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rights.

As they were leading him away, Javier called to Jeth, “I didn’t tell you but I shoulda. Anita, she left me, and the girls, too. The storm took them, it was the same thing. That cabrone, the hurricane. That fishing client of mine who’s an attorney, call him, okay? You know his name.”

Javier’s bemused look again: God’s shitty jokes!

B ehind me, I could hear Bern Heller yelling, “That’s it? That’s all? The guy’s obviously crazy, comes on my property with a gun, and all you do is talk to him?” His throat was hoarse. His voice was shaking, he was so mad.

“Mr. Castillo is on his way to jail. What did you want us to do, Mr. Heller? Shoot him?”

Heller nearly said, Yes, but caught himself. Instead, he pointed at us. “What about these three jerks? They’re not only trespassing, we caught them stealing. We already recovered our things from their boat.”

I turned to see the deputy rip a sheet of paper from his clipboard at the same instant he lifted his head, seeing me. He spent a moment looking at my bloody shirt, at the gash on my face caused by the head butt.

“Whose boat?”

“The guy wearing glasses. His boat.”

“The man who’s bleeding, you mean.”

“Yeah, that’s right. He stole from me and wouldn’t give the stuff back, so I detained him.”

The deputy said slowly, “Your employees removed property from a private vessel?”

“Because we saw them stash it in his boat. They stole it from us!”

The officer moved his eyes to Jeth, then to Moe, who was on his knees trying to wipe the fish stink off his hands having already tried the towels. The deputy looked at Tomlinson, with his hippie hair, wearing the magic green goggles around his neck.

“I’m going to get my tape recorder,” the officer told us. “A couple more deputies, too, to take statements.” His tone saying: This is going to take awhile.

8

Bern looked forward to telling Moe that he was fired, then slapping the man stupid. Stupider. The loser: he’d just stood there and admitted to the cops that he’d taken the stuff from that jerk’s boat. Moe had time, he could have made up a story.

When they unfolded the towels and saw the Nazi badges, even the cops didn’t say anything for a while, all of them breathing through their noses as they moved closer to look. A diamond swastika. Silver skull with diamond eyes. A German eagle on metal that might have been brass, it was so black.

In Milwaukee, by the airport, there was a shop that sold stuff like that. On the south side, near the nudie bars Bern frequented whenever he was in town, always staying at the best hotel in the world, the Pfister, down by the convention center.

The store called itself a war museum, but was really a place that sold retail. Japanese samurai swords, uniforms, old medals, a German Luger pistol engraved with SS lightning bolts—Bern had bought a working replica for his collection—and similar things. Expensive.

Nothing in the place, though, as impressive as the diamond swastika. Probably nothing as valuable, either.

“Who knows what else was in that glob of stuff?” Bern had said to Moe as the cops pulled away, the lunatic Cuban handcuffed in back of a squad car. “Damn it, we may never know now!”

Which was true because the cops had made Moe give back everything he’d taken from Ford’s boat.

Ford, being a smart aleck even with his swollen face, had thanked the cops for the diamond swastika, and offered to let Heller keep the bucket, which the jerk had filled with rotten fish. His tone had been so easygoing, eager to be fair, that the deputies had actually said, “There you go, Mr. Heller. Dr. Ford’s not filing charges, and he’s willing to compromise.”

Redneck Cracker jerks, sticking together, even though the cops pretended to be impartial—they’d as good as told Ford he should press charges. They probably bowled together on weekends. Belonged to the same lodge.

He’d like to get Ford alone. The man thought he’d taken a beating? Bern hadn’t even gotten started good. On his grandfather’s farm outside Baraboo, what they’d done to pigs to get a laugh before slaughtering them—that’s what he wanted to do to Ford. No…the hippie first, then Ford. Catch them someplace in the middle of nowhere, nobody around to hear.

Moe had it coming, too. Slap him a few times, then use elbows on his kidneys. Let him piss blood for a week to remind him how stupid he was. That’s what Bern wanted to do.

Problem was, he couldn’t fire Moe. Not now. Moe knew how to scuba dive. In fact, he’d taken Augie and his chubby butt-buddy, Trippe Oswald, to the same instructor, Korzeps, in Fort Myers, where they both took the course, while Moe completed some kind of higher certification.

Bern needed the man’s scuba skills. Maybe there were more diamond-studded badges out there in the Gulf.

Another small problem: Moe knew things that could cause Bern trouble, maybe even put him in jail. The boat barn that had collapsed—he’d bribed the building inspector, so it wasn’t up to code. Also, Moe had been on site when Bern had bulldozed the mangroves, then used the Indian burial mounds for fill—which added a couple more acres of waterfront property but was a felony.

Hurricane damage could explain everything. Unless someone like Moe started talking.

Bern needed something on the man. Something that could put him in jail. Let Moe use his scuba skills until they didn’t need him anymore, then fire that loser’s butt.

Bern gave it some thought, and came up with an idea, the sort of thing his grandfather had pulled on his employees all the time. Relatives included.

But Bern couldn’t trust himself to talk to Moe right away. He was too mad. So he waited a couple of hours, then called Moe to tell him they had to load diving gear on the Viking tonight because they were diving tomorrow.

“We need to go looking for the place where they found those diamonds,” Bern told him. “Get out on the water before those Sanibel jerks do. Can you get back to the marina by nine?”

Bern also mentioned that, in an unrelated matter, they had something important to discuss.

Moe was suspicious. “Unrelated to what?”

Unrelated to your being choked to death, Bern wanted to say. “Don’t worry. It’s good news.” Good news for me, anyway.

He turned his thoughts to Augie. Another idiot. But at least Augie had told Bern what he needed to know.

Right after the confrontation, he’d dragged Augie inside the Viking, insisting he remember where they’d found the artifacts. Augie had just played dumb, pissing him off, and further pissing him off because Augie had seen the hippie and Ford make him look like a fool. Worse, Augie would tell the rest of the family. By Christmas, when nearly a hundred Roths, Pittmans, and Hellers gathered in Appleton, every branch of the family would know that a hippie had beat his ass, and a dork had made him look dumb.

Finally, Augie had mouthed off just one time too many.

In a tone that was supposed to show he was an adult, not a kid anymore—like that was possible—Augie had told him, “Out there on the Gulf of Mexico, all you see is waves, and every wave looks the same. It’s not like driving the boat ten miles down the channel for dinner at South Seas. Next time, maybe I’ll take spray paint and make an X on the fucking water.”

Jesus, that did it. Bern was punching buttons on the GPS one moment, next Augie was on the floor after being slapped so hard that his vision was blurry. Then Bern was grabbing Augie’s belt. He lifted him one-handed and slammed him against the cabin wall.

“You worthless little punk, you’ve been tit fed all your life. Never smart-mouth, ever.”

“Sorry, Uncle Bern. I mean it, I really am.”