The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [185]
She smiled. “I know the feeling.”
“Rafael Rook’s already in Sigsbee, spilling his guts.”
Instinctively she tensed. “I thought you said your lawyer friend could get Raffy out on bail?”
Dan took the Key West exit. “They wouldn’t have brought him to Sigsbee from Dade County if they hadn’t needed him to tell them stuff. Raffy knows how to cut his own deal. But for insurance, whatever favor they want from you, you make them ease up not just on your dad but on Rook. All they want’s the Queen.”
The problem was, she no longer had it. Her father had stolen it out of her hotel room and left her a million dollar IOU in its place. If he was alive, he was halfway around the world with the relic by now, having outsmarted the police and Feliz Diaz and God knows who else. She grinned. “Well, at least it was your ex-wife’s SUV Dad sank.”
“Melissa’s car was a real gas guzzler. Serves her right.”
Annie gestured out the windshield. “Are you kidding? What do you get to the gallon? This Thunderbird’s got a McCulloch supercharged V8 in it. You could hit 125.”
He laughed. “How do you know that?”
“I looked under the hood. That engine has speed.”
He kissed her fingers. “I bought this Bird for its looks, the grille, and the tailfins. I don’t want fast, I want beautiful. But, hey.” He smiled at her. “I’ll take both.”
As they headed into Key West’s Old Town, Dan got another phone call. His chief at MPD was officially reinstating him. The paperwork was already in the chute. The chief also wanted in on Dan’s involvement in the Jack Peregrine case. Dan told him one sure thing was that the con man’s daughter Annie knew absolutely nothing of her father’s crimes.
“Not really true,” Annie admitted after he’d hung up. “I’ve always known Dad was a crook.”
Dan shrugged. “The Vapor didn’t believe me anyhow.”
They agreed, and she leaned to rest her hand on his leg, that they would need to stay in a hotel tonight, since they weren’t wanted at Sigsbee base until morning.
They drove past the harbor of tall ships and through blocks of pastel Victorian B&Bs and converted bungalows that had once been the homes of Cuban cigar workers. Dan was looking for Duval Street. “There’s a ’20s place I always wanted to go. Casa Marina. Are you hungry?”
Touching the skin of his hand, his wrist, his arm, as if to memorize the unfamiliar, she thought again, oddly, of It Happened One Night, of a moment when Clark Gable was cooking breakfast for Claudette Colbert in their roadside motel cabin, how delicious the simple egg had tasted to the spoiled heiress. Annie said, “Totally starving! I hope they have key lime pie, I hope they have a pool and I hope our room faces the sea.”
He pulled her closer to him. “Hope’s good.”
“Oh it’s very good,” she agreed. “I’m hoping to get in the habit of hope.”
Curving westward, they were driving now into the sunset, as if they were about to step onto the top of the enormous round sun, where both of them would be able to balance for a while, like dancers on an orange circus ball. All around them the sky flung purple streamers though the clouds and the ocean brightened, red as a parade.
When they reached the hotel Dan was looking for, there happened to be available—a cancellation—a beautiful room with a balcony facing the ocean. They could see the pool from this balcony. Annie swam laps while Dan made phone calls and then they changed clothes and strolled along Duval Street through crowds of summer cruise-ship tourists. They found a pretty restaurant where they ate tuna tartare and coconut shrimps and very good key lime pie. At the meal’s end, Dan noticed that his phone