maid he’d fired—she hated Tovar. Nice old lady living in this trailer park,trying to support her daughter’s babies. She described what sounded like a false wall downstairs—he’d slapped the shit out of her just for being in the room. I don’t think she believed I was an undercover repo man. That’s what I told her, but it didn’t matter. We worked out a deal.”
Deon claimed he’d told no one about his plan to rob the house—a claim I doubted. He was a drug addict who lived with his stripper girlfriend. Same when he swore he’d found the .22 caliber pistol behind a false wall where Tovar had stashed his most prized artifacts.
“What’s that tell you?” Deon had rationalized. “The shit’s stolen. Otherwise, he’d put it in a bank. The maid said Tovar had a big safe upstairs. But, no, he
hid
this stuff. A whole roomful. I just took a few pieces.”
Their stories meshed. Tomlinson finished his account, saying, “I figured the guy in the ski mask was SWAT team—black Ninja clothes. That he was after Mick or some hidden meth lab. Didn’t matter when he started shooting. Man, we were so
out
of there
.”
Tomlinson looked at the bag again and said, “Your turn, Doctor Ford.”
It was three p.m. Inland, anvil clouds were gathering heat and moisture—a couple of hours before the first boom of thunder would chase us back to Sanibel. I started engines and idled toward shore to give myself time to think.
“This is
me
you’re talking to,” Tomlinson pressed.
I remained cautious. “When you were in Tovar’s house, did you or Duncan touch anything? Or leave anything behind?”
“My ass puckered when I heard shots. So I
almost
left something, but just a false alarm.”
“This is important, stop screwing around.”
Tomlinson gave me his
Okay, Teacher
look while opening thecooler. “One of us could’ve touched the door, maybe, on the way out. But I don’t think so. It was wide open and that’s the way we left it.” He pawed through the ice. “Hey . . . you already drank two beers? The six-pack of Kalik was for me, man.”
I said, “If Duncan tries to hitchhike, police will pick him up. I think I was right. I think he jumped parole. Why else would he take off on his own?”
“It’s what a medicine man does,” Tomlinson said, miffed about the beer Deon had drank. “He’ll change shapes—shape-shifters can fly when they need to. Or buy a bus ticket. No . . . What I think is, Dunk will go to the closest lodge. So stop worrying.”
“Lodge?”
My mind had to shift gears. Brighton Indian Reservation near Orlando was the closest, but that was seventy miles east. “Police will spot him on the highway,” I said.
Tomlinson popped one of the remaining beers, tilted the bottle back, and used the back of his hand as a towel. “Cop’s would’a had to be damn quick on their toes to catch him before he got to the lodge. We passed one on Venice Avenue. Dunk saw it. Didn’t you?”
“Saw what?”
“A lodge, man.”
“In Venice?”
“Right there in front of your eyes.”
I have learned to disengage when conversation with Tomlinson becomes cryptic ping-pong. It’s his specialty. He enjoys the game too much. So I opened the electronics cabinet overhead and pretended to fine-tune the Doppler weather radar—a storm building over Myakka, which was phosphate country . . . another storm east of Englewood, but still plenty of time to get home.
Finally, Tomlinson lost patience and explained, “A Masonic lodge. Dunk’s a Freemason—a lot of Skins are.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“As if you’d believe me.”
“With good reason,” I said, which sucked me right back into his game.
“Believe what you want. You’ve never wondered why Mohawks fought the British? They were Masonic warriors just like Ben Franklin and Paul Revere. Near Sedona, the rez there, a lot of Skins are in the Brotherhood. Wisconsin—the great Sauk chief, Black Hawk, was a Mason. Red Jacket in
Jill Myles, Jessica Clare