They heard the front door open and Gentry turned and shouted, “We’re back here, Helen.”
He asked Lucas, “Can we be done now? She knows all about Blue Tuna, but she’d freak out if she thought I was still being watched by cops.”
“We’re done,” Lucas said. “We won’t tell Roger Quinn wherewe got his name. If anything bad happens to this Morris guy—we’re gonna look him up—we’ll be back.”
“Yeah. You’re gonna find a Morris in Miami without knowing his first name? Good luck with that,” Gentry said. “Oh, wait, I forgot: you don’t need any luck, you got him on speed dial. Tell him, ‘Hello from John, you fuck,’ next time you see him.”
Neither Lucas or Bob bothered to deny it.
They were allon their feet when Gentry’s wife came through, a thin, sunburned woman in a white golf shirt, slacks, and white visor, pretty, maybe seventeen years younger than Gentry. She looked at Lucas and Bob, then at Gentry and asked, tension in her voice, “What’s going on?”
Lucas said, “We’re federal marshals and we’re investigating a man named Morris, who your husband knew years ago. We thought he might be able to help us.” He shrugged. “It was too long ago, I guess. Nothing really to do with your husband, if you’re worried about that.”
Gentry said to his wife, “The last time I saw Morris was about two hours before Hurricane Andrew, back in ’ninety-two. I never heard of him after that. He’s probably dead.”
Lucas said, “Thanks for your help, John. We’ll get out of your hair.”
Helen Gentry stayed in the house, watching from the door, as Gentry walked them out to the truck.
“Thanks for that, but there’s gonna be some serious drama tonight,” Gentry said.
Lucas asked, “You never heard another single thing about that Mako?”
“I didn’t. I’d tell you,” Gentry said, shaking his head.
Lucas walked around the truck and got in the driver’s seat and Gentry said to Bob, as he was getting in, “You look like the kind of guy who’d be on the water.”
“I am, but small water, in Louisiana,” Bob said. “I share a bass boat with a friend.”
“Shoot, you gotta try the Islands,” Gentry said, with a toothy grin. “You go down there once and you’ll go down there all the time.”
“Like you and your yacht?”
“Maybe see you there,” Gentry said, and he pushed the door shut. “Down in the Islands, it’s all willing women and the chicken dance.”
“Things usually come down to that,” Lucas said, as he buckled in. “One way or another.”
“Yeah, they do,” Gentry said. “Hey—good luck, guys.”
As they droveout to the freeway, Bob asked, “What do you think about Gentry? You think we got it all?”
“Campbell was probably right. Gentry’s got a bundle salted away somewhere. I don’t care about that,” Lucas said. “He sounded sincere about the Coasties getting shot... so... I think we got what he had.”
Bob: “Magnus Elliot or Roger Quinn?”
“Quinn. Sounds like he actually laid eyes on the killers.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Lauderdale YachtClub 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-Outwas about two minutes off the Yacht Club.
Big Mac’swas 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?”
