A pristine motor clamped onto a piece of shit boat.
Life’s full of paradoxes.
Lowry could have saved himself the discomfort and indignity of lying prone in the mold-boat; he could have, in theory, given the task to one of his men.
But there was no way in hell he was gonna let one of his guys get the money shot.
Whacking the mayor?
No, no, no. Lowry was going to do that himself. He’d made the city of Sarasota his own, so killing its mayor was akin to a presidential assassination or dethroning a king.
This moment would define him.
And add some hefty digits to his bank account.
When the deed was done, having a friend as the new mayor had obvious benefits of its own.
Everything about this situation was glistening gold.
The gun was an old M1A, a civilian version of the military’s M14 rifle. At least, that’s what Cameron, his source for high-level arms, had told him when he sold it to him two weeks ago. But since Cameron had said that the weapon was a “ghost,” it might well have been made of mismatched parts, some legal, some not, some with filed-off serial numbers, some custom-fabricated. Lowry had raised a skeptical eye to the rough-looking exterior of the gun, but a couple of test rounds at Cameron’s private indoor range had reaffirmed Hardin’s trust in his arms dealer.
Regardless, none of this particularly mattered, as the plan was to drop the weapon in the sea after Hardin had fired the shot and used the sparkly-new outboard to flee the area.
He was at the bow of the boat, which rocked gently, creaking, squeaking, waves lapping against the hull. The boats in the slips on either side of him were dark and empty. So too were the bigger boats closer to the main dock with the restaurant and offices.
Hardin had done an excellent job choosing the slip, as it was positioned across the water directly in line with the tip of Bayfront Park’s peninsula, where the vigil was being held. Before Lowry, the dark water undulated gently, sparkled by both white stars above and golden points of light from the candles in the hands of the people gathering for the event.
It was a straight shot—quite literally—across the water to the speaker’s podium, about three hundred fifty feet away.
After the shot, Lowry would fire up that peppy outboard, shoot past the marina, past the park—and what would surely be a frightened, panicked crowd—through the bay to Big Sarasota Pass, where a yacht would be waiting for him. The gun would be dropped, the shitty boat would be easily capsized, and Lowry would be on his way out of town for a few nights, letting the heat pass, before returning to a large paycheck and more street credibility than he could have ever imagined.
Across the water, the little golden lights twinkled through the black silhouettes of the trees, so many lights, a warm, undulating blanket that was gradually contracting around the dais, where three people climbed the steps—Hardin, Adriana Ramirez…
And Mayor Sizemore.
Lowry grinned.
Chapter Twenty
Silence meandered through the people assembled at Bayfront Park, a peninsula that jutted out into the bay, curving around the marina, offering sweeping views of the water and the sparkling waterfront towers, the stuff of postcards and travel calendars.
The crowd milled among the trees, spilling through the green spaces and onto the paved patches and beach areas, all of them holding small white candles with paper drip guards, the lights twinkling off palm fronds and oak branches, dancing on the waves. On the opposite side of the water, at the marina a few hundred yards away, were slips full of boats, descending in scale—massive yachts nearest the crowded restaurant, sailboats at the other end. In the distance, towering condos framed the quiet beauty.
Silence moved toward the end of the peninsula, where the crowd slowly congregated. Quiet conversations, punctuated by a few smiles and a few low, restrained laughs. Only a few. The gathering had a reverent purpose, so the crowd’s respectful hum barely registered over the sounds of the waves and traffic in the city beyond.
A stranger approached him and wordlessly handed him a candle. Silence nodded a thank you as the man lit the candle and continued past him to the next candle-less individual.
Silence continued forward, around a curve in the concrete path.
And there they were.
Hardin and Adriana.
At the very tip of the peninsula, beyond the fountain with jets of water and sculptures of leaping dolphins, past a small cluster of palm trees, at a small, raised platform.
Hardin held a microphone low at his side, not yet preparing to speak, and Adriana stood behind him as he conversed with another man, someone Silence recognized from the newspaper—Mayor Sizemore.
In the newspaper photograph, Sizemore had appeared rattled, harried; now his face wore a different stress, the heavy type, the emotional type, the weight of sorrowful responsibility, a countenance in tune with the event. Hardin put a hand on his shoulder, said a few solemn words.
Hardin was accounted for. Adriana was accounted for.
But no Lowry.
Silence headed toward the water, around a tree and past a pod of white-haired retirees gripping their candles and shaking their head, murmuring about what the world was coming to. There was a larger group behind them, maybe twenty or so, in a darker section of the trees, an ideal place for Lowry to conceal himself.
Silence slipped to the side, behind a palm, and took a small pair of binoculars from his jacket pocket. He looked to the group in the back, which the binocular’s night-vision optics showed him in shades of green, blazing white pinpoints from their candles.
Bowed heads. Solemn nods. More of the strangled, sad smiles. But he didn’t see Lowry’s long hair, long nose, penetrating eyes beneath a protruding brow.
He scanned past the group, past the trees, over the water, toward the marina, over a dock with slips full of bobbing sailboats.
And he stopped.
There was a figure on one of the sailboats, a bright bit of heat
