I Surfaced cautiously, still wearing the rebreather. Came up beneath the dock, peering out. My teeth were chattering, my fingers puckered. Wind was in the trees, showing silver in the tops of palms, blowing sand across the lake.
There was someone in the pavilion, a lone figure.
The old brown Indio woman sitting there in her dark dress.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and called something, her words muffled by the wind. She tried again, louder. I realized she was calling out in Spanish: They are gone!
Who was she speaking to? No way she could know I was there.
Apparendy, she did, though, because she stood and began to find her way toward me, hands outstretched, feeling the air.
Heard her say: I have been waiting for you.
If a woman without eyes knew where I was, there was no fooling anyone else they'd left behind, so I dropped the scuba pack and scrambled up the bank. When a man climbs fully dressed out of a pool or lake, he frets about mundane things: sopping billfold, credit cards, treasured leather belt. I had something more pressing on my mind.
I touched my pockets.
The pendant was still there.
As she drew closer, I saw that she had something in her hand-my glasses. I'd lost them on the beach, but how had she found them? As I put them on, she said again, "I have been waiting for you."
I said, "Everyone's gone?"
"Yes. Everyone."
"Your name's Bella."
"Yes. And yours is Ford."
"How do you know that?"
"I know more than you realize, big man. I know they tried to kill you but couldn't. I know that you swam into the eye of the earth and stayed as long as a fish. If your power is so great, perhaps you can destroy them. You found the amulet? The golden god?"
"I didn't find anything. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you did. You need not lie. I want to help you. I can feel the power of the amulet in you, but believe what I say: use it, but do not cling to it. Free yourself of the golden god the moment you are finished. It is evil and it will consume you."
I looked down into her face. Even with the wrinkles and sun damage, I could see that she had once been very beautiful. She kept her eyes closed tightly-a touching vanity. I asked, "The other woman, the younger one named Nora, did they kill her?"
"No, I do not think so. He gave her the drunken potion to make her useful. He likes to use his women before he eats their souls."
In place of Borracho to describe the drug, she used a chilling Spanish phrase, cadavere vivo.
"Then she must be on the boat."
"Yes. The girl and the large black man, the policeman. Both will be killed before they reach the city if you do not hurry. The policeman, I do not care about. But the woman, it would be a good thing, very powerful, if you could save her. There is a spirit in her. I felt her strong presence when she arrived." The woman began to walk toward the pavilion, signaling me to follow. "Come. I have something that may help you."
She handed me a leather snap-open case. Inside was a 20cc glass syringe, very old, and a heavy-gauge, beveled hypodermic needle. The syringe was full of a dark liquid.
"Borracho?" I asked.
"Yes."
"I'd rather have a gun."
The old woman smiled slightly, the contracting of facial muscles allowing me a brief glimpse into the white orbits which once held her eyes. "If there was a gun they did not lock, do you think they would be alive now? You will need a boat to go after them."
I said, "I've got a boat."
"I know. But they moved it so no one would become suspicious. The black man moved it there."
She gestured toward the river.
I said, "You're certain there's not a gun around? The old man's a hunter. If he keeps the guns locked, I could break in. Just show me where he keeps them."
She was shaking her head. Her expression said, Impossible. "He locks them in a steel safe. The safe is one whole wall of his study. It has a knob that clicks. Only he knows the way in."
What was I going to do? Finding them wouldn't be enough. I'd have to stop them. There was one other possibility. I said, "What about chemicals? Do you have a gardener's shed? A maintenance shed? The sort of place they would store gasoline, poisons, that sort of thing."
"If you want to poison them, why not use the drunken potion?"
"That's not exactly what I have in mind. Can you show me?"
I followed her across the lawn to a concrete building the size of a garage. I had to use a brick to smash the lock off. I flipped the light switch and stepped into stale air that smelled of fertilizer and paint. I began to lift cans and jars from the shelves, looking at labels. It is no longer true that it is easy to make a bomb from common household products. However, it is very easy to make a lethal variety of explosives from chemicals and propellants purchased legally from a garden supply store. On the shelves, I found a particular mix of nitrate fertilizer, a bottle of ammonia, plus a very common kind of acid used for cleaning metals. I found a large thermometer, the mercury still in it. I found a botde of ethyl alcohol, a box of coarse salt and a squirt bottle full of soap. There was a five-gallon can of gasoline, a couple of kerosene railroad lamps and several Mason jars that probably once held paint thinner.
