“I’ve got to quit smoking,” Angie said as we arrived at the terminal.

“Or breathing,” I said. “One of the two.”

Trevor, of course, had a car waiting for us. It was a beige Lexus four-door with Georgia plates and Lurch’s southern double for a driver. He was tall and thin and of an age somewhere between fifty and ninety. His name was Mr. Cushing, and I had a feeling he’d never been called by his first name in his life. Even his parents had probably called him Mr. Cushing. He wore a black suit and driver’s cap in the broiling white heat, but when he opened the door for Angie and myself, his skin was drier than talc. “Good afternoon, Miss Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie. Welcome to Tampa.”

“Afternoon,” we said.

He closed the door and we sat in the air conditioning as he walked around and opened the front passenger door for the Weeble. Mr. Cushing took his place behind the wheel and handed three envelopes to the Weeble, who took one and handed two back to us.

“Your hotel keys,” Mr. Cushing informed us as he pulled away from the curb. “Miss Gennaro, you are staying in Suite Six-eleven. Mr. Kenzie, you are in Six-twelve. Mr. Kenzie, you’ll also find in your envelope a set of keys to a car Mr. Stone has rented on your behalf. It’s parked in the hotel parking lot. The parking space number is on the back of the envelope.”

The Weeble opened a personal computer the size of a small paperback, pressed a few buttons. “We’re staying at the Harbor Island Hotel,” he said. “Why don’t we all go back and shower and then we’ll drive to the Courtyard Marriott where this Jeff Price supposedly stayed?”

I glanced at Angie. “Sounds fine.”

The Weeble nodded and his laptop beeped. I leaned forward and saw that he’d called up a map of Tampa on the screen. It morphed into a series of city grids, each growing tighter and tighter until a blinking dot I assumed was the Courtyard Marriott sat in the center of the screen and the lines around it filled with street names.

Any moment I expected to hear a tape-recorded voice tell me what my mission was.

“This tape will self-destruct in three seconds,” I said.

“What?” Angie said.

“Never mind.”

16

Harbor Island looked to be man-made and relatively new. It grew out of the older section of downtown, and we reached it by crossing a white bridge the length of a small bus. There were restaurants and several boutiques and a yacht basin that glittered gold in the sun. Everything seemed to be following a coral, Caribbean motif, lots of sandblasted whites and ivory stucco and crushed-shell walkways.