“Damn it,” Rob yelled, “you said they were going to the marina.”
“That’s what they said. That’s why I think they’re trying to get off the resort by car.”
“So you think they’ve got Tommy and Dexter, too, and don’t intend to let either one of them go.”
Sims sat up, held his head, and looked sadly at Rob. “They’re pros,” he said. “Make sure the gates are secure.”
“They’ve got my son.”
Rob’s voice cracked at that part of his radio orders. He didn’t bother with the wide loop around the Sands course; he drove across two fairways to save time.
Maybe Sims was right. Maybe the men had faked the story about the marina and were heading out by car. They certainly had proved themselves adept at diversionary tactics, which Rob now recognized the burglaries to be. He had kept Buster and the rest on station along the perimeter road and gates.
But he couldn’t bet everything on Sims’s hunch. Maybe there was a boat lying in the darkness off the marina, waiting to pick up the kidnappers... or were they assassins? If they now had Dexter, why had they taken Tommy, too?
“Unit One’s code one to the marina,” he said hoarsely. “Out.” And he switched off his radio.
Speeding out of the residential area, he thought of Davis, sitting out on the fairway, no doubt hearing all this, wondering what was going on, probably trying to call Rob’s dead radio now. How would the resort owner react when Rob told him he had tipped off the mob to Dexter’s whereabouts when he signed into the convention security seminar and asked questions about guarding federal witnesses?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was what he found at the marina. And if he found nothing, did that mean Sims was right or that Rob was too late? He turned off the truck’s lights and pulled into the yacht club parking lot.
Stopping next to the club building, he saw it: a big cruiser, maybe forty feet, running lights off, slipping into the shadows, engine barely audible.
Rob turned on his radio. “Rose, call Harbor Patrol,” he said, giving her a sketchy description of the vessel.
Then he pushed himself out of the truck and bounded onto the dock, knowing that the Harbor Patrol would never find the ship carrying away his son. The ship would hide in the dark vastness of the night sea, as its owners hid in the moral confusion of an uncertain people, evil guaranteed anonymity... except when someone made a mistake.
Rob trotted down the dock, eyes trained on the disappearing ship, giving up. Dexter’s body would turn up somewhere, a message. And Tommy? What did they want with Tommy, who, like his mother, just got in the way?
Was the little boy somewhere by the stern, looking back? Could he deal with this? Was he, as Dexter had said, “tougher” than Rob thought? Did his captors know he couldn’t be left alone?
Rob heard sirens that didn’t matter behind him. He tasted again the unfair poison of grief. He burned in his rage. And he looked below at the dark water. Could he find comfort there?
“Tommy,” Rob whispered, tears stinging his eyes. “Tommy,” he yelled into the darkness. “Oh, God, Tommy!”
“Captain Defendo!”
The affected, low voice came from the low deck of a sailing yacht behind him. Rob turned.
And he saw the tiny fists, the arms high in the Captain Defendo Salute, the beaming smile of his son standing up from play.
“Tommy!”
Rob jumped into the boat and pulled his son up in a joyful hug. “How long have you been here?”
The little boy pursed his lips and shrugged. “I don’t know. Those men took me on a boat ride. I thought they were bad men at first because they had guns and took me away from Mr. Sims. But they said Mr. Dexter would be there and everything would be all right, so I just waited, and sure enough Mr. Dexter came a little while ago. He talked with the men, and they put me in that boat, and Mr. Dexter said he was going for a boat ride but you’d be along. And here you are.”
This didn’t make sense. “Tell me again: Mr. Dexter wasn’t with you when you left the condo?”
Tommy shook his head. “I was real scared until he came.”
So Dexter had clubbed Sims, knowing the agent would have resisted his surrendering in return for Tommy’s freedom.
Rob set his son back down on the deck. “Weren’t you afraid out here all by yourself?”
Tommy raised his fists again. “Captain Defendo likes boats,” he said. “Besides, Mr. Dexter said you’d be here. And you know what else?”
Rob lifted his son, his tough little boy, onto the dock.
“No. What else?”
“He said to tell you he was sorry about Mom. I still don’t know why he says that, but he didn’t kill Mom.”
Rob climbed out of the yacht. “You’re right: He didn’t kill Mom. Let’s go home.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, sport?”
“How come we’re not waiting for Mr. Dexter to come back from his boat ride?”
Family Rates Available
by John H. Dirckx
I keep my conscience in an old cigar box in the bottom drawer of my desk. That way I can get at it when I want it, but it doesn’t get in my way when I don’t want it.
For years I ran a pawn shop. Besides selling articles acquired in the normal course of business, I did a comfortable trade in stolen merchandise. I wasn’t a fence. I never knowingly bought hot merchandise from a thief in my life. If you’re as astute as you think you are, you’ve already figured out that I’m a thief myself. Or was, until my big windfall. That was where having a flexible conscience really paid off.
I had a simple, foolproof system of acquiring electronic equipment and jewelry for nothing and keeping it on ice for two years before marketing it. I don’t want to talk about that. This isn’t an autobiography, just the story of my last heist — the one that made it possible for me to relocate in the tropics and live like a retired dentist.
It was just after sunset on a foggy, sultry September evening when I parked my van on Teagarden Street, right around the corner from the Ashloe residence. The house faced on a cul-de-sac and I didn’t want any complications to arise when I was ready to leave.
I sat in the van absorbing atmosphere and memorizing topography while I waited for the shadows to congeal. Not that I hadn’t sat there in another car at the same hour on previous evenings. All the houses thereabouts were big, solid-looking, and old. The lots were likewise big and the trees were likewise old. The whole neighborhood wore an air of drowsy respectability and prudently stashed cash.
Weedless lawns sprawled like velvet in the failing light. Chandeliers with cut-glass pendants blazed in vaulted dining rooms. Now and then an expensive sports car pulled into a driveway, restoring some battle-weary executive, financier, or plumbing contractor to the bosom of his family. Somewhere a piano was being played with more zeal than grace.
Traffic was thin on Teagarden Street. A Little League baseball team filed along the sidewalk, poking their boring, embryonic faces at me through the gloom. Once a flash of lightning lit up the landscape again for an instant, followed long after by a remote, dull thump of thunder like a trunk lid closing in an attic.
At seven o’clock I got out of the van, opened the rear door, and removed a clipboard and a bulky parcel wrapped in brown paper. The box inside the wrapping was practically empty, but I don’t think a chance passerby would have suspected that from the way I carried it. I’d been practicing.
I walked around the corner into the cul-de-sac and started up the stone steps that cut diagonally across the sloping lawn toward the Ashloe house. Halfway up the steps I paused in the shadow of some willows to listen to a noisy dialogue trailing out of an open window somewhere on the ground floor.