B0092XNA2Q EBOK (10 page)

When I cranked the boat, and dialed in the radio frequency, the anchor started his broadcast by saying, “Good evening. Tonight’s one-hour special… Katie Quinn. ‘All Hail the Queen.’ ” I turned it off.

The boat was dark. I skipped dinner and lay swinging in my hammock a long time.

She woke me at two. I rubbed my eyes. She handed me a cup of coffee and whispered, “Can I talk with you?”

S
he’d been crying. Arms folded. She didn’t waste time. “I was wondering if you’d walk me through door number three.” She had chosen her words carefully and the choice of “walk me through” did not escape me. Far different than “I’m walking through.” The latter is an individual pursuit. The former is a shared experience. I didn’t take it as a crutch. I had the feeling she could do most anything she set her mind to. It almost had the ring, or tone, of an apology.

“You sure?”

She nodded but didn’t look at me.

We towed my boat out across the grass flats. A slow drive. Steady waited on the
Gone Fiction
.

Fifteen miles out, I found some shallow water, set it in neutral, and anchored the Pathfinder. A clear night. The explosion would be seen in Flamingo, Everglades City, maybe even Naples. Once lit, there’d be no going back. The shallow water meant that it’d be easier for search and rescue to find what was left of the boat.

I was readying to scuttle the boat when she tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you mind if we do one thing first?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“This thing cost me almost half a million dollars. I’d like to see how fast it will go before we blow it up.”

“Okay.”

We lit out across a sheet of black, moonlit glass. I throttled up, pushing the lever farther forward. Pressed against my seat, we ate up the ocean. I’d never been so fast in my life. We passed a hundred miles an hour in a matter of seconds and climbed from there. The boat was heavy, around twelve thousand pounds, but when I got her to a hundred and fifty, I doubted anything but the propeller was in the water. I inched it forward, feeling the knots in my stomach. We passed 160, 170, 180. With throttle yet to go, I got scared at 193 miles per hour. My palms were sweating and my heart was racing. But not Katie. Eyes closed, she was calm. Breathing normally. Hands folded in her lap. Another millimeter on the throttle and we hit 203.

I spoke, looking straight ahead. “Any faster and we’ll need wings.”

She nodded and then cut her hand through the air as if to say, “Enough.”

I circled the ten miles back and the boat came to a rolling stop next to
Jody
. I ran my hand across the dash. “Seems a shame to sink something so—”

She opened her eyes. Pursed her lips. “It’s a shell. That’s all.”

I got her settled in the Pathfinder, made some adjustments to the gas line on her boat, and was about to crank the engine when I said, “You want to say anything? If Steady were here, he would.”

She stared out across the water, beyond where the blackness ended. She slid her iPhone out of her pocket and threw it into her boat. It landed on the floor beneath the driver’s seat. A whisper followed it. “Set it on fire.”

We were about two miles away when almost three hundred gallons of gas ignited at once, sending her half-million-dollar boat in a million different directions. We saw the flash and heard the boom a second or two later. Flame spread across the water and burned orange and then blue while the gulf swallowed the back end of the boat. The hull came to rest on the shallow bottom while the bow pointed upward, nosing out of the water. Wouldn’t be tough to spot. Word would spread quickly.

She spoke without looking. “How do you know so much about door number three?”

The flames rose, shining on the water. “Steady.” The enormity of that struck me—how a name can say so much. The flames flickered. Soon, only the smoke would remain. And in an hour or so, it, too, would be gone. Like nothing ever happened. A watery grave.

We returned from the edge of the gulf, through the gates of the grass flats, and started weaving among the mangroves. The white hull of the
Gone Fiction
reflected in the distance. I smelled coffee. She looked at me, tilting her head. “How long have you been out here?”

I counted backward. “A decade—give or take.”

“How do you do it? How do you stay out here all alone?”

“My books.”

“Why here? Why not some farm in the woods? A mountain cabin. Someplace on dry land. Any place but here.”

About then, it hit me. Life as I’d known it the last decade was over. I glanced back in the direction of the smoke cloud rising above the mangroves and realized that more than just her life was going down with it. Without really thinking it through, I’d just signed up to help her figure out how to disappear. How to drop off the face of planet Earth. And when you’re her, you can’t just do that overnight. It takes time. And it takes help. And unless I was cruel, hard-hearted, and downright mean, I was that help.

My very private, very self-centered, very just-the-way-I-like-it life was about to get adjusted. Truth was, I knew what she needed. And, while Steady did, too, he needed me to pull it off.

I pulled the stick into neutral, turned, and watched our wake settle behind us. The churn and bubbles spread in a V through the outstretched arms of the mangroves. The water settled. Rolling glass. A mirrored picture of the heavens. I waved my hand across our path and shook my head. “Miss Quinn… no matter how wide or deep you cut it… it has no memory. No… scar.” I pointed toward the bow. “Out here, it’s all future, no past.”

