I made airline reservations for Chicago, but as I hate layovers, the earliest direct flight wouldn’t leave until the next morning. Still, it beat driving. I decided to use the time to check out the hotel and resort grounds.
I put my contacts back on and visited the pro shop. It resembled the showroom of a BMW dealership, only swankier. After scanning my room key, the clerk signed over a set of Ben Hogan clubs and a red E-Z-GO golf cart.
While still parked outside the pro shop, I fiddled with the cart’s stereo receiver and scanned channels on the satellite radio. Considering how well-marked the course was, I found the dash-mounted GPS an excess even for this place. Then again, maybe the GPS was a necessity for inebriated and disoriented guests to navigate their way around. Maybe the GPS was also a way to track the whereabouts of every cart.
With rockabilly tunes twanging from the stereo speakers, I drove past the first tee and began my reconnaissance.
The front nine holes were north and west of the hotel. Stands of pine and oak, and sloughs with alligators basking on the muddy banks, separated the guest grounds while disguising the less picturesque support buildings. I paused where a narrow road passed behind a green wooden fence. The gate opened to a parking lot. On the left stood a large maintenance shed. Two men in the resort uniform-teal polo shirt over khaki cargo shorts-pushed a riding mower into one of the bays. On the right, a couple of panel trucks-May River Commercial Laundry-backed up to the service entrance on the side of the hotel. Men guided the trucks and shouted commands in Spanish.
The gate closed by remote control, creaking on steel wheels, moving like a curtain drawn shut to hide family secrets.
I kept on the cart path to an open area beside the closest fairway. A Bell Long Ranger executive helicopter in bright colors sat on a concrete pad. In the calm air, the orange windsock hung limp as an empty condom.
Condos bounded the north side of the resort grounds. I turned around and drove the cart to the nine holes south of the hotel. I passed tennis courts, two swimming pools, and a pond watered by a fountain. I continued over a wooden bridge toward the back nine. The course faced east toward Calibogue Sound and Daufuskie Island. A growth of dense juniper-ten, twelve feet high-continued as a straight row from the back of the main building of the hotel to a distance of about two hundred meters.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. This place seemed too perfectly neat, except for the big wrinkle that Goodman worked here.
A narrow asphalt road followed close to the back of the hotel. I couldn’t tell where the road came from but it headed into a break in the junipers to my far left, the entrance to the enclosed area. To the right, pampas grass and sea oats atop sand dunes marked the boundary with the beach.
I stopped, got out of the cart, and walked until I found a path across the dunes. The beach was a wide, flat stretch of sand. At low tide, the Atlantic surf splashed a hundred meters away. Pelicans dove into the ocean and dolphins broke the surface in graceful arcs. A breeze cooled the air enough that the few people strolling the beach wore long pants and windbreakers. From back here, the resort blended into the clumps of palms and pink buildings stretching along the beach.
The loud thumping of rotor blades announced a Blackhawk helicopter banking over the water. It entered a descent for an area between the beach and the back of the hotel. Unlike the Long Ranger in its colorful livery, this helicopter was painted in a drab, military finish. The Blackhawk tilted its nose up to decelerate and disappeared over the tops of the junipers. If there was a helicopter pad on the other side of the hotel, why did the Blackhawk land here?
I returned to my golf cart, walking unhurriedly, like just another casual tourist. The arrival of the military Blackhawk stoked my suspicions about Goodman and the hotel. When I got to the cart, the helicopter rose straight up from behind the junipers. The dense stands of trees muffled the roar of the turbines and rotor blades. The Blackhawk rotated to the south and accelerated, leaving tree branches and palm fronds quivering in its wake.
The junipers obscured my line of sight and prevented me from seeing anything but the flat roofline of a three-story building, its stucco painted to match the hotel. I’d already seen the maintenance shed. With its forest of antennas, what was this building?
Thorny rosebushes grew parallel to the path. I found a gap and rumbled through.
Immediately, my GPS display flashed: OFF COURSE. TURN AROUND.
Loud beeps shouted from the stereo speakers. I turned the volume down on the speakers but the beeping continued. I mashed the GPS off button but the GPS kept resetting itself. I reached under the dash, found a bundle of wires, and yanked. The beeping stopped and the display went black.
I steered the cart closer to the junipers so I could study the rear of this building. The few windows on the wall were squinting, horizontal slits. The roof was a jungle of spindly radio whips, clusters of dishes pointed up, and ladderlike masts festooned with pods. Definitely high-grade communications equipment, not the sort of getup you’d need just for HBO. Why all these antennas?
A small green John Deere Gator truck appeared around the far end of the junipers and turned toward me. I took my contacts out, stored them in their plastic case, and put my sunglasses back on.
