by Chris Niles
“Think she just ran?”
“Cops do. Downtown wasn’t all that crowded, and they talked to everyone they could. No one saw anything. They found a missing persons report up in Dade County from about four years ago where she turned up a few days later, so they think she just took a break.”
Steve waved up to the parking lot. “But her car is still here.”
“Yeah. Only thing she had with her was her purse and her phone. They tried to track that, but it’s not responding. They’re betting right now that she met a guy and… you know how those things happen around here. I think they expect her to turn up this afternoon, messy hair and afterglow.”
Steve raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I don’t think so, either. I watched her with Eddie. He’s a handful for sure, but he’s everything to her. No way she’d just skip like that. Not even for a night of…” She trailed off.
Steve glanced around, his shoulders stiff. “So, um… Tony? How’s… um…”
Kate gasped, then swatted at his shoulder. “Steven Welch, I can’t believe you’re asking what I think you’re asking! And not that it’s any of your business, but no. It’s not like that. He’s just a good friend.”
Steve winked. “Mm hmm. I told you when he turned up and I’ll tell you again. Watch out for that one. He knows what he wants, and he’s willing to wait for it. For you.” Then he pulled Kate’s hand into his. “And you’d do well to let him in. It’s time, Kate.”
She pulled her hand back as a shiver rolled up behind her ribs. “I don’t know. I like my life just fine how it is. Just me and Whiskey.”
Steve waved down the dock and across the island. “And all of us.”
“All you troublemakers.” She winked. “And speaking of troublemakers, I promised Tony I’d help him mount his rear air conditioner today. Wanna come?”
“How romantic,” Steve laughed. “Nah, I’ve got an afternoon charter. Justin is gonna run the boat, and I’m just gonna lead the dives. It’ll be good to get more bottom time for a change.”
Kate heard a clank near the top of the dock and looked up as Justin popped through the hedge, gear bag on his back and headphones in his ears. His dreadlocks swung from side to side as he ambled down the dock then hopped over the rail to the dive deck.
“Reporting for duty, Capt’n” He gave Steve a little two-finger salute, then, without waiting for a reply, dropped his gear to the deck and started pulling pieces out of the bag.
“Kids these days…” Kate gave Steve a wink and a loose hug then hauled herself back up to the dock.
Chapter Ten
“Kate, up here!”
Kate glanced around the parking lot. As Tony’s shout rolled across the dusty expanse, she turned and jogged up the steps to the restaurant deck.
Kara leaned against a table, her ample figure squeezed into a skin-tight catsuit, a pile of papers in her hand. Michelle sat across from her, and Tony waved Kate over to an open seat.
“I asked my staff to keep their eyes open, and they all offered to help put flyers up around town.”
Kara owned and emceed at Dreamgirls, one of the most popular drag clubs on Duval Street, so from her bouncer to her bussers, her people saw everything that happened downtown. If anyone saw anything, they’d find out.
She hugged Kate, leaving a wet, exaggerated kiss on each cheek, the smooching sound nearly popping Kate’s eardrums, then took the stack of flyers and sashayed down to the cool of her still-running Mercedes.
Tony held Kate’s chair until she sat, then he settled back in his own. “Tell her what you found.”
Michelle tapped at the screen of her tablet before looking up at Kate. “So, I’ve been working on this app.”
Kate grinned. Her friend was always working on some app or another. And while most of her ideas ended up in a virtual scrap pile, a couple of them had done well enough to fund the Jenkins’ very comfortable early retirement aboard a forty-foot catamaran called the Knot Dead Yet and a host of toys for her husband William, including his pride and joy, a TBM 700B turboprop airplane that had carried Kate and her friends around the Caribbean on more adventures than Kate had expected to have.
“What’s this one do?”
“Well, remember after the hurricane last fall, I got the idea from Kara’s sister for a peer-to-peer communication net?”
“A… what?”
“The app that would let people reach each other even when cell and Internet service were down?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I remember that.”
