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He nodded, eyes wide. “Sí.”

“I still haven’t talked to Hart, gracias to you, Mr. Rook. He claims my father has a sixteenth-century relic that belongs to Cuba. Does he?”

The slender man shrugged. “I hope so. There are Cubans who would smile and smile, as the great Shakespeare tells us, to see eels in Jack’s ribs, if you follow me. ‘Full fathom five.’”

She glared. “Do you and my father own an Cessna Amphibian with the ID ‘N678ST’?”

Again he looked skyward. He appeared to find no more answers there now than earlier. “There is a plane in which we have an interest, whose ID I don’t recall. But ‘own’ is perhaps not the word. Fees may be in arrears.”

“I bet. Talk to me about this gold relic.”

He shook his head emphatically. “I hope it’s the object you’ve brought me? Is it?’’

She said, “I brought a case.”

He looked puzzled. “A case of what?”

“No, a metal courier case.” She said she had found it behind a panel in the fuselage of the King of the Sky. “Were you planning to fly with him someplace in the King to deliver this case?”

Jack, sighed Raffy, was now unfortunately in no position to fly anywhere and he, Raffy, couldn’t fly a kite much less a Piper Warrior. Carefully smoothing a long thin cigarillo and placing it, unlit, in his mouth, the Cuban added quietly, “Where is this case?”

“Why should I give it to you?”

His large eyes narrowed. “Because I’ll get you in to see Jack, without the cops, who frankly have got a fixation to put your papa away for, well, the rest of his life, pretty much.” He crossed nicely shaped brown slender hands over his shirt. “I swear to you on the honor of the Ramirez family. On the souls of my mother, alive in Havana, and my father dead before his time, and my grandpapa, killed by the son-of-a-bitch CIA, I swear I’ll take you to Jack!” He kissed a tiny cross on a thin gold chain around his neck. “I’m not necessarily a believer”—he showed her the cross—“but interested in all possibilities.”

Annie paced a circle around him. “What’s inside Dad’s courier case? It was locked.”

“You don’t know?”

She grimaced sarcastically. “What is it, a million dollars in cash?”

His eyes dilated but he scrunched his thin shoulders up toward his ponytail. “Honestly and truthfully you need to ask Jack.” Scooting sideways, he collected his small knapsack from the curb.

Annie’s frustration heated her like a rash. “Fine! I’ve also got a large emerald of his. Very large.”

The large brown eyes took on a glitter. “With you?”

She shook her head. “Back at the hotel. In the room safe. The courier case is back there too.”

Puffing nervously on his cigarillo, the Cuban walked away from her. With a smoothly languid movement, he opened his knapsack and slipped his hand inside it. “I want the emerald and I want the case.”

“Well, you can’t have either.”

In a sudden move, Rook pulled out a large silver revolver, so long in its barrel that Annie laughed. “Where did you get that thing?”

“My abuelo, grandpapa, Simon left it to me, if you want to know.” With the gun, he gestured at her ominously, smiling his sad sweet smile. “God’s truth, I’ve got nothing to lose. Go with the flow, Annie. We’re going to your hotel room and you’ll give me your papa’s property. To quote the Buddha, I think it was, you can’t step in the same river twice. But life has taught me that you can, more or less, by watching where you go, avoid slipping on the dog-doo of our human condition and breaking your neck. Could I use your phone to call a cab?”

Chapter 31

Without Reservations

Within ten minutes of Rook’s call, a battered taxi appeared in an outburst of black smoke and backfires. A young man drove it, whom Rook introduced as his “cousin” Julio. In exchange for sixty dollars in cash, borrowed from Annie, this young man drove them to the Dorado and allowed Rook to remove a guitar in a black cardboard case from the trunk of his cab.

“And you still owe me a hundred,” the driver growled at Rook as he let them off at the hotel