Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,44

of conversation.

I stood there mystified, phone in my pocket, wondering what new blunder I had committed. I walked a few feet, then stared at the dog’s empty food bowl. Then a few feet more and my eyes found the empty bench that was the cat’s favorite spot to doze in the sun. A black cat gathers heat like an oven on winter mornings, so Crunch & Des had been as warm to the touch as freshly baked bread.

I berated myself: You live alone by choice, Ford—THEIR choice, every woman you’ve ever met.

Then Mack’s voice came into my head: I’m a fool, a bloody fool.

No shit, Sherlock! Six words that summarized the regrets and dumb behavior of every male who has survived the slippery trip through the womb and then stumbled through life.

I went into the house where I changed, then continued to wallow in self-pity as I did the grunt work required of an aquarist. Three times the phone rang and I ignored it—Cressa Arturo was pissed, apparently, because I had yet to appear. Good.

But not a word from Hannah Smith.

Can you blame her?

When the phone beeped a fourth time, I looked and read a text. Bernie Yeager wanted to make contact via military SATCOM. That, at least, presented an opportunity to think about something else. So I dried my hands, hung my lab apron on a hook, and called.

—

FIFTEEN MINUTES WE TALKED, Bernie doing most of it while I made cryptic notes. He didn’t have all the information I’d requested, but enough to snap me out of my piteous mood. My wise old friend also grounded me with an axiom I had jotted in a notebook and shared with him long ago:

The fact that unexplained elements are noted within a similar time frame while in the field does not guarantee those elements are linked or are even significant.

He was referring to the jumble of unknowns I’d dumped on him: a strange boat, missing planes, a married mistress, and a filmmaker who seemed to have ulterior motives.

“Focus,” Bernie told me after he’d shared what he’d uncovered. “You don’t have to be a botanist to cut down a tree.”

The homespun aphorism wasn’t an exact fit, but close enough to get his point across. And by the time we signed off, I was focused, fully in the moment, even though there were plenty of blanks unfilled.

The hunter is being hunted, Tomlinson had told me. That’s your drug of choice.

Apparently so, because the buzz of elevated awareness returned. I switched off lights in the lab, slipped a tiny semiauto pistol into my pocket—a .32 caliber Seecamp stainless—then headed for the door. I lived alone—so what? Their choice, my choice—either way, traveling life single was the least cluttered of vehicles. More maneuverable, life was cut closer to the bone.

As I closed the walkway gate, I was trying to convince myself. The less baggage, the less chance of leaving something behind.

12

JUDGING FROM THE WAY CRESSA ARTURO WAS DRESSED, she was, indeed, eager to make up for a decade of celibacy. She greeted me at the door in a bathrobe that was belted loosely, the bikini top or bra she had selected right there for me to see, two black hammocks of lace fully laden, the breasts separated by the palest of milk cleavage.

If she had seduction on her mind, though, it had been earlier, before the dog had dampened her mood on this night of dry wind and moon.

“My god, where have you been?” Cressa demanded, motioning me inside. “I can’t control that animal. Take a look at what he’s done to my house . . . and my pool!”

Swimming pool, too? I managed to conceal my delight as I took a last glance behind me, then stepped inside.

I had arrived by pickup truck, a blue ’72 GMC now parked conspicuously in a drive that weaved through palms and landscaping to three tiers of stucco that was visible through the trees. The house was built on the beach close enough that I heard waves sluicing sand when I got out and pretended to yawn. While yawning, I scoped the area. If someone was watching the place, where had they concealed themselves?

Thanks to Bernie, I now knew things about Cressa, her husband, and her husband’s family that suggested the woman was dangerous company, possibly very dangerous. And that she was being watched.

I had narrowed it down to three likely spots before touching the doorbell, then covering a smile that now broadened as I followed Cressa into