A Gambling Man (Archer #2)(87)
He glided in at an angle, then cut the wheel hard toward the dock, killed the motor, and jumped out as the stern swung landward. He quickly tied up the boat, grabbed his hat and the flashlight, and walked off the dock and onto the island.
He looked around, aiming the beam here and there. He was also wondering why, if the military still owned this piece of land, no one was here to challenge him for trespassing.
He walked in a westerly direction, shining his light over the dirt. The land was reasonably flat but then elevated to about forty or so feet as he drew closer to the middle of the island, which made sense to protect against flooding. There had clearly been structures here, large ones, if their remaining foundations were any indication. Like an archaeologist he could roughly determine what had been here by what had been left behind. He saw discarded cables, stacks of used lumber, chunks of concrete, and an empty crate that had RADAR stenciled on the side. There were old tires, the remains of a Jeep buried in the mud, empty boxes that had been filled with C rations, a sailor’s white cap, an empty ammo chain for a machine gun, and a fifty-gallon oil drum that was labeled PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. A little ways away he saw the rusted undercarriage of a Mark VI railway gun mounted on a rotating platform. He had seen these guns while training on the Channel Islands. They could move around in a circle and take on both enemy aircraft and ships.
Under the illumination of his light he spotted something interesting. He walked over and knelt next to a hole in the ground with a stake driven in next to it. Some number and letter markings were on the wooden stake, but he didn’t know what they meant. This very same thing was also at several other places, all on the elevated portion of the island.
Then he saw another post in the ground with a name on it.
LANCET SURVEYORS AND ARCHITECTURAL GROUP, BAY TOWN.
There wasn’t a phone number or any other information on the post, but he wrote down the name in his notepad.
Archer performed a run-fast walk until he reached the water on the other side of the island. He had measured his strides and gauged the island as being about three miles in width. He had earlier calculated it was about twice that in length. Three miles by six miles, or eighteen square miles in total. Not a lot of land, but certainly big enough to do something with, as the Navy apparently had. And it was an engineering marvel that they had created an island from basically a shallow spot in the ocean. And to his knowledgeable eye, the large dock located here could have handled the biggest destroyers the Navy had.
Farther out there was a long, shadowy form. It took Archer a few moments to figure it out.
A breakwater.
That would make sense when you were docking ships out this far from the mainland.
He looked up at the sky as the blinking lights of a plane buzzed overhead. Its angle of ascent showed that it had probably just taken off from the coast. It continued in a westerly direction, maybe on its way to Hawaii, he thought. To his practiced ear, it was a four-engine aircraft, and it would need all that horsepower to make it that far.
He trudged back to the boat, feeling disappointed. He hadn’t really accomplished much of anything, and it had cost him ten bucks. Archer picked up his pace as a flash of lightning appeared far out over the ocean to the west. A storm was rolling in.
He jumped into the boat, fired up the engine, untied his lines, and pulled away from the dock. He pointed his bow east and throttled up. He could feel the wind at his back, and then the barometric pressure dropped with a rush. This was nature’s warning sign of foul weather coming.
He pushed the throttle down further, and the Chris-Craft’s powerful engine thrust the boat through the increasingly heavy seas. Archer listened to the cracks of thunder as the storm chased him all the way back to the California mainland. He slid the boat into its slip, tied it up, left the key under the seat as the man had instructed him, and hustled back to the Delahaye. He got the top on and the windows rolled up a few seconds before the rain began to fall in buckets. He sat in the car with the engine off and stared out to sea. Three miles out was an island. And he was pretty sure that that was where Sawyer Armstrong and those other men had gone. Now the question was why.
MIDNIGHT MOODS WAS STARTING TO HIT ITS STRIDE as Archer valeted his car at the front entrance. Apparently, a brutal murder of one of its employees wasn’t going to interfere with business. People still wanted to drink, dance, gamble, and watch pretty young girls lift their legs and sing their hearts out.
The rain had already passed through, but it was still drizzling and about fifteen degrees cooler than before the storm had hit. He spotted the valet captain in his hat, buttons, and military-style uniform at the key desk. Archer walked over and held up his PI license.
The captain took a long look at the photostat copy. The gent was in his fifties, with thinning gray hair, a handlebar mustache, and a nervous tic at his right eye, which made Archer nervous just watching it. His lips and nails were stained yellow from his smokes. He was every inch of five-six, and that frame carried about thirty more pounds than it ideally should have.
“Okay, what do you want?” he asked.
“You know Sawyer Armstrong?”
“No, never heard of the guy,” the man said, sarcasm dripping like the fake medals on his chest. “Oh wait a sec, ain’t he the man who owns this place?”
“You can play me for a sap and this dance will just take longer than you want it to.”
“The cops were already here, shamus. I talked to them but I don’t have to do the same to you. So scram.”