Sacred (13 page)

I’d never been on a private jet before, so I really had nothing to compare it to. I couldn’t even make a leap and compare it with being on a private yacht or a private island because I’d never been on one of those, either. About the only “private” thing I owned was my car, a rebuilt ’63 Porsche. So…being on a private jet was a lot like being in my car. Except the jet was bigger. And faster. And had a bar. And flew.

Lurch and the Weeble picked us up at my apartment in a dark blue limousine, which was also a lot bigger than my car. Actually, it was bigger than my apartment.

From my place, we drove down Columbia Road past several onlookers who were probably wondering who was getting married or which high school was holding a prom in mid-March at nine in the morning. Then we glided through rush hour traffic and the Ted Williams Tunnel to the airport.

Instead of entering the traffic heading toward the main terminals, we looped around and headed toward the southern tip of the airport landmass, drove past several freight terminals and food packaging warehouses, a convention hotel I’d never even known was there, and pulled up in front of the General Aviation Headquarters.

Lurch went inside as Angie and I rifled the wet and dry bar compartments for orange juice and peanuts, stuffed our pockets, and debated whether to clip two champagne flutes.

Lurch returned, followed by a short guy who jogged to a brown and yellow minivan with the words
PRECISION AVIATION
on the side.

“I want a limousine,” I said to Angie.

“Parking in front of your apartment would be a bitch.”

“I wouldn’t need my apartment anymore.” I leaned forward, asked the Weeble, “Does this thing have closets?”

“It has a trunk.” He shrugged.

I turned back to Angie. “It has a trunk.”

We pulled in behind the van and followed it to a guard kiosk. Lurch and the van driver got out, showed their licenses to the guard, and he noted the numbers on a pad and handed Lurch a pass, which Lurch placed on the dash when he got back in. The orange barrier arm in front of the van rose and we drove past the kiosk onto the tarmac.

The van pulled around a small building and we followed, and cruised along a path between two runways, with several more spread out around us, the pale bulbs of their lights glistening in the morning dew. I saw cargo planes and sleek jets and small white puddle-jumpers, fuel trucks and two idling ambulances, a parked fire engine, three other limousines. It was as if we’d entered into a formerly hidden world, which reeked of power and influence and lives so important they couldn’t be bothered with normal modes of transport or something so banal as a schedule designed by others. We were in a world where a first-class seat on a commercial airliner
was considered second-class, and the true corridors of power lay before us dotted with landing lights.

I guessed which was Trevor Stone’s jet before we pulled to a stop in front of it. It stood out even in the company of Cessnas and Lears. It was a white Gulfstream with the thin slanted beak of the Concorde, a body as streamlined as a bullet, wings tucked tight against the hull, a tail the shape of a dorsal fin. A mean-looking machine, a white hawk in holding pattern.

We took our bags from the limousine and another Precision employee took them from our hands and placed them in the luggage compartment by the tail.

I said to Lurch, “What’s a jet like this run—about seven million?”

He chuckled.

“He’s amused,” I said to Angie.

“Busting a gut,” she said.

“I believe Mr. Stone paid twenty-six million for this Gulfstream.”

He said “this” Gulfstream, as if there were a couple more back in the garage in Marblehead.

“Twenty-six.” I nudged Angie. “Bet the salesman was asking twenty-eight, but they talked him down.”

On board, we met Captain Jimmy McCann and his copilot, Herb. They were a jolly pair, big smiles and bushy eyebrows raised behind mirrored glasses. They assured us we were in good hands, don’t you worry, haven’t crashed one in months, ha ha ha. Pilot humor. The best. Can’t get enough of it.

We left them to play with their dials and their torques and think up amusing ways to make us lose bowel control and whimper, and we headed back into the main compartment.

It, too, seemed bigger than my apartment, but maybe I was just star-struck.

There was a bar, a piano, three single beds in the rear. The bathroom had a shower in it. Plush lavender carpeting covered the floor. Six leather seats were spread out along the right and left side and two of them had cherrywood tables riveted to the floor in front of them. Each seat reclined like a BarcaLounger.

