“Suppose it’s a trap?” Charles asked.
“Why on earth should it be a trap?” I asked with stubborn incomprehension.
“Because it’s all so secretive,” Charles said. “Dirt roads at midnight, no one else to be there. I’d say it was a trap, wouldn’t you?”
“Why on earth would they want to trap me?”
“Because we hurt that fellow, that’s why, and he probably wants revenge.”
“Nonsense!”
“I don’t like it, I don’t trust it,” Charles said unhappily. He had fetched one of the tourist guides from the guest-house reception desk and discovered that Sun Kiss Key was a real-estate name for a proposed housing development on one of the middle keys that lay some twenty miles from Key West. He telephoned a realtor friend and learned that none of the houses had yet been built, and that consequently there was nothing on the island but newly excavated boat canals and a network of unpaved roads. At night it would be deserted. “If I stay a hundred paces behind you,” Charles suggested, “then maybe they won’t notice?”
“No!” I insisted.
“Then take this.” He opened the drawer of a bureau and brought out a holstered revolver. “It’s licensed!” he said, as though that made possession of the handgun quite acceptable. I felt the surprise and revulsion that most Europeans feel for handguns, but nevertheless I gingerly reached for the weapon. It was a long-barreled, single-action Ruger, only.22 caliber, but it looked lethal enough. “Have you ever fired a handgun?” Charles asked me.
I nodded, though the last time had been twenty years before in the army, and even then I had only fired six reluctant shots to satisfy an insistent firearms instructor. “I’m sure I won’t need this,” I said to Charles, though his supposition that von Rellsteb wanted revenge was enough to make me keep the small gun.
“If you don’t need it, then just keep it hidden. But if you do need it, then you’ll be glad to have it along.” Charles took the gun from me and loaded its cylinder with cartridges.
“Why do you keep a gun?” I asked him.
He paused for a second. “Once upon a time,” he said, “my car broke down in Texas. I’d decided to drive all the way to San Francisco in an old Packard. It was an antique car, very rare, and someone had told me I could sell it for a lot of money in California, but its back axle broke in Texas. Then two guys stopped in a pick-up. I thought they were going to help me, but…” He stopped abruptly, and I wished I had not asked the question, for I saw how the memory pained him, but then he grinned and thrust the revolver toward me. “Fairy firepower, Tim. It shoots slightly up and to the right. And I suppose you’ll want to borrow the car as well?”
“Can I?” I asked.
“You may,” he said grandly, “indeed you may. But bring it back in one piece. You can be replaced, but Austin-Healeys are rare indeed.”
I spent that afternoon writing another letter to Nicole, in case the first was illegible. It was much the same as the first letter. I told my daughter that I loved her, that I wanted to see her, and that I was lonely for family. I told her I had not killed her brother, and I was sure she knew that, too. It was not a long message, but it still took a long time to write. Then, filled with hope and dread, I waited.
The weather forecast hinted at the possibility of a thunderstorm over the Keys, so I borrowed a black nylon rain slicker from Charles, which I wore over black trousers, black shoes, and a dark blue shirt. “Black suits you,” Charles said approvingly.
I growled something ungrateful in reply.
“Don’t let a compliment go to your head,” he told me, “because your appearance could still take a few basic improvements. A water-based moisturizer for your skin, a decent haircut, and some nice clothes would be a start.”
“Shut the hell up,” I said, and tucked his holstered gun into my right-hand trouser’s pocket. I had Nicole’s letter in my shirt pocket, where, if it rained, it would be sheltered by the nylon slicker.
“And for God’s sake,” Charles went on, “stay under the speed limit on the highway. If the police find you with that gun, we’ll both be up to our buns in trouble.”
I stayed under the speed limit as I drove up the Overseas Highway which arced on stilts across the channels between the islands. I had left Key West at nine o’clock, wanting to arrive very early at Sun Kiss Key, so that I could scout the rendezvous to smell for even the smallest hint of trouble. Not that I expected trouble, but the strangeness of the occasion and the heaviness of the thundery air gave the whole night an unreal tinge. Ahead of me, like a grim sign of doom, the northern sky was banded by jet black clouds, while overhead the stars pricked bright. There was a half-moon in the east that made the unclouded part of the night’s sky lighter than I had anticipated.
I found the dirt road leading off the highway. As I slowed and turned my headlamps flashed across a massive billboard which advertised “Sun Kiss Key, Your Home in the Sun! Waterfront Lots from Just $160,000!” Beyond the billboard the dirt road lay like a white ribbon through the low scrubland. To my left a few pilings had been driven into a cleared patch of land. The pilings were evidently supposed to form the stilts of the development’s show house, but work must have come to a standstill, for the pilings were now being used only as supports for a couple of ragged osprey nests. The water in the newly-cut canals was black and still.
I looked in the mirror. No one was following me. Dust from the sport car’s tires plumed to drift onto the bushes. I passed another of the canals that was designed to provide boat docks for the planned houses. Behind me the headlight beams blazed and faded along the highway, but no vehicles turned to follow the Austin-Healey onto this lonely and bumpy road.
I came to the end of the track, where I parked the Austin-Healey in a patch of inky shadow. With the engine switched off the night seemed very silent, then my ears tuned themselves to the noises of a myriad of insects and to the faraway drone of the traffic on the Overseas Highway behind me. I climbed out of the car. The night was warm and still. Far off to my left the sea sucked and splashed at the shallows that edged the keys, while beyond the reefs a motor-cruiser with brightly glowing navigation lights ran fast toward the southwest. To my right, beyond the highway, I could see the lights of the houses on the Atlantic side of the island. The half-moon hung above those houses, while to the north the clouds seemed thicker and blacker. Sheet lightning suddenly paled those dark clouds, hinting at rain over the Everglades. I walked to the water’s edge to see that it was a mangrove-edged channel leading to the open sea. Sun Kiss Key was a lonely place for egrets and bonefish, herons and ospreys, but a place doomed to be destroyed by bulldozers and pile drivers, by houses and carports, by powerboats and barbecues.
Waves fretted on the offshore coral. More sheet lightning flickered silent to the north. Someone, I thought, was having a bellyful of bad weather, though the dark clouds did not seem to be spreading any further south. The thought of bad weather gave me a sudden and stunningly realistic image of hard ocean rain falling at sea; an image of clean, fresh water thrashing at a boat’s sails and drumming on her coach roof and sluicing down her scuppers, and I wondered just how many months it had been since I had last sailed a boat properly.
It had been too long, I thought, much too long. Apart from the odd delivery job up-channel and shunting boats about the boatyard’s pontoons, I had not sailed properly since Joanna’s murder. I had not had the energy to provision a boat nor to face the problems of navigation, yet suddenly, in the humid night air of Sun Kiss Key, I missed the ocean. I wanted to feel the chill wind’s bite again. I wanted to go far from land into the blank emptiness of the charts where the only guide to life was a belief in God and the high, cold light of His stars. I thought of Tort-au-Citron, Stormchild as was, and I resented that she was rotting on a mooring when she and I could have been sailing the long winds of nowhere, and that sudden yearning made me feel that I was at last waking from a nightmare, and I vowed that when I got home I would rig a boat, any boat, and, late though the season was, I would cross the channel and sail round Ushant to where the Biscay rollers would shatter themselves white on my boat’s stem.