“As I was working on it, I also started thinking about how to find the people who hadn’t been heard from, and then I started thinking about how to find people in general. Which took me down a very long rabbit hole into skip-tracing tools. The more I looked into what’s out there, the more I thought there’s got to be a better way. So that’s what I’ve been working on.”
Kate stared at her friend. “Seriously?”
“When Shelby showed up, I did a quick background check for Chuck. I found her employment records with the airline, and a basic credit check was clean. But I wanted to go a little deeper, and to do that, I had to pull from so many different sources, I just built a really quick aggregation interface—”
“A what? An aggro gator?”
Tony laughed. “I’ve seen my share of pissed off gators, but no, Kate. She means data aggregation. It’s pulling a bunch of information into one place.”
Kate stared across the table. “What does a door-kicker know about… what did you call it? Data aggregation?”
“I’m more than just a pretty pile of muscle.” He winked as he flexed a very toned bicep at her.
“Are you, now?”
He dropped his gaze to the table. “I might have done a little bit of computer kind of stuff while I was active duty.”
Michelle waggled her eyebrows at Kate. “He’s cute and smart. You better not let this one get away.”
Kate’s nostrils flared. “What’s it with everyone—”
“Settle down, Kate.” Tony raised both palms. “No one’s tryin’ to make you do anything you don’t want…” Then he winked at Michelle. “She’s fine. I’m not goin’ anywhere. So, tell me about this app.”
Michelle rattled off a long string of technical jargon, which Tony clearly understood, because he returned equally unintelligible follow-up questions. For five full minutes, Kate’s mind only registered words like “tunnel” and “query” and “concatenate” until Michelle finally switched back to English and pointed to the screen of her tablet.
“You can see here, there’s lots of activity on her cards up through Saturday. In the past month, she’s been all over Latin America and the Eastern seaboard. Totally normal patterns for a flight attendant. Most recently, it looks like she did an overnight in Bogota, Colombia. A couple charges at a hotel, a coffee shop, then one at a shop in the airport.
“After that, there’s one hit on Saturday morning at a gas station in Miami. She’s got multiple charges there, going way back, with a bunch of charges under five bucks. That’s coffees, sodas, treats for Eddie? It’s not gas, so it’s got to be close to home.
“As for her residence, I’ve got two probable addresses, which is really odd. One looks like it should be hers, but there’s a second one where she’s had household-type stuff shipped really recently. Toilet paper. Baby shampoo. So, I’m not entirely sure what to make of that.”
Tony leaned over to peek at Michelle’s screen. “Are the addresses close? Where are they in relation to the gas station?”
Michelle shrugged. “Couple miles apart. Draw a circle linking them and the airport, and the gas station is in the center of them. Still kinda can’t tell from that which place is…”
“Hey, geeks?” Kate waved a hand behind the tablet at them. “I really admire the amount of information you’re able to find on a complete stranger — actually, it terrifies me — but why don’t we just look in her glovebox?”
Michelle dropped her forehead to he
r palms. Tony fell back into his chair.
A shout and then the scrabble of Whiskey’s toenails on the wooden deck pulled Kate’s attention to Eddie and the big dog scrambling up the steps and running toward her.
“Miss Kate, Miss Kate! There’s a alligator that lives across the street from Mister Tony! Whiskey growled at it, but Mister Chuck wouldn’t let him chase it!” He pointed back down the lane with his stuffed sloth’s long arm.
Following behind them at a more adult pace, Chuck ambled across the deck. “I already called Trey. He’ll be out this afternoon.”
“Trey?” Tony’s question hung over the table.
“Trey Reeve. Only vermin guy I trust to not hurt the animals when he captures them.”
Eddie jumped on Tony’s lap. “I only saw one other alligator outside of the zoo.”
“Yeah, buddy?” Despite the heat, Tony pulled the little boy up onto his lap and helped him settle the furry stuffed sloth into an empty chair beside them. “Where was that?”
