“Relax,” the pilot told me. “We’ll get in a good forty-five minutes before they do.”
I didn’t relax, but I felt a little better. I watched as we passed over the boat and left it behind us, and finally, just as it dropped out of sight, the pilot spok
e again. “Fort Jefferson,” he said.
The fort began to take shape as we got closer, and it was impressive. “It’s big,” I said.
The pilot nodded. “You could fit Yankee Stadium inside with room to spare,” he said. And although I couldn’t think of any reason why someone might want to try that, I nodded anyway.
“Very nice,” I said.
I shouldn’t have encouraged him; he began to ramble, a long blather about the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln and even something about a missing hospital on a nearby sandbar, and I tuned him out and concentrated on the fort. It really was huge, and if I let Crowley get loose on the inside, I might never find him. But on the far side of the fort there was a pier jutting out, and as far as I could see it was the only one attached to the island.
“The boat has to dock there, right?” I said. The pilot glanced at me, with his mouth half-open. I had interrupted him in the middle of a story about a lighthouse that was just visible a mile or so across the water from the fort.
“That’s right,” he said. “But you see some of the people get off it, you wish they’d just dump ’em out there.” He nodded at the stretch of dark blue water between the fort and the lighthouse. “Leave ’em for the Channel Hog.”
“The what?”
He smirked at me. “Channel Hog,” he said. “Biggest goddamned hammerhead shark known to man. Over twenty feet long, and always hungry. I truly would not recommend taking a swim out there, buddy.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “When do we, um, splash down?”
He looked a little peeved that I had failed to appreciate his wit, but he shrugged it off. After all, he had enough of my money to take the sting out of such a small snub.
“Right about now,” he said, and he banked the plane, bringing it in low over the Channel Hog’s front hall. The plane’s pontoons smacked down, sending up showers of clean and fresh-looking salt water, and the noise of the engine rose up to a higher pitch for a moment as we slowed and turned toward the fort. It really was huge, and it stuck up out of the flat expanse of water around it, looking very imposing and out of place, with its enormous redbrick walls looming up over a few palm trees. Closer up I could see a row of gaping holes across the upper part of the fort, probably unfinished gun ports. They had a haunted look to them, as if they were the empty eye sockets of some gigantic skull leering down at me, and it gave the place a slightly spooky appearance.
The pilot slowed the plane a little more, and we bumped through the small waves past some pilings from a vanished jetty and turned into a very nice little harbor. A cluster of yachts was anchored at the far side, and a smaller boat with a National Park Service logo on the side was tied at the dock. We slowed, turned, and slid in next to it.
I walked off the dock and onto the brick path that led into the fort, looking for the perfect place to wait for Crowley—someplace where I could see him without being seen, and take him before he knew I was anywhere near. I do love a surprise, and I wanted to give Crowley one of my best.
The sun was still hot and blindingly bright, and I didn’t see any good places to lurk on the outside. The brick path led to a wooden bridge over a moat, where a few people stood. They were dressed in shorts and flip-flops and they all had earbuds crammed into their ears, each of them swaying slightly to a different beat as they stared at a sign that said:
FORT JEFFERSON
DRY TORTUGAS NATIONAL PARK
It was only six words, and it shouldn’t have taken very long to read, but maybe they couldn’t concentrate with their music blasting directly into their skulls. Or maybe they were just slow readers. In any case, I didn’t think the sign would make a good hiding place, even without the postliterate witnesses.
I moved past them and crossed the bridge. At its other end, directly underneath an American flag flying from the top rampart, a large and dark gateway led inside the walls. Even crossing the moat, I couldn’t see what was inside, except for a circle of daylight on the far side. I went through the square marble arch and stepped in, and I paused, because I couldn’t see anything at all in the sudden gloom. It was like stepping into midnight, and I had to blink for a moment as my eyes adjusted.
And as I stood there squinting in the darkness, a small light came on in the deeper darkness between my ears, and I actually heard myself murmur, “Aha.”
This was the place. This was where I would wait for Crowley. I could see out, all the way to the dock where the ferry would tie up, but he could not see me here, nestled in the shadows. And he would come off the boat, thinking that I was sixty miles behind him, and he would walk up the path, across the moat, and into this archway, where he would be temporarily blinded, as I had been. And then he would take that one last step, right into the True Darkness of Dexter’s Delight. It was perfect.
Of course, it left me with the problem of what to do next. I could easily surprise Crowley, overpower him before he knew what was happening—but what then? I had none of my special party favors with me: no noose, no duct tape, nothing. And I was in a very public place. It would be easy enough to knock him out—but then I would have a large and unconscious body to cope with, never an easy assignment, even without the assorted tourists who might be dawdling nearby. I could drag the body somewhere, but then I would certainly be observed, which would leave me with nothing but some truly lame excuse like, “My friend is drunk.” Or I could finish him off quickly right here in the dark gateway and simply leave him, making a rapid but nonchalant exit with the kids. If we got most of the way to the dock before we were seen, we just might get away with it.
I bit my lip so hard I nearly broke the skin. This whole thing was all “if” and “hope,” and I hated that. There were people wandering around all over, and if only one of them saw what I did it was too many. There was going to be a dead body, and I was going to be seen with it before it died. And since I was already under police scrutiny for two murders, I didn’t think they would buy the good old standby of saying it was an accident.
But there really was no choice. I had to do this, I had to do it now, and this dark archway gave me my best chance. I just had to hope I would get a small break. I’d never relied on luck before, and it made me very unhappy to do so now. I didn’t believe in it. It was too much like praying for a new bicycle.
A middle-aged man and woman walked into my shadowy retreat from the interior of the fort. They held hands and ambled past me, hardly seeing me, their flip-flops slapping on the hard stone floor, and then they disappeared out the other side toward the dock. I thought it through again, and it didn’t get any better. But I didn’t think of any other choices either. My best new thought came when I remembered that technically, Crowley had kidnapped Cody and Astor. If I was truly cornered, I could claim I had been defending them and throw myself on the mercy of the court. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a lot of that in any Florida court, and I didn’t think much of it would be reserved for me, but it didn’t really matter. This was my only shot, and I would just have to take it and let things sort themselves out later.
In any case, I really wanted to do this. I wanted Crowley dead, and I wanted to do it myself, and nothing else was quite as important as that. If that meant a long vacation behind bars, so be it. I probably deserved it.
I looked at my watch. The boat should arrive in about half an hour. I couldn’t lurk here in the shadows the whole time without somebody wondering what I was doing. So I continued on through the gateway and walked into the fort.
It seemed even bigger on the inside. The walls folded around a huge green lawn speckled with trees and crossed by a few pathways that led away to the far side, which seemed to be very far away. There were a few buildings, probably where the park rangers lived. To the right was a sign that read, VISITOR CENTER, and beyond it on the top of the wall a black lighthouse stuck up into the bright blue sky.