Lost (29 page)

Gingerly touching the bucket, her hand encounters the handle, reclined against the side. The handle is nothing more than a curved piece of stiff metal rod, with ends that hook into the side of the bucket. Exploring the handle inch by inch, she discovers that the hooked end is sharp. Not razor sharp by any means, but she can feel the edge.

Her hands shaking slightly with excitement, Kelly unhooks the handle. Straightening it as best she can, she begins to rub the sharp end of the handle against the floor of her prison. Steel against steel.

After a few minutes the metal rod warms in her hands. It begins to have the feel of a weapon. Something sharp and
strong. Something she can plunge into the heart of the next man who comes through the door.

21. Strictly Stiltsville

The Glock is within reach, Shane decides. Ricky Lang having nonchalantly tucked the weapon in the waistband of his cargo pants. As if, the issue of releasing his captives having been settled, there is no need for guns.

The only trouble, if Shane does manage to get his hands on the Glock he will undoubtedly have to shoot the guy, thereby complicating the task of recovering Kelly Garner. Not that Shane is convinced Ricky Lang is telling the truth about letting his captives go. Truth being a relative term to a man who believes he can make himself invisible. Probably thinks bullets won’t hurt him either, but Shane is pretty sure a.45 caliber slug, discharged at close range, will kill him. Rendering him useless in a search for the victims.

Shane decides to bide his time. Determine if Lang really intends to lead him to the captives, then take whatever action is necessary.

“You like boats?” Lang wants to know.

“Sure,” says Shane.

They’re detouring around the sapphire-blue pool, heading for the seawall. Shane would dearly love to get out his cell phone and make a few calls but he’s afraid of interrupting the flow, the insane rhythm of the man with the bowl-cut hair. If there had been any doubt as to his mental state, it was confirmed when Lang had ducked into what was obviously a child’s bedroom and waved bye-bye to the empty space.

“My kids,” he’d said, black eyes shining with a ferocious, mind-consuming love. “Alicia and Reya, those are the girls,
aren’t they sweet? Troy, the little one, he’s my little boy. Go on, kids, wave to the nice man!” He waits a beat, turns to Shane and says, “Cute, huh?”

Shane had, of course, agreed.

At the seawall Rick Lang produces a small remote control and sets about lowering the sleek red boat into the water. The notion of fishing as a pleasant activity aside, Shane knows very little about boats. This thing, long and narrow and pointy, looks built for speed and nothing else.

“My special baby, a Y2K Superboat,” Lang explains as the winches unwind. “Pure racing machine, custom-built in New York. Turbocharged, seven hundred horse motor with a Bravo One stern drive. Three stage hull. You want to know how fast it goes? Hundred miles an hour, man. Get you to Bimini in twenty minutes.”

“Very impressive.”

Lang’s finger comes off the remote and the winch stops, causing the big boat to shudder in its cradle. “You messin’ with me, man?” he says, his eyes hardening.

Shane, not sure how to react to the sudden change in mood, asks, “Why would I mess with you?”

Ricky Lang snorts, his neck swelling. “The way you said ‘very impressive.’ Like you don’t believe me. Some crazy Indian bragging on his stupid boat, is that what you think? Huh?”

“No, no,” says Shane, trying to assure him. “I mean it. I love the boat. Very impressive.”

“So you know about go-fast boats?”

“Not a thing, no. Comes to boats, I’m dumb as a rock.”

Lang stares at him, then thumbs the remote, resumes lowering the boat.

“This an A-class racer,” he explains, sounding like a man grievously wounded by insult, struggling to be amenable.
“Water gets a little rough, it goes faster. Get it balanced right, there’s only about two square feet of hull in the water at any one time. Air under the hull lifting like wings on a plane. Boat rides on the prop, man. It flies, okay?”

“Sounds dangerous.”

Lang chuckles, a sound that, with his pumped-up build and the Glock in his possession, is anything but reassuring. “Oh man, this boat’ll kill you, you don’t look out.”

Lang leaps spryly into the cockpit, holds a hand out to help him aboard.

Shane hesitates. “We’re going to get the captives?”

“Captives?” Lang says, sounding puzzled.

“Kelly Garner. Seth Manning.”

“Not captives, man. Guests.”

“Guests, yes. But they’re okay? They’re alive?”