The Gator was a utility vehicle, not much wider than my cart and with an aluminum bed on the back. It halted by my cart.
The tiny cab of the Gator had no doors. Radio traffic cackled from a speaker. A man in the resort uniform swung his lanky, hairy legs out and stood to face me. The resort logo decorated the shirt and his ball cap. Unlike other employees, he had a special ID tag swinging from a cloth lanyard looped around his neck. The ID tag bore iridescent hologram markings, the resort logo, and his photo and last name: Lewis.
Coming close, Lewis rested an arm against the roof of my cart. He moved with the confident swagger of an ex-cop.
“Good afternoon, sir.” He forced the polite tone. Blue eyes contrasted with his bronzed complexion. “Is there a problem?”
Lewis expected a dumb-ass executive, so I gave him one.
“Problem? Damn right there’s a problem. It’s my friggin’ game. Sliced my hook.”
He grinned. “Sliced your hook?”
“Yeah,” I replied innocently. “Must be something wrong with my clubs.” I leaned over the steering wheel. “My ball went flying this way.”
Lewis glanced from the distant fairway to the grass around my cart as if doubting that I could have hit the ball this far. “Don’t see it.” He tilted his head and examined my dash panel. “Why isn’t your GPS on?”
“Is that what this is? Goddamn thing started beeping like crazy.” I pounded the dash panel. One of the buttons popped loose and fell to the floor. “I think it’s broken.”
Lewis reached and pulled my hand away from the dash. “I’ll take care of it, sir.” He looked over his shoulder back to the ruts I had crushed through the roses.
“Did I do that? Didn’t see them. Sorry.”
Lewis set his cap on the back of his head. His jaw muscles tightened.
“What about my ball?” I lowered my voice and pretended that I was sharing a secret. “Listen, I got money riding on this game and right now I ain’t doing too good.”
“Take a mulligan,” Lewis said with growing irritation. He rapped his knuckles on the roof. “First, you need to get back from the fence.”
“What fence?”
“I meant the junipers, sir.”
But he had said “fence.” “Maybe my ball went on the other side.” I extended a leg to dismount.
Lewis planted a big hiking boot in my way. The corners of his mouth bent into a frown. “Sir, please return to the path. I’ll look for your ball.”
“If you cost me this game, so help me.”
“You got a problem, talk to my supervisor.” He leaned close and sneered. “You rich, dopey assholes think the rules don’t apply. Well, you can stick it up…”
I lifted my sunglasses.
The pupils in his eyes dilated into circles the size of dimes. His face went slack and his jaw drooped. Saliva pooled over his lower lip.
I grabbed his collar and walked him back into the cab of his truck. Pushing him into the passenger seat, I turned his head and fanged him, drinking only enough to keep him docile and quiet. I savored his blood as if it were a chocolate truffle melting in my mouth.
I took his cap and left him doubled-over. I scooted behind the steering wheel and turned the truck toward the far end of the junipers. Driving close, I saw that they had overgrown a tall chain-link fence.
I reached the end of the junipers and paused. The tree line turned north. A cinder-block tower with dark windows overlooked the entrance.
“Unit 83,” a voice beckoned over the radio speaker. “Are you 10-6?”
Looking back to the hotel from this perspective, I appreciated the architectural sleight of hand used by the designers of the resort. The wings of the hotel curved away. The windows were carefully angled so that guests had splendid views of the grounds yet no one could see into the area defined by the perimeter of junipers.
The voice started again. “Unit 83, you still 10-6 with the wanderer nosing around the annex?”
Another voice hailed, this one stern. “Eight-three, you copy?”
I noticed the number 83 written on the radio console. They were asking for Lewis and the “wanderer” must be me. The annex was this secret building with all the antennas and security detail.
“Eight-three?” the first voice asked again.
If I replied, they would recognize that I was not Lewis. Under hypnosis, humans weren’t good at conversation, so I couldn’t expect him to answer convincingly.
“Eight-three, you there?”
I picked up the microphone and keyed the transmit button twice, radio shorthand for “I acknowledge.”
The stern voice returned. “Eight-three, this is tower one, when you’re called, respond immediately.”
Asshole. Again I clicked twice.
What was on the other side of the fence? I couldn’t risk getting closer to the entrance without being further challenged by the tower. If the measures here were sophisticated enough for the GPS transmitters to narc on the golf carts, then the fence was certainly wired to catch trespassers.
I returned to my cart and left Lewis conked out in the cab of his truck. I covered his face with the cap to make it look like he was dozing off.
I drove back to the pro shop, wondering: why so much secrecy?
The fenced area was well protected against human intruders. But what about a vampire? Let me find Goodman first. Then I’d come back and I’d find out.