The Four Corners Of The Sky (54 page)

Brad was indignant. “I’d never testify against Annie.”

“Can I cut a deal, testify against him?” Annie asked.

Brad’s eyes darted everywhere, looking for an angle. He turned a solemn look on Annie. “Let’s don’t get personal.”

She scoffed. “Don’t get personal? We’re married.”

“Well, maybe you’re right, we shouldn’t wait a month.” In fact, Brad said, he wasn’t going to argue with Annie anymore about proceeding with the divorce. He’d sign right away. He did have to think about his responsibilities to his family and to Hopper Jets. He did have to consider the firm’s reputation and—

Annie interrupted him. “Oh Brad, just shut the fuck up.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk that way,” said the handsome pilot.

Dan laughed. “Okay, Lt. Goode, let’s go. We got some cellmates waiting for you—some wino hookers, four or five skinhead bull dykes, half a dozen paranoid crackheads, you know, the regulars. Don’t leave town, Hopper.”

Brad’s eyes squeezed shut as if he hoped to make everything go away.

At Annie’s handclap, Malpy jumped into her arms. Dan picked up her duffel bag and led her out of the room.

“Annie, want me to call you a lawyer?” the handsome head of Hopper Jets shouted down the hall.

She turned back and waved good-bye. “No thanks, Brad. Just go home.”

“Okay, take it easy, Annie. Want me to call Sam?”

“Just go home.”

I
t was a long trip south down through the keys on US 1. Passengers in other cars waved happily at the pale blue 1957 Thunderbird coupe with its white top and whitewalls. The car, said Dan, probably looked to them like some old lost innocent dream of American freedom. Dan and Annie crossed bridge after bridge, heading toward Naval Air Station, Key West, at Sigsbee Park, where they would meet at
JIATF
EAST
(the Joint InterAgency Task Force East) with agents and officers involved in “the Peregrine matter.”

From Key West, the southernmost tip of Florida, Jack Peregrine had been illegally flying in and out of Cuba in his Cessna Amphibian for years. While allegedly on “fishing trips” in the waters off the key, he had actually been smuggling goods into the country for Miami businessmen expatriated from the island. Dan’s investigation had never been able to prove exactly what the goods were: propaganda material, laundered money, weapons, drugs. Possibly Jack had also been smuggling on his own into the U.S.—maybe illegal immigrants, maybe artifacts like the Queen of the Sea herself. Dan wasn’t sure. He’d been focused not on Jack’s smuggling but his fraud scams.

Now Cuba (represented by officials at Museo Habana in Plaza de la Revolución) was claiming that Jack had stolen their sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary. While they did not appear to have known about the relic until Feliz Diaz announced he was giving it to a cathedral in Miami, they had immediately insisted that because five hundred years ago
La Reina
had sunk in Cuba’s territorial waters it was therefore legally a national antiquity; to keep it would be diplomatic trouble. The
FBI
was in charge of getting it back for them.

Driving to Key West, Dan and Annie practiced what Annie would say in her “interview” with
FBI
and
NAS
officials at the Sigsbee meeting this evening. They also talked about their past marriages and their childhoods and their likes and dislikes. They had no trouble finding worlds to talk about.

In Islamorada, Dan suggested that Annie, exhausted, might want to nap. She insisted she wasn’t tired but her eyes kept shutting, the long curve of lash closing over blue. Finally she nodded against his shoulder. Later, drifting awake, she listened to him singing along with Sarah Vaughan. “What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four little hours.”

“You’re a terrible singer,” she mumbled drowsily.

“Awful,” he agreed. “But you can’t stop enjoying things just because you’re bad at them.”

It was a surprising point of view for Annie, who had always believed you had to be first or right or best or why bother. But then everything felt like a surprise to her now, including the realization that she’d been so often wrong. Riding in this car half-asleep, hearing the whir of the wheels, soft jazz on the radio, it all felt so surprising and yet so easy; it all felt comfortable enough for her to drift in and out of sleep, just as if she were home in Emerald. “Is everything okay?” she asked Dan.

“Fine,” he promised.

She’d certainly been wrong to so dislike him, and not that long ago either, just like…like, she yawned, like Claudette Colbert in…

The car hummed over miles of bridge, island to island.