“It was at Miss Kelsey’s house. Mama was at work and Miss Kelsey and I were walking her dog — her dog is way littler than Whiskey, and she’s a girl dog. But Whiskey’s way cooler—”
“Eddie, who’s Miss Kelsey?”
“She takes care of me when Mama goes to work. Her and Mister Brian.”
“Hey, Eddie.” Michelle leaned across the table. “When your Mama goes to work, how long is she gone for?”
Eddie shrugged. “It depends. Sometimes I get to watch two movies and sometimes a lot more than that.”
“Movies?”
“Yeah, Miss Kelsey lets me watch one movie at night when I’m going to sleep. Then I don’t feel so lonely. But that was before Mama brought me Slothie. Now he keeps me company. Mister Chuck didn’t have a TV in my room, but Slothie kept me company, and I didn’t need a movie.”
Eddie grabbed the stuffed animal by the arm and dropped it on the table. The toy looked as if it had been dragged through the mud at low tide, with dirt and dried salt matting its synthetic fur.
“Eddie, Slothie looks like he could use a bath.” Kate pinched it by its green tag and lifted it from the table. “How ’bout—”
“NO!” Eddie’s cry turned heads all around the deck.
“Okay, okay, no bath.” Tony took the sloth from Kate and handed it back to Eddie.
“Sloths like to be dirty. Sometimes mold grows under their fur. They like it that way.”
Kate cringed. In the Florida humidity, even a little bit of mildew could spiral out of control.
“Hey, bud?” Tony turned the boy on his lap so they were face to face. “Do you know where Miss Kelsey and Mister Brian live?”
Michelle turned to her tablet, hand poised over the keyboard.
“They live in a big pink house with a boat in their backyard. The alligator was down the street, and Miss Kelsey was worried it would eat her little dog.”
Michelle tapped and swiped while Tony kept Eddie talking.
“What else is around there?”
“We go see Miss Kelsey’s dad every day. He’s old. We walk to his house for lunch, and then I play dominoes with him. Miss Kelsey says it helps him keep his brain healthy. He’s nice, so I like to play with him, even though I don’t really like dominoes that much. I like to build things with them, but I don’t like when I don’t have the right numbers. I don’t have a dad. Mama said he went to the army then Jesus took him home from there, but I think she’s wrong because Jesus never brought him back home—”
A deep growl rumbled from under the table, then Whiskey launched at the bushes beside them. Eddie shouted, then scrambled down off Tony’s lap and dove into the leaves beside him.
Kate hopped up and whispered to Tony, “I’ll go find her keys.”
But she paused when Whiskey emerged holding a small iguana by the tail between his teeth.
Tony stared at him. “Whiskey, drop it. Now.”
The dog opened his jaw then the reptile scurried away. Whiskey shuffled back to the shade, his head low and his tail even lower.
“Mister Tony, why’d you make him drop it?”
“Because nobody deserves to get eaten when they’re just minding their own business.”
Chuck appeared at the table with a tray filled with red baskets lined with white paper. “Well, maybe nobody but these pesky lionfish.”
Chapter Eleven
“I want to stop at that gas station. If Shelby was in and out as often as her credit card says she was, the clerks have got to know her.”
Kate grunted agreement to Tony’s plan, and an easy silence fell around them again. Her gaze focused on the thin brown scrub flying past the passenger window. The drive up the Overseas Highway was a study in contradictions. Arid soil with weedy grasses struggled for each drop of rainwater, while ten feet away, an infinite expanse of gin-clear ocean stretched to the horizon.
Alongside upscale condos and gated communities, ramshackle shops of crumbling concrete and peeling paint lined the highway, their windows still boarded from the most recent hurricane. The gap between the locals and the tourists widened with every disaster.
Tony’s voice startled Kate. She shook off her trance and forced her attention back to the moment. “Sorry, what?”
“I said, I put a call in to a buddy at Boca Chica. He agreed with the local cops she probably just met someone — apparently that happens all the time down here — but I convinced him to dig a little bit anyway.”
“Thanks.” As they approached Seven Mile Bridge, Kate pointed at the sign. “Longest bridge in the state.”
