“ Seven in the AM,” the man said.
“ My door’s stuck,” Harpine said, surprisingly calm.
Rick unbuckled and jumped to the ground.
“ I need some help getting out of here!” Harpine wailed, the calm gone.
“ You hurt in there mister?” the old man said.
“ I just want out!” Harpine said.
Rick moved around to Harpine’s side of the plane. The old man followed.
“ I’ll push and you pull,” Harpine said, voice gaining an octave.
Rick grabbed onto the handle, turned it and pulled. The door popped. Rick and the old man jumped back as Harrison Harpine came tumbling out, landing on his side on the wet, early morning earth. Rick offered him a hand up. Harpine grabbed it in a Viking grip and Rick pulled him from the dew damp ground.
“ We are a pair of lucky, sons-of-bitches!” Harpine said, relief flooding through his voice.
“ Okay, Chief, you’re alive, now I gotta go,” Rick said. Then to the old man. “I have thirty minutes to get to the pier.”
“ Mister, why didn’t you put down at the airport?”
“ I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you get me to the Seawolf before it sails.”
“ I’ll get the car.”
“ Nate, don’t you want to know why he put down here and why he’s in such a hurry?” the woman asked. She’d been standing behind the man when he’d opened Rick’s door. She was thin and frail, with gray flecked auburn hair and crystal green eyes. It was easy to see that she’d been a looker in her time.
“ Nope. Five hundred dollars is all I need to know.” Nate was thin, too, but wiry, with muscles that hadn’t gone to seed. His eyes were as green as hers and just as penetrating.
“ I wanna know,” Harpine said.
“ You got a gun, Chief?” Rick asked.
“ No, I don’t carry when I fly, too much of a hassle.”
“ What about your plane?” the woman asked, ignoring Harpine.
“ I’ll give you another five hundred for the inconvenience and I’ll come back in a couple of days and take care of getting it removed.”
“ Get the car, Nate!” the woman said and the man limped around the house to the garage in back.
“ No one’s going anywhere,” Harpine said.
Nate ignored him, continuing on toward the garage.
“ You have to understand,” she told Rick after her husband was out of earshot, “we live off of Nate’s Social Security. We don’t get any other money. If his brother didn’t let us live in this cabin, I don’t know what we’d do. A thousand dollars is a lot of money to us.”
“ It’s a lot of money to me, too.”
“ What’s so important about getting to the fishing boat?” Harpine asked.
“ It’s personal.” Rick turned back to the plane, reached across his seat and took out the caged bird.
“ What do you have there?” the woman asked.
“ A bird that’s going to carry a very important message.” He fished into a side pocket on the pilot’s door and pulled out Christina’s log book. Looked around in the pocket some more and pulled out a couple of charts. He tossed them on the seat, reached in the pocket again, coming out with a short stub of a pencil. He ripped part of a page out of the log, held it against the plane and wrote:
Judy,
J.P. kidnapped. Am coming with the Wolf. Phone may be tapped. Meet me. Bring the GUN.
Rick
“ What’s that all about?” Harpine asked, reading over his shoulder.
“ Not now, Chief,” Rick said and something in his voice held Harpine in check for a few seconds while Rick tore off the top of the page containing the message and rolled it into a tight ball. He took the racing homer out of the cage and opened the capsule that was affixed to the bird’s leg and inserted the message.
“ Go home, Dancer.” He released his grip on the bird.
He looked up with his left hand, shielding his eyes and watched Dancer fly into the sun and start a great circle, but before completing the three-sixty the bird got his bearing and took off in the direction of Tampico. Somehow he knew Judy would be at home. Somehow he knew that she’d cancelled her trip to Hawaii. The thought danced as true through his mind as Dancer’s flight path toward Tampico.
“ Now all I have to do is get to the boat in time.”
“ This sounds like police business to me,” Harpine said.
“ Sorry, Chief, this is private.”
“ I can stop you.”
“ Or you can come along?” Rick said, not wanting Harrison to come, but not wanting him to stay behind, suspicious enough to make any phone calls, either.
“ With you? After what you just put me through? I’d sooner eat dog shit. Besides, I fuck with you too much, you might forget that campaign promise. Tell me about the boy,” Harpine said.
Rick sensed that Harpine was looking for a face saving way of not going with him, of not getting involved. He gave it to him. “It’s a custody battle. J.P.’s father has the boy,” Rick lied. “He plans on threatening Judy with a nasty court battle she can’t afford. The gun’s just to scare the chicken-shit son of a bitch.” Tough words, words Chief Harrison Harpine could understand.
“ The last thing I want is to be a party to murder, two thousand dollar campaign contribution or no.” Rick noticed Harpine had doubled the amount.
“ I thought I’d promised three,” Rick said, winking.
“ Oh, yeah, I forgot.” Harpine winked back.
“ Nate will get you there,” the woman said, interrupting them and then was interrupted herself by the sound of the car as it backed out of the garage. “It might be old,” she said of the battered pickup, “but it runs fine. It’ll get you there.”
“ Hop in,” old Nate said, “time’s a wastin’.”
Rick opened the door, slid into the passenger seat, cranked the window as the man backed the car around, so that it was facing down the dirt track, away from the house. Then he threw it into first and put his foot to the floor. The old man knew how to drive. “We’ll make it in time, son, don’t you worry none.”
The pickup kicked up dust as the tires bit into the dirt and the taste of it on his teeth reminded Rick of the race in Australia. Somehow, in some weird way, all of this, everything that had happened since he had returned-Judy’s encounter on the beach, the Donovan’s murder, the Bootleg murders, J.P.’s kidnapping and perhaps Ann’s death-were all connected with something that happened there.
“ Hold on son,” the man shouted above the engine’s roar.
Rick snapped to attention in time to brace himself as Nate expertly applied brake pressure into the turn off the dirt road and onto the highway. Three quarters of the way into the turn and he had the throttle to the floor. Nate knew how to drive.
“ I’ll have to slow down when we reach the bend. That shithead Malloy sits there with his new toy.”
Rick didn’t know what he was talking about but found out as they approached a bend in the road and Nate hit the brakes, slowing to a respectable fifty-five. When they rounded the curve, they saw a Palma City Trooper sitting on his Harley with a radar gun pointed at them.
“ Little shit really gets off with that thing,” Nate said.
As they passed the trooper, Nate picked up the speed.
“ Aren’t you afraid he’ll come after us?”
“ Naw. He’s too stupid to turn around.”
Minutes later, doing fifty in a twenty-five, Nate spun onto Main Street, speeding through the center of town like he was on the freeway.
“ I’ll have you there in less than a minute.” And true to his word, the old man was slamming on the brakes, laying rubber onto the pavement, bringing the truck to a stop where the Palma Pier met the land.
“ I got you here with twenty minutes to spare. Not bad for an old man.”
“ And I appreciate it” Rick pulled a banded wad of bills out of a hip pocket.
“ That’s a pile of money.”
“ And it’s yours. There’s ten thousand dollars here.” He handed the banded bills to the old man.
“ You don’t have to give me all this. We had a deal.”
“ If I save the boy, it was worth it and if I don’t, I won’t need it.”