“Leon…” he said, shaking his head. If the guy were to hear their motors…“Shit!” Deal said again. He couldn’t cut the motors or they’d be flung broadside onto shore.
He nudged Homer aside, threw the engines into forward, his hand ready at the throttle. Nothing but a low hum from the engines at near-idle speed. If they creep along, could get far enough downwind, they wouldn’t be heard above the rush of the storm and the waves. If he could round the jut of land at the far end of the neighbor’s property, get them out of the wind, not run aground…
But the wind was forcing them steadily closer to the seawall: fifty feet now, then forty, the wheel useless, they were nearly broadside to the waves now, twenty-five…he could see the looming shape of the davits on the neighbor’s dock, like deserted cranes canted nearly overtop of the bow of Miss Daisy…here we go, he thought, down the jaws…
…then suddenly they steadied, as if a giant hand had reached out from the shore to stave them off from disaster. Deal stared out at the dark waters, stunned for a moment… then realized. The backwash of the waves coming off the seawall had caught them. The very force that had been driving them in had passed them by, struck home, and rebounded. In a few seconds they were easing softly up to the neighbor’s dock…“like kissing a girl,” he found himself thinking.
Homer leapt ashore, trailing the forward line in one hand. He tied it off quickly, then caught the aft line that Barbara tossed him.
“Give us some slack,” Deal called. “Or we’ll pound to pieces.”
Homer nodded, spun out a loop of rope before he secured it. Deal watched him lean out to pull Barbara ashore, then made his own leap to the dock, timing it with the upthrust of a wave that brought the decks nearly to the top of the pilings. Slack or no slack, he thought, Miss Daisy would be driven relentlessly into the dock. They’d be lucky to find anything left of this boat if it were tied up long.
He hurried across the slippery planks of the dock and onto shore, up through the screen of shrubbery that shielded Alcazar’s house from view. He heard Barbara and Homer crashing through the tangle behind him. He was about to turn to quiet them when another sheet of lightning lit the sky, and he froze.
He’d only seen it for an instant through the brush, but the image burned steadily, madly, in his mind: huge Leon in a yellow slicker out there in the middle of Alcazar’s lawn not fifty feet away, bent over something, wrestling with it, some thrashing creature…
Deal warned the others to be still, then edged closer, guided by Leon’s grunts and curses. When he was as close as he dared, he pushed aside a holly bough in time to see Leon, illumined by the glow of the house lights now, lunge backward with a cry of satisfaction.
“Mother-fucker,” the big man cried, then spun like a hammer thrower to fling whatever he was holding from his grasp. Deal ducked down, hearing a crash of glass above the storm. He felt Homer come up beside him, then they both peered out through the brush to see it:
Leon was striding away down the lawn in his slicker, leaving the scene of battle. One of the big picture windows in the house had shattered, and something that looked like an animal, a horse, a giant bird, leaned crazily through the sharded opening. A floor lamp had toppled over inside, its shade gone, its bulb still burning. You could see a tangle of roots beneath the thing that hung in the window now, see that it was no creature at all, but something green and leafy, a carefully manicured shrub of some kind.
“Jesus Christ, he killed a tree?” Homer said. “What’s the matter with him?”
There was a great roar from the direction of Alcazar’s docks, the mighty engines of the Donzi tied off there cranking up like Hell clearing its throat. Deal stared at the house, then back toward the docks, frozen. Maybe Janice was inside there, maybe Leon had lost it, was running off, all Deal would have to do was walk in through that shattered window, find her, sweep her up in his arms like some hero in the comics…but on the other hand, how could it be so simple? He heard the growl of the Donzi’s engines even out, ready to fly…
…and then, he was crashing back through the underbrush toward Miss Daisy, Homer at his back, past a glimpse of Barbara’s rain-streaked, puzzled face as he tore past her.
In moments they were all back aboard. Deal had rammed the throttle full, at the same time swinging her nose around into the waves. Homer and Barbara hung on desperately to the rails, banging into one another, into Deal, who leaned hard against the wheel.
