Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

He shrugged. “Mr. Stone insisted.”

I picked up the phone attached to my seat console. “Well, let’s see if we can’t change Mr. Stone’s mind.”

He placed his hand on mine, pushed the phone back into the console. For such a small man, he was very strong.

“Mr. Stone doesn’t change his mind,” he said.

I looked into his tiny black eyes, and saw only my reflection blinking back at me.

We landed at Tampa International at one, and I felt the sticky heat in the air even before our wheels touched down on the tarmac without so much as a bump. Captain Jimmy and copilot Herb might have seemed like goofball knuckleheads, and maybe they were in all other aspects of their lives, but by the way they handled that plane during takeoff, landing, and one bit of turbulence over Virginia, I suspected they could land a DC-10 on the tip of a pencil in the middle of a typhoon.

My first impression of Florida after the heat was one of green. Tampa International looked to have erupted from the center of a mangrove forest, and everywhere I looked I saw shades of green—the dark blackish green of the mangrove leaves themselves, the wet gray-green of their trunks, the grassy small hills that bordered the ramps into and out of the airport, the bright teal tramcars that crisscrossed the terminals like something out of Blade Runner if it had been directed by Walt Disney.

Then my gaze rose to the sky and found a shade of blue I’d never seen before, so rich and bright against the white coral arches of the expressway that I would have sworn it had been painted there. Pastels, I thought, as we blinked against the light streaming through the windows of the tramcar—I hadn’t seen this many assaultive pastels since the nightclub scene in the mid-eighties.

And the humidity. Jesus. I’d gotten a whiff of it as I left the jet, and it was like a hot sponge had punched a hole in my chest and burrowed straight into my lungs. The temperature in Boston had been in the mid-thirties when we left, and that had seemed warm after such a long winter. Here, it had to be eighty, maybe more, and the moist, furry blanket of humidity seemed to kick it up another twenty degrees.

“I’ve got to quit smoking,” Angie said as we arrived at the terminal.

“Or breathing,” I said. “One of the two.”

Trevor, of course, had a car waiting for us. It was a beige Lexus four-door with Georgia plates and Lurch’s southern double for a driver. He was tall and thin and of an age somewhere between fifty and ninety. His name was Mr. Cushing, and I had a feeling he’d never been called by his first name in his life. Even his parents had probably called him Mr. Cushing. He wore a black suit and driver’s cap in the broiling white heat, but when he opened the door for Angie and myself, his skin was drier than talc. “Good afternoon, Miss Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie. Welcome to Tampa.”

“Afternoon,” we said.

He closed the door and we sat in the air conditioning as he walked around and opened the front passenger door for the Weeble. Mr. Cushing took his place behind the wheel and handed three envelopes to the Weeble, who took one and handed two back to us.

“Your hotel keys,” Mr. Cushing informed us as he pulled away from the curb. “Miss Gennaro, you are staying in Suite Six-eleven. Mr. Kenzie, you are in Six-twelve. Mr. Kenzie, you’ll also find in your envelope a set of keys to a car Mr. Stone has rented on your behalf. It’s parked in the hotel parking lot. The parking space number is on the back of the envelope.”

The Weeble opened a personal computer the size of a small paperback, pressed a few buttons. “We’re staying at the Harbor Island Hotel,” he said. “Why don’t we all go back and shower and then we’ll drive to the Courtyard Marriott where this Jeff Price supposedly stayed?”

I glanced at Angie. “Sounds fine.”

The Weeble nodded and his laptop beeped. I leaned forward and saw that he’d called up a map of Tampa on the screen. It morphed into a series of city grids, each growing tighter and tighter until a blinking dot I assumed was the Courtyard Marriott sat in the center of the screen and the lines around it filled with street names.

Any moment I expected to hear a tape-recorded voice tell me what my mission was.

“This tape will self-destruct in three seconds,” I said.

“What?” Angie said.

“Never mind.”

16

Harbor Island looked to be man-made and relatively new. It grew out of the older section of downtown, and we reached it by crossing a white bridge the length of a small bus. There were restaurants and several boutiques and a yacht basin that glittered gold in the sun. Everything seemed to be following a coral, Caribbean motif, lots of sandblasted whites and ivory stucco and crushed-shell walkways.

As we pulled up to the hotel, a pelican swooped in toward the windshield and both Angie and I ducked, but the freaky-looking bird caught a bit of wind and rode it in a low swoop onto the top of a piling by the dock.

“Friggin’ thing was huge,” Angie said.

“And awfully brown.”

“And very prehistoric-looking.”

“I don’t like them, either.”

“Good,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel silly.”

Mr. Cushing dropped us at the door and the bellmen took our bags and one said, “Right this way, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” even though we hadn’t introduced ourselves.

“I’ll meet you at your room at three,” the Weeble said.

“You bet,” I said.

We left him chatting with Mr. Cushing and followed our impossibly tanned bellboy to an elevator and up to our rooms.

The suites were enormous and looked down on Tampa Bay and the three bridges that intersected it, the milky green water sparkling under the sun and all of it so pretty and pristine and placid I wasn’t sure how long I could take it before I puked.

Angie came through the door that adjoined the suites and we stepped out onto the balcony and closed the sliding glass door behind us.

She’d changed from basic black city clothes into light-blue jeans and a white mesh tank top, and I tried to keep both my mind and my eyes off the way the tank top hugged her upper body so I could discuss the business at hand.

“How fast do you want to dump the Weeble?” I said.

“Now isn’t soon enough.” She leaned over the rail and puffed lightly on her cigarette.

“I don’t trust the room,” I said.

She shook her head. “Or the rental car.”

Sunlight streaked through her black hair and lit the chesnut highlights that had been hiding under all that darkness since last summer. Heat flushed her cheeks.