“There’s no way he could sell five or six kilos of uncut cocaine in Key West,” Tommy said. “If that much was in there, it was bound for somewhere else, like Miami.”
“Tommy, if you had half a dozen kilos of pure coke and you wanted to get them to Miami, how would you do it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t drive it,” Tommy said. “There’s only one road, and if you get stopped for a broken taillight and get searched, well …” He looked thoughtful. “Boat or light aircraft,” he said. “And there’s a lot more boats around here than light aircraft.”
“How long to Miami in a boat?” Stone asked.
“Well, in something that could do twenty-five, thirty knots, one long day. Any faster than that might attract the attention of the Coast Guard.”
“The right boat sounds like a good investment in time,” Dino said. 6 3
S t u a r t W o o d s
“We got two questions to answer here,” Tommy said. “Where did he get it, and how was he going to move it?”
“He got it from South America or Mexico, like everybody else,”
Stone said. “And there’s no shortage of means to move it.”
“Evan Keating has a new boat,” Dino said, “and he was chummy with Charley Boggs, at least for a while.”
“And his boat was parked all night out at the reef,” Tommy pointed out. “Another boat could have handed something off.”
“Or an airplane could have dropped it,” Stone said. “As I recall, it isn’t very deep out at the reef.”
“Not deep at all,” Tommy agreed. “You could pick something off the bottom with a snorkel; you wouldn’t even need scuba gear.”
“Well,” Dino
said, “I guess we’ve solved this crime. Except for the part about who killed Charley and where the cocaine is now.”
“Yeah, except for that part,” Tommy said.
“I don’t think Evan is our guy,” Stone said.
“Why not?” Dino asked. “I like him for it.”
“Okay, let’s say that Evan bought Chuck Chandler’s boat for the purpose of picking up packages at the reef and delivering them to Miami. Was Chuck’s old boat good for that, Tommy?”
“Yeah, I know the boat, and it was pretty fast. It also doesn’t look like something a drug dealer would use, it being an old classic and all.”
“But why would Evan hide the coke on Charley Boggs’s houseboat? Why wouldn’t he pick it up at the reef and just keep going until he got to Miami? Why trust Charley with a hundred and fi fty grand worth of powder? Charley didn’t look all that trustworthy to me. And if Evan and Charley were in business together, why would Evan have to kill him to get the product?”
“Partners can disagree,” Dino pointed out.
Tommy sighed. “I don’t think we’ve solved this crime yet.”
6 4
15
THE THRE E O F them had lunch at the Raw Bar. Dino looked across the table at Stone. “Why are you looking so glum? Are you sad that Charley Boggs is dead?”
“Well, yeah, since he was our only connection to Evan Keating.”
“We know what kind of boat Evan is driving now. How about that?”
“Dino, you remember the whole afternoon we spent in a rented boat looking for Evan?”