Back at Wicker Wharf, Cray excused himself to take a nap, and Luke and Barclay and Melody headed for the vendor hall. I talked Neil into taking a walk around the pool bars so I could learn what he thought about the shipwreck rum.
“You OK?” I asked him as we stood under a palm tree on the fringes of the revelry and sipped delicious Mai Tais by Chicago’s Lost Lake, featuring macadamia nut orgeat.
“I don’t know why I thought that charlatan might have a lead on the Lord Archibald, but I’m disappointed,” he said.
“You don’t even know if that shipwreck is connected to your grandfather’s disappearance, do you?”
“You’re right. I’m grasping at straws. Anyway, the more interesting point is that Winston Reckel is supplying the guy with fake rum.”
“Well, real rum. Just not shipwreck rum. Maybe Winston doesn’t even know it’s fake.”
“Possibly,” he said.
“Then again, the bottle didn’t even look like the one Fizz had. Do you think Winston is trading the real stuff for himself and the knowledgeable collectors and putting one over on guys like Thor the treasure hunter?”
“Thor?” came a familiar voice from right behind us.
I spun around to see Val, a drink in her hand.
She stepped closer. “You two weren’t at that stupid treasure museum, were you?”
“A little field trip,” Neil said. “You know the guy?”
She laughed. “I know he’s as genuine as a three-dollar bill. He might’ve flirted with treasure hunting here and there, but most of the stuff in that museum is a joke, including the rum. He actually bought the museum from another guy, thinking it was full of gold coins and other valuable stuff. When he had it appraised, the insurance people told him it was ninety percent fake. The real stuff had been sold right out from under him.”
“Sucks for him,” I said.
“Yes, it does,” she said. “It’s too bad, too, because I was hoping to learn more about the Lord Archibald from him.”
I raised my eyebrows at Neil.
“What’s your interest in the shipwreck?” Neil asked in his calm way. Which was good, because I would’ve done something embarrassing, like jump and squeal.
Val looked around and lowered her voice. “I heard a story when I was in Ireland consulting, helping a tiki bar launch in Dublin. There were some drunk guys who came in one night talking about lost treasure. They looked and sounded like money men, a little bit dangerous. I know it sounds fanciful, but it was a slow night, and I found a reason to sit in the booth behind theirs. I love a good story. And they were talking about rum from the Lord Archibald. Some kind of special rum in a special bottle, extraordinarily valuable.”
“The rum Fizz had is extraordinarily valuable, isn’t it?” Neil asked.
“Sure, but this sounded like something … unusual. Anyway, since then, researching the ship has been kind of a hobby for me. Honestly, I’m no treasure hunter. But if a bottle of that stuff will give me the coin to open another bar in New York, I’d be very interested.”
“Have you had any luck?” I asked.
She gave me one of her hard stares. “Not much. I found an antique dealer in London who said he had a letter from the captain. You know, the one who turned pirate? The dealer said it was in code and wouldn’t let me look at it unless I showed him I had the money to buy it. Of course, I didn’t. The next time I asked him about it, he said it was stolen.”
“Stolen! Sounds like somebody is on the same trail you are,” I said.
“Maybe. Or he was bullshitting me.” She took another sip of her cocktail. “I think he wanted to be paid in something other than money, if you know what I mean. And I’ve had it with that kind of crap from men. They’re either trying to seduce me or rumsplaining. No offense,” she said to Neil.
He chuckled. “None taken. I don’t deal in crap, myself. And I wouldn’t presume to rumsplain any rums to you.”
She nodded at him. “I can buy that.” She tossed her head, flipping her pink bangs out of her eyes for a second. “Later.”
“You like her, don’t you?” I asked Neil. Argh. It was the rum talking.
“I do like her.” His tone was innocent. Amused. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah. I think I do. Though she can be scary sometimes.”
He laughed. “That’s part of her charm. And now I’m going to keep my eye out for a letter from the captain of the Lord Archibald.”
“Pepper!” I looked up to see Gina coming toward me in a fabulous tropical dress (I really needed to check out the vendors), Larry trailing after her like a puppy, and my real puppy straining at her leash to get to me.
“Hey, Gina! Hey, Astra!” I leaned down and with one arm, scooped up the pup, who licked my face and stole the lime wheel off my drink. Astra swallowed it before I could snatch it back.
I sighed and handed my cup to Neil. “You’re such a sweetie,” I cooed to the dog as she panted in my face. “Yes, you are. Dumb, but incredibly cute.”
“She’s having fun. Everybody loves her,” Gina said as Neil and Larry greeted each other. “Though she kicked up a fuss earlier that had me kind of worried.”
I scratched behind Astra’s ears. “What do you mean?”