Ricky Lang grins, showing his square white teeth. “They be better when you come to the rescue, man.”

Biscayne Bay is the color of a mint-green milk shake, little foamy whitecaps marching along in ragged formation, propelled by a hot, southerly breeze. Off in the distance, a land mass connected by a long sliver of causeway. Must be Key Biscayne, Shane concludes. Beyond that, South Beach is a smudge on the horizon. In the heat of the afternoon, with sunlight exploding from every whitecap, it could be a pastel mirage, hastily sketched. Closer to hand are a number of smaller islands, some natural, others created by developers, as well as navigational aids that appear to be extruded upward from the shallow sea bottom.

As the throbbing beast of a boat glides through the intricate channels, heading out into the bay, Ricky Lang smiles and points out the sights, chatting amiably as he drives the
big racing machine one-handed. Shane can’t make out a word, and forms the impression that Lang knows this full well. As if he’s performing a pantomime show, impersonating a friendly host. And yet the way he’s ever so casually leaning on his seat, oriented toward his “guest,” would make it difficult if not impossible for Shane to grapple successfully for the gun.

The posture is hardly an accident. Ricky Lang may or may not be delusional, but he’s what the FBI assault teams would call “situationally aware.” Armed, dangerous and playing a part. Or maybe lost in his role, hard to say.

At the end of the channel Lang slots the shifting lever to neutral, lowers the throbbing engine to idle, and raises his voice to make himself heard.

“So you up for a ride, man?”

“Where we going?” Shane wants to know.

“Check out my little guesthouse, what you think? You want to be a hero or what?”

Shane considers the man, the handsome eagle-beak of a nose, the keenly intelligent eyes. How does it reconcile with the Moe Howard hairstyle, the swaggering, almost theatrical way he presents himself? What’s the message here? Is he daring the world not to take him seriously? Does he revel in his clownish behavior, using it as a disguise? Or are these all symptoms of a deteriorating mental condition?

Randall Shane, never a profiler and always distrustful of snap psychological assessments, decides he has no clue as to what motivates Ricky Lang. “I just want to find the girl,” he says truthfully. “And the boy, too, if he’s still alive.”

Ricky laughs. “What are you so worried about?”

“Boats make me nervous.”

“Yeah? You don’t look nervous, man. You look more like you’re planning to jump me, hijack my ride.”

Shane manages to look astonished. “Why would I do that? I want to find the girl.”

“Yeah, but when I take you there, then you’ll jump me, right? Shoot me, arrest me, whatever.”

Shane shakes his head. “Not me. I’m no longer a law enforcement officer.”

“Somebody else then. Snipers. A SWAT team. Shoot me in the back, like at Wounded Knee.”

“Doesn’t have to be that way, Mr. Lang. Take me to the girl, you’re free to go. No one will press charges. It was a simple misunderstanding.”

“You serious? No charges?”

“I swear.”

“Like it never happened?”

“Absolutely.”

Lang chuckles, shakes his head. “Man, you’re a good liar, you know that?”

“Seriously, if the girl is unharmed we can work something out.”

Lang grins, seriously amused. “She’s okay, man. Hang on, I’ll show you.”

He jams the throttle down, pinning Shane to his seat.

For the next two minutes all he can do is hang on for dear life because the boat, as Lang promised, is pretty much airborne. Scudding over the swells, barely making contact with the water as it accelerates. The pitch of the huge screaming engine is a mere decibel below total disintegration. To Shane the sensation is akin to falling down an elevator shaft, except death by elevator would be over by now and at ninety
miles an hour across open water, two minutes is a very long chunk of eternity.

With the boat careening around like an Exocet missile, visibility is pretty much nil. Plumes of white spray explode over the bow, only to be crushed back into the sea by the headlong velocity of the boat.

At the last possible minute Shane sees a structure looming. Scabby concrete pilings holding up what looks like a giant shoe box. They’re going to hit it head-on, at nearly a hundred miles an hour, with a thousand pounds of supercharged engine, and who knows how much fuel right under his seat.

No time.
That’s the profound thought he has at the very moment of his death.

No time.

Then Ricky Lang yanks the throttles back, killing the motor if not all of the momentum. Shane is thrown forward, whacking his head on the padded dashboard, which starts his nose bleeding in a fresh spurt, and he ends up flat on his back in the bottom of the cockpit confused and dazed.

