The Shop (17 page)

A man stood under the overhang of the gift store and bait shop, eating a candy bar. Landry had been on his way back to the boat when he spotted him.

The man was easy to make. He pretended to look at the bulletin board by the door, which was cluttered with business cards and photos of tourists holding up big fish. It was dusk, gloomy, but he could tell the man kept one eye on the AG’s boat. He looked casual, but wasn’t. For one thing, he wasn’t really looking at the photos. Landry could tell by the inclination of his head, by the small movements he made, shifting slightly to the left and then turning back. His cap pulled down too low.

Landry walked down the other dock to a slip holding a sports fisher and stepped aboard. Walked around the outside of the cabin as if he owned it. Bent down to work the line.

He did this for maybe a minute. Darkness closing in. He slipped into the water, swam under the dock, and came up on the other side. Got his bearings and swam to the other dock, right to where Frank’s boat,
Judicial Restraint
, was tied up.

He had not lost his ability to board a boat silently. It was like riding a bicycle; you never forgot.

He slid sideways through the narrow doorway to the galley, looking toward the stateroom doorway. He’d memorized the layout. He saw the edge of something black—a man’s leg, clad in cargo pants. Knife in a scabbard. Soft-soled shoes.

Another man.

The watcher by the bait shop must be a lookout. He could be one of Frank’s people, but Landry doubted that. He was pretty sure that someone besides him was interested in Frank’s business.

The man on the boat must have just gotten here. He was bent over the bed, looking at the bag of triptascoline, trying to figure out what it was.

The entry to the stateroom was extremely narrow. Landry sidled in, then moved quickly.

The man sensed something and stiffened. Landry had seen this in a rabbit just before a hawk bolted out of the sky—a sixth sense. But the man wasn’t a pro. It took him a second to believe his senses, and by that time it was too late. Landry held his head in a vise, hands on either side of the head. He jerked backwards, wrenching the neck sideways at the same time. Heard the pop as the neck snapped, severing the spinal cord: instant unconsciousness, followed by death.

He allowed the body to fall back against him, then lowered it to the sole. The smell of feces was overpowering.

Landry found a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Fantastic. He cleaned the body up and dragged it to one of the bench storage seats in the galley. Lifted the hinged seat. Empty. He heaved the body inside and closed the lid.

More cleanup. There wasn’t much. Urine trailing to the bench seat, pulled along by the man’s heels. Landry worked efficiently and quietly in the light of the dim lamp from the stateroom. He wet a towel to get rid of the Fantastic smell, wiped the galley sole dry. Admiring the satin finish of the cherry wood sheen.

Twenty minutes later, he felt the boat rock as the lookout stepped aboard.

The man was quiet and careful, but eventually he would have to come through the doorway.

When he did, Landry shot him.

Jolie thought:
Memorial Day weekend.

Something had gone on at Cape San Blas that weekend. A party, a gathering—something. She remembered Kay mentioning it. Kay was always mentioning parties and galas and barbecues and visiting dignitaries, and Jolie was always tuning her out. Now she wished she’d listened better.

She almost called Kay, but decided not to. As much as she liked her cousin, this time she would keep her in the dark.

She Googled Memorial Day and Indigo. Memorial Day and Frank Haddox, Memorial Day and attorney general and “party.” And so on.

Zip.

Jolie thought about Zoe and Riley, the day they visited the sheriff’s office. Riley worried about the nude pictures on Luke’s cell phone. Zoe telling Jolie that Riley and Luke broke up that weekend.

Jolie didn’t like coincidences, but she couldn’t see how these pieces fit. What did Riley’s and Luke’s breakup have to do with a missing gay man? Luke and Riley’s breakup seemed straightforward and self-contained: Luke had broken up with Riley, and Riley was worried that Luke had a sex video of her on his phone. The phone was probably with the FBI—swallowed up into a black hole.

So Jolie tried it from the other end. The man named Rick had come to Cove Bar looking for a young man to take to a party on San Blas. A certain type.
Like picking a lobster out of a tank
. Technically a man, but slim, young-looking, boyish.

A memory poked up.

It was just a piece of gossip, something her cousin Kay had told her when they were alone together on a shopping trip in Tallahassee. Kay looked around at the few oblivious shoppers in the mall before saying anything. “The veep’s coming this weekend.”

“The veep?”

