He could see a likely spot from where they were right now, as a matter of fact, a thin slice of white against the ragged Everglades coastline a few hundred yards to the northwest. But at this very moment, they were nudged close to an islandlike outcropping of mangroves just offshore, another priority at hand.
Russell Straight had reeled in now and was struggling to untangle his leader when Ainsley Spencer left the wheel of the houseboat to come lend a hand.
“Let’s try us another shrimp then, what do we say?” The old man pulled Russell’s ragged-looking bait off the hook and tossed it over the side. Deal saw a swirling motion just beneath the surface as something took the free lunch.
Russell waited for the old man to thread on a fresh shrimp, then turned back to his target and whipped the rod back, and once again forward, in a far too rapid motion.
“Damn,” Russell said, watching the flight of his cast.
“I didn’t say in the trees,” Ainsley Spencer said, gazing off at the result.
“What now?” Russell said, looking in dismay at the shrimp that dangled from a mangrove branch.
“Wait for whatever’s down there to evolve,” Deal suggested. “A couple million years, it’ll be a shrimp-loving squirrel to climb right up out of that water.”
“Somebody must have said you were funny once,” Russell said.
“Let me see that,” Ainsley Spencer said, taking the rod from Russell. The old man switched the rod a few times. There was a plop over by the mangroves as the tangled line came free. Seconds later the rod bent, as something took the bait.
“Here,” the old man said, handing the rod to Russell. “Don’t be herky-jerky, now.”
Russell snatched the rod up and leaned back as if he’d hooked a marlin. Seconds later the line had parted and the big man turned to them with a crestfallen look.
“It got away,” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it,” Deal said. He absently fingered the scar near his hairline, a lasting souvenir of the last time he’d been aboard a houseboat. The hair had grown back, but he knew what marked it now: a neat wedge of white in an otherwise sun-bleached shock.
“Lunch is ready,” an authoritative voice called from the cabin. A screened door swung open, and the broad brown face of Minerva Betts poked out. “We eating here or someplace else?”
“I thought over by that bit of beach,” Ainsley Spencer said, pointing toward the sliver of sand glinting in the distance.
“Then why we be waiting here?” Minerva Betts said, her tone indignant. “Get us going there, old man.”
As she ducked back inside, the door swung fully open and Denise emerged, wiping her hands on a dish towel that surely contained more fabric than the bathing suit she wore. “Lost another one, I see,” she said to Russell, who stood examining the snapped end of his line with a mournful expression. “If it wasn’t for Deal, it’d be peanut butter for lunch,” she added.
“He used all the good shrimp,” Russell said.
“The man knows how to fish,” Ainsley Spencer cut in. He turned the starter and the motor of the houseboat grumbled to life.
“You caught all the fish, Daddy?” Deal turned as his daughter, Isabel, pushed herself up off the cushions of a canopy-shaded settee where she’d drifted off. She was yawning, rubbing sleep from her eyes with her knuckles.
“Every last one of them,” Russell Straight said.
“Don’t listen. There’s plenty more fish, sweetie,” Deal said. He put out his arms as she came to snuggle in his lap.
The boat was moving now, lumbering over the gentle swells toward the beckoning stretch of beach. “I want to catch one,” she said as she nestled close.
“You will,” he told her, nuzzling her hair with his chin. “You’ll catch a million of them.”
“Are you going to stay in Key West forever?” she asked then, her gaze averted.
“Who told you that?”
“Uncle Russell said he was,” she said.
Deal glanced toward the railing of the boat, where Denise and Russell leaned at the rail, their heads bent in close conversation. “Did he, now?”
“He did,” Isabel said. “He said you have all this work to do in Key West now, and somebody has to watch over it.”
Deal nodded, glancing involuntarily back over the placid surface of the bay in the direction they had come. Shortly after Detective Dickerson had dropped by his rooms at the Pier House with the news that he and Russell had been cleared of charges, a delegation composed of the mayor, the director of the chamber of commerce, and the head of the Monroe County Development Commission had arrived, bringing with them the Islamorada attorney who was the executor of Franklin Stone’s estate.
Their proposal contained many of the same terms as those outlined in the paperwork that Stone had stuffed in his pocket earlier, sweetened a bit by the common desire that Deal carry out the environmentally amended plan that Stone had agreed to before his death. In that way, argued the city fathers, the project would be withheld from normal probate, thus ensuring there would be no takeover by some outside, far less sensitive interests.
For once, Deal mused, the politics of expediency seemed justified. It would mean considerable shuttling back and forth from Miami to Key West, of course, but at least he would have an able project manager in place.
He cut another look at Russell, who had his arm around Denise’s shoulders, then gave his daughter a hug. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m not moving to Key West.”
“Good,” she said, giving him a kiss on his cheek. “You need to shave,” she added as she snuggled in again.
Deal smiled, running a hand over his cheeks as Ainsley Spencer brought the houseboat into a turn fifty feet or so off a stretch of brilliant white beach and cut the engines. The water off the side of the boat was as crystal as that of a spring.
“Are you going swimming, Daddy?” Isabel called.
Deal nodded. “Sure,” he said. “How about you?”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s why I’m wearing my suit. Aunt Denise, too,” she added, pointing.
Deal smiled and helped her down from his lap. Isabel started away, then stopped and came back to him. “Daddy?” she asked.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Don’t you wish Mommy was here?”
Deal stared back into her innocent gaze for a moment, some minuscule portion of the million or so words that an answer to that question would require flashing briefly through his mind. An easterly breeze had sprung up the moment they’d stopped, traveling the same course that hurricanes used, in a different season, of course. The wind is in from Africa, he thought, and made his way to his feet.
“Sure I do,” he told his daughter, who accepted this answer with a nod.
“Lunch is served,” Minerva Betts called, pushing her way through the screen with a formidable hip, platters of freshly grilled snapper arrayed down each of her arms.
“Looks good,” Ainsley Spencer said. “Looks mighty good.”
“Back off, old man,” Minerva Betts scolded him. “Let these others eat.” She was slapping platters down on the picnic table that took up most of the rear deck space.
“How about a little wine with lunch?” Deal said. He reached into the duffel bag that he’d stowed beneath his chair and pulled out a bottle.
Russell Straight glanced at what was in his hand. “Maybe you ought to save that one,” the big man said.
Deal glanced down at the label and shrugged. There had been no trace found of the missing cache of wine, but then again, perhaps his description of two bright red and overloaded Donzis headed hell-bent for leather out of the port might have had something to do with that.
No reason to do otherwise, Deal had told himself, as he’d once again lied to a detective named Dickerson. The men who’d bought the wine from Rusty Malloy were simply businessmen. And they’d been kind enough to give a lady a lift out of a jam.
; He hefted the heavy bottle in his hand, bothered not a bit by what he’d once used it for. Without it, he thought, they might not have been here at all.
“Save it for what?” he said, turning to Russell. He pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and flipped the corkscrew out. As he worked the point into the still-firm cork, he nodded toward a stack of plastic cups that Minerva Betts had plopped down in the middle of the picnic table.
“Get yourselves a glass,” he called as the cork popped and a trace of something like smoke appeared and vanished as quickly as a genie’s track.
Deal held up the bottle and glanced off to eastward once again, thinking of toasts he might have otherwise proposed, and wondered if someday, somehow, he might yet have that chance.
“To life,” he said as the song began to cycle through his mind once again. And finally he began to pour.
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