Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [68]
Charlie and I stared at each other as we waited.
“Is this what I think it is?” Charlie said. “Are we actually making some progress?”
“Shhh,” I said. “Hold your breath. We don’t have the address yet.”
Chapter 84
AFTER AGREEING that neither one of us could physically set foot on another airplane until morning, Charlie and I decided on dinner instead.
“I’ll behave, too. I’ll drink only light rum,” Charlie said as our taxi let us out on crowded Duval Street.
We sat in a booth at Jack Flats. The place had an awesome, long, beat-up wooden bar and old black-and-white photographs of cigar factory workers who had populated the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Outside the open stall-like doors, Duval was the same as ever. Think a drunken Greenwich Village block party in New York, with flip-flops. Only it was even crazier now that the Independence Celebration was in full swing.
I stared, amazed, at the Yanks-Rays game playing above the crowded bar beside a neon Dolphins helmet. I’d been so busy in the last few crazy days, I’d almost forgotten that there was a sport called baseball. I needed to call Emma as well. I decided I’d text her once I got back to my hotel.
“Don’t tell me. You’re a Yankees fan, too,” Charlie said as I clapped at a Posada double. “Could you try just a tiny bit more not to make me hate you even more?”
“Not a chance,” I said before finishing my beer and standing. “Watch my seat, and I counted my wings, by the way, Harvard boy.”
The first thing I noticed as I headed back to our table a few minutes later was that there was a police car at the curb in front of the open doors. The second was that there was somebody in my seat.
When I realized who that somebody was, I stopped in midstride in the middle of the bar as if I’d hit an invisible wall.
Chapter 85
I STOOD THERE. The people at the bar and the multiple ball games on the TVs above them suddenly seemed out of rhythm, somehow both too slow and too fast. The sound from the bar’s speakers, which had been playing the classic rock song “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” alternately blasted and dipped, as if a child were playing with the volume knob. The cigar factory workers now sent me malignant stares from the vintage photographs. So did a stocky waitress, jostling past me, as I stood in the middle of the crowded room, my lungs and heart seizing.
Peter sat in the booth with Charlie less than ten feet away on my right. He was wearing his dark blue police uniform, his thick, chiseled arms as deeply tanned as I remembered them. It was as if he hadn’t aged at all.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the butt of his gun on his Sam Browne belt. In a moment, he would turn and see me, I thought. In a moment, he would stand and draw and fire his gun into my face. People or no people, the fact that almost two decades had passed meant nothing. Killing was what Peter did.
I was suddenly extremely aware of my heartbeat. I could feel the systole and diastole of my heart clenching and releasing as I waited for Peter to catch me out of the corner of his eye.
But after one second and then two, miraculously he didn’t turn. After a third moment, my paralysis lessened, and I was suddenly able to move. I mustered up the last iota of my will to live. I backpedaled, turned, and squeezed into a place along the crowded bar.
“So you’re still trying to pull some tricks up in Boca,” Peter said to Charlie at my back, as I eavesdropped. “I mean, you seem like a decent lush, Baylor. Why represent a piece of garbage like Harris? Controversial client like that is bound to stir up people’s emotions. I’d hate to see you become a victim of a violent crime.”
“Is that a threat?” Charlie said.
“Just some friendly advice,” Peter said. “Your own personal public service announcement from Key West’s chief of police.”
“Don’t you have any drunks to beat up?” Charlie said.
“Fresh out,” Peter said. “But if you’re free, we could