“The young lieutenant returned one afternoon to find that his wife and daughter had been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Edgar did it all by himself. Went calling, found the two of them alone, and went to work. It was an aluminum bat and he left it there. His little warning to every other man who works for him. Since then, he hasn’t had any problems with his people selling product behind his back.”
I said, “His enemies, when someone crosses him, he goes after their children. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Uh-huh, which is why I think it’s Cordero. Like his personal signature. Something else-I mentioned that I think he’s a sociopath? Listen to this. Edgar also has a fondness for cutting off the ears of adversaries. Before he kills them. They say he keeps them on a string behind the bar at his ranch up in the mountains. The ears, I mean. He shows them off to friends… or to people he wants to intimidate.”
“I can see why you don’t want a guy like that after Lindsey.”
He said, “If it is Cordero, I’ll know soon.”
We discussed details for a while longer before I asked him if he had any kind of timetable in mind. He said, “My hunch is, the next couple of days, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. They won’t be ready yet. Today’s Thursday? By Sunday, though, you better be on your toes. Sometime next week for sure. If they decide you’re worth the effort.”
I had a feeling Harrington would do his best to get them to think that I was. As I stood there listening, looking at the clear winter sky, looking at the guides drinking beer inside the Temptation, I felt a constricting sense of the inevitable that was nearly overwhelming. I had no options. As much as I despised what he was asking me to do, I had no choice. It was as if I had stepped onto a trapdoor and plummeted right back into the world I thought I’d left far, far in my past.
He had me, and he knew it. I couldn’t refuse, which made me furious. But I could negotiate. At least, I could try to negotiate.
When he’d finished, I said to him, “I’ll help-but only because I care about Lindsey. And I want a favor from you in return.”
After I’d told him what the favor was, he said, “I figured it was something like that.” His voice had a little smile to it when he added, “Sure. No problem.”
9
R ansom said to me, “You don’t want me as your sister, okay. But here’s what I don’t get, man. Why don’t you want to be richer? That’s what I really don’t understand. Ev’body loves money. And Daddy left us a nice chunk of it. Just out there waitin’ on us to go find. So why you bein’ so stubborn, man?”
A bunch of money. Right.
In his letter to Ransom, to be delivered only after his own death and the death of at least one of his many enemies, Tuck had written: “Follow my directions, and you and your big brother will find more than six thousand dollars cash greenbacks, which I got from the recent sale of fifty head of prime Brangus beef cattle. Along with the money, there’s some old-timey letters and pictures I collected on the trail. You may get a hoot out of the stuff if, being an uneducated island girl, any American ever takes the time to learn you to read.”
My sexist, condescending uncle. The letter was in his familiar block script; lots of phonetic spellings: Fallow my directions amp; you and yore big brother… Tucker implying that someone else was too dumb to learn to read and write. The man never recognized nor admitted his own ironic view of the world.
He’d also written: “I’d leave the cash money to you the regular way, keeping it in a bank, but I don’t trust no damn bank, plus there’s some local talk of a white man and a big Indian robbing the Miami loan shark that stole money from them first. Being Italian and not trustful, this foreigner kept a list of serial numbers from every hundred-dollar bill he left out open in the till like bait to test his runners and pimps. Which is why it’s a good thing I got your money selling prime beef and hid it away so’s the wop couldn’t prove it from that paper full of serial numbers.”
Because I was making every effort not to speak badly of her father, I didn’t tell her that the white man was obviously Tuck and the big Indian was Joseph Egret, a genuinely decent man who was my uncle’s best friend and partner for many decades despite Tucker’s constant criticism and racial insults. Why Joseph tolerated the old fool, I never understood. I suspected they stayed together out of habit, like an old married couple, and because they’d come to rely on one another during long and rugged lives spent mostly just outside the law.
Money, though, I could talk about. I tried to make her understand that her inheritance wasn’t really that valuable-not easy, because she came from a section of the Bahamas where the average annual income was less than what an average American makes in two weeks.
Not an unusual disproportion in poor regions around the world.
I’d pointed it out before, and now I reminded her again, “Even if he did leave you six thousand dollars, which I doubt, it’s not that much money. Not in the States, it isn’t. Not most places in the world. If you had fifty times that much, you couldn’t call yourself rich. Think about it. You come all the way to Florida from the islands, invest all the time and expense, you’re not going to end up with much profit. Which is why I want you to have what money there is. All of it. Take everything you find, plus I’m going to give you what’s left of Tuck’s ranch. You arrange for an attorney to do the work; I’ll sign the papers. All I ask in return is leave me out of it. Go without me. Take Tomlinson. The guy’s brilliant when he’s not falling down stoned. If anyone can figure out Tucker’s directions, it’s Tomlinson.”
Ransom already trusted Tomlinson, I could tell. Not surprising. I’d seen more than one crippled bird or malnourished stray dog thread its way through a dockside crowd to nudge attention from Tomlinson’s hand. Same with people. He attracted the shy, the damaged and the frightened ones. They were drawn to him like a lantern attracts moths, as if he provided a lighted safe haven. Abused women have haunted eyes, like a small creature peering out from a hole, and mannerisms that are nervous, self-conscious. Many times I’d watched Tomlinson work his magic on them. The soothing voice and kind words. Mostly, though, it was his touch. He would wrap their hand in his, or hug them, and you could almost see the fear and pain being drained from their bodies. You could watch the darkness pass from their eyes.
Not that Ransom was a damaged woman. No. She was strong-willed, smart, transparently manipulative and had a gift for turning arguments around to emphasize her opponent’s guilt, which she then tried to use as leverage.
Now, for instance, she made a guttural noise of irritation, jammed her fists on her hips, and said, “You’re startin’ to piss me off, my brother. My friend Mr. Thomas not here to speak for himself and you callin’ him a drunk like he some bum you find in Nassau town, eating outta the garbage pails at the Straw Market. Then you call Daddy a liar, sayin’ he never left us no money. If Daddy such a liar, how come I got this?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a worn gold coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Held it in the light so that I was staring at an image of some long-gone Spanish king struck deeply into the metal. On the coin’s smooth field were the words FERDINANDUS DG HISP REX and the date 1751. Apparently the king’s name from that period was Ferdinand.
Struck on the coin’s back was a complicated shield and the words NOMINA MAGNA SEQUOR. My Latin is imperfect. Something about a name… a charter and… Sequor? I didn’t have a guess.
It wasn’t the first time she’d used a doubloon as proof of Tuck’s veracity. Yesterday, after dragging the nets, and after my conversation with Harrington, she’d sat me down in the kitchen of Tomlinson’s bungalow, and dropped four gold coins on the table-a theatrical effect that Tucker would have appreciated. One of the coins was smaller than the others, but all had a surprising weight and density to them. They were cool to the touch.