Five of the seats were empty. The sixth was occupied by Graham Clifton, aka the Weeble. I’d never even seen him leave the limousine. He sat facing us, a leather-bound notebook in his lap, a closed fountain pen on top of it.

“Mr. Clifton,” I said, “I didn’t know you’d be joining us.”

“Mr. Stone thought you could use an extra hand down there. I know the Gulf Coast of Florida well.”

“We don’t usually need extra hands,” Angie said and sat down across from him.

He shrugged. “Mr. Stone insisted.”

I picked up the phone attached to my seat console. “Well, let’s see if we can’t change Mr. Stone’s mind.”

He placed his hand on mine, pushed the phone back into the console. For such a small man, he was very strong.

“Mr. Stone doesn’t change his mind,” he said.

I looked into his tiny black eyes, and saw only my reflection blinking back at me.

We landed at Tampa International at one, and I felt the sticky heat in the air even before our wheels touched down on the tarmac without so much as a bump. Captain Jimmy and copilot Herb might have seemed like goofball knuckleheads, and maybe they were in all other as
pects of their lives, but by the way they handled that plane during takeoff, landing, and one bit of turbulence over Virginia, I suspected they could land a DC-10 on the tip of a pencil in the middle of a typhoon.

My first impression of Florida after the heat was one of green. Tampa International looked to have erupted from the center of a mangrove forest, and everywhere I looked I saw shades of green—the dark blackish green of the mangrove leaves themselves, the wet gray-green of their trunks, the grassy small hills that bordered the ramps into and out of the airport, the bright teal tramcars that crisscrossed the terminals like something out of
Blade Runner
if it had been directed by Walt Disney.

Then my gaze rose to the sky and found a shade of blue I’d never seen before, so rich and bright against the white coral arches of the expressway that I would have sworn it had been painted there. Pastels, I thought, as we blinked against the light streaming through the windows of the tramcar—I hadn’t seen this many assaultive pastels since the nightclub scene in the mid-eighties.

And the humidity. Jesus. I’d gotten a whiff of it as I left the jet, and it was like a hot sponge had punched a hole in my chest and burrowed straight into my lungs. The temperature in Boston had been in the mid-thirties when we left, and that had seemed warm after such a long winter. Here, it had to be eighty, maybe more, and the moist, furry blanket of humidity seemed to kick it up another twenty degrees.

“I’ve got to quit smoking,” Angie said as we arrived at the terminal.

“Or breathing,” I said. “One of the two.”

Trevor, of course, had a car waiting for us. It was a beige Lexus four-door with Georgia plates and Lurch’s
southern double for a driver. He was tall and thin and of an age somewhere between fifty and ninety. His name was Mr. Cushing, and I had a feeling he’d never been called by his first name in his life. Even his parents had probably called him Mr. Cushing. He wore a black suit and driver’s cap in the broiling white heat, but when he opened the door for Angie and myself, his skin was drier than talc. “Good afternoon, Miss Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie. Welcome to Tampa.”

“Afternoon,” we said.

He closed the door and we sat in the air conditioning as he walked around and opened the front passenger door for the Weeble. Mr. Cushing took his place behind the wheel and handed three envelopes to the Weeble, who took one and handed two back to us.

“Your hotel keys,” Mr. Cushing informed us as he pulled away from the curb. “Miss Gennaro, you are staying in Suite Six-eleven. Mr. Kenzie, you are in Six-twelve. Mr. Kenzie, you’ll also find in your envelope a set of keys to a car Mr. Stone has rented on your behalf. It’s parked in the hotel parking lot. The parking space number is on the back of the envelope.”

The Weeble opened a personal computer the size of a small paperback, pressed a few buttons. “We’re staying at the Harbor Island Hotel,” he said. “Why don’t we all go back and shower and then we’ll drive to the Courtyard Marriott where this Jeff Price supposedly stayed?”

I glanced at Angie. “Sounds fine.”

The Weeble nodded and his laptop beeped. I leaned forward and saw that he’d called up a map of Tampa on the screen. It morphed into a series of city grids, each growing tighter and tighter until a blinking dot I assumed was the Courtyard Marriott sat in the center of
the screen and the lines around it filled with street names.

