In the detective room, nobody seemed to know where they were. Garcia didn’t like the looks of things.
The copy of Paula’s sketch of Blondell Wayne Tatum lay crumpled next to an empty Doritos bag on John Murdock’s desk. “Asshole,” Garcia hissed. He didn’t care who heard him. He pawed through the rest of Murdock’s debris until he found a pink message slip. The message was from the secretary of Circuit Judge Cassie B. Ireland.
Garcia groaned. Cassie Ireland had been a devoted golfing partner of the late and terminally crooked Judge Raleigh Goomer. Cassie himself was known to have serious problems with drinking and long weekends in Las Vegas. The problems were in the area of chronic inability to afford either vice.
The message to Detective John Murdock from Judge Cassie Ireland’s secretary said: “Warrant’s ready.”
Al Garcia used Murdock’s desk phone to call the judge’s chambers. He told the secretary who he was. Not surprisingly, the judge was gone for the day. Gone straight to the tiki bar at the Airport Hilton, Garcia thought.
To the judge’s secretary he said, “There’s been a little mixup down here. Did Detective Murdock ask Judge Ireland to sign a warrant?”
“Sure did,” chirped the secretary. “I’ve still got the paperwork right here. John and his partner came by and picked it up yesterday morning.”
Al Garcia figured he might as well ask, just to make sure. “Can you tell me the name on the warrant?”
“Mick Stranahan,” the secretary replied. “First-degree murder.”
Christina Marks found the darkness exciting. As she floated naked on her back, the warm water touched her everyplace. Sometimes she stood up and curled her toes in the cool, rough sand, to see how deep it was. A few yards away, Mick Stranahan broke the surface with a swoosh, a glistening blond sea creature. He sounded like a porpoise when he blew the air from his lungs.
“This is nice,” Christina called to him.
“No hot showers on the key,” he said. “No shower, period. Cartwright is a no-frills guy.”
“I said it’s nice. I mean it.”
Stranahan swam closer and rose to his feet. The water came up to his navel. In the light from a quarter moon Christina could make out the fresh bullet scar on his shoulder; it looked like a smear of pink grease. She found herself staring-he was different out here on the water. Not the same man whom she had seen in the hospital or at her apartment. On the island he seemed larger and more feral, yet also more serene.
“It’s so peaceful,” Christina said. They were swimming on a marly bonefish flat, forty yards from Cartwright’s dock.
“I’m glad you can relax,” Stranahan said. “Most women would be jittery, having been shot at twice by a total stranger.”
Christina laughed easily, closed her eyes and let the wavelets tickle her neck. Mick was right; she ought to be a nervous wreck by now. But she wasn’t.
“Maybe I’m losing my mind,” she said to the stars. She heard a soft splash as he went under again. Seconds later something cool brushed against her ankle, and she smiled. “All right, mister, no funny business.”
From a surprising distance came his voice: “Sorry to disappoint you, but that wasn’t me.”
“Oh, no.” Christina rolled over and kicked hard for the deep channel, but she didn’t get far. Like a torpedo he came up beneath her and slid one arm under her hips, the other around her chest. As he lifted her briskly out of the water, she let out a small cry.
“Easy,” Stranahan said, laughing. “It was only a baby bonnet shark-I saw it.”
He was standing waist-deep on the flat, holding her like an armful of firewood. “Relax,” he said. “They don’t eat bigshot TV producers.”
Christina turned in his arms and held him around the neck. “Is it gone?” she asked.
“It’s gone. Want me to put you down?”
“Not really, no.”
In the moonlight he could see enough of her eyes to know what she was thinking. He kissed her on the mouth.
She thought: This is crazy. I love it.
Stranahan kissed her again, longer than the first time.
“A little salty,” she said, “but otherwise very nice.”
Christina let her hands wander. “Say there, what happened to your jeans?”
“I guess they came off in the undertow.”
“What undertow?” She started kissing him up and down the neck; giggling, nipping, using the tip of her tongue. She could feel the goose flesh rise on his shoulders.
“There really was a shark,” he said.
“I believe you. Now take me back to the island. Immediately.”
Stranahan said, “Not right this minute.”
“You mean we’re going to do it out here?”
“Why not?”
“Standing up?”
“W hy not?”
“Because of the sharks. You said so yourself.”
Stranahan said. “You’ll be safe, just put your legs around me.”
“Nice try.”
He kissed her again. This was a good one. Christina wrapped her legs around his naked hips.
Stranahan stopped kissing long enough to catch his breath and say, “I almost forgot. Can you name the Beatles?”
“Not right this minute.”
“Yes, now. Please.”
“You’re a damn lunatic.”
“I know,” he said.
Christina pressed so close and so hard that water sluiced up between her breasts and splashed him on the chin. “That’s what you get,” she said. Then, nose to nose: “John, Paul, George, and Ringo.”
“You’re terrific.”
“And don’t forget Pete Best.”
“I think I love you,” Stranahan said.
Later he caught a small grouper from the dock, and fried it for dinner over an open fire. They ate on the ocean side of the island, under a stand of young palms. Stranahan used a pair of old lobster traps for tables. The temperature had dropped into the low seventies with a sturdy breeze. Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan wore jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. Tucked in the waist of his jeans was a Smith.38 he had borrowed from Luis Cordova. Stranahan was reasonably certain that he would not have to fire it.
Christina was on her second cup of coffee when she said, “I’ve been a pretty good sport about all this, don’t you agree?”
“Sure.” He had his eyes on the faraway lights of a tramp freighter plowing south in the Gulf Stream.
Christina said, “I know I’ve asked before, but I’m going to try again: What the hell are we doing out here?”
“I thought you liked this place.”
“I love it, Mick, but I still don’t understand.”
“We can’t go back to the stilt house. Not yet, anyway.”
“But why come here?” She was nearly out of patience with the mystery.
“Because I needed a place where something could happen, and no one would see it. Or hear it.”
“Mick-”
“There’s no other way.” He stood up and poured out the cold dregs of Ms coffee, which splattered against the bare serrated coral. He noticed that the tide was slipping out. “There’s no other way to deal with people like this,” he said.
Christina turned to him. “You don’t understand. I can’t do this, I can’t be a part of this.”
“You wanted to come along.”
“To observe. To report. To get the story.”
Stranahan’s laugh carried all the way to Hawk Channel. “Story?”
She knew how silly it sounded, and was. Willie had the television cameras, and Reynaldo Flemm had Willie. Reynaldo… another macho head case. He had sounded so odd when she had phoned from the mainland; his voice terse and icy, his laugh thin and ironic. He was cooking up something, although he denied it to Christina. Even when she told him about the wild incident at the Plaza, about how she had almost been shot again, Reynaldo’s reaction was strangely muted and unreadable. When she had called again two hours later from a pay booth at the marina, the secretary in New York told Christina that Reynaldo had already left for the airport. The secretary went on to report, in a snitchy tone, that Reynaldo had withdrawn fifteen thousand dollars from the emergency weekend travel account-the account normally reserved for commercial airline disasters, killer earthquakes, political assassinations, and other breaking news events. Christina Marks could not imagine what Reynaldo intended to do with fifteen grand, but she assumed it would be a memorable folly.