He didn’t look back, but felt the backwash of their wake as it piled into the seawall, was compressed, then squeezed back out and against their stern. It gave them a welcome boost against the driving wind. They couldn’t have missed the wall by more than a yard.
Miss Daisy’s engines were roaring now, but the Donzi’s noise was far greater, carrying to them above their own racket and the noise of the storm.
“That’s Leon?” Barbara called.
Deal nodded, watching the Donzi pull away from the docks.
“How come we’re going after him?” Homer cried. “We got the goddamn place to ourselves.”
Deal shook his head, pressing the throttle down full. He could only hope that Leon would have enough sense to keep the Donzi reined in, given the weather.
“We could go in there, take that chance,” Deal said. “But think about it,” he said. “You’d need a pretty good reason to take a boat ride on a night like this, even as stupid as Leon is.”
Deal hoped he was right. It was only instinct, but he could always come back here, if he was wrong. He glanced at his companions. Barbara’s face was a pale oval in the glow from the instrument panel. He knew she’d do anything to get off the pitching boat, and yet she was holding quiet.
Homer nodded grudgingly. He glanced over the rail at the Donzi, maybe a hundred yards ahead of them now, turning south, back toward the open waters they’d just crossed. Sheet lightning lit up the clouds above, but the rain had eased off, the wind slackening a bit.
“Okay,” Homer said, finally. “Leon’s stupid. What’s that make us?”
“Accessories,” Deal said, and turned back to the wheel.
Chapter 33
“We going over to Bimini?” It was Homer, glancing back at the receding lights of the city. Already they’d lost sight of a big chunk of skyline; even the huge bank towers were obliterated by a squall that had swung in behind them.
The Donzi had opened up the distance between them once they were out past the channel markers, but Leon was being cautious, apparently. The Donzi could easily double Miss Daisy’s speed, but so far he’d respected the conditions, no Don Johnson stuff, clipping off the seven-foot swells. And the weather was keeping all the other pleasure craft in, making it easy enough to keep track of him, even at a quarter mile or more. So far so good, Deal thought, wiping his dripping face on his sleeve.
“I don’t think we’re going to Bimini,” he said to Homer. He had an idea where Leon might be headed, now, but he’d hold off saying anything.
Barbara clung grimly to the rail just aft, her heaves gone for the moment. She’d tried going below, lying down, but that only made things worse. Deal felt for her, wished he could do something. He wasn’t thrilled to have her along, God knows. There was always the possibility Leon would swing the Donzi around, come back on them for a little chat cum torpedo practice, lob whatever he might have on hand their way.
He was also worried about Homer. Stolid Homer, who stood at the rail, rain dripping off his chin, doing his best to track the Donzi with the binoculars. He had no part in this, despite his sentimental feelings for Deal’s old man. They’d gone well beyond the fun-and-games stage. Wherever Leon was headed, Deal knew there was going to be deep shit when they all piled in.
For Deal, it didn’t matter. Choice was no longer an operable concept. But now he was dragging two decent people into his mess. Of course, he could bail out now, take everybody home, start over tomorrow…
“Forget it,” Barbara said, weary, pushing hersel
f away from the rail and back inside the shelter of the bridge.
“Forget what?” Deal said.
“If it were my husband we were looking for—forget I don’t have one—you think I’d call time out, take you in?” She shook her head. “I saw the way you were looking at us,” she continued. “This is one of those things you have to do, Deal. You save feeling guilty for another time.”
Homer looked up at him. “All we’re doin’s following a guy.” He waved the binoculars toward the distant lights of the Donzi. “Although I’d like to know where.”
Deal felt some relief, but not much. “We’ll find out where he’s going, that’s all,” he said, glancing at Barbara. “We’re going to stay out of trouble.”
He nodded at Homer for emphasis, praying he’d been telling the truth, then turned back to scan the dark waters ahead. The Donzi was slowing now and Deal cut Miss Daisy’s engines back. He checked what he could see of the distant skyline over his shoulder. He hadn’t been out here since he was a kid, when he and Flivey were part of that framing crew, but he had a fair memory of how the lights on shore got to looking around dark, when they’d pack it up, head home in the Penfield’s Boston Whaler. It seemed they’d come out about the right distance.