Any moment I expected to hear a tape-recorded voice tell me what my mission was.

“This tape will self-destruct in three seconds,” I said.

“What?” Angie said.

“Never mind.”

Harbor Island looked to be man-made and relatively new. It grew out of the older section of downtown, and we reached it by crossing a white bridge the length of a small bus. There were restaurants and several boutiques and a yacht basin that glittered gold in the sun. Everything seemed to be following a coral, Caribbean motif, lots of sandblasted whites and ivory stucco and crushed-shell walkways.

As we pulled up to the hotel, a pelican swooped in toward the windshield and both Angie and I ducked, but the freaky-looking bird caught a bit of wind and rode it in a low swoop onto the top of a piling by the dock.

“Friggin’ thing was huge,” Angie said.

“And awfully brown.”

“And very prehistoric-looking.”

“I don’t like them, either.”

“Good,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel silly.”

Mr. Cushing dropped us at the door and the bellmen took our bags and one said, “Right this way, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” even though we hadn’t introduced ourselves.

“I’ll meet you at your room at three,” the Weeble said.

“You bet,” I said.

We left him chatting with Mr. Cushing and followed our impossibly tanned bellboy to an elevator and up to our rooms.

The suites were enormous and looked down on Tampa Bay and the three bridges that intersected it, the milky green water sparkling under the sun and all of it so pretty and pristine and placid I wasn’t sure how long I could take it before I puked.

Angie came through the door that adjoined the suites and we stepped out onto the balcony and closed the sliding glass door behind us.

She’d changed from basic black city clothes into light-blue jeans and a white mesh tank top, and I tried to keep both my mind and my eyes off the way the tank top hugged her upper body so I could discuss the business at hand.

“How fast do you want to dump the Weeble?” I said.

“Now isn’t soon enough.” She leaned over the rail and puffed lightly on her cigarette.

“I don’t trust the room,” I said.

She shook her head. “Or the rental car.”

Sunlight streaked through her black hair and lit the chesnut highlights that had been hiding under all that darkness since last summer. Heat flushed her cheeks.

Maybe this place wasn’t so bad.

“Why’d Trevor put the pressure on all of a sudden?”

“The Weeble you mean?”

“And Cushing.” I waved my arm at the room behind me. “All this shit.”

She shrugged. “He’s getting frantic about Desiree.”

“Maybe.”

She turned and leaned back against the railing, the
bay framing her, her face tilted to the sun. “Plus, you know how it is with rich guys.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Well, it’s like if you go out on a date with one—”

“Hang on, let me get a pen for this.”

She flicked her cigarette ash at me. “They’re always trying to impress you with how fast they can get the world to jump at a snap of their fingers, how every wish they think you have can be predicted and accommodated. So you go out and valet people open your car door, doormen open other doors, maître d’s pull out your chair, and the rich guy orders your meal for you. This is supposed to make you feel good, but it makes you feel enslaved instead, like you don’t have a mind of your own. Or,” she said, “a choice in the matter. Trevor probably wants us to feel that every one of his resources is at our disposal.”

“But you still don’t trust the room or the rental car.”

She shook her head. “He’s used to power. He’s probably not very good at trusting others to do what he’d do on his own if he were healthy. And once Jay went missing…”

“He wants to know our every move.”

“Exactly.”

I said, “I like the guy and all…”

“But too bad for him,” she agreed.

Mr. Cushing was standing by his Lexus out front when we stopped to look out the window from the mezzanine level. I’d gotten a look at the parking garage on the way in and saw that its exit came out the other side of the hotel and emptied onto a small street of boutiques. From where Cushing stood, he couldn’t see the exit or the small bridge that led off the island.

Our rental car was a light blue Dodge Stealth and had been rented from a place called Prestige Imports on Dale Mabry Boulevard. We found the car and drove it out of the lot and off Harbor Island.

Angie navigated from a map on her lap and we turned onto Kennedy Boulevard and then found Dale Mabry and drove north.

“Lotta pawnshops,” Angie said, looking out the window.

“And strip malls,” I said. “Half of them closed, half of them new.”

“Why don’t they just reopen the closed ones instead of building new ones?”

