The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [96]
The slender man in the bed raised the cigarette to his lips with bandaged fingers. “She’s on her way,” he said. “As sure as the sun.”
“Ah,” smiled Raffy. “The great Swan tells us, ‘the rain it raineth every day.’”
“She’s coming.”
part two
South
Chapter 29
It’s a Wonderful World
After the muggy hues of Emerald, North Carolina, Miami had almost blinded her. Miami was in Technicolor. Annie felt as if she’d awakened in a tropical cartoon of hot pink birds and purple flowers, set to salsa music. What’s more, she felt rested, although the rest had been imposed on her.
It was July 6. She hadn’t found her father. She hadn’t reached Daniel Hart. Rafael Rook had set up two meetings that he’d skipped and another one for today to which he was now hours late. She was waiting for him at the Hotel Dorado.
The hotel stood proudly among other rainbow-painted buildings along the oceanfront in South Beach. Its curved windows, neon flutes, and wavy roof made it the prettiest in the line of boxy Deco buildings on the shore. It looked like the sort of place Jack Peregrine would enjoy staying in.
From the chilly air of the silvery lobby, with its steel S-shaped bar and blue velvet stools, Annie moved back outside to the deck chairs beside its turquoise pool. There she again studied the message she’d been handed by a desk clerk hours ago; it claimed that Rafael Rook would be coming to see her here (presumably to pick up the courier case) at one this afternoon. She squinted at her watch. It was after three.
With her hair hidden inside her black Navy baseball cap, in her fresh, ironed white T-shirt and black shorts, Annie and the little white dog Malpy seemed to be the only black-and-white objects in the vivid landscape. In the long open avenue of sand across the street, a yellow lifeguard station stood under an orange striped umbrella. Beyond the beach, sun glittered on blue ocean. Even wearing sunglasses, she found it hard to see in the afternoon light. It was hard to hear, too, above the squawking macaws and the boisterous merengue music booming out of the honking cars that cruised in a caravan up and down Ocean Drive more slowly than pedestrians weaving in and out of their way.
Her father had told her to go to the Dorado to meet Rook. As he’d also written to her on Dorado stationery and it was on a Dorado notepad that he’d long ago scribbled his mysterious password, the hotel seemed a key, somehow at the heart of whatever this big con/sting/dying-wish of his was. And while there were no records of his having ever registered here, some of the older staff—a waitress, bell captain, concierge—had recognized him from a police photo that Annie’s friend Trevor had emailed her. The concierge remembered her father’s cufflinks, the waitress his tips, and the bell captain recalled that while Jack never seemed to have any luggage, he’d nonetheless been always immaculately dressed. These people had no idea what his actual occupation, or his real name, was.
On arrival, after a few hours sleep, Annie had begun her search, helped by Trevor’s useful access to FBI information. There appeared to be no Peregrine in any phone listing of Dade County Directory Assistance, or on any driver’s license or police record or in any hospital or any morgue.
She drove to the Golden Days “rest home,” entering glass doors etched “Center for Active Living” only to be stopped at the lobby desk by a Miss Napp (as she identified herself), who stretched out her hand—lavender manicured fingernails—as if she were going to sing “Stop in the Name of Love.” Miss Napp said visiting hours had not begun; moreover, they had no patient named Jack Peregrine, nor any patient with any of the aliases Annie read off her father’s fake business cards. Under persistent questioning, the receptionist’s tight, made-up face grew increasingly hostile: only visitors