They drifted for a few moments, his eyes turned back to the darkness and finally, he touched Homer’s shoulder. He was pointing now at a series of vague lumpish silhouettes that had risen up on the skyline. They might have been mistaken for tiny oil drilling platforms, or pumping rigs, but there were no lights, no surging pumps, no stink of waste gas. More like abandoned rigs, or ghost rigs, or a kind of seaborne Stonehenge.
“Stiltsville,” Deal said. Where he and Flivey had spent their last days. It would be the perfect place, you wanted to hide somebody.
“Stiltsville?” Barbara repeated.
“Fucking-A,” Homer said. “I forgot all about that.”
Deal nodded. Stiltsville was easy enough to forget about. It had been a dream in the first place, a crackpot dream faded into a mirage you caught a glimpse of on your way out from Traynor’s to the distant reefs to dive, or using the straightest shot to the Gulf Stream and hoping you’d brought the right bait for once, you might glance over, squint, turn to ask somebody on board, “What the fuck is that?”
What it actually was was a series of houses built in the 1960s on pilings five miles out into Biscayne Bay, at a spot where the water might not reach your chin. The concept sounded great in those revolutionary times: no taxes, no law, no order. A great view, boat to work, fish out your bedroom window if you wanted.
And there’d been a couple dozen visionaries, or complete idiots, depending on your frame of reference, who were willing to try it. The place Deal and Flivey had worked on belonged to a flamboyant defense attorney and pal of Flivey’s father who found the notion appealing. There were a dozen or so houses already completed, some of them a couple thousand square feet, all the comforts of home in place, another dozen in various stages of construction at that time, the heyday of Stiltsville. Flivey and Deal were looking forward to a placid summer, framing one house after another, swim when you got hot, drink a six-pack every evening watching the sun go down, boat home, and go to bed, get up and start all over again. That hadn’t been so much to ask for, had it? And look what Flivey had gotten instead.
Deal had never been back to Stiltsville. And the summer after Flivey died, the state and federal environmental agencies got their act together long enough to swoop down on Stiltsville, slapping the project with every kind of stop order known to man. There were several legitimate environmental concerns: sewage runoff, reef infringement, and the like. But Deal suspected that the chief opposition had come from those who feared the anarchy of it all. Those good old boys in Tallahassee were not about to let the kind of bullshit that had sprung up on a bunch of hippie communes out west take root in Florida. And never mind it’d take at least fifty thousand hippie dollars to build one of the places, either. Stiltsville was out of business. What was finished got to stay. What was unfinished got to rot in the sun and the salt. He never found out what happened to the house he and Flivey had worked on.
Most residents gave up, packed it in. Some diehards made the modifications the new zoning regulations required, and actually moved in. But over the years, the novelty of a long boat ride for a box of Cheerios or a movie wore off, taking care of the permanent residents. And even the weekenders got increasingly disheartened, coming out to see what kind of shit vandals, or the summer storms, might have dumped on their living room rugs.
So now, though some of the places still stood intact, most had long since tumbled down, or were condemned, and it was rare you ever saw anyone around the places, except for the occasional fisherman tied off in the shadows, casting his rigged shrimp out toward the pilings for the unwary snapper.
What you surely wouldn’t expect, Deal thought, was a big, glossy Donzi he’d tied up under one of the houses, not at this time of night, heaving in a storm swell rolling in off the Atlantic. Still, there it was.
Deal gave the throttle a nudge. He was swinging Miss Daisy southeastward, a quarter mile or so out from the shallows where the houses stood, his own running lights switched off. If Leon were to hear them over the waves, he might mistake them for a fisherman hurrying home from the storm. Maybe.
Deal held the binoculars to his eyes, scanning the silhouette of the house where the Donzi was moored. For all he knew, it was the house he and Flivey had built. It would make sense if it were. Say Penfield had picked it up from his pal, kept it for his little private parties, that’d square with the other things he had learned.
