Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,65

a fishing trip that was already behind schedule. Statistically speaking, the logician told me, now was actually a broader, safer window in which to paw through the man’s personal possessions.

Screw the odds, I told the logician.

Coward, the logician concluded accurately.

I didn’t care. Never again did I want to experience what I’d felt while waiting for the Brazilian to throw open that shower curtain. I’d made a basic error in judgment and wasn’t going to compound it. In the Homo sapiens’ guidebook, the reasons should be bulleted under the heading Don’t piss in your own pond or crap in your own nest. I had done exactly that, but for the last time.

Taking calculated risks in South America, Asia, Africa—fine. All part of the job. But how I live, and where I live, composes the fabric of who I am. Death? It’s inevitable. Living among friends in a good place, though, is a temporal pleasure, an inviolate choice not to be risked because of something I had always suspected, but now believed: a life well lived trumps every damn drab, existential alternative, so don’t screw it up!

I was getting off that damn boat fast, but safely.

Like a teenage burglar, I hurried from porthole to porthole monitoring Diemer’s movements. He didn’t rush, a man with dignity who enjoyed attention. Which gave me time to notice the room’s only personal appointment, aside from soccer team colors, was a photo on the cabin wall: a teenage girl; blond, gawky, with braces, but cute in an agrarian way. A family resemblance in her aristocratic nose, the Germanic cheeks—Diemer’s daughter, I guessed, or a niece. The photo seemed out of place in a space so impersonal and utilitarian, and also because it was the bedroom of a bachelor. The man had at least one sentimental bond, apparently.

I moved topside and peeked through cabin curtains. Finally, when the Brazilian was aboard Hannah’s skiff flying across Dinkin’s Bay, I exited the yacht as if I owned the thing and went to find Tomlinson. He was under the poinciana tree next to the gift shop.

“I didn’t notice Hannah come back because I was busy herding Jeth away from the docks,” he explained, his nervous fingers twisting a lock of hair. “Damn, that was close, Doc!”

I said, “You turned that guy around just in time—thanks. How’d you get his cell number?”

Tomlinson gave me a blank stare in response: Huh?

My friend tugged at his hair and shook his head. “I didn’t call the man. I wanted to call, but you’re right, his number isn’t in the office. So I was on my way back to A-Dock to maybe kick the side of his boat or scream ‘Fire!’ I don’t know . . . do something that would distract him, but then the dude reappears. Looked like he was in a hurry . . . and I didn’t see any blood on his hands, so”—Tomlinson shrugged—“I figured everything was copasetic. What the hell happened in there?”

I was flipping through various explanations. Barring coincidence—which was possible but unlikely—there was only one possibility.

My eyes searched for my former flats skiff, scanning from west to east across the bay, while I explained, “He got a phone call seconds before the shit really hit the fan. The caller said they needed him right away. He took off.”

My skiff was there, just off Woodring Point, a mile away, a dark husk supporting a lean vertical silhouette that was Hannah Smith.

“Saved your ass,” Tomlinson agreed, “whoever made that call.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “She really did.”

THAT NIGHT, because the moon was too bright for sleeping, I rode my bike to the beach and jogged a mile of ocean, turned, then picked up the pace all the way back to Tarpon Bay Road. Because I was without a running partner, I took the dog, who trotted at heel when he wasn’t trying to retrieve waves.

Vargas Diemer was in the lab waiting when I returned, a day’s growth of beard sculpted onto his Zorro face—the Hollywood look. Surprise!

I’d left the lights on, the doors unlocked as always. Even so, it was unusual to find an elite killer sitting at my desk, reading from a folder I’d left on the autoclave. Worse, there was a black semiauto pistol near his right hand. A sound suppressor lengthened the weapon. It added a look of surgical intent.

When I pushed the screen door open, the man didn’t bother to look up as he said with only a trace of accent, “I decided to return the favor,

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