Contraband

4

Stone awoke to sunlight streaming through a porthole and a ringing phone that wasn’t his.

“Hello?” Max said, sitting up in bed and failing to cover her very attractive breasts. Stone lay there, enjoying the view.

The speaker was on, perhaps inadvertently. “Yes, Cap?”

“Max, there was an attempt on the life of Al Dix at the hospital last night.” He explained what had happened. “I’ve requested an emergency rush on the tox lab’s report. Can you get back here in a hurry? The call was answered by a car on patrol, driven by a clueless, rookie uniformed officer, and I’ve got two detectives out with the flu. Anyway, it’s been your case since you loaded him onto the chopper.”

“I’ll find out how quick I can get there and call you back,” she replied, then hung up. She turned to Stone. “Enjoying the view?”

“It’s a sublime view,” Stone said.

“How fast can I get back to Key West?”

“Well, we’ve planned our departure for after breakfast.”

“What speed can this yacht make?”

“We normally cruise at fifteen knots. She’ll do twenty-five in a pinch, but she sucks up a lot of fuel at that speed. It would be better if we just put you in the RIB and point you east. That thing will cruise happily at forty knots and screamingly at fifty. One of the crew can bring it back.”

“I know how to drive it,” she said. “Can I just take it and leave it at your berth?”

“That makes more sense,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Just after seven. Have some breakfast before you go.”

“Something light,” she said. “A muffin, orange juice, and coffee.” She called her captain and gave him an ETA.

Stone picked up his room phone, called the galley, and placed her order, then hung up. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “We’ve got to do something until then.”

She pushed him onto his back and mounted him. “Something like this?”

“Exactly like this,” he said, meeting her movements.

When they had both climaxed, Max ran for her cabin, leaving Stone inert and gasping. He got himself together, called Captain Todd, and asked for the RIB to be fueled and launched.

Stone cast her off. “At forty knots, you’ll be there in an hour and a half. We’re berthed next to the old submarine base. There’s a sign.” He tossed her duffel down to her; she started the engines and Todd pushed her off. She turned for the entrance to the lagoon, and shortly she was in open water, cruising around the fort, headed east.

An hour and a half later Max tied up near Breeze’s berth, where it would be plainly visible to Stone’s crew, tossed her duffel up onto the stone pier, and climbed the ladder. To her surprise, an unmarked KWPD car was idling there, its windows up to keep the air-conditioning in. A window slid down, and Tommy Scully waved her over.

She climbed into the front passenger seat, tossing her duffel into the rear. “I thought you had the flu,” she said.

“I got over it,” Tommy replied, “when I heard the words ‘homicide attempt.’”

“Don’t exhale,” Max said.

Tommy got the car rolling. “What’s the matter, didn’t you get your flu shot?”

“Yes.”

“So did I,” Tommy replied. Tommy was in his sixties and would already have retired if he hadn’t loved the work so much. Originally a detective in the NYPD, he had come to Key West years before and had quickly risen to chief of detectives. He gave that up at retirement age, to make room for a younger man, and here he was, still working cases.

Max was glad.

They drove to Key West Hospital, a modern facility on Stock Island, one island up the Keys. They flashed brass and were let into the emergency room, where a young resident and a nurse were examining an EKG from an older man on the table.

“The good news,” the resident said, “is your chest pains were not caused by a heart attack.”

“It’s my gallbladder, isn’t it?” the man said.

“I concur with your diagnosis. We’ll get you over to radiology and get a scan, just to be sure.” He beckoned to an orderly and gave him instructions for radiology, then turned to the detectives.

“Sorry for the delay. He’ll be gone for at least half an hour, and we don’t have another immediate case. You’ll want to know what happened.”

“Please,” Max said. “This is Detective Tommy Scully, and I’m Detective Max Crowley. Start at the beginning.”

“I’m Dr. Keith Barron and this is Julie Harmon. We were, ah...”

“I got an alarm from my patient, Mr. Dix,” Julie said, interrupting. “I checked on him and found that he had freed a hand — he was restrained to keep him from turning over in the night and injuring himself with a broken rib — and had yanked out his IV. He said somebody had tried to kill him.”

“Why did he yank the IV?” Max asked.

“He said another nurse had come into his room, took a big hypodermic from a case, filled it with a fluid, then injected it into his IV bag, telling him it was for his pain and to help him sleep. Then she left.”

“Why did he think the nurse was trying to kill him?”

“He said he used to be a junkie and knows about needles and such, and that the hypo was too big for the job.”

“May we speak to the other nurse?” Max asked.

“There was no other nurse on this floor,” Julie replied.

“And you kept the IV bag and gave it to the cop?”

“Correct.”

Max turned to Tommy. “Any word on the tox report?”

Tommy shook his head.

“From what direction did you approach his room?”

“From this direction,” Julie said, pointing. “One floor up.”

“What’s in the other direction?”

“A dead end with an emergency exit to a fire escape. If you open the door a loud bell rings. We heard nothing.”

“Let’s have a look at it,” Max said. She followed Julie upstairs and down the hall, where the nurse reached for the doorknob.

“Don’t touch it,” Max said. “Let me.” She opened the door carefully, but no bell sounded. She examined the hinged edge and found a wire that had been cut. “Let’s get a team up here to take prints,” she said to Tommy, who nodded silently, then made a call.

“Now let’s talk to Al Dix,” Max said.

Dix’s bed was raised, pointing him at the door. “Hi, Dixie,” Max said. He was about fifty, with an abundance of thick gray hair.

“Hi, Max,” Dix replied in a normal voice, if a bit softer. “Nice to see you sober.”

Max laughed. “I’m nearly always sober.”

“Nobody at the Lame Duck is ‘nearly always sober.’”

“You have a point. I hear you had a visitor last night. Can you describe her?”

“Taller than you, shortish dark hair, slender, nice tits, dressed in blue scrubs.”

“I don’t suppose she introduced herself.”

“Nope, and she wasn’t wearing an ID badge like Julie’s.” He nodded toward the nurse.

“She wasn’t ours,” Julie said. “Nobody on duty matches that description.”

“I’ve seen her before,” Dix said.

Max’s eyes widened. “Oh? Where?”

“At the Lame Duck,” he said. “Where else? Everybody goes there. You go there. Not him, though.” He nodded toward Tommy.

“I’m sorry, this is Detective Scully.”

“I know who he is,” Dix said. “He just doesn’t go to the Duck.”

Tommy shrugged. “I got a wife who doesn’t like noisy places. They got security cameras there?”

“Yes,” Max and Dix said simultaneously.

“Then that’s our next stop,” Tommy said.

“We’re not finished here,” Max said.