Sheet lightning on the horizon backlit the place briefly, once, twice, but still he couldn’t see anything, not the faintest hint of light about the windows. No sign of movement. Nothing.
“What are you waiting for?” Homer said, nodding at the house. “Take us in there. We can handle the bastard.”
Deal glanced down. Homer had jimmied open a locker, found a flare gun, some extra flares that looked like monster shotgun shells. He’d also come up with a fishing gaff with a wicked point, which he brandished in the air between them.
Deal leaned backward. “Put that thing down before you stab one of us, Homer.”
“Two of us, one of him,” Homer said.
“You don’t know who’s in that place,” Deal said. “Go in there with your spear, Leon and his buddies’ll make a shish kebab out of you.”
Deal was stalling, trying to figure out what he could do. He’d be surprised if many of Alcazar’s men were in that house. How many guys could you convince to sit around, wait for a typhoon to blow them to kingdom come. No, not many people inside. But he thought he knew who one of them might be, and he prayed he was right. The only question was what to do now.
He could wait, see who came out. Maybe Leon was simply doing his jailer’s duty, delivering the groceries, checking things out. Sure, he thought, and maybe he was going to dust and clean the windows too. A jagged bolt of lightning cut the sky just to the south and thunder rolled over the waves toward them. As he’d told Homer, you’d need a good reason to come all this way on a night like this.
“I’m going to count on you, Homer,” Deal said, abruptly.
“’Course you can,” Homer said, clutching his spear. His expression was uncertain.
Deal continued. “I want you to keep the boat nosed into the waves, just like we are, hold the throttle steady. The wind and the current will hold you just about in the same spot, same as walking a treadmill.”
Barbara shoved away from the railing, pulling strands of hair off her pale cheeks. “What are you talking about, Deal?”
He was ducking out of his poncho, kicking off his shoes. “You keep watch through the binoculars,” he told her. “You see me get inside the house, give me ten minutes. If I’m not out, head for shore, call for help.”
She stared at him incredulously, then pointed out into the darkness. “You’re going
to swim? In that?”
Deal was stepping out of his slacks. He glanced out at the swells, thought a moment. “I’ve been in worse,” he said. “The current’ll help me out.” He pointed toward the dark shape of the house.
“You want to kill yourself, why don’t you just fall on this,” Homer said, holding up the gaff.
“You going to take this wheel or not?”
Homer nodded grudgingly. He laid the gaff aside, took hold of the throttle, which revved momentarily then fell back as he adjusted his grip. With the other hand he grabbed the wheel. Deal patted his shoulder, but Homer wouldn’t look at him.
He pulled off his shirt, surprised at the chill that hit him. Just the wind and the rain, but still surprising for Florida in July. He held the binoculars out to Barbara, who shook her head, looking him over, him in his skivvies, trying to keep his knees from knocking.
“Seems like a hell of a waste,” she said. “Why don’t we all head in, get the cops on this.”
“Ten minutes, okay?” He stared at her until her eyes met his. “Okay,” she said finally.
He moved quickly back the deck then, climbed up on the transom, wavered, caught his balance. He sensed the water heaving beneath him…and then he was off, rising effortlessly with the toss of the boat, weightless for a moment, and then into the surprisingly warm grasp of the water.
***
“You can sit there, stare at it all you want, it ain’t gonna go away.” It was Leon, standing by the stove in the tiny kitchen of the house, his hand on a pot of water he’d put up.
Janice glanced up from the papers he’d spread out on the Formica table, looked around the interior of the place. It was the first time he’d let her out of the bedroom since he’d brought her here. Typical tract home interior, furniture from the 1960s, rental decor, a wretched seascape above a moldering couch. All the windows were boarded over.
She could hear the storm raging outside now, the water raging, shaking the foundations of the house. It had to be a place directly on the water, but somewhere all by itself. She’d heard some distant boat traffic, had screamed herself hoarse several times, to no avail. She tried to think where she could be, but it was difficult to concentrate. She was weak, from hunger, from exhaustion, from fear. But she would die before she’d wilt in front of this creature.
Done Deal Page 24
