The Water Keeper(61)
“You sure?”
She nodded.
We walked out of the bank and stood on the boardwalk. Staring around. Gone Fiction floated alongside. Calling to me. The look on Ellie’s face said she was wondering what to do next. Stoically, she took off my Rolex and held it out to me. As if I’d fulfilled my end of our bargain and our time had come to an end. She spoke without looking at me. “Thank you.”
I wasn’t about to just let her walk off, but I couldn’t make her stay. I had to make it seem as though the idea were hers. “Give me an hour. I’ll get you to the airport. Fly you back to school or—” I pointed at the envelope. “Wherever.”
Summer nodded in agreement, then lowered her arm. I had a feeling Ellie was short on money, which explained why she considered my option. She pressed the envelope to her chest with crossed arms. She stared west, then down at the boat. Then at me. Finally, she nodded and climbed down, taking her seat on the bench in the stern.
I cast off the lines and followed my map, trying not to pay attention to the hair standing up on my neck.
We drove south, the engine turning at less than a thousand rpm’s for the better part of an hour. Given their wealth and influence, the folks in South Florida have swayed their representatives to declare most of the IC in their area as a no-wake zone. It deters fast-boat traffic, which means most people who want to go fast opt for the unregulated Atlantic. I understood the reasoning. Without the restrictions, you’d have go-fast boats scorching down the ditch at over a hundred miles per hour and kids dying on jet skis all the time. If you want to go fast, take it out in the ocean. But given the steady thirty-knot wind currently blowing out of the northeast, we were stuck idling down the IC at a snail’s pace.
We turned farther south into Lake Worth, with Peanut Island and Lake Worth Inlet just off our bow. We passed under the Blue Heron Boulevard Bridge, where the water on our port side was dangerously low. As in shin deep. During the daytime, this half-mile-square area would be log-jammed with two hundred boats and a thousand people. Locals call it the Low Tide Bar, because at low tide it’s where the locals go to drink. It’s one of the most popular places in this part of the world where the kids come out to play and show off their toys—the living, the sculpted, the siliconed, and the motorized.
We passed the Port of Palm Beach and soon saw the headlights of cars moving slowly north and south along North Flagler Drive and beneath the Flagler Memorial Bridge and A1A. On our port side was one of the wealthiest zip codes on the planet. Palm Beach proper. It’s the home of The Breakers and Mar-a-Lago. Folks over there don’t mess around. They have their own police force and their own speed limits, and you’ve never seen immaculate landscaping until you’ve driven North County Road. Landscape companies are interviewed and vetted for the unique opportunity to pick up blades of grass by hand.
With the Royal Park Bridge overhead and Palm Beach Atlantic University on our starboard side, we began running parallel to Everglades Island and Worth Avenue off our port side. Everglades Island is a smaller man-made island attached by a single road to the intracoastal side of Palm Beach. The only road runs due north and south and splits the island down the middle. Ginormous single homes sit on either side. The entire island might contain fifty homes. It’s an exclusive situation inside an exclusive situation. Sort of like a gated community within a gated community—situated on an island that juts off an island.
Google Maps led me to a massive compound of a house on the southern tip of Everglades Island. I turned 180 degrees north and tied up at a deserted, unlit, and unwelcoming dock capable of harboring an eighty-to hundred-foot yacht, plus several slips for tenders that were also empty.
Despite the daylight, motion lights flicked on the moment I stepped foot on the dock. Ground-level lights lit up the marble walk to the house, which was fifteen thousand square feet and stretched even wider with two wings that looked to be two or three thousand square feet each. The entire thing was surrounded by a ten-foot wall covered in some sort of flowering vine. And maybe fifty cameras.
Chapter 27
Beer, wine, and liquor bottles lay scattered across the lawn, sparkling like discarded rubies, emeralds, and diamonds in the bright sunlight. The once-meticulous landscape had been trampled in random places in what looked like the mob movements of a herd of animals wearing high heels. Exotic bushes and shrubs had been broken off near the roots, and forty or fifty rosebushes had been broken at dirt level by one or more golf clubs. I know this because someone had emptied an entire bag of clubs, each shaft broken in half, and left them scattered like pick-up sticks among the dead and decapitated roses.
The remains of an enormous bonfire smoldered in the middle of the grass. Odd pieces of wood and debris lay half burned in a circle around the epicenter where the fire once consumed its contents. Absent their pedestals, several naked marble statues rested quietly on the floor of the pool, each striking some strange and no longer erotic pose made even more ridiculous by the green-tinted water. Four dented and evidently empty beer kegs pivoted about the pool’s surface like bumper cars. At least, I guessed they were empty given the ease with which they floated. Lying on its side in the deep end, which according to the tile at water level read twelve feet, was what looked like a BMW motorcycle.
Across the pool deck, every manner of shirt, pants, dress, shoe, sock, underwear, bra, and any other item of clothing once worn by someone lay crumpled where it had been removed. The grill in the outdoor kitchen still smoldered with the charred remains of something. Steak, maybe. Hard to tell. It was ready to eat a few days ago. The eight ceiling fans were each missing at least one blade. Some two. Most were still spinning, wobbling wildly. Five television screens flashed some sort of input problem. Two of the screens had cracked when someone threw a bottle—which now lay in shards on the ground—at them. One of the grills, possibly a smoker of some sort, had been moved to the pool, turned on its side, and appeared to be the ramp Evel Knievel had used to submerge the BMW.