The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [104]
Annie thought about karate-chopping the Cuban and taking the long revolver that he kept nudging at her from inside his knapsack. He was having trouble managing it with his guitar case anyhow. But she decided that doing so would only slow down her getting into her father’s room at Golden Days without involving the police. It was obvious that just as Rook couldn’t fly a kite, much less a plane, so he couldn’t kill a cockroach, much less a naval officer.
They walked together through the Hotel Dorado lobby and took the elevator up to her hotel room. There she felt to the back of the safe for the large emerald. She tossed it at him by its thin gold chain. It fell to the floor and Malpy bit Rook hard on the hand when he bent over to retrieve it.
“My hand!” he cried. It was bleeding. “I play guitar with that hand!”
Annie shrugged. “So why don’t you shoot the dog, you’re such a killer?”
The musician snatched a cloth napkin from an uncollected lunch tray to wrap around his wound. “I’m not necessarily going to kill you.”
“No kidding?”
She noticed a blink of messages on the room’s phone. “Excuse me.” Indecisively he shook the gun to stop her but it was evident he had no instinct for violence.
The first message was from Rook himself, left hours earlier, urging her to “say nothing more!” to Sgt. Daniel Hart of Miami Vice.
The other message was from that same Sergeant Hart, apologizing gruffly. He’d been dealing with Rook, then gotten called in by his division chief and, thanks to Annie, reamed out. He’d be in touch. Sit still.
She slammed down the desk phone. “Why is it my fault he got reamed out by his chief?”
“With cops, it’s always blame somebody else,” the young Cuban growled. “I’m taking that emerald now.”
“Fine by me.” She handed it to him.
Raffy studied the jewel appreciatively. “So give me the case.”
“Sure,” she said. “The combination lock on the handle is four numbers. I don’t know what they are. There’s also a long password my dad needs. Maybe two passwords. I’ll give you those for free.” She said them very quickly, knowing he couldn’t possibly remember them. “362484070N and 678STNX211. Maybe it’s a bank account, maybe it’s a computer code.”
Rook squeezed his eyes tight, puzzled but intrigued. “You didn’t make those numbers up?” She shook her head. “He said you could remember numbers like that! I wish I could remember Shakespeare that way. I can only keep a line or two in my head, not like your papa; till his illness, he could do whole scenes. Write those numbers down for me.”
“Nope.” Annie opened a jar of expensive peanuts from the minibar, offered him some. Malpy crawled out from under the bed to beg to be fed. “Do you know what the passwords are for?”
With an elongated shrug, Raffy tried both to claim and deny knowledge. “We need to talk to Jack. Let me use your phone.”
Maybe, thought Annie, her father hadn’t confided everything to Rafael Rook. Maybe the Cuban was not a partner but just a flopper, a street musician who made his living by rolling off the front fenders of slow moving cars, then pretending that he’d been struck down by drivers like Joyce Weimar, whom he would trick into paying him not to call the police. Annie knew about floppers; her father had said they were low down in the ranks of his profession of swindles and frauds. Floppers threw themselves in front of the cars of senior citizens who were terrified of losing their licenses and were thereby encouraged to “settle” with the scam artists right then and there to cover their minor injuries: A few hundred in cash should do it, the flopper would say, and the frightened drivers would pay off in order not to risk getting charged with some troublesome misdemeanor. It was the bottom-feeding floor of con work, her dad had said; it was “Slots Life” rather than high stakes.
Rook was helping himself to cashews as if he hadn’t eaten all day as he