Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (94)

Bosch walked over and turned off the hose.

“You get back in late?” Bosch asked casually. “Everybody else is gone.”

“I don’t go out,” the man said. “I just clean boats.”

“Got it. Deck Doctor. Do you clean Davy Byrne’s boat?”

The man shook his head.

“Uh, he doesn’t have a boat,” he said. “The CJ is Henry Jordan’s.”

“The CJ,” Bosch said. “Which one is that?”

“About nine or ten down. You walked right by it. Calamity Jane.”

“Oh, right, I saw it.”

“Davy might act with the tourists like he owns it, but Henry kept a majority ownership. I know that for a fact.”

“So Davy’s just an investor?”

“More like an employee. But you’d have to ask Henry about that when he gets back.”

“Back from where?”

“No idea. Can you hand me down the charge line?”

Bosch looked around and saw a thick yellow electric cord coiled and left on a hook attached to a steel girder. The girders supported the corrugated shade structure that ran the length of the boat row. One end of the cord was attached to a high-voltage plug. He unhooked the coil, fed some of it out, and then tossed the rest down to the Deck Doctor. The man walked the other end over to an electric attachment port beneath the gunwale and plugged it in. Bosch assumed it would recharge the boat’s batteries and other electric devices.

“So,” Bosch said. “How long has Henry been gone?”

“Almost a year, I guess,” the Deck Doctor said. “He supposedly took Byrne’s money and said, ‘See ya.’ He and the wife took off on a trip around the world and left Davy to run the boat, live on the floater, everything. A sweet deal, you ask me, but that’s none of my business.”

“What’s a floater?”

“Houseboat. On the other side of the causeway, there’s the marina on Garrison Bight. That’s where all the floaters are, including Henry’s. A lot of the guys with boats here live over there, get to walk to work.”

Bosch nodded.

“Sweet,” he said. “You don’t know which one is Henry’s floater, do you?”

“You mean the address? No,” the Deck Doctor said. “But his is the one with the smiley-face pirate on the roof.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t ask for clarification.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” the Deck Doctor said. “You some kind of cop or something?”

“Or something,” Bosch said. “How long have you been doing this, working on the boats?”

“The quick answer is all my life. But if you mean here on the charters, I’ve had my cleaning business about eight years.”

“How long has Davy Byrne been around?”

“Here? He definitely showed up after me. Maybe six years ago. I remember because old Henry was looking for a partner, and I was trying to scrape the cash together. But then Davy Byrne came along and beat me to it. To this day, I don’t know how. He supposedly lost his ass on that pub he ran before he showed up here.”

“I heard about that.”

“Yeah, he couldn’t run a bar right, then he shows up here and thinks he knows all about charters and catching fish.”

Bosch nodded. He now had a solid grasp on the Deck Doctor’s sour grapes.

“So, you said Henry’s been gone almost a year?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know, at least eight or nine months,” the Deck Doctor said. “Supposedly they’re hitting all seven continents. But that’s according to Davy Byrne.”

“Listen, thanks for your help. Can you do me a favor? If you see Davy, don’t mention me.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t talk to that guy.”

Bosch walked back down the row to his car. He saw that the sun was riding low in the sky. It would be sunset soon. He had planned to be at the Mallory docks, Key West’s sunset mecca, for the island’s signature moment, but he was juiced by the idea that he might know where Finbar McShane was. There would be another sunset tomorrow. If he was still here to see it.

The parking lane was one-way. It took him on a swing under the causeway and then out at the entrance to another marina. He saw boat ramps and, beyond them, the houseboats grouped together on the water like a floating village. Most of them had smaller runabouts with outboards attached to back-door docks and decks. The houseboats were painted in pastels, two-story structures sitting on barges and lashed together to create a community.

From Bosch’s angle of view he counted eight houses extending out into Garrison Bight. The second-to-last house had a sloping gray roof with a large yellow smiley face painted on it. It had a black eye patch and a red bandanna with a skull-and-crossbones pattern. The siding of the house was a matching yellow, and a small outboard boat was tied up to its back porch.

The parking lot in front of the floaters was crowded. Bosch had to park in the next lot down and walk back. His knee was beginning to hurt again but he had left the bottle of Advil in the hotel room. By the time he got to the ramp down to the floaters, he was limping.

There was no security gate on the gangway leading down to the floaters. Bosch held the railing and carefully stepped down the steep ramp until he was on the wide and level concrete pier that connected all of the houseboats.