Ten Thousand Islands (27 page)

Still lying on the deck, Rossi stopped, tried to turn and get more comfortable, but couldn’t. “So that’s about it, pal. What you say, you cut me loose, then we go on back and have a beer? One day, we’ll probably laugh about this shit, huh? A tough guy! Come down here to rough you up a little and I run into another tough guy. What’re the fucking chances?”

The recorder was off. I placed it in the black briefcase, stepped over Rossi and stored the bag in a dry locker. “Where’s the Bauerstocks’ ranch? How do you get there?”

“Easy, only I don’t try going in there without an invite. They got fences, cameras, the whole works. Security you wouldn’t believe. You know where Port of the Islands is on the Tamiami Trail, east of Naples? They own about a thousand acres west of there, but that’s the road you take in. Get within a mile of the mansion, though, someone will stop your car.”

“What about by water?”

“Water? What’a you mean, water?”

“How hard would it be to go in there by boat?”

“By boat, yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. The back way, you mean. They got water access. A river cuts in behind their place, and it’s connected to the long canal that leads in from the islands. I can’t remember its name. Hey, pal? You gonna let me go now, right? I cooperated. I’m gonna have to move out of Florida now that I spilled the beans. Maybe even outta the country, because of it. But, hey, I told you everything you wanted to know. I was honest.”

In the vertical rod holders bolted to the console, between my fishing rods, I keep a stainless scissors. I reached for the scissors now, held it for a moment, then touched the point to Rossi’s neck. “You watched that girl die. You did nothing to stop it.”

“Hey! What was I supposed to do? The man was on his own private property with a girl I’d never even met. It wasn’t none of my business.”

I said, “So she deserved it. That’s what you’re saying.”

“The girl who died? Who knows? Maybe she got smart-ass with Teddy. It ain’t my problem.” Rossi was looking up, into my face. There was more light now, a pale dawn rising, and he could see what was in my eyes. “Hey, wait a minute, pal. I don’t like what you’re thinking. Wait …
don’t
. You got no reason to blame me. Really, I’m begging you. Don’t kill rat,
please
.”

With a slash, I cut the tape that bound him to the anchor, then I cut the tape around his legs.

“Get out of the boat.”

“What?”

I repeated myself.

“Jesus Christ, you’re not serious. It’s gotta be a quarter mile to that island, and with my hands tied?”

“Get out of the boat!”

I grabbed him by the belt and throat, lifted him and threw him over. Watched him thrash and splash for a moment … until he got his feet under him, then he stood.

“Fucking water’s only three feet deep! You bastard, you fucking lied to me!”

I said, “You got conned, Frank. So you’re not very bright. Who you going to blame?
Me?
”

I told him he could wade two miles to Key Largo
where his car was waiting at Shell World. Or wade to the island and hope to flag down a boat. He was still screaming at me when I started my engine and left him.

Back at the Mandalay, Reefer Vinny, one of the locals had already popped a sunrise beer. He was wearing a T-shirt that read,
Think Globally, Drink Locally
. When I told him I’d been out by Ronrico Key, he became concerned. “Watch your step out there, Captain. You didn’t know? They should note it on the charts. Someone released a bunch of circus chimps there years ago when they got too big and mean. A deserted island, what’s the harm? they figured. Plenty of wild monkeys around the Keys, islands full of them. But these chimps, they bred. That’s why no one goes there. They’re big. There’s not much to eat, and they hunt in packs.”

T
omlinson said, “Just because Ted had some emotional problems when he was younger, it doesn’t mean he’s crazy now. I myself spent a year or so in, well, let’s just say a confined, safe environment.”

I looked at him sharply. “You ever murder anyone?”

In his expression, I could see the question jolt him; could see that it hurt. He said softly, “I think you know the answer to that. I think you’ve known for a while.”

We were in the upstairs apartment, and I was packing. I was also hitting the redial button on the phone, trying to contact Detective Parrish, trying to warn Nora.

It was a little after eight
A.M.

Parrish didn’t answer. I got an infuriating recording when I dialed Nora: “
The Cellular-One customer you have called is unavailable or has traveled outside the coverage area….
”

I said, “Once again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He ignored the evasion, looking at me. “There are things I’ve done in my life that I will regret for eternity. There is no absolution. None. Not from outside or from within. Some things make me wince, others make me want to cry. I try to make up for those sins as best I can.”

“Ted Bauerstock doesn’t strike me as the crying type. Della and Nora need to get the hell out of there. If I can’t get Parrish in the next twenty minutes or so, I’m leaving. I’ll have to go by boat.”

“You already spoke to the Sheriff’s Department?”

“The woman on the desk treated me like a crank. Mr. Bauerstock is dangerous? She laughed at me.”

The apartment’s dining table was made of glass and chrome. On it was a fax I’d found tacked to my door when I came up the steps from the fueling dock. It was from Dieter Rasmussen. At the top of the first page he used precise block letters to note:
This is consistent with the man in question
.

There were four pages. Some parts were more telling than others:

At the bottom of the final page, Dieter had written: “Dr. Ford, The human brain is especially vulnerable to such defects. During the last 1.5 million years, it has tripled in size. Any organ that changes that rapidly is increasingly prone to genetic error. There will be more and more of these people, yet society allows their defective genes to be passed on through conjugal visits in prison!”