She nodded and turned. Placing her back between her and what lay behind us.

“I’d like it if you called me ‘Katie.’ ”

“Katie is back there in the water.”

She looked up at me. “So is Miss Quinn.”

We heard a helicopter off to the southwest, flying fast. “I suppose you could change your mind and make up some story but… starting about now, the world is beginning to believe that Katie Quinn just died.”

She reached slowly for my hand. She uncurled my fingers, spreading my palm. She traced the edges, her fingers confirming what her eyes told her. “I’m sorry about your hands… I’m very sorry.”

We rode the last half mile in silence. I set the stick in neutral, gliding. Then cut the engine. She stood, her face two feet from mine. I felt like she needed comfort, or maybe I felt like I wanted to comfort her. I’m not sure. Whatever it was, one half of me wanted to offer it while the other doubted I was the one to give it or that she would find it comforting. I whispered, “You made one assumption tonight that may or may not be correct.”

“Which is?”

Steady stood above us on the upper deck, looking down. His face calm. Rosary beads draped between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Robes flowing. Pipe glowing. Smoke trailing from the corner of his mouth. White hair flittering in the breeze. Her face was close. Sweat on her temples. Emerald green eyes. Big and round and telling. I swallowed. “That your secret is more valuable to me… than mine.”

W
e didn’t say much that night. She didn’t ask and we didn’t offer. The circles beneath her eyes were deep and dark. She looked drained. Depleted. Bone weary. Having made her decision, she walked into my cabin, shut the door, and fell into bed.

She stayed there five days.

Every few hours I walked alongside the deck and glanced through the cabin window, where I found her curled up in bed, knees tucked up in her chest, arms wrapped around herself, seldom moving, pillow wet with drool. I think she’d been running on auxiliary, borrowing from reserves, for a long time. Like maybe longer than anybody suspected. When she did wake, she didn’t eat, didn’t talk. She quietly got up, went to the bathroom, sipped some water, and fell back in bed.

Steady called in and told them he was taking a few days off. They understood. They knew he was her priest and that her death would hit him hard. After he told them that he had been to Sky Seven the
night before and that he was, more than likely, the last person to see her alive, they said, “Take all the time you need.”

They found the boat that first night. Search teams scoured the water. Pictures of divers holding jagged pieces of boat covered the front pages of the
Miami Herald
. One diver held her burned and mangled iPhone. The fallout was immediate and total. Her death consumed every channel, every outlet, every network, for a week. The second night, I made my way into Chokoloskee, pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes, and drank a beer at the historic Rod and Gun Club bar.

The bar was full of media and mourning fans. On the TV, all the Hollywood A-listers were making the late-night rounds talking about the tragedy. About their friend Katie. One report told how her flame-scarred iPhone had sold for six figures in an auction on eBay.

I finished my beer, got in my boat, and slipped back out into the trees. Out in the gulf, a makeshift shrine developed. Somebody put a huge cross constructed out of white PVC pipe next to the hull of her boat. Covered it in a wreath. Others tied or taped notes to it. Some tossed bricks wrapped with plastic bags holding tearful letters. Others dropped messages in bottles that floated wherever the current took them. A continual procession of boats I’d never seen made their way from Chokoloskee to “the graveside.” Some came from as far away as Miami. Within days, more crosses appeared. Some wooden, some metal, most were made from PVC or plastic tubing because it would last longer and weather the storms. Four nights after her “death,” more than seventy-five boats had anchored in what was being called a “water memorial.” A solemn affair. People talking in hushed tones. The smell of pot, stale beer, rum, and coconut oil. Some forty crosses now rose up in ordered rows out of the water. The networks had hired several barges, anchored close to the burned-out hull, showered it in a twenty-four-hour spotlight
and transmitted around the clock as the ceremony continued and the number of boats grew—as if she might, at any moment, rise from the water.

But Katie Quinn was no phoenix.

One guy in a hundred-and-ten-foot yacht positioned two huge flat-screen televisions—maybe seventy inches—on the deck, wired them through speakers equally as large, and played her movies around the clock. The parties lasted all night. I drove the perimeter, outside of the light, amazed at the number of boats and people and their devotion to someone they did not know and had never met. I cut my running lights and returned under the cover of darkness. I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone with a camera and microphone stumbled upon us and started asking questions. “Did you see the explosion?”

That night, Steady and I moved both the
Gone Fiction
and
Jody
deeper into the islands where only the ghost of Osceola could find us. Which was good because the water was crawling with boats. Katie Quinn had been a spectacle in life and her fans were making sure her death was one as well. On the sixth morning, tucked well back in the trees, she woke. It was daylight. Steady and I were sipping coffee, twiddling our thumbs. She shuffled in; her eyes were slits. She sat at the table, pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands and held them under her chin. The circles beneath her eyes were still there, just not as dark, and maybe not as deep.