The next morning, despite a fear of flying, he caught a plane to Nassau and went shopping for an attorney. None of those who met him would initiate a lawsuit without a retainer, which Neville couldn’t afford. They seemed disappointed to learn he wasn’t seeking any monetary compensation, only the return of family real estate that had been lawfully sold by his half-sister. The prevailing opinion was that he stood virtually no chance of winning in court.
Neville stayed overnight with a nephew who wanted to take him to the Atlantis resort for a big time, but Neville declined. He was sore and unsteady after the beating by Egg. When his nephew asked what was wrong, Neville said he’d gotten into a fight over a girl.
“Oh mon, did you hot get broke?”
“No, suh.”
“Because I know plenny women kin fix dot.”
“I’m okay,” said Neville.
The following day he bought a pair of sunglasses at the Straw Market and rode the mail boat back to Andros.
Yancy breezed through Immigration and Customs in Nassau. All he carried through the checkpoints was his duffel and a Sage fly-rod tube that falsely announced him as a free-spending American sportsman, always a welcome breed. He took a taxi to the general aviation terminal and told a handsome woman behind the counter he was looking for a pilot friend. “This is what he’s flying,” Yancy said, and showed her a picture of the white Caravan. He’d printed it out from the flight-tracker website. “I was told to meet him here.”
“Are you sure, sir? That plane left a couple hours ago.”
“No way. He was supposed to take me fishing!”
“They went to Lizard Cay,” the woman said. “Same as usual.”
“That sonofabitch. He promised to wait for me.”
“There’s usually a three o’clock flight on Tropical. I’ll give you the phone number.”
Yancy smiled. “Darling, you just saved my vacation.”
It was from his father that he’d gotten not only his passion for fishing but also a love of small planes. Every year the park service would conduct aerial counts of eagle nests in the Everglades, and after turning eighteen Yancy was allowed to ride with his dad and the pilot in the government Beechcraft. He always brought his own binoculars.
While he waited for his flight Rosa called to say that she’d FedExed to Key West police the slug from the gun that killed Gomez O’Peele. Yancy was confident that ballistics tests would prove it was the same .357 used on Charles Phinney. Rosa hadn’t provided the details of the doctor’s death to the detectives.
“But I’ll have to tell them what I know,” she added, “if the bullets match.”
Yancy apologized for putting her in a dicey situation. She said she was a big girl and she knew the ropes. He asked if any news reporters had called the medical examiner’s office to inquire about the severed arm in the golf bag.
“Well, we might have lucked out,” she said.
“I like this ‘we’ business.”
“The man to thank would be the late, great Dawkins Brophy. The same night the grave robbers stole Stripling’s arm, Mr. Brophy—”
“I thought Brophy was his first name.”
“Whatever, Andrew. It’s not even my case,” Rosa said. “Anyway, the same night our severed limb reappeared, Mr. Dawkins Brophy—or Brophy Dawkins—washed down three Ecstasy tabs with a half pint of Bombay gin. Then he went racing through Government Cut on a turbocharged WaveRunner until he drove full speed into the stern of the Duchess of the Caribbean, killing himself and his date, a Belorussian lingerie model whose name I can’t possibly pronounce.”
“In other words, splat.”
“Big-time splat.”
“Damn,” Yancy said.
Brophy Dawkins was a burly country-music star whose hit single was “Jesus Don’t Speak Jihad,” a defiant post-9/11 anthem. The Duchess of the Caribbean was one of the world’s largest passenger cruise ships.
“It was a collision only in the sense that a june bug collides with a Buick,” Rosa said. “Mr. Dawkins was decapitated and, consequently, his remains weren’t fully recovered for a day or so due to tidal factors. Since then the media have taken an interest, Andrew. Rabid would be one way to describe it.”
“Rule one: A celebrity head always trumps an anonymous arm.”
“Sick but true,” said Rosa. “Can I ask you something? I’ve been thinking about this Andros trip.”
“I’ll buy you a ticket. Please come.”
“No, listen. Say you track down the murderous wife and her boyfriend—then what? You can’t make a legal arrest over there. And the Bahamian cops won’t do it without U.S. extradition papers, which you don’t have in your possession because those documents don’t freaking exist. The risk-reward ratio seems low, Andrew.”
“Everyone needs a project.”
“Soon as I hang up, know what I’m Googling? Three words: ‘Nassau bail bondsmen.’ ”
“Come on, girl, have some faith.”
In the olden days Claspers smuggled weed and later cocaine. He never got busted though he didn’t stay rich for long. Now the shit was coming in on freight trucks across the Mexican border, or by air from Haiti, where Claspers refused to fly. But after four thousand hours in the cockpit, on and off the books, he could still find lawful work. The Bahama Islands he knew well, from Bimini to the Exumas. These days in small planes he delivered wealthy tourists and expats to some of the same bleached airstrips upon which he’d once landed overloaded DC-6s at night, guided only by automobile headlights.
As a legitimate aviator Claspers was doing okay—not gangbusters, but he made enough money to cover the rent on his duplex, a car payment, child support and weekly visits to a club in Lauderdale called Marbles, where a bartender one-third his age pretended to be interested in him. Claspers didn’t mind being strung along. The bartender had stellar fake boobs and a quick sense of humor. He considered telling her about his years as a big-time smuggler, but he doubted it would improve his odds of getting laid. Once upon a time, sure, absolutely—but hers was a generation that grew up on homegrown or Humboldt and thought Panama Red was a merlot. Claspers suspected the young bartender would have been more impressed to meet a guy who worked for Apple, or maybe a professional skateboarder. He overtipped her anyway, because it brought back memories that made him feel good.
Lately Claspers had been piloting for a shady duck named Christopher Grunion, who disliked the formalities of the U.S. Customs service. Sometimes Grunion asked Claspers for clandestine transport between Andros Island and the lower Florida Keys. For these high-risk endeavors Claspers was decently compensated—not doper-league pay, but enough to sustain his loyalty. A secondary enticement was the opportunity to dust off his outlaw moves.
The aircraft leased by Grunion was a Cessna floatplane, a ten-seat Caravan that cruised at 160 knots. From Andros—either Congo Town or Lizard Cay—Claspers would steer a southeast course toward the Ragged Islands until reaching a singular quadrant where the seas belonged to the Bahamas while the airspace belonged to Cuba. Basically it was a neutral zone for law enforcement, and that’s where Claspers would drop to four hundred feet, below radar, and swing sharply back across the Florida straits. Coming in low over the waves was the only way to cross undetected, because on Cudjoe Key the U.S. government tethered a famed surveillance blimp known as Fat Albert, which had been effectively used by the DEA to bust some of Claspers’s colleagues in the aerial import trade.