“That would be a reasonable question,” Guthrie said.
“The reasonable answer is that we follow all leads in an ongoing murder investigation.”
“Yes, but did you follow this lead?”
“I believe I said all leads.”
“So you tried to locate this person described as ‘The Shadow,’ is that correct?”
“First, Mr. Lamb...”
“Call me Guthrie.”
“First, Mr. Lamb, we tried to determine whether Karp was a man accustomed to seeing comic-book characters materializing out of the night. The Shadow tonight, maybe Batman or The Joker tomorrow night, hmm?”
“Maybe,” Guthrie agreed.
“We checked. All the way back to when he was a private in the Vietnam War. Bad war, that one. Left a lot of people still seeing things in the night. But we didn’t find any record of a mental problem,” Hagstrom said, “so maybe Karp really did see The Shadow on the night of the murder. Or someone who looked like The Shadow.”
“Maybe he did,” Guthrie agreed, and waited.
“We tried to corroborate the sighting. Questioned anyone who was still around the club at the time Karp says the person went aboard...”
“Which was around eleven-fifteen.”
“Give or take. Nobody saw anybody dressed all in black.”
“How about the Bannermans? Who said they heard shots from the boat twenty-five minutes later.”
“Went all the way to West Palm to talk to them,” Hagstrom said, and nodded. “Nothing.”
“So that was the end of it.”
“That was the end of it.”
“And if he exists?”
“You go find him,” Hagstrom said.
Instead, Guthrie went to find Nick Alston over at the Calusa P.D. facility.
“How you doing on my tire track?” he asked.
“I called Gracie last night,” Alston said.
“Oh, yeah? How’d it work out?”
“You didn’t tell me she was still hooking,” Alston said.
“I really didn’t know.”
“I asked her would she like to go to a movie or something, she laughed in my face.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I just wanted her to see me sober,” Alston said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Well.”
Both men were silent for several moments.
At last, Guthrie asked, “Does this mean you won’t run down the tire track for me?”
“I just haven’t got to it yet,” Alston said.
Warren was standing outside the closed and locked door to the head, listening to Toots taking her morning pee inside there, when he heard the boat approaching. He looked up curiously, and then, as the sound of the motor got closer and closer, he realized the boat was pulling alongside, and he was starting topside when he heard a voice shouting in a Spanish accent, “Allo, anybody aboar?”
He went up the ladder to the cockpit.
A bearded man who looked like one of the banditos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre was already aboard. Big toothy smile in his scraggly beard. Wearing chinos, thong sandals, and a loose white fisherman’s shirt bloused over the trousers. Another man was standing at the rail of a shitty little fishing boat bobbing alongside Amberjack’s rig. He, too, was smiling. No beard on this one. Leaner and taller than the squat bearded guy. More muscular. Wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. Both of them smiling. Which meant trouble. Smiling men meant trouble.
“What can I do for you?” Warren asked.
“You alone here?”
Still smiling. Accent you could slice with a machete.
Warren debated which way to play this, seemingly pleasant or obviously annoyed? Man came aboard without a by-your-leave, sailor had a right to be pissed, no? Siacute;. On the other hand, there were two of them.
“Nice bo you have here,” the lean one said, and climbed onto the rail of the fishing boat and leaped down to where the bearded one was standing near the dash. Warren noticed the fishing knife in a sheath at his belt.
“You alone?” the first one asked again, smiling.
“Yes,” Warren said, and hoped Toots wouldn’t suddenly come out of the head and wander topside. “What do you want?”
Sharply this time, bracing himself, letting them know they had boarded his vessel without permission and he wasn’t happy about it.
“He wanns to know wah we wann, Luis,” the husky one said.
“So tell him, Juan,” the lean one said.
“We wann dee bo,” Juan said, still smiling in his beard.
“Fat Chance Department,” Warren said.
“Qué dices?” Luis asked.
“I said I’m a private detective and you’re making a big mis—”
“So arress us,” Juan said, smiling, and reached under the blousy fisherman’s shirt and yanked what looked like a nine-millimeter Glock from his belt. At the same moment, Luis pulled the fishing knife from its sheath. It was rather large.
“Fellas...” Warren said.
Juan hit him with the butt of the gun.
Toots knew she shouldn’t come out of that bathroom.
She had heard enough through the door to know that two Spanish-speaking men were aboard and that they had done something to Warren. She’d picked up a lot of Spanish because her previous fandango with cocaine had necessitated buying dope from, and selling herself to, all sorts of people, white, black, Hispanic, you name it, men, women, gays, lesbians, who gave a shit? Knew enough to ask “Cuento el kilo, amigo?” knew enough to explain “Por cinco dólares con mi mano. Con la boca, le cuesta diez. Y mas de veinte por mi concha pristina, señor,” fine little lady Tootsie Cokehead had been back then. Or was now, for that matter, though this time around she hadn’t yet run out of her life savings, hadn’t yet had to degrade herself, not yet, not quite yet.
The engines had started half an hour ago, and she knew they were now under way, but she couldn’t tell in which direction they were moving. There was a sliding glass window in the bathroom, but all she could see through it was grayish-green water rolling away to an empty, featureless horizon far in the distance.
She kept wondering when either of the two men would want to use the toilet.
The door was locked from the inside.
She kept listening, waiting.
And then there was the BAER, which was not a misspelling of BEAR, but was instead an acronym for Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response testing, wherein sound is applied to the ear’s eighth cranial nerve (the CNVIII, as it was known to Spinaldo and others in the trade) in order to assess how long it took for the waveform to travel from the ear stimulus to the brainstem and back again. Spinaldo assured me that my responses were fast enough, which was good.
Everything looked good, they kept telling me.
But...
I still had trouble with short-term memory. I would store something for immediate recall and hours or sometimes minutes later could not remember what it was.
This will improve, Spinaldo kept telling me.
But...
I still had trouble finding words. I would know the word I was searching for, but I simply could not bring it to my tongue. Spinaldo called this aphasia. I called it a pain in the ass. He said it would pass. I tried to tell him I was hopeful it would, but I couldn’t think of the word “hopeful.” He told me not to worry.
But...
One day they asked me to draw a clock face, and to set the hands at five o’clock. When I did this task successfully, they asked me what time it was, and I replied “Happy hour.” I was being nasty, yes. But I really didn’t know what time it was. They were targeting motor, sensory, memory and cognitive functions, you see. The goal was to identify any problems I might have with the activities of daily living. (ADLs in the jargon, go ask Spinaldo.) Things like dressing, bathing, shaving, eating, and writing legal briefs, ha! I made hourly calendars reminding me of what I was to do when. But I became easily fatigued, and I found myself distracted and edgy — “You’re like yourself, only more so,” Patricia said — and increasingly more impatient with all the tests and their goddamn initials in caps, the SSEP and the MRI and the SPECT and the VEP and the SHIT! — my chest still hurt!