“The vice president? Owen Pintek? Remember him?” As if Jolie should know everything she did about the goings-on at Indigo Island. “I know I told you this. He’s always coming down here—it’s private and he can have a good time.”

“I like his wife.” The vice president’s wife worked tirelessly for the women of Afghanistan. She’d used the bully pulpit, and used it well. A beautiful, charming woman. Genuine.

“Merle doesn’t come down here much.”

“Why not?”

“They have separate lives.” Kay lowered her voice. “Between you and me? He likes boys.”

Jolie Googled Vice President Pintek, plus visit, plus Cape San Blas. The first two of seven hits were from the
National Enquirer
. The other four looked like blogs, each one referencing the
Enquirer
’s headline: “
VEEP’S SECRET GAY HIDEAWAY
.”

The article about the vice president was the cover story for the April 3 edition of the
Enquirer
, accompanied by a telephoto shot of Indigo Island.

“After months of playing hide-and-seek at Washington’s toniest gay underground love nests, Vice President Owen Pintek has moved operations to a private Florida island more suitable to hedonistic fun and games, insiders say. ‘He can’t get out and about the way he used to since he became vice president,’ says one staffer close to the VP. ‘Too many people know about him—and his unusual appetites.’”

Jolie had never paid attention to the
National Enquirer
. It wasn’t on her radar at all. She’d walk right past it in the supermarket, never even register its existence. So she had no idea that the vice president of the United States would be on the cover. She opened up the cached webpage and scanned the article from over two months before. It was mostly innuendo with no real facts—enough journalistic leeway to drive a truck through.

The whole case hinged on the word of an unnamed staffer, as well as “sources close to the vice president.” According to the staffer and the sources, Pintek not only liked boys, but he liked rough sex. He liked sex games, he liked bondage. He liked being choked, and he liked choking. And his favorite place to blow off steam was Indigo Island, the home of the former attorney general of the United States.

Jolie went back to Google. There were no references to Owen Pintek and his sexual preferences other than this
Enquirer
article and another in the same tabloid—a rehash. Jolie often watched CNN on the nights she was home. She’d never seen any reference to Pintek’s homosexuality. She’d never read about it in the paper. She doubted this story had made the mainstream media. It was all innuendo.

She went back to the Google search, looking for other references to the VP, and found the important one, halfway down the third page. Just a small snippet, a quote from the
Port St. Joe Star
.

Owen Pintek was in town on Memorial Day weekend.

He was at Indigo.

Jolie drove into the empty parking lot of the Starliner Motel. The neon sign was dark. She remembered that first night, remembered the way the sign buzzed and blinked: N- VACA-CY. The office door was locked. She walked around the side of the office, which also served as Royce Brady’s living quarters, but the shades were pulled and no light seeped out. She knocked on the door out of practice, but she knew the place was empty.

There is always a feeling to a place that has been abandoned. Even if it’s only been a day or two, everyone knows. The animals know and move in. People driving by sense the place isn’t lived-in anymore.

Jolie tried Brady’s number, got his voice mail. She should know the disposition of the case against him, but didn’t. Was he incarcerated? Doubtful. She was sure he’d have been able to make bail. In fact, it could be that he wasn’t even charged.

She could ask Skeet, and he’d probably tell her. But then he’d want to know why.

She ran through the sequence of events on the day of the standoff. According to Mrs. Frawley’s granddaughter, Charly, Luke Perdue left with a man on the morning of the standoff. An hour later he took Kathy Westbrook hostage and holed up in the motel room. Chief Akers negotiated with him for several hours, and it looked as if it would turn out all right. Then Luke brought his hostage to the door, and that was when it went wrong. The FBI sniper killed them both.

Which led to the question, did the FBI have anything to do with his? Could it have been a setup?

If it was a setup, there would have to be a reason. Jolie couldn’t think of any, except a tenuous relationship between Luke and Riley’s breakup and the vice president acting on his predilection for young men. Both happened on the same night, on the same weekend.

It all became clear. Luke didn’t just go out to get some pot and then left. He left because he saw something. Something that scared him.

Scared or not, Luke had told Amy. He’d involved her in it somehow. Jolie was sure of it.

She took the walkway that ran along the front of the units. She came to the oleanders and looked through a gap in the hedge at the railroad tracks beyond. The streetlight shone on them. The rails glimmered like a broken silver necklace.

