She nodded at the sign on the back wall. “Our next flight is at noon,” she cawed.
“I need to get there now,” I told her.
“Noon,” she said.
I took a very deep breath and told myself that caving in somebody’s head is not always the best solution. “It’s an emergency,” I said.
She snorted. “A seaplane emergency?” she said with heavy sarcasm.
“Yes,” I said, and she blinked in surprise. “My kids are on the boat down to the Dry Tortugas,” I said.
“Nice trip,” she said.
“They’re with somebody—a man who might hurt them.”
She shrugged. “You can use my phone, call the cops,” she said. “They’ll call the ranger station down there.”
“I can’t call the cops,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask me why.
“Why not?” she said.
I thought quickly; clearly the truth was not an option here, but that has never been much of an obstacle for me. “Um,” I said, waiting for something plausible to slide into the out-box. “He’s … he’s my brother-in-law. And, you know. It’s family. And if the cops get involved it would break my sister’s heart. And my mother would … you know. It’s a family thing, and, uh, she has a heart condition.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dubiously.
I was clearly getting nowhere with her, in spite of my wonderful creativity. But I did not despair. I had been to Key West before, and I knew how to get things done here. I reached for my wallet.
“Please,” I said, counting out a hundred dollars. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
The money vanished before I finished my sentence. “I don’t know,” she said. “Lemme ask Leroy.”
There was a door on the back wall under the schedule and she went through it. A minute later she came back out, followed by a man in a pilot’s uniform. He was about fifty, with hard blue eyes and a boxer’s flattened nose.
“What’s up, Skipper?” he said.
“I need to get to the Tortugas as fast as possible,” I said.
He nodded. “Jackie said,” he told me. “But our next scheduled flight is in two hours, and we have to keep the schedule. Nothing I can do. Sorry.”
No matter how sorry he might have been, he didn’t leave, and that meant he wasn’t refusing—he was negotiating. “Five hundred dollars,” I said.
He shook his head and leaned on the counter. “Sorry, bud, I just can’t do it,” he said. “The company has a policy.”
“Seven hundred,” I said, and he shook his head. “It’s my children; they’re young and helpless,” I said.
“I could lose my job,” he told me.
“A thousand dollars,” I said, and he stopped shaking his head.
“Well,” he said.
Those of us who are fiscally responsible look with scorn and condemnation on profligates who max out their credit cards. But the hard-eyed buccaneer behind the counter very quickly dropped me into exactly that financial hot water. It took two of my cards, but when I had finally sated his unholy lust for my money, it took only five minutes more and I was buckling myself into the passenger seat of his aircraft. Then we lumbered down the runway, gathering speed, until we finally waddled up into the sky.
The man on the dock, and the brochure he had given me, had assured me that the flight down to the Dry Tortugas was beautiful and memorable. If it was, I don’t remember it. All I saw was the hand on my watch crawling forward. It seemed to be moving much slower than normal: Tick. Long pause. Tick. Another. This was taking too long—I had to get there first. How long had it been since the boat pulled away from the dock? I tried to put the numbers together in my head. It shouldn’t have been hard, but for some reason all my concentration was on grinding my teeth and I couldn’t think about the time.
Luckily for my teeth, I didn’t have to. “There she is,” the pilot said, nodding out the window. It was the first thing he’d said since we were airborne, and I stopped grinding my teeth for a moment and looked at him. He nodded again. “The boat,” he said. “With your kids.”
I looked out the window. Below us I could see the bright white deck of a large, fast-moving boat, trailing a long wake behind it. Even from our height I could see a few people on the deck, but I couldn’t tell if any of them were Cody and Astor.