Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,30
innocent, by the way . . .”
“Of course you were,” Bob said.
“. . . I did two things. I built custom homes and I ran boats. I liked building homes okay, but you know, they were custom and the wives would get on me like a hair shirt. Bitch and moan, it never stopped. What I really loved was the boats. I had a lot of friends in that community. Still do. Sport fishermen, dive guys, people who live out on the water. Even a couple of Coast Guard and Marine Patrol guys, back when we had a Florida Marine Patrol.”
Bob: “We buy that; we’ve read your file.”
“I’ve still got a boat, a little center console fisherman,” Gentry said. “Doesn’t have a head on it. Sometimes my wife and I go for a run up the Intracoastal. She likes to look at houses. We’ve been as far north as Vero Beach, which is a long-ass haul from here. The boat’s not big enough to sleep on; we stay in motels.
“Anyway, there’s this crazy old fucker named Roger Quinn, a left-over hippie. He might have run a few loads himself. He has a pontoon boat that he takes out to the Intracoastal. He sells hamburgers off a grill and he’s got a Porta Potty on the back where girls can take a leak. He charges two bucks a pee, probably takes in a hundred bucks a day in the summer. The boat’s called Big Mac’s You’re-In-and-Out. That’s sort of a pun . . .”
Lucas frowned. “What’s the pun?”
“It’s where women go to pee. You’re in and out. Urine-and-out.” He peered at them. “Urine. Because of the Porta Potty.”
Lucas and Bob caught on simultaneously, and they both said, “Ah.”
“I’ve known Roger forever,” Gentry continued. “My wife wanted to go up to Lauderdale one day, hot day, smooth water, take a run down the New River and look at houses. We got up there and she had to take a leak, so we stopped at this guy’s boat and Roger and I got to talking. This was a month or so after that Mako burned, around Labor Day, in there.
“Roger said he’d seen that Mako. That one day it came over and the guys bought burgers and fries. He said they’d been out diving, there was a black chick on board, and she was the diver. Said the guys were New Yorkers, from their accents, and said that from the look of them, he could believe they shot the Coast Guard guys because . . . they were that kind of New Yorker.”
“A black chick? The diver?”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody told anyone?” Lucas asked.
Gentry shrugged: “There were cops all over the place, every kind of cop there was, including those fucks from the DEA. I wasn’t gonna stick my hand up, not with my history. Not when it involves cops getting shot because of dope. Besides, Roger smokes more weed than the rest of South Florida put together, which is a lot of weed. Who knows what he really saw? And he’s a bullshitter. He knows everything on the water, but about a third of it is lies and bullshit.”
He hesitated, then added, “With wall-to-wall cops, you’d think they would have discovered that much, huh? The black girl? The New York guys? Roger was right there, every day, all day, not more than a mile from where the shooting happened. You’d think somebody would have talked to him. Some cop.”
“You’d think,” Bob said.
Lucas asked, “Would he be out there today? It’s kinda cold.”
“He’s out there every day. He’s out there on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Doesn’t have anything else to do. Even on a bad day, he’ll attract some traffic, even if it’s just some woman who needs to pee. I gotta say, his hamburgers are good, the fries are great. There’ll be a certain amount of dirt and gasoline in them . . . and when I think about it, maybe that’s what makes them so good.”
“You keep saying ‘women’ need to pee,” Bob said. “I’m a little curious . . .”
Gentry shrugged. “With their plumbing, it’s hard to take a whiz off the back of a boat.”
Lucas: “So . . . how would we get out there? Where Roger is?”
Gentry said, “You’re cops, you could call the Broward Marine Patrol, but . . . actually, if I were you, I’d go up to the Lauderdale Yacht Club. Roger is usually about two minutes from there. Show them your badges at the club, somebody