It was no longer a question of, could I mix together an effective explosive? The question was, what kind of explosive did I choose to make? And which would take the least amount of time? Explosives come in three basic forms: high-order explosives which detonate, low-order explosives which burn, and primers, which may do both. Nearly all combust so rapidly that large volumes of air are displaced faster than the speed of sound, and so a sonic boom occurs.
I wanted the boom. Hopefully enough to shatter the windows on a fast-moving yacht. Maybe even a little fire. And it had to be an impact explosive because I didn't want to have to mess with lighting a wick in the wind, on a moving boat.
To the woman, I said, "Go to the house and bring me a botde of iodine and a box of baking soda. Hurry! And a bucket of ice. Don't forget the ice." I'd already placed three Mason jars by the bag of fertilizer on a bench next to the acid.
"Have you cut yourself? I'll bring a first-aid kit."
I touched my ear. I was still bleeding a little, but that's not why I needed the iodine. I said, "A first-aid kit might come in handy, too."
I flew through a blur of mangrove switchbacks; twisting hedges of green that created ponds and creeks, one linked to another through a hundred miles of wilderness. The words of the old woman kept echoing in my head: He likes to use his women before he eats their souls.
In his note, Dieter Rasmussen had warned of human anomalies. Bad genes, flawed brains. Remorseless liars, strengthened by their own pathology, who were destined for success.
Teddy Bauerstock would do very well in Tallahassee. Tomlinson had said it and believed it-all his instincts, his intuition demonstrably wrong. So had Delia, one of the women Bauerstock had killed. So had everyone else the man had ever met, probably.
But he had not fooled me.
I found strange comfort in that. Inexplicably, that small triumph brought the face of Dorothy Copeland once again to memory. A lovely face with a mild, wistful smile, silken hair hanging down.
Then she was gone, a momentary nexus left in my wake.
The Hinckley had about a half-hour headstart on me. I had to catch them before they got near civilization. I had to get their yacht stopped in a place where no one could see what I was going to do. My boat was more than twice as fast, true, but, once I got into the Gulf, the growing waves would neutralize that advantage.
So I would stay in the backcountry just as long as I could. I'd gain a lot of time on them because Ted or Ivan-whoever was running the boat-had almost certainly taken the much longer route, out the channel past Panther Key, into open water. No one is going to run a half-million dollar vessel through the unmarked backcountry of the Ten Thousand Islands, even if it doesn't draw much water. The region is too remote; has too many reefs of oyster and rock. Make the wrong turn, run aground hard enough, and you could be stranded for days before another vessel happened by. Even with a cell phone or a VHF radio, help is hours away.
No, Bauerstock wouldn't risk that. Particularly with a hurricane bearing down. That's what I told myself, anyway.
As I drove, I turned the VHF radio volume full on and switched to Weather Channel 3. Heard that Hurricane Charles had already slipped through the Yucatan Channel, and was being levered toward the Florida coast by an Arctic high-pressure ridge. The ridge was steering the storm like rails beneath a freight train. Predicted landfall was somewhere between Naples and Marco.
The computerized voice told me, "… two hundred and ten miles off Marco Island, the air temperature is seventy-six degrees, water temperature eighty-two degrees, wave heights unavailable. National Hurricane Center at Miami places the eye of Hurricane Charles… slighdy north of the Tropic of Cancer, moving northeasterly at fifteen knots… expected to make landfall at approximately noon tomorrow. Voluntary evacuation is urged for residents of all barrier islands, Siesta Key to Marco Island, Goodland and neighboring areas. A mandatory evacuation notice may be issued for Marco Island, Everglades City and Chokoloskee. Winds have been measured at one-hundred-thirty knots and gusting stronger, barometric pressure at 27.50 and falling. Charles may be upgraded to a Category Five hurricane in the next advisory…"
I punched off the radio, feeling an irrational anger toward whoever the fool was who decided to replace a human weatherman with a digitized voice. The phonation was so badly coded that it sounded like a drunken polka king who'd been filching tranquilizers.
