Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,87

but she showed nothing close to the agitation of a woman who’s discovered her house has been robbed.

Months go by, and they never look, Diemer had told me about the wall safe. Theft for personal gain is gutter behavior, but the guilt I should have felt was blurred by the victim’s own twisted conduct. Cressa had damn near gotten us killed, she’d lied to us, insulted my running partner, and she had finagled information from Tomlinson about the Avenger wreckage and then passed the details along to Deano, who, I was convinced, had booby-trapped our plane. If my assessment was right, and if Bambi was to be believed, she had also used Tomlinson either to sabotage her marriage or to end an affair with her own father-in-law—maybe Deano, too—and had then tried to seduce me, a “dangerous man,” to protect her from the fallout.

The woman was poisonous even from a distance. I was done with the married mistress, which is why I focused on matters at hand as I carried the bucket to the lower deck and filled it with fresh water.

Pull the trigger and you can never stop the bullet, Diemer had told me, which now applied to the deal we’d made. But even if working with him turned out to be a pain in the ass, I could accept that, because some good had already come from it. Along with eliminating Deano and his spear-happy partner from the scene, the Brazilian playboy had canceled his fishing trips with Hannah. Good news, particularly because it had been Diemer’s idea to cancel, not mine. He would be meeting Tomlinson, Dan, and me off Lostman’s River on Saturday morning, so had to get his boat ready for the trip. Hannah hadn’t returned my calls, but if the subject came up, I looked forward to explaining that aside from telling Diemer he should pay for the canceled trips I was innocent of all involvement.

It was pleasant to linger on how our conversation would go—me saying something like, “All you’ve got to sell is your time, so of course you should be paid.” Then Hannah saying, You’re such a thoughtful man! Or, I owe you dinner, Doc. Maybe after swimming the No Wake buoys off Blind Pass? Back on friendly terms again, which would be nice.

Which is why I was in a cheery mood when the retriever appeared, already dry after swimming the afternoon away, and grunted his request to visit the mangroves. I still hadn’t heard the dog bark and was picturing how a snakebite, or constriction, might damage canine vocal cords as I filled his bowl with Eukanuba, then flipped the recliner pad where he slept. I’d replied to the pair of inquiries regarding my lost-and-found ads so might soon have to explain the injury to the dog’s rightful owner. That’s when my landline phone rang, so I hurried inside to answer. Lt. Kerry Brett calling.

First, my cop pal gave me some unsurprising news: Deano had been committed and would be transferred from county jail to a hospital once his family had been notified. Two bottles of generic Vicodin, plus pot, assorted pills, powders, and a cube of hash, found in the man’s backpack would add to his legal difficulties. Deano’s partner, whose name actually was Luke Smith, had been stopped and questioned in the Hertz lot at Southwest Regional but released because, as I’d already told Kerry, I didn’t want to press charges. I just wanted the guy gone from my life.

Then, phone to my ear, Kerry told me something so totally unexpected I replied, “If this is a joke, people here won’t find it funny.”

“Come see for yourself,” he replied, and I went out the door again in search of Tomlinson. At a jog, I crossed the boardwalk, through the mangroves, then picked up speed as I approached the marina, fighting the absurd urge to call out what I’d just heard like some horseless Paul Revere. Mack, who’d stepped out to light a cigar, gave me a lunatic look as I ran past and asked, “Where’s Tomlinson?” The man pointed and said something, but I didn’t hear.

My hipster friend was by the boat ramp, leaning over a spigot, using some kind of biodegradable goop to wash grease off his hands. Instead of blurting out the news as I clomped to a stop, the adolescent in me decided to play it cool.

“Working on your engine?” I asked, even though I knew that was unlikely. He’d just bought a new kicker