Courtney rested her gun hand on her raised left knee, the Beretta still aimed at the driver’s head. “I want you to turn right at the light. Pull into the Shell station.”
The driver went through the gears, and entered the parking lot of a Shell gasoline station and eased to a stop. “What now?”
“Give me your phone.”
“What? Why?”
“Give it to me!”
“All right. Hell, you weren’t jokin’ when you said you were on your period.”
“And I wasn’t joking when I said I’d kill you. The phone. Now.”
He slid the phone across the seat. “You are crazy.”
“Maybe. Now, you listen to me, you pervert. You’re gonna turn this truck around, drive up the interstate to New Orleans or wherever you’re supposed to be heading, and you’re not going to tell anybody about our little road tip. Because if you do, then I get to tell them you tried to fuck a teenage girl, me. Your wife will be the first to know.”
“How’d you know I’m married?”
“I didn’t. But most of you creeps are, I just feel very sorry for the wives.” Courtney scooped the phone from the seat, opened the door, and climbed down from the cab, slipping the pistol into her bag.
I closed the sliding glass door to Jupiter’s salon and sat on the couch with my laptop looking up Senator Lloyd Logan's campaign tour, his fund-raising events. There were a half dozen here in Florida, one was very soon and not far away. A place called The Villages about an hour north of Orlando.
I’d heard about The Villages. It wasn’t a retirement community, but rather a retirement city. High average net worth of its residents. Golf for life. Defibrillators on most corners. A donor pit-stop in every presidential race. Mitt Romney was the last to refuel there. And now it was Senator Lloyd Logan’s turn at the wheel.
All I wanted was a few minutes with his wife, a few minutes to take me back two decades. Maybe it was politically incorrect, but I had to go there, had to go into the past for the sake of a girl whose future was looking very dark.
20
I took a small can of dog food from the galley and picked up the leash. Max cocked her head, knowing change was in the air. “Come on, kiddo. I have to hit the road for a few hours. Let’s see if Dave or Nick can hang out with you until I get back.” I locked Jupiter and stepped onto the dock, Max trotting in front of me, her nose lifting in the air. Smoke signals were coming from Nick’s boat.
Dave Collins and Nick Cronus were sitting in deck chairs on St. Michael, a Hibachi behind Nick puffing white smoke, the scent of cooking grouper, garlic, lemon, onion, and red pepper in the air. Max stopped in her tracks and headed for St. Michael. Dave had a GPS device in his lap, bifocals at the tip of his nose, and a small jeweler’s screwdriver in his large fingers as he opened the back panel.
“Hot Dog!” Nick bellowed, standing to turn the cooking fish. “Where you been, huh? You supposed to help Uncle Nicky in the kitchen.” Max trotted over the transom and stepped down onto the cockpit, squatting in full attention next to Nick. “Sean, you and Hot Dog come eat. Grouper and snapper’s on the grill. Got some bread, cheese, and Greek wine is in the icebox.”
I stepped aboard as Dave looked up. “Nick has an ailing GPS. I’m trying to re-set its clock, so to speak.”
Nick used a fork to break off a small piece of fish for Max. “My GPS is more than ailing; it’s a sick puppy. Not like you, Hot Dog. I was in my boat half a mile off the rocks last week. Had to use my Greek sailor’s sixth sense to find a school of snapper.” He squeezed a ripe lemon over the sizzling fish and closed the Hibachi lid.
Dave grunted as he removed the back panel. “GPS is a wonderful thing, when it works — which is most of the time. And speaking of time, a global positioning system is really all about timing. Anywhere on the planet, at any given moment, at least four satellites with overlapping radio signals can pinpoint your GPS location within a few meters. It gives weight to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Time moves differently the farther you are from earth and the faster you’re moving. This means that astronauts coming back from the International Space Station actually age less than babies born on the earth at the same time that the astronauts were in space. But it’s all relative.” He looked over his bifocals and grinned, then dropped his smile. “What’s the latest on the girl and the killing?”
Nick glanced down at my hands. He said, “You’re holding a leash for Max. You don’t ever do that unless you want one of us to watch Hot Dog for a while. Where you heading, Sean?”
“A place called The Villages.”
Nick smiled. “I’ve heard of it. Heard the V might as well stand for Viagra. Lots of baby-boomers doin’ the big boom. Gotta blame it on those seeking medical attention or some kinda attention for those four-hour erections.” Nick grinned, his moustache rising. Black eyes vibrant, squinting in the noon sunlight. He bent down and picked up an icy bottle of Corona next to his deck chair.
“Why are you going up there?” Dave asked.
“Because a girlfriend I knew twenty years ago is visiting her mother there. She happens to be with her husband, Senator Lloyd Logan who’s making a fundraising stop. I’d like to ask her a question.”
Dave pushed his glasses up to the top of his head. “Wait a minute, Sean. Your ex-girlfriend is the wife of a presidential candidate?”
I smiled. “That’s assuming he wins the Republication nomination.” I told them the story of my relationship with the former Andrea Hart.
Dave exhaled and nodded. “I’d rather contemplate Einstein’s theory than yours. You may have, unknown to you, impregnated this former girlfriend, Andrea Hart, now Andrea Logan, the wife of a powerful U.S. senator, a man vying for a presidential bid. She gives the baby up for adoption nineteen years ago, and then almost two decades later, you find a young woman walking on a remote road in the heart of a national forest. You prevent two Neanderthals from attacking her. Later, she shows up here at the marina in the aftermath of a murder. A man with a Munchkin voice tells you that she told him about a shamrock-shaped birthmark on your upper left arm. And if you bore this mark, then you may be related to her. But she didn’t say how. Why wouldn’t she say how she believes you’re related if this girl was your daughter? Why the mystery?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know how she knew about my birthmark.”
Dave crossed his thick arms. “What happens if you go waltzing back into Andrea Logan’s life and somehow find out that Courtney Burke is your daughter? And to extrapolate this theory, what happens if it’s later proven that Courtney is in fact a serial killer and the biological daughter of a woman who could be the next first lady in the White House, should her husband, the esteemed Senator Lloyd Logan win the Republican nomination?”
I said nothing for a moment, listening to the slap of water against St. Michael, the sound of a siren in the distance, the flapping of a pirate’s flag on a trawler tied up behind us. “I didn’t seek this intersection at this point in my life. I can go left, right, turn around, go straight, or go nowhere.”
Nick wiped his hands on a white towel. “Sean, Forrest Gump may be a spot-on philosopher as movie characters go, but this is the real deal, brother. Shit doesn’t always have to happen if you don’t make it happen. Man, just walk away from this one. The only place this can go is the dark side.”
“What would you do if she was your daughter, Nick? I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about some politician’s desire to become president and what, if anything, this could or couldn’t do to his campaign. What I care about is the girl, what’s happened to her and what might happen to her.”