Jolie could guess the location of the shooter’s railcar by the trajectory of the bullet that crashed through Perdue’s throat. She pictured the FBI sniper and his spotter lying belly-down on the railcar’s roof.

What happened that day? What made Luke take that woman hostage?

A road paralleled the railroad tracks.

Jolie pushed through the break in the oleanders, crossed the tracks, and stepped onto the road. The street followed a slight grade to a shallow basin. Jolie saw houses and trees along the road, the glow of their windows.

She started down the hill.

The CO2 Dan-Inject JM Standard, extremely compact and with a total length no longer than its barrel, was made for precision shooting, although Landry hardly worried about it from ten feet away. The lookout’s body had blocked the entrance to the galley—it would have been impossible to miss him. Landry broke the tranquilizer rifle down and cleaned it while he waited for the triptascoline to take effect, taking his time and admiring the sleek efficiency of this model and its weather-resistant anodized aluminum parts.

When he was done, he gently laid the JM Standard in its soft-sided case and turned his attention to the lookout. He removed the dart from the lookout’s neck, dragged him to the other bench seat in the galley, and propped him up. He started the IV drip and adjusted it downward.

Next, Landry walked Frank to the radio and had him call his security detail. Frank told the head of security he was having too much fun out here, and he would be back home in the morning. The head of his security detail believed him. In fact, the man’s voice betrayed the fact that this had happened many times. The head of security made the same weak arguments he must have made before. But Frank, drugged as he was, could be headstrong. And Landry had primed the pump, telling Frank he was cooking sea bass accompanied by a very nice Pouilly-Fuissé. They were old friends by this time—blood cousins. So Frank sounded three sheets to the wind but happy, which was exactly what Landry wanted. Afterwards, he led Frank back to bed and let him sleep.

Landry took the boat out into the bay. It was going on dark, but that was fine. His attention turned to his captive, the lookout. He knew he would have to be patient with this man.

Turned out, it didn’t take long to break him. The man, an FBI agent named Eric Salter, was ambivalent, angry, and riddled with guilt. Once he started talking, he didn’t stop.

Eric Salter told Landry that he and his partner had been sent to monitor the former attorney general’s actions. Salter admitted that the surveillance wasn’t officially sanctioned by the FBI. He and the other guy, the dead man currently residing in the Hinckley’s bench seat, were “on their own.”

“What’s your partner’s name?”

“He’s not my partner. He’s a private investigator named Bakus. Some investigator. He doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

The reason Salter was here at all was because of a mistake he’d made in Iraq. He’d killed innocent civilians. Someone in the U.S. knew what he’d done and held it over his head.

Salter told Landry he’d been en route to a hostage situation four weeks ago when he received a call on a secure line.

The caller told him to shoot the man in the motel room.

Eric Salter was a sniper with the FBI.

He said no, of course. But then they put his eight-year-old daughter on the line. She’d been picked up on her way to school.

“So now it wasn’t just about ruining my career,” Eric Salter said. “They would have killed her.”

Landry thought about how he would feel if someone had picked up Kristal. His reaction would have been different. He would have found the abductor and killed him slowly. He asked, “So you shot this man when you didn’t need to?”

“Yes. It was clear he was going to surrender.”

Landry stared at the man until he squirmed. In that moment he seemed truly lucid, the self-hatred in his eyes shining through. “I thought I had a clean shot, thought I could take him out, but…he moved.”

“He moved?”

“Just a quarter of an inch, but it rattled me.”

“It rattled you because you didn’t want to do it?”

“Roger that.” Vituperative.

“Then what happened?” Landry asked, although he wasn’t particularly interested in a hostage situation at a motel.

“I had the shot. I was sure I had the shot.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I got him. But I got the hostage, too.”

When they were done talking, Landry turned up the triptascoline until Eric the FBI agent drifted off into the netherworld. Landry found his carotid artery and injected air from an empty syringe just below the jawline. The resulting embolism was quick, painless, and hard to trace. That done, he deposited the body in the other bench seat compartment.

The FBI agent hadn’t been much help. He was too consumed by guilt and self-loathing. He didn’t know who ordered the hit. It was all pretty much a wash.

Clearly, the agent’s fear had affected his aim at the motel. He wasn’t choosing his shot. He was
forcing
his shot.

Eric Salter had failed as a sniper. It was probably just as well he was dead.