Deadly Pursuit Read Free

you do that?”
    “Beats me.”
    The joke registered. She rewarded him with a brief softening of her features.
    They found Pice on the deck of the Black Caesar, fussing with the contents of a stowage cabinet. He greeted them in a booming voice like a cannon shot.
    “You must be the Gardners. Right on time, too.”
    Steve shook the captain’s hand. Creased and leathery, like a well-worn glove.
    Somehow Pice managed to compress his entire biography into a few introductory sentences as he walked back to the car with them to help unload their supplies. His full name was Chester Edmund Pice, and he’d lived in the Keys all his life, thereby qualifying as a bona fide Conch. His boat, as they had surely observed, was the Black Caesar, so christened in honor of a half-historical, half-legendary buccaneering companion of Blackbeard.
    “But old Caesar, now, not only his beard was black,” Pice explained with a lion cough of laughter. “He was black, every bit as black as yours truly. He made piracy an equal-opportunity profession.”
    Pice himself, he assured them, had never run the Jolly Roger up his mast. For more than forty years he’d fished the Florida Straits, before deciding to give the fish a break and himself a rest. Semi-retired now at sixty-five, he’d made an arrangement with the Larson family to ferry vacationers to and from Pelican Key.
    “I’ll get you there,” he promised cheerfully while helping the Gardners load their luggage and groceries aboard his boat. “And I’ll be back to pick you up in two weeks.”
    Steve handed him a small traveling case of Kirstie’s. “There’s supposed to be a motorboat at the island for everyday use.”
    “Sure is. Little wooden-hulled job with an Evinrude outboard. Nothing fancy, but she’ll get you back and forth to town. You won’t use her much, though. You won’t care to leave Pelican Key. It casts a spell on you. Half a month there, in blessed isolation—why, it’s as good as a miracle cure.”
    He hefted their heaviest suitcase without strain and went on speaking as if he were empty-handed.
    “Believe me, I know. I see them all the time—people like you. They show up worn out and frazzled and cranky, with the world’s weight bearing them down, and when I retrieve ’em a couple weeks later, they’re like members of a whole new species.”
    Kirstie was amused. “We’re not usually quite so worn out. It’s just that we’re a little tired after the drive—”
    “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you look frazzled, ma’am,” Pice said hastily, worried that he’d given offense. “You’re a vision of loveliness and youth.” He winked at her. “But your hubby, now, he could use a rest.”
    Kirstie nodded, meeting Steve’s eyes. “Definitely.”
    Steve could hardly dispute the point. “That’s why I’m here,” he said mildly. “And I know I picked the right place, because I used to visit Pelican Key fairly regularly.”
    Pice put down the suitcase on the gangplank and studied him with a squinty pirate’s eye. “Did you, now? Paying a call on Mr. Larson?”
    “No, this was seventeen years ago or more. Back when I was in high school. Before Mr. Larson lived there.”
    “Before ...? Son, in those days Pelican Key was uninhabited.”
    “I know it.”
    “So who exactly were you visiting?”
    “Nobody.”
    “You’ll have to explain that.”
    “My best friend’s dad had a boat docked up north. Every summer the three of us would cruise south to Islamorada. Then my friend’s dad would canvass the local bars, while the two of us boys rented a dinghy with an outboard motor and went exploring. Somehow we always ended up at Pelican Key. Probably we weren’t supposed to be there; Larson owned it even then, of course, though he hadn’t started the restoration work yet. Anyway, nobody ever stopped us.”
    “What did two boys encounter on Pelican Key that was so fascinating?”
    “Everything. The old plantation house, the reef, the boardwalk