After a moment, the shoe box resolves into a boarded-up wreck of a house on stilts, way out in the bay. Nothing but blue sky and sunshine and a row of insolent-looking seagulls perched on a railing, staring down at the intruders.

Ricky Lang then looms over him, offering a hand.

“We’re here, man. Stiltsville, or what’s left of it.”

Not a bad spot, Shane is thinking, to stash a captive or two.

22. Small Miracles

Lang insists that Shane disembark by going over the side of the boat.

“You want me to dent this fine machine by tying up to the pilings in this chop? No way, man. You want to be a hero, you can jump the last couple of yards. You gotta ask yourself, What Would Superman Do?”

“It looks abandoned,” Shane says, looking up at the boarded-up shack.

Rick Lang shrugs. “That’s because it is abandoned. Park took over, kicked the people out. Back in the day, this is where they gambled and whored. Put a boat aground on a sandbar two miles from shore and open for business, the law couldn’t touch you. Water’s only three feet deep, you could get out and walk.”

Shane, pretending to tend to his smashed-up nose, calculates his odds. What he’d prefer is to subdue the suspect and then conduct the search, in case the shack is a ruse or a trap, as seems likely. But his adversary is pumped and hyper and despite being a head shorter looks about as easy to subdue as a charging rhino on amphetamines.

Everything about Ricky Lang screams
go on, make your move,
like he’s been practicing his quick-draw techniques and wants to try them out. Plus there’s the fact that he may be clinically insane, talking to invisible children and muttering about, of all things, Superman. What that signifies, Shane hasn’t a clue. Other than a conviction, born of experience, that psychotic suspects are infinitely more difficult to subdue.

“They’re in the shack,” Shane says, watching Lang’s hands. “Kelly and Seth. Alive?”

Ricky Lang grins. “Only one way to find out, man. Because you ain’t got X-ray vision, that’s obvious. You had X-ray like me, you’d already know.”

Shane makes his decision, slips over the side. Ready to duck under the hull if Lang reaches for the Glock. Instead he
slams the gear into reverse, leaving Shane standing, as promised, in waist-deep water.

By the time Shane wades over the soft, mucky bottom to the stilts beneath the shack, the big racing machine is nothing but a white rooster tail fading into the hazy distance. He’s pulling himself up a rusty iron ladder when he remembers that the cell phone is in his pants pocket, and therefore has been submersed in salt water.

Great, perfect. And maybe that’s what Ricky Lang intended all along. Neutralize the larger man with promises, put him off balance with feigned insanity, then dump him in the water a couple of miles offshore and make an escape.

Crawling up the ladder, Shane shakes his head. Still doesn’t make sense. No need to play games when Lang had the Glock. One bullet does it, either to disable or kill. No need for mind games or boat rides or stories about superheroes.

Unless his captives are really stashed in the shack. Alive or dead.

At floor level Shane hauls himself up through an opening in what remains of a narrow porch that runs around the entire building. The seagulls have fled, but unless the birds are big beer drinkers, the shack has a history as a party destination. Empty cans and bottles strewn everywhere. The windows and doors have been securely boarded with heavy plywood by Biscayne National Park, which has stenciled warnings all over the plywood.

Shane, dripping and no longer hopeful, bangs a fist on the plywood. “Kelly! Seth! Anybody there?”

He puts his ear to the plywood. Hears a moaning. Not human, but wind whistling through the building. Which means there must be an opening. He lopes around the deck, scuffling through the party debris, searching. Finds, on the side facing the sea, a section where the plywood has been unfastened along the bottom edge. Leaving a gap of an inch or so, more than enough for the wind.

Shane braces himself, heaves against the heavy plywood. Not quite enough leverage. He repositions his feet against the base of the wall, leans back, using his legs.

With a mighty screech the sheet of plywood comes loose, yanking screws and through-bolts through the softened wood frame. Shane lands on his ass with his hands full of splinters and the plywood in his lap.

Catches his breath, shoves the plywood aside, and crawls through the dark opening.

Shane stands up.

The floor is spongy underfoot. There’s a stink he associates with nesting birds. A few slashes of sunlight penetrate through the galvanized metal roof and under the eaves. As his eyes adjust he’s able to determine that the shack is basically one big room, bare to the wood frame walls, stripped of anything that’s not nailed down.