Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Bob: “You’re sure you don’t have a yacht tucked away somewhere? Maybe under a BVI corporate name? Maybe over in St. Pete, or Naples, or Lauderdale? Or two blocks from here? At the marina where your wife is?”

“You guys are so suspicious ,” Gentry said. He looked sad, thinking about it, then ruined it with a sly smile.

They heard the front door open and Gentry turned and shouted, “We’re back here, Helen.”

He asked Lucas, “Can we be done now? She knows all about Blue Tuna, but she’d freak out if she thought I was still being watched by cops.”

“We’re done,” Lucas said. “We won’t tell Roger Quinn where we got his name. If anything bad happens to this Morris guy—we’re gonna look him up—we’ll be back.”

“Yeah. You’re gonna find a Morris in Miami without knowing his first name? Good luck with that,” Gentry said. “Oh, wait, I forgot: you don’t need any luck, you got him on speed dial. Tell him, ‘Hello from John, you fuck,’ next time you see him.”

Neither Lucas or Bob bothered to deny it.

They were all on their feet when Gentry’s wife came through, a thin, sunburned woman in a white golf shirt, slacks, and white visor, pretty, maybe seventeen years younger than Gentry. She looked at Lucas and Bob, then at Gentry and asked, tension in her voice, “What’s going on?”

Lucas said, “We’re federal marshals and we’re investigating a man named Morris, who your husband knew years ago. We thought he might be able to help us.” He shrugged. “It was too long ago, I guess. Nothing really to do with your husband, if you’re worried about that.”

Gentry said to his wife, “The last time I saw Morris was about two hours before Hurricane Andrew, back in ’ninety-two. I never heard of him after that. He’s probably dead.”

Lucas said, “Thanks for your help, John. We’ll get out of your hair.”

Helen Gentry stayed in the house, watching from the door, as Gentry walked them out to the truck.

“Thanks for that, but there’s gonna be some serious drama tonight,” Gentry said.

Lucas asked, “You never heard another single thing about that Mako?”

“I didn’t. I’d tell you,” Gentry said, shaking his head.

Lucas walked around the truck and got in the driver’s seat and Gentry said to Bob, as he was getting in, “You look like the kind of guy who’d be on the water.”

“I am, but small water, in Louisiana,” Bob said. “I share a bass boat with a friend.”

“Shoot, you gotta try the Islands,” Gentry said, with a toothy grin. “You go down there once and you’ll go down there all the time.”

“Like you and your yacht?”

“Maybe see you there,” Gentry said, and he pushed the door shut. “Down in the Islands, it’s all willing women and the chicken dance.”

“Things usually come down to that,” Lucas said, as he buckled in. “One way or another.”

“Yeah, they do,” Gentry said. “Hey—good luck, guys.”

As they drove out to the freeway, Bob asked, “What do you think about Gentry? You think we got it all?”

“Campbell was probably right. Gentry’s got a bundle salted away somewhere. I don’t care about that,” Lucas said. “He sounded sincere about the Coasties getting shot . . . so . . . I think we got what he had.”

Bob: “Magnus Elliot or Roger Quinn?”

“Quinn. Sounds like he actually laid eyes on the killers.”

CHAPTER

EIGHT

The Lauderdale Yacht Club was a big white building with water on three sides and oversized yachts tied up on their docks. They went inside, found a manager, who looked at their badges, said, “Cool, no problem.” He found a man named Javier to run them out in a little outboard; as Gentry said, Big Mac’s You’re-In-and-Out was about two minutes off the Yacht Club.

Big Mac’s was as advertised, a tri-tube pontoon with a sea-green fiberglass Porta Potty on the stern, a barbeque shack on the bow, and tie-up cleats on all four sides.

Roger Quinn, the owner, had an eye patch on his left eye and brown precancerous spots sprinkled across his face; something had been done surgically to one side of his bulbous nose, because it didn’t match the other side. He was a short man with shoulder-blade-length gray hair and ragged cutoffs. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt and was barefoot, despite the cool weather.

Javier tossed him a line and Quinn tied off the boat front and back, looked at Lucas and Bob and asked, “What’d I do?”

“Jesus,” Bob said to Lucas. “We can’t even walk around without people asking us that.”

Javier said, “Roger, these two people are U.S. Marshals, Tony told me to ride them out here . . .”

Quinn looked at them with a single watery eye and no visible enthusiasm. “Yeah?”

Lucas explained the mission and when he was done, Quinn asked, “This gonna get me killed?”

“No reason it should,” Lucas said. “We don’t talk about this kind of thing.”

“What if I gotta testify?”

“You won’t have to testify—whatever you give us, we’ll figure out a different way to get it.”

“Might want you to look at some mug shots,” Bob said. “See if you recognize anybody.”

Quinn said, “Yeah. I seen them close up, but I ain’t lookin’ at any mug shots. I’m no fool. You’re lyin’ to me. If I saw them in a mug shot book, you’d make me look at a lineup, and then I’d have to testify in court. So, you know, basically, fuck that.”

Bob started, “Look, Mr. Quinn . . .”

Quinn said, “I ain’t doing it. If you’ll leave me alone, I’ll give you something better than me.”

Lucas: “What’s that?”

“I can give you somebody who knows them,” Quinn said.

Lucas and Bob glanced at each other, and then Bob asked, “Who?”

Quinn asked Javier, “You know that guy Beddy who runs the Down East ?”

“I know him a little,” Javier said. And to Lucas and Bob: “Captain Buddy runs a party boat called the Down East , out of Aventura, which is just down the way.”

Quinn said, “That’s him, but his name is Beddy, not Buddy. When that Mako was here, the Down East come in.”

Lucas asked, “What about it?”

“Beddy was doing a party and the boat was full of hairdresser girls. Young girls. They graduated from hairdresser school somewhere and they were celebratin’. Didn’t have to pee, not one of them, must be at least two or three heads on Beddy’s boat. They came in because they said I looked neat and they wanted burgers and fries. Ran around my boat, like to tipped it over. Had a fry fight, threw most of the fries in the water. Tipped me a hundred dollars. They was all wearing their teeny bikinis, tits and ass all over the place. They started talking to the guys on the Mako and the Mako guys liked that a lot. They were all here for an hour and the way they were talking, I think some of them girls got together with the Mako guys that night, at a hotel.”

Bob: “You mean . . .”

“It looked like that to me, some of them girls was gonna get their legs up in the air,” Quinn said. “I know they were talking about a hotel.”

“You know what hotel?” Bob asked.

“Nope. Didn’t pay much attention to that part of it. Do remember, it was down in Miami Beach.”

“Where do we find this Beddy guy?” Lucas asked.

Quinn said, “Down to Aventura. It’s a big boat basin south of here.”

“Anything else?” Lucas asked. “Did you see the diver?”

Quinn scratched his neck. “The diver. She was Bahamian, I think. Black chick. The way she talked, her accent. I’ll tell you boys something—if she’s gone back to the Bahamas, you’ll have a tough time digging her out of there. People in the Bahamas, if they don’t want to be found, you won’t find them. Too many islands, about six cops between them.”