Now I put a small bag over my shoulder. “Keep trying to call. I’m going to load the boat.”

“It’s going to be rough out there.”

“I’ll run backcountry, cut up through Whitewater Bay and the islands, hug the beach and stay in the lee. It won’t be bad at all. The hurricane’s still five or six hundred miles away.”

Tomlinson had already agreed to take my truck, drive up to Sanibel and board my windows. The Florida Keys were no longer in danger. I’d asked him to release my sharks just in case.

“Can you do me one more favor? Go down to the bar, ask around, see if you can borrow or buy some goggles. The kind the motorcycle guys wear.”

“Goggles?”

I went toward the door. “Yeah, for the first time, I think I’ll open the throttle. See what my boat can do.”

I idled beneath the bridge off Largo Sound, my Yamaha burbling like an alcohol dragster, then jumped to plane and was doing a spooky seventy miles an hour within seconds. By the time I hit The Boggies and crossed into Florida Bay, I was doing seventy-five; I could feel the squirrely, dancing feeling of air beneath the hull. The wind was gusting fifteen to twenty out of the southeast, piling water deep on the flats, so I ran a rhumb line course to Flamingo, not worried about bars or channels. I had to back off quite a bit because of the chop, especially in the open stretches, but I pushed it as hard as I could.

To the west and south were tentacles of rain suspended from thunderheads; a veil of squall to the north. I seemed to be at the very center of watery solitude, cloaked by the silence of my boat’s velocity.

Hurricane Charles was pushing weather out ahead of it, flattening pressure obstacles, causing sea birds to cauldron over land. As a hurricane grows, it gathers momentum, sucking in smaller storms as it rotates, feeding on a sea vaporized by tropic heat. The increasing disparity between pressure inside and outside the eye causes it to rotate ever faster, discharging rain, lightning, tornado appendages, spinning like a dust devil in the wake of a delivery truck.

As I steered, I tried to still my fears for Della and Nora by doing some mathematical calculations. It is an old trick. Our brains are segmented into halves. Primitive characteristics, such as emotion, are stored in the right hemisphere. Math is on the left. It is impossible to do math and be frightened at the same time.

Okay, so calculate the fastest estimated time of arrival for a storm traveling at thirteen knots that has to cover five to six hundred miles. A knot is 1.2 miles per hour, so convert thirteen knots and you’ve got … a little over fifteen miles per hour. Therefore, in a very worst case and unlikely scenario, Charles could travel one hundred fifty miles in ten hours, five hundred miles in a little over thirty hours.

But storms rarely travel straight lines. They slow down, they stall, they regather their strength over water, lose strength over land. This one would probably do what most do: bang back and forth between pressure ridges and plow ashore somewhere between Pensacola and New Orleans.

When I slowed at Flamingo, the rain finally caught me: a silver torrent with droplets that stung like pellets from an air rifle. In such a storm, you wear a foul weather jacket not to stay dry, but to avoid contusions. Even with goggles down, I couldn’t see. So I pulled into temporary dockage at the National Park Marina, used the bathroom, dropped coins into the pay phone and heard,
The Cellular-One customer you have called is unavailable or has traveled outside the coverage area
….

“Damn it!”

Dropped in more coins and heard, “Gary Parrish speaking. Calling me at home, on my day off, this better be good.”

Detective Parrish said, “You got a tape of who saying what?”

I repeated myself.

“Holy shit, man, you serious. Teddy Bauerstock, I thought he was one of the good ones. You sure about this,
Ford? Goddamn it, you better be sure ’cause it’ll be your head and my job if you’re not. How you know Rossi wasn’t lying, making up all that shit?”

“Take my word for it. Rossi was in no position to lie.”

“Oh goddamn, that’s just great. You beat another confession outta someone. That ain’t gonna stand up in no court.”

“I never expected it to. You’re the cavalry, I’m just the messenger. Have the right people listen to the tape, you’ll come up with the evidence. All I care about now is making sure Nora and Della are safe. You got Nora’s message, right?”

“Yeah, man. Couldn’t figure out why she was laying all the information on, now I see. I don’t care how crazy Teddy is, he knows she’s got the cops involved, he’s bound to be a good boy.”

“Oh, he’s crazy. Wait till you hear the tape.”

Parrish began to chuckle, “I hope to hell you made more’n one copy. Something happen to you, man, I’m gonna miss out on a lot of fun. Arrest Teddy Bauerstock for a fifteen-year-old murder, hot damn!”

“Don’t worry, I made several.” I had, too. Tomlinson had one copy, and I’d addressed two to myself at Dinkin’s Bay, asking Jack at the Mandalay to mail the envelope. “You want, I’ll meet you at Port of the Islands; we can get into Bauerstock’s ranch by boat. Go the back way.”

“The back way? That back-way, back-a-the-bus shit went out with Kennedy, man. I’ll meet you at Port of the Islands, but we’ll take my squad car. Go in with the blue lights flashing, you want. One more thing, Ford—where’s Rossi? He’s okay, isn’t he? You didn’t kill him. I don’t want to have to arrest you, too. But I would. Don’t doubt it.”