The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [112]
He looked even more worried. “What do you mean? What did she say?”
“She asked me if I was Annie Goode from Emerald, and when I said I was in Miami, she said, ‘Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.’ Meanwhile, what is everybody doing with my new cell phone number anyhow? Where did you get it—Sam?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sam.”
“Well, please stop passing it around. Who is she, this woman that called?”
He kept shaking his head softly against the pillow. “No idea. What did she sound like?”
Annie thought a moment. “…Like cigarettes in a black and white movie.”
“Ah,” he said. Then he shook his head.
The hospital room had nothing personal in it. She opened its closet but there was nothing inside, no clothes, no suitcase. Walking to the foot of his bed, she told him, “Talk. Here I am. What do you want?”
He grinned wanly at her. “So you found the courier case?”
Yes, she’d found the courier case in the panel in the rear of the King of the Sky; it was back at the hotel. What was in it?
He said matter-of-factly, “A sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “Sure.”
“Remember, I used to tell you about her. La Reina Coronada del Mar?”
“Sure.” She gestured in Raffy’s direction. “I guess that’s why you and Raffy bought that Cessna Amphibian plane for your company La Reina. So you could go visit the Queen in Cuba. By the way, that Cessna’s registration number, N678ST, is part of your password.”
Jack gave her the smile that as a little girl she had worked so hard to earn; the reason she would try to get all the numbers right, win the prize, the A-plus. “How’d you find that out?”
“A friend in the FBI.” She studied him a while. “Can you really even fly a plane?”
“I love to fly.” Quietly he quoted, “‘To a skylark, the earth is scornful.’ Have I got that right?” He pressed his fingers at his temple. “Terrible when you can’t remember the poetry you loved. Remember when we used to—”
She interrupted him, holding up a warning hand. “Where’s your Cessna now?”
“In Key West, parked in a lot at the Key West airport.” He rubbed at his bandages. “On hold.”
“Repossessed?”
“Sort of. You know Key West?”
Annie had both trained and taught at Naval Air Station Key West on Boca Chica. She’d even led a practice mission to “bomb” the Marquesas “Patricia” Target, a hulking shipwreck just west of that base. Was that what he wanted, she asked, for her to fly the Cessna somewhere for him?
“Exactly right,” he told her.
Raffy inserted himself into the conversation, lifting his thin shoulders to Annie in supplication. “We need help. Even if Jack had his hands, which he does not, there is unfortunately now a new problem. The police are watching the Cessna like foxes.”
She looked at her father’s bandaged palms; it was true that piloting wouldn’t be easy with those injuries. Moreover, his face looked blanched, his lips thinned by pain. Was it the beating he’d suffered or had she been wrong to doubt that he was dying of cancer? “Is there a doctor I can talk to here?”
“The best time’s in the morning.” He gestured at his bruised face and made an effort at the old lovely grin. “A mess, huh? I had some…” He rubbed his forearms against the sides of his head. “Some treatments.”
“What kind of treatments?”
Raffy pulled her aside. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Her father nodded. “Result is, I can’t remember things. Isn’t that something? I used to be able to recite whole scenes, whole acts.”
“Hamlet, start to finish more or less,” testified Raffy.
Her father reached under his pillow and took out a small envelope. From it he shook out two large rectangular green stones. They looked to be cut like the emerald she’d brought with her. Impatiently he gestured at her and spilled them into her palm. “They go in the Queen of the Sea’s crown, okay? Believe me, they were a bitch to recover. But that’s what I get for burying bones.”
Oddly enough, she immediately knew what he meant. “You hid one of these emeralds in the cockpit of the Lindbergh plane in the airport,” she told him. “You hid one in the