The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [97]
Back at the hotel, after further unsuccessful phone calls to the Miami Vice Sergeant Daniel Hart, who remained “away from his desk,” she kept herself busy on her laptop; she answered her emails, went over her divorce papers from the lawyer, paid her bills, prepared for her fall class at Annapolis, and edited a lecture she would deliver in November at the International Organization of Women Pilots. She ironed her dress uniform.
Finally she bought a bathing suit and took a swim in the hotel pool, where a peculiar sense of peace came suddenly over her, an acceptance that there was nothing more she could do until she could do something. It was a strange unsettling sensation.
After her swim, with Malpy on her lap, Annie fell asleep on a blue deck chair by the pool. At some point she was half-awakened by what indistinctly felt like a shadow moving across her cheek, leaning over her, shading a coppery sun. Then the shadow moved away. She sat up startled, looking around, but there was no one near the pool. It must have been a dream. She fell back asleep.
Her cell phone sang shrilly on the table.
The caller was Sergeant Hart, finally returning her messages. While he had the same pleasant baritone as in their previous talk days earlier, he had taken on a curiously inquisitorial tone. “This is Daniel Hart, MPD. Do you have Jack Peregrine with you here in Miami?”
Confused, Annie rubbed her face to awaken. No, she confessed, she hadn’t yet located her father; that’s why she’d kept calling Hart, hoping he could help her.
He replied brusquely, “Withhold his whereabouts again, I’ll bring you in as an accessory.”
Baffled, she sat up. “What?”
Hart sounded bizarrely annoyed. “You should have told me you were headed to St. Louis as soon as you heard from him. You flew there to help him avoid arrest. Aiding and abetting an escaped suspect is a felony.”
“Hey, just a minute here—”
“I’m on my way to the Dorado now. I’m sorry you picked it. My ex loves that bar so much it makes me sick even to set foot in it.”
Annie swung her legs over the chair side. “What the hell are you talking about? What’s that got to do with me?”
“Sit tight. Don’t make me arrest you.”
“Are you nuts?” Indignation lifted Annie to her feet and sent Malpy tumbling. The little dog trotted to the pool and lay down, staring at his reflection in the water.
Hart added, “And stay away from Rafael Rook.”
Annie paced along the pool edge. “How do you know Rafael Rook?”
“You always answer a question with a question, Annie?”
Once again she was taken aback by his use of her name. “What are you, spying on me? What’s it to you if I see Rafael Rook?”
Hart told her that her “Cuban muchacho” had “a rap sheet thick as the Miami Yellow Pages,” that Rook and her father were notorious in the city for all the cons they’d pulled off together in the last ten years. If she persisted in “hooking up with them”—
She exploded. “Goddamn it, I’m not committing crimes with Jack Peregrine. He’s my father—”
“Ma Barker had sons.”
“This is insane! He said he was dying of cancer. I’m just trying to find him before it happens!”
Hart turned abruptly affable. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He was not.
For another thirty minutes, Annie paced the Dorado lobby. After a while, she returned to the large tiled swimming pool and paced beside it. Daniel Hart never arrived. The cell phone number he’d given her still didn’t answer; his office at the Miami Police Department kept putting her on hold.
A tan waiter with bleached hair, who’d been staring at her legs as he hurried past, almost ran into her. She grabbed at his tray of martinis and stopped the blue glasses from tipping.