The next thing Annie knew, she was staring up at gold in the afternoon sun. Dan was ending a phone call. He pointed as they passed a sign for Key West. She stretched, yawning, feeling curiously rested. “We’re in Key West? I never go to sleep like that,” she said. “Are we driving straight to Sigsbee?’

“No, they just postponed. We don’t meet them till 7 a.m., tomorrow.”

“I thought it was urgent, that we had to be there tonight.”

Dan lifted his hips to slip the phone back in his jeans pocket. “Don’t ask the Feds to explain themselves. They’re flying somebody named McAllister Fierson in from the State Department and he’ll be there in the morning. Whatever they ask you, just keep saying you don’t know a thing. We’ll get you out of this and your dad too, if they ever catch him.” Reassuring, he moved his hand against her cheek. “It’ll be fine. I think this whole thing is about smoothing Cuba’s feathers over a stolen statue before anybody gets embarrassed. Two weeks ago the
FBI
was negotiating with state prosecutors about your dad. Now they’re just pissed he got away from them.”

She smiled. “I know the feeling.”

“Rafael Rook’s already in Sigsbee, spilling his guts.”

Instinctively she tensed. “I thought you said your lawyer friend could get Raffy out on bail?”

Dan took the Key West exit. “They wouldn’t have brought him to Sigsbee from Dade County if they hadn’t needed him to tell them stuff. Raffy knows how to cut his own deal. But for insurance, whatever favor they want from you, you make them ease up not just on your dad but on Rook. All they want’s the Queen.”

The problem was, she no longer had it. Her father had stolen it out of her hotel room and left her a million dollar
IOU
in its place. If he was alive, he was halfway around the world with the relic by now, having outsmarted the police and Feliz Diaz and God knows who else. She grinned. “Well, at least it was your ex-wife’s
SUV
Dad sank.”

“Melissa’s car was a real gas guzzler. Serves her right.”

Annie gestured out the windshield. “Are you kidding? What do you get to the gallon? This Thunderbird’s got a McCulloch supercharged V8 in it. You could hit 125.”

He laughed. “How do you know that?”

“I looked under the hood. That engine has speed.”

He kissed her fingers. “I bought this Bird for its looks, the grille, and the tailfins. I don’t want fast, I want beautiful. But, hey.” He smiled at her. “I’ll take both.”

As they headed into Key West’s Old Town, Dan got another phone call. His chief at
MPD
was officially reinstating him. The paperwork was already in the chute. The chief also wanted in on Dan’s involvement in the Jack Peregrine case. Dan told him one sure thing was that the con man’s daughter Annie knew absolutely nothing of her father’s crimes.

“Not really true,” Annie admitted after he’d hung up. “I’ve always known Dad was a crook.”

Dan shrugged. “The Vapor didn’t believe me anyhow.”

They agreed, and she leaned to rest her hand on his leg, that they would need to stay in a hotel tonight, since they weren’t wanted at Sigsbee base until morning.

They drove past the harbor of tall ships and through blocks of pastel Victorian B&Bs and converted bungalows that had once been the homes of Cuban cigar workers. Dan was looking for Duval Street. “There’s a ’20s place I always wanted to go. Casa Marina. Are you hungry?”

Touching the skin of his hand, his wrist, his arm, as if to memorize the unfamiliar, she thought again, oddly, of
It Happened One Night,
of a moment when Clark Gable was cooking breakfast for Claudette Colbert in their roadside motel cabin, how delicious the simple egg had tasted to the spoiled heiress. Annie said, “Totally starving! I hope they have key lime pie, I hope they have a pool and I hope our room faces the sea.”

He pulled her closer to him. “Hope’s good.”

“Oh it’s very good,” she agreed. “I’m hoping to get in the habit of hope.”

Curving westward, they were driving now into the sunset, as if they were about to step onto the top of the enormous round sun, where both of them would be able to balance for a while, like dancers on an orange circus ball. All around them the sky flung purple streamers though the clouds and the ocean brightened, red as a parade.

When they reached the hotel Dan was looking for, there happened to be available—a cancellation—a beautiful room with a balcony facing the ocean. They could see the pool from this balcony. Annie swam laps while Dan made phone calls and then they changed clothes and strolled along Duval Street through crowds of summer cruise-ship tourists. They found a pretty restaurant where they ate tuna tartare and coconut shrimps and very good key lime pie. At the meal’s end, Dan noticed that his phone was no longer in his jacket.