“When we were walking down the sidewalk over there, we almost got mowed down by some guy in a hoodie. Astra acted like she wanted to take a bite out of him. But he was gone too fast. Headed toward the parking lot.”
Neil and I exchanged a glance. “When was this?” Neil asked.
“About lunchtime?”
“Did he have a backpack?” I asked Gina.
“Maybe. I was too busy trying to keep Astra in check to notice. She’s so sweet to everybody, I thought it was weird.”
“Yeah, that’s not like her at all. Why don’t you take a break?” I told Gina. “I’ve got to get ready for tonight. I’ll give Astra a little walk before I head for the room.”
“That would be awesome,” Gina said. “Um … Larry asked me to go with him to Pau Hana tonight. Would that be OK? I mean, will Astra be all right?”
I looked at the hot, happy dog. “She’ll be exhausted after all this partying. I’m sure she’ll just want to sleep. She’ll be OK in the room for a few hours.” I put her on the ground and grabbed the leash from Gina.
On impulse, I turned to Neil. “Want to go for a walk?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve had any time for the weight room.”
Huh. Neil used weights? I thought he mainly lifted bags of ice. This explained a lot about his hidden muscles.
“Let’s walk by the marina,” I said. “I want to see the water.” I also wanted to see if I could get a sense of where hoodie guy might’ve been going—assuming it was the same guy who beat up Winston Reckel. If he was headed to a getaway car, then he probably wasn’t even attending Hookahakaha. We’d never find him.
Neil dropped our empty cups in a bin. With Astra trotting ahead of us, we strolled out of the hotel courtyard, through the parking lot and to the walkway that bordered the marina. The docks were lined with shiny boats, chrome glinting in the sun. A breeze from the east hinted of the ocean. The water glittered, suggesting refreshment, even if we were sweating.
Astra seemed thrilled to have new things to smell and pee on as we gawked at the boats, which got bigger and bigger as we headed toward the Intracoastal Waterway.
“Too bad I’m not into boats,” I said. “These are gorgeous.”
“Beautiful. I have nothing in common with these people,” Neil said to my chuckle. “You know, this quote keeps coming back to me.”
“When don’t you have a quote rattling around in that head of yours?”
“I don’t think they rattle. It’s not like it’s empty in there.”
I laughed. “Definitely not. The quote?”
“Well, you know I have this thing for reading old temperance literature.”
I quirked my mouth at him. “No, I don’t know this. Why would you put yourself through that?”
“It’s interesting,” Neil said. “And sometimes it has a point. That movement arose out of suffering. I mean, Prohibition was a disaster, but I get it. Not everyone has the good relationship with alcohol that we do.”
“Granted,” I said. “I guess that’s a good perspective for a bartender to have, especially when you have to ‘86’ someone.”
“At The Junction Box, I inform them they’ve been cut off with a pre-printed coaster laid over a glass of water so they can leave quietly with their dignity intact.”
“Oooo, I might have to steal that idea. But wait … what’s the quote?”
“Oh, right. It’s from a temperance poem called ‘The Rumseller’s Dream’ I found in an 1887 education journal. I memorized the first stanza because it was so, I don’t know, melodramatic.” Neil took a breath as I looked at him expectantly and launched into the verse:
The Rumseller dozed in his easy chair,
At the close of a busy day.
And before him passed in dreams, as he slept,
A long and sad array
Of those whose lives had been wrecked by rum,
'Till scorched by its fiery breath,—
They had gone to their graves in untimely haste,
Or worse—to a living death.
I remembered to close my mouth after a second of processing the words. “That’s eerie.”
“I know,” Neil agreed. “It’s not about murder, obviously, but it’s creepy. It’s about all the lives the rum seller has ruined. He sees a parade of them and mends his ways.”
“Well, I’m not mending my ways anytime soon.”
“I should hope not. Not in the middle of Hookahakaha.”
And then I almost fell over when Astra dug in her feet at a cluster of bushes by the hotel’s ballroom building, straining against the leash, refusing to move as she barked at the bushes.
“Come on, Astra. Do you have to poo?” I asked as Neil snickered.
Astra whined and surged forward. The leash snapped right out of my hands.
“Damn it!” She scrambled under the bushes as I tried to grab the leash, afraid she’d run off and be attacked by an iguana or something. “Astra! Get out here!”
Neil headed farther down the sidewalk to try to head her off.
A minute later, a triumphant Astra emerged from the bushes, her face covered in tiny sand spurs, which are these horrible, thorny little things that adored dog hair. And she had something unwieldy, dark and smelly in her mouth. Something made of fabric.
“Rum,” I murmured as I got a whiff. I grabbed her leash and tugged the object out of her teeth. “Good girl.”
