The boats left from a dock about half a mile from where I stood right now, and the second and final boat left at ten a.m. I looked around the lobby and found a clock over the desk; it was nine fifty-six. Four minutes to get there.
I sprinted out of the lobby and down Duval. The crowds were even larger and jollier now; it was always Happy Hour in Key West, and trying to run through the mobs of revelers was nearly impossible. At the corner I turned right on Caroline Street and the flock thinned out immediately. Half a block up, four bearded men sat on the curb with a bottle of something in a paper bag. They were not Hemingways; their beards were long and matted, and they watched me with dead faces and then cheered sloppily as I ran past. I hoped there would be something to cheer about.
Three more blocks. I was sure it had been more than four minutes already. I told myself that nothing ever left on time. I was soaked with sweat, but the water was in sight now on my left, between the buildings, and I picked up my pace as I galloped into the large parking area at the docks. More people now, music coming from the waterfront restaurants, and I had to dodge a couple of slow and wobbly bicycles before I came out on the old wooden pier and pounded out past the dockmaster’s shack, out onto the battered planking of the wharf—
And there it was, the Conch Line’s superfast ultramodern high-speed catamaran, leaning away from the dock and slowly, ponderously, slipping out into the harbor. And as I crashed to a halt on the last eight inches of the dock it was not really very far away across the water, not far at all, only about fifteen feet from me—just far enough to be too far.
Just far enough to see across the widening gap as Cody and Astor stood at the rail, looking anxiously back at me. And right behind them, wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and a triumphant smirk, Crowley. He put one hand on Astor’s shoulder, and he raised the other to wave at me, and I could do nothing but watch as the boat pulled away from the pier, picked up speed, and vanished past Sunset Key and then south into the deep and empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean.
THIRTY-THREE
A LOT OF PEOPLE DO NOTHING IN KEY WEST. IT’S A GOOD place for that. You can watch everyone moving along Duval Street and wonder what strange alien race they belong to. Or you can go down to the water and look at the pelicans, watch the boats bobbin
g at anchor or racing past in the harbor, crowded with sunburned partiers, and if you look up you can see the planes flying low overhead towing their banners.
For five minutes, that’s all I did. I slumped right into the national pastime of the Conch Republic and I did nothing. I just stood on the dock and watched the water, the boats, the birds. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot more I could do. The boat with Cody and Astor was gone, speeding away across the ocean. It was already more than a mile away and I couldn’t call it back and I couldn’t run after it across the water.
So I did nothing. And it seems a little bit ironic, but apparently there is actually one place in Key West where you can’t do that, and I had found it. I became aware that people were pushing past me, briskly moving coils of rope and hoses and two-wheeled carts stuffed with baggage, food and ice, and dive gear. And judging by the irritated glances they sent me, I was in their way.
Finally one of them stopped beside me, dropping the handles of a cart filled with scuba tanks and straightening up to face me. “Say there, Captain,” he said in a bluff and friendly voice. “Wonder if you could move off to the side a bit? We got to load the boat for a dive trip.”
I turned away from the water and looked him in the face. It was a friendly and open dark brown face, and just in case I might be a potential customer, he added, “Right out to the reef, it’s absolutely beautiful. Oughta see it sometime, Captain.”
A tiny little gleam of hope flickered deep in the dark corners of my brain. “You don’t go anywhere near Fort Jefferson, do you?”
The man laughed. “Tortugas? No, sir, you just missed the last boat down there. Next one’s tomorrow morning.”
Of course—as always, hope was a stupid waste of time. My one small flicker hissed out and the gray fog rolled back in. And because people always insist on talking to you when you want to be alone with your quiet despair, the man went on babbling at me with his cheerful huckster’s patter.
“Now, Tortugas are worth seeing, too, you know. You can’t believe Fort Jefferson till you see it. Maybe the best way to see it, by air? Got a brochure over here …” He trotted five steps to his right and rummaged in a dock locker, then came back and handed me a glossy, brightly colored pamphlet. “Here ya go,” he said. “My girlfriend works for them. They fly down there four times a day? Beautiful, coming in low over the fort, and then you splash down, very cool, very exciting …”
He thrust the brochure into my hand and I took it. It said, ALBATROSS AIRLINES! across the top—and suddenly it really was exciting, the most exciting thing in the world. “It’s a seaplane?” I said, staring at the pictures.
“Sure, has to be, no landing strip down there,” he said.
“It would be a lot quicker than the boat, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Conch Lines boat takes a good three hours, maybe a little more. This’ll have you there in like forty minutes. Great trip, too.”
It didn’t matter to me if the trip was great. If it got me to the Dry Tortugas before Crowley got there, before he could set his Dexter-Smashing Trap, it could be the most miserable trip of all time and I would still want to hug the pilot. “Thank you,” I said, and I actually meant it.
“Sure thing,” he said. “Uh, so if you wouldn’t mind …?” He gestured to one side of the dock and raised his eyebrows to help me find my way out of his path, but I was already gone, sprinting down the dock, past the shops and restaurants and into the parking lot, where for once luck was with me and a bright pink Key West taxi was just disgorging its load of pale overweight passengers, and I jumped in as the last of them paid the driver.
“Hiya, bud,” the driver said. She was about fifty, with a square face that had been savaged and turned to old worn leather by the sun, and she stretched it into a brief professional smile for me. “Where to?”
It was a fair question, and I realized I didn’t know the answer. Luckily, I was still clutching the pamphlet, so I opened it up and scanned it rapidly. “Airport,” I said, as I found it on the page. “And as quickly as possible.”
“You got it,” she said, and we were off, out of the parking lot, across the island, and out on the far side on Roosevelt. My phone rang; it was Rita again. I turned my phone off.
The cab rolled past Smathers Beach. A wedding party clustered on the sand, the bride and groom standing at the edge of the water under a white canopy, the kind they use in Jewish weddings—a hoopoe? No, that was a bird. Something like that. I couldn’t think of the word. That didn’t seem as important as the fact that we were finally turning off the beachfront road into the airport.
I jumped out of the cab and flung money at the driver without counting it or waiting for change, and as I ran into the terminal I thought, Chuppah. That was the name of the Jewish wedding canopy. Remembering the word pleased me a whole lot more than it should have, and I made a mental note to think about why that mattered some other day.
I found Albatross Airlines down at the far end of the terminal. A woman in a brown uniform stood behind the counter. She was about fifty, with a leathery face that looked like my cab driver’s twin. I wondered if she was the girlfriend of my new friend on the dock. For his sake, I hoped not.
“Can I help you?” she said in a voice like a very butch raven.
“I need to get to the Dry Tortugas as fast as possible,” I told her.