“It’s a mystery,” I said.

The Florida we’d seen until now had been the postcard Florida, it seemed—coral and mangroves and palm trees, glittering water and pelicans. But as we drove Dale Mabry for at least fifteen of the flattest miles I’ve ever driven, its eight lanes spread out wide and pointing infinitely through waves of rubbery heat at the overturned bowl of blue sky, I wondered if this wasn’t the real Florida.

Angie was right about the pawnshops and I was right about the strip malls. There was at least one of each per block. And then there were bars with cleverly subtle names like Hooters and Melons and Cheeks broken up by fast-food drive-through places and even drive-through liquor stores for the drunk on the go. Pocking the landscape within all this were several trailer parks and trailer park dealerships and more used car lots than I’d ever seen on the Lynnway Automile.

Angie tugged at her waist. “Jesus, these jeans are hot.”

“Take ’em off then.”

She reached over and turned on the air conditioning, hit the switch on the console between our seats and the power windows rolled up.

“How’s that?” she said.

“I still like my suggestion better.”

“You don’t like the Stealth?” Eddie, the rental agent, seemed confused. “Everyone likes the Stealth.”

“I’m sure they do,” Angie said. “But we’re looking for something a little less conspicuous.”

“Wow,” Eddie said as another rental agent came in off the lot through the sliding glass doors behind him. “Hey, Don, they don’t like the Stealth.”

Don screwed up his sunburned face and looked at us like we’d just beamed down from Jupiter. “Don’t like the Stealth? Everyone likes the Stealth.”

“So we’ve heard,” I said. “But it doesn’t quite fit our purposes.”

“Well what y’all looking for—an Edsel?” Don said.

Eddie loved that one. He slapped his hand on the counter and he and Don made noises I can only describe as hee-hawing.

“What we all are looking for,” Angie said, “is something like that green Celica you have in the parking lot.”

“The convertible?” Eddie said.

“Sure ’nuff,” Angie said.

We took the car as is, even though it needed a wash and gas. We told Don and Eddie we were in a rush, and they seemed even more confused by that than our desire to trade in the Stealth.

“A rush?” Don said, as he checked our driver’s license information against that on the original rental agreement Mr. Cushing had filled out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s when you have places to go in a hurry.”

Surprisingly, he didn’t ask me what “hurry” meant. He just shrugged and tossed me the keys.

We stopped at a restaurant called the Crab Shack to pore over the map and figure out a plan.

“This shrimp is unbelievable,” Angie said.

“So’s this crab,” I said. “Try some.”

“Trade.”

We did, and her shrimp was indeed succulent.

“And cheap,” Angie said.

The place was literally a shack of clapboard and old piling wood, the tables pocked and scarred, the food served on paper plates, our plastic pitcher of beer poured into waxed paper cups. But the food, better than most seafood I’d ever had in Boston, cost about a fourth of what I was used to paying.

We sat on the back patio, in the shade, overlooking a swamp of sea grass and beige water that ended about fifty yards away at the back of, yep, a strip mall. A white bird with legs as long as Angie’s and a neck to match landed on the patio railing and looked down at our food.

“Jesus,” Angie said. “What the hell is that?”

“That’s an egret,” I said. “It’s harmless.”

“How do you know what it is?”

“National Geographic.”

“Oh. You’re sure it’s harmless?”

“Ange,” I said.

She shuddered. “So I’m not a nature girl. Sue me.”

The egret jumped off the rail and landed by my elbow, its thin head up by my shoulder.

“Christ,” Angie said.

I picked up a crab leg and flung it out over the rail
and the egret’s wing hit my ear as it took off over the rail and dove for the water.

“Great,” Angie said. “Now you’ve encouraged it.”

I picked up my plate and cup. “Come on.”

We went inside and studied the map as the egret returned and stared at us through the glass. Once we had a pretty good idea where we were going, we folded up the map, and finished our food.

“You think she’s alive?” Angie said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And Jay,” she said. “You think he came here after her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me either. We don’t know much, do we?”

I watched as the egret craned its long neck to get a better look at me through the glass.

“No,” I said. “But we’re quick studies.”