“What is it?” Neil asked, taking it from me.
“It’s a bag. It smells like rum.”
“That must be why she wanted it.” He grinned. “As a present for you.”
“Smart-ass.” I took it back and turned it over. It was a backpack. A backpack with a small, iridescent triangle on the front pocket that flashed in the sun. “Oh my God, Neil. This is the backpack the jumping thief had when he stole those bottles from Winston Reckel.”
“No way.” He looked closely at the bag. “EO. Does that mean something to you?”
The letters were in the little triangular patch. A line seemed to encircle the O, like a plane orbiting the Earth. “Orbiting the Earth,” I murmured. “EO. ErthOrbyt.”
“Wait,” Neil said. “You mean Arnold Preiss’s company? They don’t make bags, do they?”
“But they do promo items, right? All companies do. Just the sort of thing an employee might carry around. Or a CEO.”
Neil looked skeptical. “See what’s inside.”
I gingerly opened the bag. An alcoholic vapor wafted out of its depths. I angled the inside toward the sun. Something reflected the light. Fragments. “Broken glass,” I said. “Thick, old glass. This has to be the bag.”
“Maybe. Probably. But the chances of it being Arnold Preiss’s bag are pretty astronomical.”
“Are they?” Astra sensed my excitement and barked. “It fits, sort of. He’s an obsessive collector. And how many people at Hookahakaha would have this bag?”
“Why would he dump it?”
“Evidence. If he got searched, no one would find it on his yacht if he left it behind in the bushes.”
“His yacht?” Neil looked around. “His yacht is here?”
“Yeah, that’s what he told me. We should go see him.”
He shook his head. “There’s no way a billionaire tech CEO is stupid enough to use his own branded bag to rob a rum collector.”
“He didn’t expect to screw up and break the bottles,” I said. “And maybe he’s not cut out for crime.”
“Ha,” Neil said. “Or jumping over balconies?”
“He climbs mountains, doesn’t he?” I asked.
“That doesn’t mean he jumps off them. At least, not without a rope.”
“Up. Down. It’s all the same. He won’t hurt us. He’s into computers, not kung fu.”
“And yet he might’ve beaten the hell out of Winston.”
I couldn’t fault his logic, but I smiled up at him. “Come on. Let’s take a look around. You can protect me.”
Neil rolled his eyes. “Astra will protect us. Let’s stow that bag somewhere. Let him think we have it safe, not give it to him outright.”
“These bushes worked pretty well before.”
“OK.” I put it back where Astra had found it and noted where it was in case we wanted to pick it up again later. Sensing adventure, the dog didn’t seem to mind me re-burying her treasure. “Now let’s see if we can spot the yacht.”
Neil was already doing a three-sixty. “I spotted it.”
I followed his gaze and swallowed hard. There was no mistaking it. At the far end of the walkway, where the biggest boats were docked, a sleek, silver-gray yacht dominated the view. It was easily half the length of a football field, with multiple decks and a bunch of antennas and domes on the top. It looked like a supervillain’s battleship. And on its bow, it featured the exact same logo that was on the rum-soaked bag.
As we walked in that direction, I carried Astra and used a comb from my bottomless bag to get the sand spurs out of her fur. She was very patient and happy to be held, but my mind was humming.
As we got closer, I saw a couple of uniformed crew moving around the big boat. A guy on the top deck in some kind of paramilitary uniform cradled an assault rifle as he scanned the horizon.
“What the hell does Preiss need a goon for?” I asked.
“Prestige?” Neil suggested. “Also, he really is worth a bazillion dollars. Security is probably something he worries about.”
“He invited me to come check out his yacht,” I said. “It should be no problem getting on board.”
“Pepper, think for a minute. He just saw you and me in Winston Reckel’s suite—I mean, if it was Preiss. Or maybe it wasn’t. What if the jumper was the guy with the big gun or some other ‘security’? Whoever it is could identify us and realize we know something. Are you sure getting on the billionaire battleship with a man who almost killed Winston Reckel is the best plan?”
I was torn. One, I hated boats. They made me barf. But a big boat standing still wouldn’t be so bad.
Two, I’d always wanted to see inside a yacht.
Three, I didn’t want to die.
“You may have a point,” I said. “Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t know we’re on to him.”
“And if he doesn’t, he’ll probably come to Pau Hana tonight for the big bash and act like everything’s normal. He might even get drunk, let his guard down.”
“And I can corner him in the bar and make him talk.”
A corner of Neil’s mouth twitched. “Right.”
“But we’re going to go get that bag Astra found and save it for Detective Flores, OK?”
Astra barked in agreement as Neil nodded.
Time to get all tiki’d up and ready for battle.