“You are so out of your element on this one, Rusty. Hell, we both are.” I spun away, out of range of his touch. “I’m not sure you and I have an explanation for what happened to her at the hospital the other night or out at Mambo Racine’s tonight. But didn’t you hear what I said? It worked. She’s talking again. And one thing I do know is that those people were not faking it. What I saw tonight—” I paused, not knowing how to explain it to him, how to give it the reality and the dignity I had seen. “Rusty, they believed completely. I’m not sure I'm ready to believe they were possessed by spirits, but it sure as hell was every bit as real as what your cousins up in the Georgia mountains do when they handle snakes and speak in tongues.” I crossed the living room and plopped down on the couch, leaned back, and closed my eyes. “Man, am I tired.” My stomach gurgled, and I pulled my arm across my belly to try to muffle the sound. “And starving. Haven’t eaten anything since about noon.”
Rusty walked over to the front door, crossed his arms again, leaned against the doorjamb, and stared out into the yard.
Jeannie had one of those couches with tons of throw pillows and cushions, and the cushions seemed to be pulling me down, relaxing me. I’d just about nodded off when I heard Rusty say something.
“What?”
“They’ll still be serving over at the Downtowner. Do you want to go over and grab a bite? I’ll buy if you’ll stop yelling at me and tell me what’s really going on with this kid.”
I opened one eye and looked up at him. I wasn’t thrilled about being seen with him in that uniform. Could scare off some of my clients who sometimes tread lightly on the wrong side of the law. But I was starving. “Conch fritters and fries?”
He lifted his cell phone off his belt and dialed a number. “Hi, it’s Rusty. Think you could pick me up at Cooley’s Landing in about ten?... Thanks.” He put away the cell phone, then reached for my hand to pull me up off the deep couch. “Let’s go. The Water Taxi’ll pick us up at the marina.”
I took his hand but let my body remain a dead weight. He had to strain to lift me up from those deep cushions.
“Man, you are heavy, Sullivan.”
“Wimp,” I said, and smiled as he pulled me to my feet, and I bumped into his left side, where the cold steel of his gun brushed against my arm. “Seeing as you are wearing a gun, however, I guess it’s Mr. Wimp.”
“Damn right.”
I stopped briefly to tuck Solange in like my mother used to do for me and wondered, as I kissed her forehead, why I was flirting with Rusty. As I passed by the master bedroom, I told Jeannie we’d be gone for about an hour.
Rusty came down the hall and motioned to me with a “let’s go” signal. I turned back to Jeannie.
“Thanks again, Jeannie. I know she’s better off with you than anywhere he wants to send her.” I cocked my head in Rusty’s direction.
“So I’m the bad guy, eh?” Rusty said over my shoulder.
“Yes,” Jeannie said. “Get over it.”
“Jeannie,” I said, “I’ve got a connection to the Miss Agnes from my visit to Pompano tonight. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
“Sounds good. Animal sacrifice, Voodoo, secret meetings. I can’t wait.” She winked.
The walk to Cooley’s Landing Marina was only about three blocks, but being tired, I began to wish we’d taken the car. The Downtowner was on the other side of the river, and they had a large parking lot, so the car would have been easy. I feared we’d have a long wait for a Water Taxi.
Rusty sensed that I was not in a talkative mood. The streets were dark under the heavy canopy of old trees that covered most of Sailboat Bend.
“Over there,” Rusty said when we reached the marina parking lot, and he pointed to the boat idling at the dock next to the launch ramp. There were no other passengers aboard. “Hey, Carlos,” he said to the captain, a kid about twenty years old. “Thanks for the lift. This is Seychelle Sullivan.”
“Sullivan Towing? Gorda?"
I nodded.
“Thought I recognized you. Seen you go by on your boat a lot.”
“Carlos’s dad works with me at the Border Patrol.” He clapped his hand on the young man’s back. “We’ve been fishing together since this guy was in diapers.”
I leaned back and watched the lights of the parks and businesses downtown as we motored downriver. Too often lately, the river became just the place where I worked. It was pleasant being a passenger for a change, enjoying the view without worrying about bridges or currents or traffic.
The restaurant and bar were nearly empty inside. I waved hello to Pete behind the bar and his one customer, Nestor, a charter-boat captain. Pete raised his eyebrows at me when he saw I was with a guy wearing a gun.
“You want to sit outside?” I asked Rusty. The privacy of it would make it much easier to tell him about the evening’s events—the story still sounded weird even to me—and more difficult for the guys inside to eavesdrop.
I waited until the server had taken our orders and brought us our cold draft beer.
“So tomorrow I’ll go see this friend of Juliette’s at the Swap Shop. I’m fairly certain that this girl actually came over on the Miss Agnes."
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get involved like this. You should leave this to the professionals. We could round up the people who work in this Swap Shop booth and question them all.”
“Come on, Rusty. From the first minute I saw that kid’s face, I’ve been involved. Do you really think these Haitians are going to say anything to Immigration? In their eyes, you guys are worse than the smugglers—even if the smugglers are bashing in a few heads.”
He took a long swig from his beer, then reached for my hand. “I worry about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“That’s nice, but I’m just meeting a kid at the Swap Shop—one of the most populated tourist attractions around here. I’m not walking into some den of bad guys. Not this time.”
He shot me a questioning look, and I hurriedly changed the subject. “On the way home tonight, Solange said she saw ‘Le Capitaine’ at the Toussaint house. The guy on the boat that brought her here. He must have been the guy who knocked me down running out of the altar room. I didn’t get a good enough look at his face to say whether or not he’s the same guy who was in her hospital room, but the height, build, and facial hair were about right. And I remember seeing rings, several of them on the left hand, both times.” I thought about mentioning the skull and crossbones on the sunglasses I had found on board the Miss Agnes but thought better of it. I didn’t want to be accused of tampering with evidence. “It’s got to be the same guy, but I don’t know that I could pick him out of a lineup.”
“Here’s a question,” Rusty said, and he hitched forward in his chair, now grasping my hand in both of his. “What was he trying to do to her tonight, and why didn’t he succeed?”
“I assume he was going to shut her up—permanently,” I said. “As to why he didn’t succeed, well, according to Racine Toussaint, he couldn’t do it because the lwa protected her. Racine wanted me to leave her there overnight. She said it was the only place Solange would be safe.” With my free hand, I fingered the pouch Racine had given me that I had tucked inside my T-shirt.
“I’m sorry, Seychelle, but that’s bullshit. I hope you don’t believe that.”
I pulled my hand back out of his grasp and finished off the last of my beer, feeling light-headed and confused from the combination of beer, exhaustion, and an empty stomach. “You know, Rusty, I don’t know what to believe.” Looking around me, at the glamorous yachts docked along the river, and above me at the blue and white lights of the downtown highrises, I found it hard to believe what I had seen in that yard in Pompano just hours before. “I’m not going to just dismiss this as hocus-pocus, though. I can’t. I was there and something very powerful was going on,” I said. “Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”