Night Moves (Doc Ford)

6




DAN HAD BEEN TRUE TO HIS WORD AND OUR RIDE WAS waiting for us when we got to the Tamiami—thankfully, just before the rain hit.

The next two days, I had plenty to do in the lab, so I really didn’t spend much time thinking about the near plane crash or the many theories about who might be trying to kill us.

Until I met one of the theories in person at Dinkin’s Bay.

—

IT HAD BEEN A STRANGE NIGHT to begin with. I’d been standing by a fire near the marina docks with my friend JoAnn Smallwood, a chunky, busty woman with big bones and a handsome face, who’d just had a fight with her boat partner, business partner, and on-again off-again bedmate, Rhonda Lister, and so was feeling weepy and fragile.

Then she looked at A-Dock, where the deepwater boats are moored.

“That’s something else that’s making me crabby,” she said, staring.

“What?”

“That.”

I followed the lady’s gaze to a neat and incremental line of oceangoing sailboats, sails rolled, portholes dark, trawlers, cruisers, and blue-water sports fishermen, most cabins buttoned tight. But a few of the regulars were alive with light: Mike Westhoff’s Sea Ray Playmaker, Dieter Rasmussen’s Grand Banks, Geno Lamont’s Birdsong, a classic Hinckley, and JoAnn’s boat, Tiger Lilly.

Because it was two weeks before Easter, a lull in high season, there were a few open slips, but not many. Two spaces down from Tiger Lilly was a new arrival, a sleek powerboat, thirty-plus feet of Kevlar Stiletto that looked more like a futuristic spaceship. Dark hull, low black flybridge that tapered aft toward a transom compartment which hid two or three mega-horsepower engines. The engine space was decked with plush cushions, roomy enough for a dozen starlets in bikinis. Oval ports showed lights inside. A string of LEDs mounted under the hull transformed the water beneath to lime Jell-O. No name on the stern, either. Unusual.

I said, “In showrooms, boats like that are missing only two options: an ego big enough to buy it and a lackey to start the engines.”

“It showed up last week. Came in at night, the engines so loud it shook the windows. I should’ve got up and taken a look, but I didn’t. You were away on one of your mysterious trips.”

“Tampa,” I replied automatically.

“Whatever,” JoAnn said, giving it a mall-girl inflection. “Sure, you expect some bigmouthed real estate tycoon or a trust fund brat. But we’re two slips down, and Rhonda and I haven’t met the owner or even seen him. Woke up next morning and there it was.”

I was thinking, Mysterious. Just like Tomlinson’s mistress, as my neighbor continued talking.

“At a marina this small, you expect people to be friendly . . . or at least sociable. I’m telling you, Doc, Dinkin’s Bay is changing. This place used to be more of a crazy little family, but now the rich ones come and go, and Mack doesn’t give a damn as long as they bring cash or euros. That, plus Rhonda’s crazy mood swings, I’m starting to feel too old and tired to put up with this bullshit much longer.”

Just then, I saw headlights of a luxury car illuminate the parking lot, then a man get out and open the gate. It was Tomlinson, with his married mistress, returning from South Trail Animal Clinic, where he’d taken the dog.

JoAnn nudged me and said, “Looks like your dog’s home.”

In the two days since we’d returned from the Everglades I’d repeated “I’m not keeping the dog” too many times to count, so I didn’t bother. Instead, I switched the subject to the married mistress by nodding toward the car. “Has anyone seen her? I know she’s been in the lab. There was blond hair in the shower drain, and someone refolded my kitchen towels. Then she neatened up the drawers.”

JoAnn replied, “Except for the towels, it could’ve been Tomlinson.”

“Not a chance. There was still a quart of beer left in the fridge.”

That was enough to convince her. “So he admitted using your bedroom?”

“Why ask?” I replied. “After I’ve been away, I change the sheets and soak my toothbrush in alcohol no matter what. Laboratory grade.”

JoAnn said, “I saw her once . . . at Bailey’s grocery. Just a quick glance, though—I recognized her Mercedes SUV. She’s everything I’ll never be: tall, Nordic, rich, wears tailored clothes—even to grocery-shop—and too damn skinny for tits the size of hers. Plus, she’s married. Not happily, which is obvious, thank god. Otherwise, I don’t think I could bear it. It’s women like her who make me want to curl up in a ball and cry myself into a puddle.”

