“No, mon.”
Rosa said that was good. “For her and you.”
“I dont won hafta move ’way. Home is home, you unnerstahn.”
“You won’t ever have to leave,” Yancy said.
“I be hoppy ’f dot’s true.”
“It’s true, Mr. Stafford.”
Rosa went to the ladies’ room. Neville asked Yancy about his own difficult situation back in Florida, about the large house being constructed on the land where the little deer lived—the deer that were no bigger than dogs.
“You gon stop dot fella and make ’im rip de place down?”
Yancy smiled in a tired way. “Wish I could, but it’s probably too late.”
“I hope not,” Neville said.
Yancy said good-bye and shook his hand. Rosa did the same when she came back. She told him to take good care of Coquina, and to put Driggs on a strict fruit-and-fiber diet—no more conch fritters! Yancy said it was time to go. He and Rosa picked up their bags and went inside the terminal building.
Standing at the chain-link fence, Neville saw several overturned planes on the turnaround section of the tarmac. He also noticed, undamaged, the single-engine seaplane belonging to the man he knew as Christopher. A few white men and some local teenagers were out clearing the landing strip of hurricane litter. Soon the American policeman and his girlfriend would be able to take off, if they had a pilot who would fly them. The weather out west, toward Florida, looked all right.
The car belonging to Coquina’s mother was a rust-freckled Taurus with a Salt Life decal on the back window and a fickle alternator. Neville tried the key seven times before the ignition turned over. Then, barely a mile from the airport, the engine quit. Neville got out and popped the hood hoping for something as simple as a loose wire. He fiddled with various connections but nothing worked.
Neville heard a car coming the other way and decided to flag it down. As the vehicle came into view he noticed first that it was yellow, then that it was a hardtop Jeep Wrangler, of which there was only one on the island. Neville stopped waving and backpedaled for cover behind the broken-down Taurus.
But the Jeep was moving too fast. Both occupants looked squarely at Neville as they swerved around the stalled sedan and sped on toward the airport. The bastard that Neville had stabbed in the back sat upright in the front next to his woman, who was driving. Their taut expressions displayed not a flicker of recognition, only annoyance at the roadway obstruction.
Once they were out of sight, Neville placed both hands over his heart and thanked the Lord Almighty for his good fortune. Obviously the murderous fugitive had no idea who’d speared him from behind with a fishing rod.
Minutes later Neville heard an aircraft lifting off from Moxey’s. He looked up and saw the floatplane, as white and graceful as a gull. The man known to him as Christopher wouldn’t have had enough time to make that flight, no matter how fast his woman was driving.
So it had to be Yancy, the American policeman, on board. Yancy and his girlfriend.
The fact was confirmed minutes later when the yellow Jeep reappeared, racing back from the direction of the airfield. This time Neville didn’t wave at the Striplings as they passed, but he didn’t bother to hide, either.
Rosa fell asleep on Yancy’s shoulder but he kept awake, his eyes on the pilot. The flight to Miami was only forty-five minutes through a light chop. To the north, beyond Grand Bahama, towered a bank of muddy clouds, the last tailings of Hurricane Françoise.
Riding on small planes never failed to put a tune in Yancy’s head, and this time it was “Mozambique.” Claspers didn’t ask for details of Stripling’s crimes or say much of anything at the controls. Yancy figured he was preoccupied devising a story for Nick or the FAA, depending on which way he decided to play it. After the Caravan touched down at Miami International, Yancy offered him a one-hundred-dollar bill for fuel. Claspers shook his head and pointed to a gold AmEx clipped to the sun visor. The name imprinted on the card was Christopher Grunion.
When the plane taxied to a stop, Claspers tugged off his earphones.
“So, what are your plans?” Yancy asked.
“I’m not sure. Too old for prison and, man, I do like to fly.”
“It won’t be my call. The feds can be prickish, as you know.”
Claspers said, “I had no idea he murdered anybody. Swear on the Bible, the Koran, whatever.”
“Hey, I believe you.”
“Then I was thinking maybe you could help. Put in a good word.”
“Sure, but here’s the situation,” Yancy said. “Technically I’m not a cop. I’m a restaurant inspector.”
“Fuck a duck!”
“It’s just a temporary reassignment. The badge I borrowed from a colleague.”
“Other words, you count dead flies at the Pizza Hut. This is who I got for a character witness.”
“I’ll be a detective again in the very near future. Meanwhile, let’s not disparage the tireless civil servants who keep our public dining establishments free from vermin.”
“You don’t mind,” said Claspers, “I got a shitload of paperwork.”
Yancy woke up Rosa. They climbed out of the plane and jumped from a pontoon to the tarmac. A brief snag occurred upon re-entry when a Customs officer asked Yancy to unzip his footwear, tight nylon booties that were tailored for water wading though not ideal for travel. The fishing shoes smelled vile but the Customs man intrepidly probed their sweaty interiors in search of contraband.
Afterward Rosa called a cab to take them to the parking garages, where they kissed good-bye and set out separately to locate their cars. Twenty minutes later Yancy was in his Subaru heading up the interstate to the FBI office in North Miami Beach. He wasn’t dressed for the occasion, and in fact looked like a man who’d spent the night in a hurricane. Again the booties were a liability.
Getting past the reception desk required dropping the name of a well-regarded Miami police lieutenant for whom Yancy had once worked. Eventually he ended up in an interview room with the two humorless street agents he’d encountered at Nick Stripling’s funeral. They remembered Yancy with manifest unfondness, so he rather enjoyed dropping the bomb.
“Mr. Stripling isn’t dead. I just left him in the Bahamas, bleeding from a fresh hole in his back.”
The posture of the agents improved. They began to fashion questions. One of them asked who stabbed Stripling. Yancy said he didn’t know; it was a drunken dispute.
The other agent asked if Yancy had traveled alone to the islands.
“Yep,” he said, which was technically true. Rosa hadn’t told him to leave her out of the recap, but that was his intention. The FBI needed to know only the basics, beginning with Stripling’s whereabouts.
The taller agent was Strumberg and his partner was Liske. Their suits weren’t the same shade of gray but the cut of the lapels looked identical. When Yancy told them about Stripling’s self-amputation, they tried to act as if they heard such stories every day.
However, Yancy knew they were stoked because they called in an assistant to take down what he was saying. The assistant’s laptop needed recharging so there was a period of lame small talk while she got on the floor to locate an electric outlet. Strumberg asked how Yancy had lost his detective job.
“Aw, come on. You guys know what happened. They let you have free Internet, right?”
“The media can exaggerate.”
“Not this time,” Yancy said. “In defense of a woman’s honor I waylaid her husband with a portable vacuum. The gesture was unappreciated and, unfortunately, witnessed by the proverbial throngs.”
The assistant’s laptop beeped to life, and the important phase of the interview continued. At one point Liske asked Yancy to draw a map of Lizard Cay. Yancy politely suggested that a satellite photo would be more accurate. The assistant found one on a classified government website and zoomed in on Bannister Point.
Yancy placed a fingertip to the screen. “That’s the house your subject is renting, but he won’t be there much longer. You should call whoever you need to call and have him arrested. But that’s probably not going to happen this afternoon, is it?”