“Check out my competition over there.” I squeezed the lime down the neck of the bottle and took a couple of swallows.
“Interesting,” he said. “Think we ought to mosey over and see who’s smoking that other cigarette burning in his ashtray?”
I hadn’t noticed the smoke rising from the ashtray. “Think he’d tell us if we did?”
“Probably not.”
I told Mike about the tow of the Italian yacht O Solo Mio. “Perry seemed to be very proud of his connections to those big boys. I’ve always thought of Perry as just a sleaze ball— a user, yeah, but not a dealer. A guy not above some smalltime crime if the chance presented itself, but not a big criminal. Do you know anything I don’t know?”
“Not really. I know he’s been busted for drunk and disorderly a few times, and he does sell a little weed to his friends. That’s it, far as I know. I think he’s probably just bullshitting, but then again, I wouldn’t put it past him, trying to hook up with some kind of big-time score.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think anything's beneath Perry.”
Mike laughed. “Yeah, he’s definitely a bottom-feeder.”
The beer tasted fresh and clean. My throat already felt scratchy from the cigarette smoke and from trying to shout over the noise coming from both the jukebox and the inebriated crowd. I turned around on my stool and watched the game of pool at the table behind us for a few minutes.
“Doesn’t look like Gil’s here,” Mike said, and I could tell he understood how disappointed I was.
A heavyset, ponytailed white man at the pool table was accusing a younger black man of having cheated by moving the cue ball. Ponytail was a biker type with a huge gut and various chains hanging off his belt. On the table, the striped balls grossly outnumbered the solids, and I suspected the accusation was a way of trying to make up lost ground.
I turned around and reached for the last of my beer. “Let’s get out of here.”
At that moment the door to the men’s room opened and a large man walked out, his hands still fumbling with his fly. His belly, stretching the fabric of the faded black T-shirt, was third-trimester size, and his head bobbed as he struggled to get things situated in his trousers. When he stepped into the red glow of the neon Bud Light sign, I saw the wide handlebar mustache and the scarred, off-kilter face. Although the skin was etched with deep crevasses, there was now more to the unbalanced look than just the eyebrow. In person, Gil Lynch looked positively insane.
Gil saw us just as he came abreast of our bar stools, and when I opened my mouth to speak to him, he bolted for the door. The move caught me off guard, his quickness remarkable for such a heavy man.
Mike was off his stool and heading for the door before my brain was able to process what was happening. He turned to me and shouted, “Come on,” his cop instinct just like a dog’s—the sight of a man’s back only whetted his appetite. As my feet hit the floor, I identified the source of my confusion: I couldn’t comprehend why or how Gil would know that we were looking for him. To my knowledge, I’d never met the man before.
I was no more than a few seconds behind Mike, but he had stopped and was holding the door, staring out toward the street. Just before I went through the door, I saw Perry cover his face with his hand. Seemed nobody wanted to have anything to do with me today. Outside, I looked to my right and saw the bike and its rider in a faded black T-shirt turn south in the direction of Pattie’s.
“We’ll never catch him by running, leastwise I never will,” Mike said.
“Think he’s headed back to the marina?”
“Probably.” He stretched out his hand in front of me. “After you.”
The dinghy was still where we’d left it, a fact that caused us both to sigh with relief when we walked down the gravel road in front of Pattie’s office and saw it still floating along the fuel dock. The chickee hut was abandoned, the only sign of its recent occupants an overflowing ashtray and one still-smoldering butt. Gil’s bike lay on its side in the weeds next to the office trailer.
“Come on, let’s have a little talk with the folks here.” Mike stepped up and opened the door.
Pattie sat back in an aging office chair on the far side of a low counter. From where we stood, the counter hid nothing, and I had to stifle a grin when it struck me how much her body looked like one of Abaco’s chew toys—a round piece of red rubber that bulged with multiple rings of ever-widening widths. She sat with her legs spread, her capri pants showing her thick, vein-riddled ankles.
“Howdy,” Mike said, once again removing his hat for the lady. “Seems we just missed Gil over at Flossie’s. I seen his bike out there. Any idea where he got to?”
I was amazed at how well Mike spoke the lingo of those he questioned. The man was a veritable chameleon, but Pattie wasn’t smiling at him this time.
“Shoulda told me you was a cop.”
“Me?” Mike looked absolutely injured. “I’m not a cop.” Then he ducked his head and looked apologetic. “Well, it’s true, I used to be a cop, but not no more. Hell, you ever see a one-legged cop?”
That stopped her. Her face seemed to fold in on itself, eyebrows lowered, chin up, as she mulled that one over. “Yeah, okay. Well, Gil said you was a cop.”
“He musta recognized me from the old days.”
“He’s not so right in the head sometimes,” she said. “He took the marina launch. It’s got a twenty-five-horse engine. I don’t know where he’d be headed. Think he’s got someplace he sleeps up the canal somewhere. You know, he’s good on the water. He don’t want you to find him, you ain’t gonna find him.”
XV
On the fuel dock, we saw that, though the dinghy floated where we’d left her, she was no longer tied to the dock. Gil had thrown off our line to untie the marina boat, and the dinghy painter now trailed into the depths of the brown, oily water. It was Mike’s cable around the piling that had prevented the boat from drifting off.
Once he got the outboard started and we were idling out toward the canal, Mike said, “Pattie’s probably right. We’ll find him another day. I sure as hell would like to know why he’s running, though.”
From Pattie’s marina, we could get back to Mike’s dock by turning either left or right since we were on a big circle made by the New River and the Dania Cut-off Canal. We headed left, west, up the canal, inland. Joe D’Angelo’s house, our next stop on our way back to Mike’s, was far up the New River, and eventually the canal we were on would connect with the river. Mike explained to me that Joe had bought his house in the Riverland neighborhood back in the eighties when a DEA guy could afford those places. His point lot home not far from the Jungle Queen’s tourist compound was the smartest investment the guy had ever made.
As we entered the stretch of the canal that passed through Pond Apple Slough, the canal banks changed from neat lawns to twisted mangroves. The evidence of civilization slipped away. Except for the occasional channel marker, we could have been deep in the Everglades. The Slough was one of the last remaining freshwater swamps on the southeast coast of Florida, and environmentalists had managed thus far to prevent its total destruction. It remained an isolated island of wilderness in the middle of Fort Lauderdale’s urban sprawl.
Mike pushed the throttle forward and the inflatable jumped into a plane. While I would have preferred to dawdle along at five knots, watching for birds and fish and raccoon, I had more important things to do—like find Solange’s father. A snapshot of her face kept popping up in my mind, even as I watched the flocks of cattle egrets take off from the mangroves as our outboard sped by. Occasionally, narrow passages branched off from the main waterway, and I glanced down them, yearning to explore. I’d forgotten how pretty it was up here. I told myself I’d have to come back here someday in one of the Larsens’ kayaks. Maybe bring Solange once this whole mess was worked out.