Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,32
eyes on the killers.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Lauderdale Yacht Club was a big white building with water on three sides and oversized yachts tied up on their docks. They went inside, found a manager, who looked at their badges, said, “Cool, no problem.” He found a man named Javier to run them out in a little outboard; as Gentry said, Big Mac’s You’re-In-and-Out was about two minutes off the Yacht Club.
Big Mac’s was as advertised, a tri-tube pontoon with a sea-green fiberglass Porta Potty on the stern, a barbeque shack on the bow, and tie-up cleats on all four sides.
Roger Quinn, the owner, had an eye patch on his left eye and brown precancerous spots sprinkled across his face; something had been done surgically to one side of his bulbous nose, because it didn’t match the other side. He was a short man with shoulder-blade-length gray hair and ragged cutoffs. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt and was barefoot, despite the cool weather.
Javier tossed him a line and Quinn tied off the boat front and back, looked at Lucas and Bob and asked, “What’d I do?”
“Jesus,” Bob said to Lucas. “We can’t even walk around without people asking us that.”
Javier said, “Roger, these two people are U.S. Marshals, Tony told me to ride them out here . . .”
Quinn looked at them with a single watery eye and no visible enthusiasm. “Yeah?”
Lucas explained the mission and when he was done, Quinn asked, “This gonna get me killed?”
“No reason it should,” Lucas said. “We don’t talk about this kind of thing.”
“What if I gotta testify?”
“You won’t have to testify—whatever you give us, we’ll figure out a different way to get it.”
“Might want you to look at some mug shots,” Bob said. “See if you recognize anybody.”
Quinn said, “Yeah. I seen them close up, but I ain’t lookin’ at any mug shots. I’m no fool. You’re lyin’ to me. If I saw them in a mug shot book, you’d make me look at a lineup, and then I’d have to testify in court. So, you know, basically, fuck that.”
Bob started, “Look, Mr. Quinn . . .”
Quinn said, “I ain’t doing it. If you’ll leave me alone, I’ll give you something better than me.”
Lucas: “What’s that?”
“I can give you somebody who knows them,” Quinn said.
Lucas and Bob glanced at each other, and then Bob asked, “Who?”
Quinn asked Javier, “You know that guy Beddy who runs the Down East?”
“I know him a little,” Javier said. And to Lucas and Bob: “Captain Buddy runs a party boat called the Down East, out of Aventura, which is just down the way.”
Quinn said, “That’s him, but his name is Beddy, not Buddy. When that Mako was here, the Down East come in.”
Lucas asked, “What about it?”
“Beddy was doing a party and the boat was full of hairdresser girls. Young girls. They graduated from hairdresser school somewhere and they were celebratin’. Didn’t have to pee, not one of them, must be at least two or three heads on Beddy’s boat. They came in because they said I looked neat and they wanted burgers and fries. Ran around my boat, like to tipped it over. Had a fry fight, threw most of the fries in the water. Tipped me a hundred dollars. They was all wearing their teeny bikinis, tits and ass all over the place. They started talking to the guys on the Mako and the Mako guys liked that a lot. They were all here for an hour and the way they were talking, I think some of them girls got together with the Mako guys that night, at a hotel.”
Bob: “You mean . . .”
“It looked like that to me, some of them girls was gonna get their legs up in the air,” Quinn said. “I know they were talking about a hotel.”
“You know what hotel?” Bob asked.
“Nope. Didn’t pay much attention to that part of it. Do remember, it was down in Miami Beach.”
“Where do we find this Beddy guy?” Lucas asked.
Quinn said, “Down to Aventura. It’s a big boat basin south of here.”
“Anything else?” Lucas asked. “Did you see the diver?”
Quinn scratched his neck. “The diver. She was Bahamian, I think. Black chick. The way she talked, her accent. I’ll tell you boys something—if she’s gone back to the Bahamas, you’ll have a tough time digging her out of there. People in the Bahamas, if they don’t want to be found, you won’t find them. Too many islands, about six cops between them.”