No, it had been a group decision, more likely. Individuals are rarely so misguided. Because the voice was difficult to understand, I hadn't been able to decipher the exact location of Charles, nor how many miles the storm still had to cover before it reached the coast. Computer profiteers like Ivan Bauerstock would've applauded the transition to something that was programmable. Maybe that's why it made me so mad…
I swung in close to Dismal Key: a ridge of black trees rimmed with swamp. Said a silent greeting to the old hermit who once lived in a shack on the high Indian mounds there, A1 Seeley.
A1 lived without phone, power or running water, just him and his little dog. He painted, he read books. He had a sharp intellect and an appreciation for the ironic. He loved to tell the story of a hermit colleague who came to Dismal Key determined to build a bomb shelter. He spent hours in the heat and mosquitoes digging through shell until he said, screw it, let global warfare do its worst. He was tired and in need of a beer.
Heading out to sea only hours in advance of a Category Five hurricane, A1 would have found that ironic, too. There was no place safer than the high mounds of his island.
I busted out of the mangrove gloom at Turtle Key and went pounding through whitecaps, steering toward a sunset horizon that was a firestorm of smoldering clouds and tangerine sky. Big, big seas and lots of wind. I banged my way toward Coon Key Light: an offshore tower built of metal and wood that marked the back entrance to Marco and then Naples.
In these seas, Ted or Ivan would have to take the back way to Naples. No way they'd run outside the islands and risk the surf at Big Marco Pass. They would see the light tower on the radar screen, and they would steer for it. Or maybe the marker was already programmed into their Loran and autopilot system. Either way, the thing was nearly twenty-five feet high and impossible to miss. If I kept my skiff close enough to the tower, that's all their radar would pick up.
My boat would be invisible until I decided it was time for them to see…
I began to think I'd missed them. Or that they'd taken the more dangerous, outside route. I sat in my skiff, the engine idling, rolling in the heavy seas. I could feel each wave gather mass beneath the boat. Could feel it lift and thrust me skyward before I slid back into a green trough. From the top of each wave, I could see around the horizon. What I saw was not reassuring. I was the only boat for miles. No Hinckley. No Namesake.
Where the hell were they? Could I have gotten that far ahead of them? Or maybe they'd already passed Coon Key Light and were on the Intracoastal to Naples.
Or maybe, just maybe, they'd stopped back there in the Ten Thousand Islands to dump two bodies…
I had no choice. My best chance of intercepting them was to sit right where I was.
I watched a sunset that had no sun. The world became lemon-bright, as if seen through yellow glasses. A horizon of copper clouds sailed northward and then curled west. The clouds moved in horizontal bands, one above the other, striatums of blue sky showing through. I was seeing the front rim of a hurricane, spinning in slow motion over the earth's curvature. Fog drifted down out of that copper rim, moving toward me as a wave, and then I realized it wasn't fog, it was a misting rain. The rain swept across the water in panels of silver, soaking me, dripping off the poling platform of my skiff.
The lemon world became purple… then charcoal… then gray, as I waited.
Behind me, the solar switch was activated and Coon Key Light began to strobe every four seconds. Wind blew the light across the water in streamers of green, along with the stink of bird guano.
I'd missed them. Unless they'd run aground, or they'd had engine failure, there was no way it should have taken them so long to get to Marco.
So what was Plan B?
Plan B, I decided, was to get to Naples Yacht Club as fast as possible, and maybe catch them there. Get the law involved somehow, make them search the boat.
I'd been holding my skiff bow into the sea. But now I nudged it into gear and began to turn. I waited until I was atop a wave to complete the turn-which is when I noticed the shell of a dark hull wallowing on the horizon, not more than a mile away.
It was the Hinckley.