ears, he sounded less than convincing.

“You know who,” Gentry said, opening his eyes. “I don’t expect you to admit it, but the only guy I talked to about that shooting was Morris. I didn’t talk to anyone else at the Baily about it.”

“What’s Morris’s first name?” Bob asked, taking a notebook out of his pocket.

Gentry shook his head. “What’d you do, get his ass in a crack? Squeeze him?”

“We don’t know a Morris, but we’d like to,” Lucas lied. “That’s not really the point. The point is, where’d you hear about a woman diver? Where’d she come from?”

Gentry leaned back and closed his eyes again, while Lucas and Bob waited. Then he said, “Before we got busted by the DEA, back in the nineties—we were totally innocent, by the way . . .”

“Of course you were,” Bob said.

“. . . I did two things. I built custom homes and I ran boats. I liked building homes okay, but you know, they were custom and the wives would get on me like a hair shirt. Bitch and moan, it never stopped. What I really loved was the boats. I had a lot of friends in that community. Still do. Sport fishermen, dive guys, people who live out on the water. Even a couple of Coast Guard and Marine Patrol guys, back when we had a Florida Marine Patrol.”

Bob: “We buy that; we’ve read your file.”

“I’ve still got a boat, a little center console fisherman,” Gentry said. “Doesn’t have a head on it. Sometimes my wife and I go for a run up the Intracoastal. She likes to look at houses. We’ve been as far north as Vero Beach, which is a long-ass haul from here. The boat’s not big enough to sleep on; we stay in motels.

“Anyway, there’s this crazy old fucker named Roger Quinn, a left-over hippie. He might have run a few loads himself. He has a pontoon boat that he takes out to the Intracoastal. He sells hamburgers off a grill and he’s got a Porta Potty on the back where girls can take a leak. He charges two bucks a pee, probably takes in a hundred bucks a day in the summer. The boat’s called Big Mac’s You’re-In-and-Out . That’s sort of a pun . . .”

Lucas frowned. “What’s the pun?”

“It’s where women go to pee. You’re in and out. Urine-and-out.” He peered at them. “Urine. Because of the Porta Potty.”

Lucas and Bob caught on simultaneously, and they both said, “Ah.”

“I’ve known Roger forever,” Gentry continued. “My wife wanted to go up to Lauderdale one day, hot day, smooth water, take a run down the New River and look at houses. We got up there and she had to take a leak, so we stopped at this guy’s boat and Roger and I got to talking. This was a month or so after that Mako burned, around Labor Day, in there.

“Roger said he’d seen that Mako. That one day it came over and the guys bought burgers and fries. He said they’d been out diving, there was a black chick on board, and she was the diver. Said the guys were New Yorkers, from their accents, and said that from the look of them, he could believe they shot the Coast Guard guys because . . . they were that kind of New Yorker.”

“A black chick? The diver?”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody told anyone?” Lucas asked.

Gentry shrugged: “There were cops all over the place, every kind of cop there was, including those fucks from the DEA. I wasn’t gonna stick my hand up, not with my history. Not when it involves cops getting shot because of dope. Besides, Roger smokes more weed than the rest of South Florida put together, which is a lot of weed. Who knows what he really saw? And he’s a bullshitter. He knows everything on the water, but about a third of it is lies and bullshit.”

He hesitated, then added, “With wall-to-wall cops, you’d think they would have discovered that much, huh? The black girl? The New York guys? Roger was right there, every day, all day, not more than a mile from where the shooting happened. You’d think somebody would have talked to him. Some cop.”

“You’d think,” Bob said.

Lucas asked, “Would he be out there today? It’s kinda cold.”

“He’s out there every day. He’s out there on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Doesn’t have anything else to do. Even on a bad day, he’ll attract some traffic, even if it’s just some woman who needs to pee. I gotta say, his hamburgers are good, the fries are great. There’ll be a certain amount of dirt and gasoline in them . . . and when I think about it, maybe that’s what makes them so good.”

“You keep saying ‘women’ need to pee,” Bob said. “I’m a little curious . . .”

Gentry shrugged. “With their plumbing, it’s hard to take a whiz off the back of a boat.”

Lucas: “So . . . how would we get out there? Where Roger is?”

Gentry said, “You’re cops, you could call the Broward Marine Patrol, but . . . actually, if I were you, I’d go up to the Lauderdale Yacht Club. Roger is usually about two minutes from there. Show them your badges at the club, somebody would take you out in a tender.”

“Okay. You got anything else?” Lucas asked.

“Nope. I really don’t. Listen, don’t tell Roger I brought up his name, huh? He’s a friend,” Gentry said. “I only told you about him because I hated the idea of those Coasties getting shot. I really did. They’re water folks like me. And I’m not really getting him in trouble, because he wouldn’t have anything to do with those assholes on the Mako. He’s not a dope guy. He works hard and he’s a straight arrow.”

“Except for smoking more weed than everyone else in South Florida put together,” Bob said.

“That’s not even a traffic ticket anymore,” Gentry said.

“As we’ve found out,” Lucas said.

Gentry nodded. “Here, I’ll sweeten it up for you. You don’t tell Roger and I won’t give that fuckin’ Morris a hard time about giving me up.”

“We don’t know any Morris,” Lucas said. “We’d like to.”

“Have it your way,” Gentry said, rolling his eyes.

Bob: “What’d you do with your ten million?”

Gentry waved his arm around, taking in the house. “Does this look like ten million?” He shook his head. “There never was any ten million. I was completely, totally innocent.”