five gringos standing in ankle-deep water where their stash of money should have been.
Without a word or gesture, the driver sped up. The boat veered away. It headed out to sea, leaving a silver wake like a scythe.
Ty exhaled. "Close."
Chase stared at his empty hands. Markie's face was pale.
"What?" Ty asked. "They're gone, aren't they?"
I didn't have the heart to tell him. But their message was clear: the Mexicans wouldn't waste their time shooting Ty and his friends now. They would have it done properly, in a much more public place.
I knelt down and sifted through the water until I found the gun Markie had dropped. It was a .22, Ty's marksman pistol. It occurred to me that a .22 could've been the same caliber that had killed Jesse Longoria.
"Start planning your statement for the police," I told Markie.
"The drugs are gone," he said miserably. "What's the point of talking to the police?"
"Because it might be your only chance at staying alive."
I sloshed back toward the ruined hotel, leaving the college kids standing in the water where the source of their next year's tuition had washed away.
"What kind of wire?" Garrett asked.
We were sitting in the destroyed dining room. I was briefing Maia and Garrett on my fun-filled excursion into the surf. Garrett's question took me by surprise.
I dug around in my pocket, found the frayed copper wire and handed it to him.
He scowled. "You found this in Lane's closet?"
"Yeah."
"Ain't for computers."
I didn't argue. Garrett was the computer programmer in the family.
He twirled the wire between his fingers. "So what's it for?"
That's when it hit me - why the wire had bothered me, something that should've been obvious. "It's part of an IED."
"A what?"
"Improvised explosive device," Maia said, keeping her voice down. "A bomb."
"A bomb?" Garrett definitely did not keep his voice down.
Jose and Imelda looked over from the kitchen doorway. They'd been scavenging breakfast for the guests and were now dividing up their loot - a bag of saltines, five green apples.
"A little discretion," I told Garrett.
"Discretion," he said. "Somebody tries to blow up Lane and you want discretion?"
"We don't know that anyone was targeting Lane." Maia put her hand on Garrett's arm. As usual, she was able to calm him down a lot more than I could, but he still looked pretty damn angry.
He leaned toward me. "The guy we saw in Lane's closet - he was real."
"I think so."
"We scared him out of there before he could plant a bomb. He dropped this wire."
"One possibility," I agreed. "But why target Lane?"
Garrett stared outside. In a burst of optimism, Jose and Imelda had removed the plywood from the last intact dining room window. Slate gray sky and sea spread toward the horizon like unwashed sheets.
"It couldn't have been about her," Garrett decided. "Besides, we'll be outta here soon. Whatever this guy was trying to do - "
"Garrett," I said, as gently as I could. "Do you want to ask her about it, or should I?"
He twisted his linen napkin. In the stormy light, his three-day whiskers looked grayer than usual. "Yeah," he said wearily. "I'll talk to her."
Jose and Imelda went off to distribute their high-cuisine breakfast, which left Maia and me alone in the dining area, munching stale saltines and watching the rain make claw marks on the window.
"Drugs," Maia said. "Someday maybe I'll hear about a case that doesn't involve drugs."
We both knew the odds of that were long. It didn't matter if you worked with runaways, prostitutes, politicians, murderers or socialites. Drugs were as omnipresent as sex and greed.
"Chris Stowall used his manager's job to make some extra money on the side," I told her. "He was mad at Alex for closing the hotel because his revenue stream was about to dry up. The twenty thousand from the boathouse - that was Chris's life savings. He was getting ready to make a break for the mainland and disappear, as soon as he delivered Calavera to Longoria and Lindy. Chris stood to make an extra fifty grand from that. He figured he'd try to milk Chase and his friends, too. Get a little more money that way."
"You don't think he fabricated the Calavera story?"
"No. The email was real. Chris found it, somehow he realized what it meant. But I think he found something else, too. Something that really startled him."
I told Maia about the statue in Alex's room - the lady who looked like Rachel Brazos. I told her about my conversations with Lindy, who apparently