A False Dawn

THIRTY-NINE

I hoped the gnawing in my gut would subside if I actually ate lunch. At the tiki bar, I ordered a blackened grouper sandwich. Kim brought my order, set the food down, and stared at me. “You okay?” I asked.

“I’m just a little nervous because you haven’t eaten here in a while. I just wanted to make sure your sandwich is okay before I serve the table behind you. Corona?”

I nodded and took a bite. She opened a longneck Corona with specks of ice sliding down the sides of the bottle. “Enjoy, handsome.”

“Kim.”

“Yeah?”

“Food’s great.”

She smiled and left to wait a table. I heard the sound of a motorcycle entering the parking lot. Within a few seconds, Nick pulled into his parking spot in the grass, killed the engine, and got off his bike. He glanced toward the tiki bar, saw me, and shook his head in a look somewhere between a grin and a grimace. He walked up to the bar and flopped down on one of the barstools.

“Sean, you’re not gonna freakin’ believe where I’ve been.”

“Try me.”

Kim came around the bar, saw Nick and said, “The prodigal mariner. Your pal here, O’Brien, has been pacing the restaurant trying to figure out if Martians captured you. Whatcha drinking, Nicky?”

“Bud.”

Kim opened a bottle of Budweiser and pushed it in front of Nick. He took a quick sip, scratched at the stubble on his chin and shook his head in a hound dog kind of resignation. “Man,” he began, “I go to get you outta jail and I go to jail.”

“What?”

“This cop, I swear he musta been waitin’ for me. I get on my bike to go bail you out. I go about a half mile down the road, and all these blue lights start flashing. This cop pulls me over. Says my taillight is burned out. I say, no problem, thank you. I’ll get it fixed. He asks me if I’ve been drinkin.’ I told him only two beers. Then he tells me to touch my nose with this finger…then this finger. I do okay, but the cop, the same cop on your boat with onion head, he said I’m under arrest for DUI. I ask if he’s kidding me. The next thing I know is I’m being handcuffed, read my rights, put in the back of the police car, and taken to the jail. They put me in a big cell with lots of people who were really drunk. The place smelled like shit, man. Vomit on the floor. Blood on shirts from fights. And there I sit. No phone. No lawyer. No nothin’. I couldn’t even tell you where I was, and I was probably not far from you. Come mornin,’ I explain to the judge, dude called Judge Pappas, what went down. ‘Cause they didn’t get a breath test, brother Pappas threw it out.” Nick drained the can and got Kim’s attention. “I’ll have what Sean has. But bring me a hamburger instead of the fish.”

“Okay, Nicky.”

“Sean, what the hell’s going on? These cops really think you’re goin’ around knockin’ off farm girls?”

“Women who are held against their will, sexually exploited and sometimes killed. I have a problem with that. And onion head, as you call him, has a problem with me.”

“I say we go rearrange his face, ‘cause now he’s really pissin’ me off.”

“His fall is coming. I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen before any more women are killed.”

“He’s the killer?”

“Don’t think so. Someone more cunning, smarter than Slater, is involved. Slater’s role is probably PR.” I finished my beer and watched a seagull battle a blackbird for a piece of shrimp that had fallen from the table a teenager was busing.

“Nick, I found a bug on Jupiter, hidden in the smoke detector.”

Kim brought Nick’s food. He attacked it, taking two bites in a row out of the hamburger. Chewing, he managed to say, “What? Somebody spying on you? Listen to everything we talk about?”

“You got it.”

“Everything? Even about women?”

“Probably.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“Somebody really wants to either pin all or some of this on me, or they think I know a lot more than I do. Either way, I sent them a message.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought they’d picked you up. Maybe holding you against your will.”

“I was in jail. That’s against my will.”

“I know, but I thought it might be something worse.”

“What’s worse than being sober and spending a night with a dozen drunks vomiting on themselves? I coulda caught some disease in that place.”

“I don’t know how deep and far this thing is. I have a hunch there’s sexual slavery here. There could be a lot of people involved at different levels. Underage women from anywhere in the world, forced to become prostitutes. Their Johns are probably the people who bring or import them into the country. These girls are scared kids with nowhere to go. The customer base probably includes some pillars in their respective communities. Maybe a few politicians, cops, churchgoers, men used to buying whatever they want: teenage girls, kinky sex, threesomes, toss a lawyer in because they’re always involved in some level of corruption, and there you have a lot of powerful reasons for secrecy.”

Nick shook his head and ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. He sipped his beer, searching for words. “What’d we do?”

“You keep catching the big fish in the sea. I’ll try to catch the land sharks.”

“Man, I know I’m not a cop. I know you have all the professional training, but I’m strong, fast, don’t take no shit from nobody. You need me, Sean.”

“I need you to stay alive. To go fishing with me. To tell me about the Greek Islands and why I need to live the rest of my life there.”

Nick started to protest as my cell rang. It was Leslie. I thought she was calling to either cancel the dinner or give me directions to her place.

“Hi,” I said on the second ring. “I forget to ask you what kind of wine you like. I’ll pick up a bottle.”

“Sean,” her tone was serious. “I got some early results on the toothpick. Jonathan, in the lab, busted his butt to get it done fast for us. No rush charges.”

“What do you have?”

“DNA on the toothpick matches the DNA under the fingernail of your victim.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure. We’ll run the tests again, but it looks like Silas Davis, the jerk who tossed the toothpick in your face, beat up the face of your victim. I’d say you found the killer. Congratulations.”