Murdock gave a hateful moan, but Stranahan needed to talk. “Here I’m minding my own business, feeding the fish, not bothering a soul, when some guy shows up to murder me. At my very own house, John, in the middle of the bay! All because some goddamn doctor thinks I’m going to break open a case that’s so old it’s mildewed.”
The dying Murdock seemed hypnotized by the flashing blue light. It was ticking much faster than his own heart. One of the detective’s hands began to crawl like an addled blue crab, tracking circles on the blood-slickened deck.
Stranahan said, “I know it hurts, John, but there’s nothing I can do.”
In a slack voice Murdock said, “Fuck you, shithead.” Then his eye closed for the last time.
Mick Stranahan and Christina Marks were waiting when Luis Cordova pulled up to the dock at nine sharp the next morning.
“Where to?” he asked Stranahan.
“I’d like to go back to my house, Luis.”
“Not me,” said Christina Marks. “Take me to Key Biscayne. The marina is fine.”
Stranahan said, “I guess that means you still don’t want to marry me.”
“Not in a million years,” Christina said. “Not in your wildest dreams.”
Stranahan turned to Luis Cordova. “She didn’t get much sleep. The accommodations were a bit too… rustic.”
“I understand,” said the marine patrolman. “But, otherwise, a quiet night?”
“Fairly quiet,” Stranahan said.
The morning was sunny and cool. The bay had a light washboard ripple that made the patrol boat seem to fly. As they passed the Ragged Keys, Stranahan nudged Luis Cordova and pointed to the white-blue sky. “Choppers!” he shouted overthe engine noise. Christina Marks saw them, too: three Coast Guard rescue helicopters, chugging south at a thousand feet.
Without glancing from the wheel, Luis Cordova said, “There’s a boat overdue from Crandon. Two cops.”
“No shit?”
“They found a body this morning floating off Broad Creek. Homicide man named Salazar.”
“W hat happened?”
“Drowned,” yelled Luis Cordova. “Who knows how.”
Christina Marks listened to the two men going back and forth. She wasn’t sure how much Luis Cordova knew, but it was more than Stranahan would ever tell her. She felt angry and insulted and left out.
When they arrived at the stilt house, Stranahan took out the Smith.38 and returned it to Luis. The marine patrolman was relieved to see that it had not been fired.
Stranahan hoisted two of the duffel bags and hopped off the patrol boat.
From the dock he said, “Take care, Chris.” He wanted to say more, but it was the wrong time. She was still fuming about last night, furious because he wouldn’t tell her what had happened. She had kicked the coconut head off the scarecrow, that’s how mad she had gotten. It was at that moment he’d asked her to marry him. Her reply had been succinct, to say the least.
Now she turned away coldly and said to Luis Cordova: “Can we get going, please.”
Stranahan waved them off and trudged up the steps to inspect the looted house. The first thing he saw on the floor was the big marlin head; the tape on the fractured bill had been torn off in the fall. Stranahan stepped over the stuffed fish and went to the bedroom to check for the shotgun. It was still wedged up in the box spring where he had hidden it.
The.whole place was a mess all right, depressing but not irreparable. Stranahan was glad, in a way, to have such a large chore ahead of him. Take his mind off Murdock and Salazar and Old Rhodes Key. And Christina Marks, too.
She was the first woman he had loved who had ever said no to marriage. It was quite a feeling.
Luis Cordova came back to the stilt house as Mick Stranahan was finishing lunch. There was a burly new passenger on the boat: Sergeant Al Garcia.
Stranahan greeted them at the door and said, “Two Cubans with guns is never good news.”
Luis Cordova said, “Al is working the dead cops.”
“Cops plural?” Stranahan’s eyebrows arched.
Garcia sat down heavily on one of the barstools. “Yeah, we found Johnny Murdock inside the boat. The boat was up in a frigging tree.”
“Where?” Stranahan asked impassively.
“Not far from where you and your lady friend went camping last night.” Garcia patted his pockets and cursed. He was out of cigars. He took out a pack of Camels and lit one halfheartedly. He glanced up at the beakless marlin hanging from a new nail on the wall.
Luis Cordova said, “I told Al about how I gave you a lift down to the island after your house got trashed.”
Stranahan wasn’t upset. If asked, Luis would tell the truth about what he saw, what he knew for a fact. Most likely he had already told Garcia about loaning the two detectives a map of the bay. Nothing strange about that.
“You hear anything funny last night?” Al Garcia asked. “By the way, where’s the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Stranahan said.
“What about last night?”
“A boat went by about eleven. Maybe a little later. Sounded like an outboard. What the hell happened, Al-somebody do these guys?”
Garcia was puffing hard on the cigarette, and blowing circles of smoke, like he did with his stogies. “Way it looks,” he said, “they were going wide open. Missed the channel completely.”
“You said the boat was in a tree.”
“That’s how fast the bozos were going. Way it looks, Salazar got thrown, hit his head. He drowned right away but the tide tookhim south.”
“Broad Creek,” Luis Cordova said. “A mullet man found the body.”
Garcia went on: “Murdock stayed in the boat, but it didn’t save him. We’re talking major head trauma. The medical examiner thinks a mangrove branch or something snapped his neck. Same with Salazar. Figures it happened when they hit the trees.”
“W ide open?”
Luis Cordova said, “The throttle was all the way down. You got to be nuts to run that creek wide open at night.”
“Or amazingly stupid,” Stranahan said. “Let me guess who they were looking for.”
Garcia nodded. “You’re on some roll, Mick. A regular archangel of death, you are. First your ex, now Murdock and Salazar. I’m noticing that bad things happen to people who fuck with you. Seems to be a pattern going way back.”
Stranahan said, “I can’t help it these jerks don’t know how to drive a boat.”
Luis Cordova said, “It was an accident, that’s all.”
“I just find it interesting,” said Al Garcia. “Maybe the word is ironic, I don’t know. Anyway, you’re right, Mick. The two boys were coming to pay you a visit. They kept it real quiet around the shop, too. I can only guess why.” He reached in his jacket and took out a soggy white piece of paper. The paper was folded three times, pamphlet sized.
Garcia showed it to Stranahan. “We found this in Salazar’s back pocket.”
Stranahan knew what it was. He’d seen a thousand just like it. The word warrant was still legible in the standard judicial calligraphy. As he handed it back to Garcia, Stranahan wondered whether he was about to be arrested.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Garbage,” Garcia replied. He crumpled the sodden document in his right hand and lobbed it out a window into the water.
Stranahan smiled. “You liked the videotape.”
“Obviously,” said the detective.
At the Holiday Inn where they got a room, Maggie Gonzalez was going through the yellow pages column by column, telling Chemo which plastic surgeons were good enough to finish the dermabrasion treatments on his face; some of the names were new to her, but others she remembered from her nursing days. Chemo was stooped in front of the bathroom mirror, picking laconically at the patches left on his chin by Dr. Rudy Graveline.
Out of the side of his mouth, Chemo said, “Fucker’s not returning my calls.”
“It’s early,” Maggie said. “Rudy sleeps late on his day off.”
“I want to see some cash. Today.”
“Don’t worry.”
“The sooner I get the money, the sooner I can take care of this.” Meaning his skin. In the mirror, Chemo could see Maggie’s expression-at least, as much of it as the bandages revealed-and something that resembled genuine sympathy in her eyes. Not pity, sympathy.