“Excuse me,” she said to the diver. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

“I’ll be here,” the diver said.

“Me, too,” said the deck ape with a wink.

She went back up the stairs and followed Lieutenant Martin inside. He led her across the bridge through a short corridor into his wood-paneled office.

“Coffee?” he said, closing the door.

“Please. Black.”

She stood silently waiting as he poured. The mug he handed her had a picture of a cute little blond boy in a funny puffy Hulk costume on it.

“Please, sit back and get comfy, Lieutenant,” Martin said, gesturing at a bench-like padded couch bolted to the wall. “There’s been a change in plans apparently.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“We’ve been advised to completely stay away from the wreckage. We’re actually leaving now. We’re supposed to babysit at a distance of a quarter mile. We’re not supposed to touch any debris. Just keep people away. Starting now. No personnel are to go near the wreckage until the navy salvage ship arrives. Including you.”

Ruby’s brow wrinkled.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“But how does that make sense?”

Lieutenant Martin leaned forward in his bolted-down office chair and thumbed back his hat as he thought about that. He took it off and began spinning it off a finger.

“I have absolutely no clue,” he finally said. “But as it turns out, I shouldn’t even have called you. My boss is pissed that I jumped the chain. I should have called him first, he said, even though he’s on leave with his family on vacation out in California. You ever see something like this with a crash before?”

Ruby looked down into her coffee and then back at him before she slowly shook her head.

“Not even close,” she said.

11

The clock in the dashboard was at 2:53 when the dirt road Gannon was looking for suddenly leaped out of the darkness into his headlights on his right.

His GMC Sierra skidded slightly as he brought it to an abrupt stop on the right shoulder and flicked on the cab light. There was a map of Eleuthera Island’s southern end on the passenger seat, and he reached over and lifted it up. He looked at the map then looked back at the dashboard, where he’d been clocking the distance on the odometer. Then he flicked off the dome light and shifted the truck into Reverse.

He’d finally arrived home around ten and put up the boat at his berth in Davis Head Harbor and went back to his house in Tarpum Head.

Weeds leaped and danced in the bobbing headlights as he turned off the asphalt down onto the slightly sloping bumpy dirt drive.

Now it was four hours later, and he was twenty miles south of his house in a mostly unpopulated part of Eleuthera known as Bannerman Town.

After a few hundred yards, he stopped again, shut off the engine, got out and stood looking.

There wasn’t much to see. The old road led into fifty or so acres of deserted pineland that had belonged to a run-down resort that had been abandoned years before after hurricane damage had finished it off.