As if on cue, she appeared with Tomlinson, he laughing at some punch line, full of life and the awareness of a burning fuse in his backside. She was a tall, vertical presence softened by estrogen contours and a halo of golden hair. The two walked up to his dinghy. The dog, at heel, walked with mechanical care—maybe because of the leash clipped to a new collar—but didn’t hesitate to follow the two into the little boat.

That was the first time I saw Cressa Arturo. It would be far from the last.

—

JANET NICHOLES, the wife of one of our guides, Jeth Nicholes, had come racing onto the dock saying she’d spotted Crunch & Des in a nearby wilderness preserve being chased up a tree by a panther. We’d gone tearassing out of there, and the whole thing had been a farce—no Crunch & Des, and I’d ended up with cuts, scrapes, and bruises for my trouble.

Late that night, the moon was still high in the winter sky as I limped toward the boardwalk and my stilthouse. Then I stopped dead because an odd shape blocked my way. A solid shape . . . an immobile darkness in the shadows . . . weighty enough to be threatening, but not tall.

I stopped, squinted, took another step, then stopped again, reaching for my little flashlight. I switched it on, then immediately off again and whispered, “What the hell . . . ?”

A thousand times I had walked this trail, sober, drunk, preoccupied, dazed, and occasionally eager as hell to disrobe whatever lady I had in tow. But this was a new one.

The dog blocked my path. When I had gone running off, he’d tried to follow and I’d ordered him to stay. “Understand? Stay here!”

And here he was. Sitting exactly where I’d left him. The precise spot, as I knew better than anyone could know. The retriever’s posture straightened when I approached, he thumped the ground with his tail a couple of times, but otherwise remained a statue. Even when I switched the light on again, he didn’t budge, although his eyes revealed a mild enthusiasm that suggested he was willing to move if so ordered.

“Amazing,” I said.

The dog’s ears stiffened, possibly while its brain sorted through a vocabulary list. Then his ears relaxed, the word now rejected as unrecognizable.

In my mind, I replayed the scene prior to getting into the truck to look for that damn missing cat. I remembered telling the dog he couldn’t go. But had I also told him to stay? Yes . . . yes, I had. No doubt in my mind.

I looked at my watch—Tomlinson’s watch, actually—a Bathys Benthic with bright green numerals that told me it was ten ’till ten. More than an hour ago, I had told this dog to stay and, by god, here he was. To him, stay wasn’t just a command. It was a mandate.

Despite my throbbing knee and the scratches on my face, I smiled and said, “Who are you?” which brought the retriever to attention. The search for Crunch & Des had been more painful than productive, but the night was suddenly improving.

“Truly amazing,” I said again. Then, as a test, I walked past the dog to the boardwalk without looking back. When I did look, the retriever’s head was turned a full one-eighty, but he hadn’t moved.

Enough testing for one night. I tried the most common release command—Okay!—and watched the dog bounce to his feet. He trotted toward me, circled away, then got derailed by a buttonwood, which he sniffed with expertise. When the ideal spot was located, he hiked a leg and marked the place with an uninterrupted stream that would have put my best and beeriest night to shame.

Comfortable again, the dog’s brain returned to another subject, so he backtracked to where he had dropped—a fish? Yes, a three-pound mullet still kicking, freshly caught. Where the hell had he gotten that? By the time I’d opened the security gate, the dog was heeling to my left but slightly behind because the of narrow walkway, the mullet sideways in his mouth like a bone. The excitement of locating a spot to piss had been replaced by his dominant temperament, which seemed to vary between boredom and dutiful awareness.

I find animal behavior interesting, seldom amusing, but I was having fun with this. Well-trained dogs are a rarity, in my experience. A well-trained retriever—if he had been trained to hunt—was also a valuable commodity. How had this dog ended up in the middle of the Everglades, hunting for food and battling snakes to survive? I would know more after I spoke to Tomlinson. A valuable dog would have had an ID microchip inserted somewhere under his skin and the vet would have found it. Until then, there were a lot of unusual scenarios to imagine.

The mystery was so entertaining, my bruised knee was forgotten. Nor did I notice that I had a visitor waiting on the porch outside my lab. When I hit the dock lights, though, she was there in the shadows of the upper deck: lean and blond, an elegant silhouette sitting in one of my cane-backed rockers. Looked right at home as if she’d enjoyed the view from that spot many times.

Maybe she had.

It was Tomlinson’s mistress. The married woman who’d claimed her wealthy husband didn’t have a clue.

Not a lie, exactly. But neither was it true.