Tuesday, September 4
1700 hours
Matecumbe Key, Florida
Sonny put the Heckler down on the table and rubbed his left hand. It felt like a radiator and looked like a ten-pound roast under the bandages. His eyes hurt from the Leupold scope and he was sick of the crying of gulls.
Sonny had been in Islamorada for three days and nights, watching the Madelaine at her slip in the marina. It hadn’t been hard to pick her out. The Madelaine was quite a boat.
She was forty-eight feet of Hatteras sports fisher, gull-white, with a double flying bridge and a tower above that, a big radar array and a SatNav receiver, four big whip-style outriggers around the fantail. There were two brass and teak fighting chairs in the fantail and not a sign of rust or rot anywhere. A glittering jewel of a boat that must have cost $300,000.
Sonny’s room in the Ramada Inn across the harbor was perfect for the job. A lot of drapes and a soft shag carpet in cool greens. A big sliding glass door that opened up onto a balcony that ran the length of the motel, ending in a stairway down to the docks. A window in his bedroom opened up over a ten-foot drop into a back lot that led to a side street. If he had to run for it, that would be his exit.
The room had a lot of sound-baffling to absorb the sound of a shot. Sonny had pulled a table and a chair into the middle of the room. The range finder read out the distance at 150 yards.
During the days he’d sit out on the balcony watching the Madelaine and putting antibiotic cream on his wounds, sucking on vitamin C’s and drugging himself with Percodan.
He could still smell Lucas on him, although he had bathed eleven times and scrubbed himself with hard soap. And the sound of his death, that liquid crack and the chuff of Lucas’s last breath in Sonny’s ear, like someone blowing out a candle, and the boneless weight that he had become in a heartbeat, half his skull gone, all there had been of all their times together spilling out onto the blacktop like fruits out of a basket.
Getting the hell out had been interesting.
Trucker’s gloves had hidden the wound in his left hand. He’d cleaned himself up in the washroom of a service station and taken side roads all the way to the airport, with his back muscles crawling, waiting for a siren, seeing State cars here and there but nobody really looking for a blue Caddy yet. He figured he had maybe thirty minutes to dump it before the bulletin got out on the air.
He rolled the Caddy into a long-term lot. A shuttle bus got him to a private charter company. They knew him there. Two hours later he was on a point-to-point Learjet flight to Miami. It cost him $30,000 to help the pilot lose his memory and his records.
The best part of that was the cash he’d found in Keogh’s car. Almost $20,000. It was sweet to think that Keogh’s money was paying for this trip. The thought kept him happy all the way to Islamorada in a Hertz car.
He spent most of his time planning for his shot. He spent no time at all thinking about Keogh not showing up. It was all he had left. There’d be no other chance.
He was going to lay it out like surgery.
When he looked at the boat through the scope, he could see it was going to be a tricky shot. Sometimes a mast would rock into the line. Winds and humid air would affect the ballistics. And the damned boat tended to ride up and sway in her slip every time another boat cruised by. He’d be damned lucky to be able to use the bipod brace.…
Well, hell … he’d be damned lucky to have a shot at the guy at all. He was buying the New York Times in town and the Sunday edition carried a small story about the suicide of a doctor up in Albany and a scandal in something called The Process Group. There was talk about this being connected to Frank Keogh. Then the thing had dropped out of the papers.
There was no FBI coverage around, anyway. The marina was wide open. Wherever they were looking for Sonny, it wasn’t here.
On Monday he had worked out the numbers. A 180-grain .308 would kick out at 2,600 feet per second. The flash suppressor would take some of that off. Even back in the room, there’d be one hell of a bang when he tapped it off. One shot. Maybe two. He didn’t want to go firing a senseless spray of rounds into the boat. There’d be gasoline. The guy would have his wife and the kid with him.
Any luck at all, he’d get a hit value of 2,000 foot pounds out there at 150 yards. The round would shoot flat or drop no more than an inch. There was a lot of stray light around, from the boats and the dock lights and the Whale Harbor Inn. It was possible. If Keogh showed, it was possible.
On Monday they’d been all over the Madelaine, cleaning and washing it, running up the engines in the slip, doing the brightwork—a full-bodied and graceful woman with soft auburn hair and a lanky sunburned teenager with a shaved head.
He had watched her with the boy. She had a fine-boned face and a long neck and a way of holding herself that was graceful without strain. She looked like a grown-up woman and if she was Frank Keogh’s, then … well, that was hard.
Hard for the boy too. It was all hard. So what? Lyle could use his life back, but he wasn’t going to get it. Poole didn’t want to be dead either, poor bastard.
Sometimes it would come to Sonny that Poole had been right all along. Maybe he was getting mean. If they’d just said, Hey, fuck it, back in Denver, Poole and Sonny would be in Costa Rica now.
Okay. He’d screwed up. But not to do it now—that felt like it had all been for nothing. If he finished it, it would be about something.
Too bad for the kid.
Anyway, the kid looked to be old enough to finish his growing on his own. And the woman was a classic. She’d have no trouble finding someone who would be damned glad to have her around on just about any terms.
When she’d walk down the jetty past the sloops and the cruisers, every man would watch her pass, and when she’d pass they would look at each other or down at their drinks and they’d shake their heads and each man would let out a long breath.
It occurred to him around three on Tuesday afternoon that he was watching the woman as much as they were.
It was strange to sit there in his room and feel as if he were floating off the transom, so close he could reach out and put a hand on her cheek.
Maybe it was the medication. Bone to stock on the Heckler, he’d settle the cross hairs on her breast and in the dim half-light of his hotel room he’d raise his right hand and touch the air where her image floated in his mind.
His hand would shake a little. His left hand throbbed and pulsed. His heartbeat would rise and ruffle in his chest. Out there in the bright sunlight, sitting in a deck chair on the fantail of the Madelaine, wearing a gauzy blue dress, tanned and talking to her son, she looked like a Carolina girl, like music over water.
Now she’d get up and say something to the boy and climb up the ladder to the flying bridge, and Sonny would watch her going up, see the way her hips moved under the thin blue dress, see the white panties under it, and when she turned at the top, her breasts would move, and her hair would touch her cheeks, and he would see a darkness in her eyes.…
Christ, he said, moving away from the scope, stepping back into the shadows of his room.
It’s gotta be the Percodan.
That was on Tuesday afternoon.
That evening he watched her kiss the boy and walk along the jetty in the soft tourmaline of sundown in the same blue dress.
Where was she going?
Why did he care?
Still, he tracked her in the scope and he was still following her when she walked up the steps to the hotel and went into Rotten Ralph’s bar.
He took the Heckler down and shoved it under the bed and paced the room for an hour, watching the light changing in the west.
He took two Percodans and lay down on the bed.
There were precisely 87 complete acoustic tiles in the ceiling. Each tile had 39 holes.
That would make a total of … 3,393 holes. Then there were the partials along the wall lines. You’d have to count them individually.…
He got up and looked at himself in the mirror.
Pounds had come off him. His cheeks were gaunt and his eyes were sinking. He felt hot and shaky.
Fuck it. This is a man who needs a drink.