Tony snickered. “So adorable. Florida might have the craziest people, but Louisiana wins with the bridges. We have four that’ll make this one look tiny. My Gran was terrified of The Causeway”
“The Causeway?”
“Yeah. The bridge across Lake Pontchartrain. Nearly twenty-four miles, that bridge. She was scared we’d run out of gas, even if the tank was full. Mama used to tease her endlessly.”
Kate’s gaze drifted back to the sharp blue line at the horizon as she thought about Eddie and Shelby. “My parents were no barrel of monkeys, but as much as I dreamed about it, I can’t imagine if they’d actually just vanished when I was a kid.”
Tony glanced over at her, then turned his eyes back to the road.
When he didn’t respond, Kate continued. “Dad wasn’t around much, anyway. He worked in the city, so he was on the train before I got up most mornings, and a lot of nights, he’d miss the last train home. So, he just stayed in the city. And sometimes, my mother would go in for a fundraiser or drinks with a potential partner — Dad was always putting some deal or other together.”
The truck eased through the crest of the low bridge, and the sandy shores of Hog Key, and Boot Key to its south, drew closer.
“When he was at home, at least he tried. Weekends, he’d sometimes take me out to the nature preserve or down to the shore. It was the only time he ever seemed to let go. Even when he was home, he never relaxed. He’d sit there at his desk or he’d be reading the paper at the kitchen table, and — I remember it so clearly — his jaw would flex under his stiff morning stubble as he clenched his teeth while he read. But out at the shore? At the shore, he smiled.”
A thick lump grew in Kate’s throat.
“When was the last time you actually talked to them?”
“Not text?” Kate shook off the memory and glanced at the truck’s clock. “Umm, I guess a week or so after that business with David Li last spring. Mother called to express her disapproval that I’d taken up residence at the resort on Virgin Gorda without asking Daddy first. Not that he’d have cared. She didn’t want the staff thinking that just anyone could make those kinds of arrangements.”
“Just anyone? You’re their daughter. You’re not just anyone. She sounds like a piece of work. But how is she—”
Kate cut him off to avoid his inevitable question. “Oh, she is a piece of work, to be sure. Daddy is the dealmaker. He can sell steak to a vegan. B
ut he’s incapable of saying no to her.”
The truck passed Publix then drew to a stop at the light.
“Looking back, I wonder if he took me out on the weekends because she told him to, rather than because he wanted to hang out with me. Not that she needed a break — the nanny and the housekeeper did all the actual work of raising me, but I don’t think she could bear actually being—” Kate paused. “Sorry, I don’t wanna get all whiny childhood-trauma on you. Especially since I really have nothing to complain about. We had so much more than most people do, so really, I should just shut up.”
Tony’s eyes softened. “No, you’re fine. It’s not relative. Your experience was your experience.”
“Nah.” Kate shifted in her seat. “What about you? You never really talk about your family much.”
“Not much to say. Dad was Navy. He’s why I enlisted, honor his memory and all. Died in a training accident when I wasn’t too much older than Eddie. Mama was a rock, though. We moved in with my Gran in the bayou, and the two of them raised me and my little sister.”
“Do you see your mom often?”
Tony’s face darkened, and he stared at the road ahead. A few miles later, as Marathon fell behind them and the narrow road stretched across yet another low bridge, he finally spoke. “Mama died from breast cancer when I was twenty. I was deployed. Didn’t get back ’til it was too late.”
Kate flinched, then caught her breath and rested her hand on his. “Oh, Tony, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He turned his hand upward and wrapped it around hers. She thought she saw the corner of his lip twitch up into a smile.
“It’s fine. It was long enough ago, I made peace with it. And if she’d been alive, I may never have gone to BUD/S.”
“Buds?”
“It’s the first major phase in the training pipeline to become a SEAL. Anyway, I don’t think I could’ve put Mom through any of this. Worry would have gotten her instead of the cancer.” He slowed for a construction area, easing the truck through a series of orange barrels and cones.