As they walked back to the hotel to look for the phone, he suddenly stopped and asked Annie what were her plans for the future? She thought for a moment and then told him, “More of the same.”

“Same what?”

She meant, doing more test flights and teaching more flying and hoping in a few years to be promoted to a senior officer, then to lieutenant commander, and then to commander and maybe some day captain…

He pulled her hand through his arm as they walked in step along the old sidewalk. No, he meant “personally.” What were her plans for her personal future, after her divorce? She said she had no plans, an uncertainty that, she admitted, ought to make her more nervous than it did, because she had always made detailed plans for the future. “I guess I don’t know.” She stopped, turned to him.

“Sure you know.” Dan leaned to her, his eyes intent on hers. “I know.”

She pressed her hand against his heart, listened to its beat. They kissed for so long that a passing pack of intoxicated college boys hooted at them.

On the balcony at Casa Marina, their bare feet tangled resting on the rail. Dan kissed the inside of Annie’s elbow. He pointed to the moon’s white shadow on the sea.

She looked at the full moon for a while. “Let’s go to Machu Picchu,” she said.

Surprised, he laughed. “So I can propose to you there?”

She moved her cheek against his. “No, I’m thinking maybe I’ll propose to you. Maybe I’ll propose tomorrow at Sigsbee at the
BOQ
. I bet you’ve never been proposed to by a Navy pilot at the bachelor officers’ quarters.”

“Just shows how much you know.” He walked her back into the room, fell softly with her onto the bed. He kissed the inside of her palm, the hollow of her neck. “Understand that I’m prepared to say yes if you propose. I’m practically yours already.” He kissed her shoulders. “Did you know Sigsbee Base was named for the captain of the
Maine
? That the
Maine
left for Cuba from there?”

“Yes, I did.” She kissed along the line of his jaw.

“Right, that was dumb of me. You’re a naval officer.” He kept kissing her neck.

“Daniel Hart,” whispered Annie. “You don’t know what dumb is until you’ve been married to Brad.”

His lips brushed the corner of her mouth. “Oh, yeah? Have you met my ex-wife?”

Annie laughed a loud long laugh. “Well, guess what? What we’re doing is totally irrational and I know, I
know,
it’s the smartest thing I ever did in my life.”

Hours later the full moon wandered into the window and awakened her. She wrapped herself in the white robe and slipped quietly out onto the balcony where she could see the luminous globe floating down below in the hotel pool. Someone had left a towel spread over a deck chair, white as a ghost.

Back in the room, the hotel phone rang. Hurrying to the bed, where Dan was sleeping, she picked it up quickly so he wouldn’t be awakened.

“That old movie,” said her father without preamble.“With Rosalind Russell; Amelia Earhart-type character, famous woman pilot.” His voice was raspy.

“Where are you, Dad? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Just listen.
Flight for Freedom
. Remember that movie I was telling you about? Where Rosalind Russell tells Fred MacMurray, ‘My Dad always used to say, when you’re safe…you’re dead.’”

How strange her father should keep mentioning that old movie and how strange that it had shown up on television at the Hotel Dorado. Maybe it had been part of some series on flying films repeated over the past weeks by the cable network. Or maybe it had been an old favorite of Sam’s and Sam and Jack had watched it together a lifetime ago at Pilgrim’s Rest.

His cough sounded tighter. “‘When you’re safe, you’re dead.’”

His repeating the quote scared her. “Dad, are you in a hospital? Go to a hospital. Where are you? Are you here in Key West?”

“Annie, when you get to Sigsbee Park tomorrow, you call their bluff. Full immunity.”

“What? How do you—”

“How about that moon?” He was swallowing his words so that they were almost hard to understand. “Your pal the moon that always came along for the ride?”

She ran out to the balcony, searched the darkness below her.

“Where’s Raffy?” he asked. “Raffy can get you to our plane and into Cuba.”

“Dad, forget it. Raffy’s a prisoner at
NAS
Key West. He can’t help me or you either.” Below, beside the pool, she saw a slender man in the moonlight step back into shadows.

“Who told you I’m going to Sigsbee tomorrow?” she asked, trying to follow the gleam of white shirt in the shadows. He didn’t answer her. “Dad? Whatever the
FBI
asks me to do to get your sentence reduced, I’m doing it. I want you to turn yourself in and go to the hospital.”