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“I didn’t mean to impl—”
“But we shall make Mr. Benjamin’s acquaintance shortly.”
“How do you know he’s there?”
“Because I’m one lucky son of a gun.”
Unimpressed, I suggested, “How about I phone him?”
Monck dug the crumpled scrap from his breast pocket and handed it to me. I tapped the digits on my phone.
Four rings, then my call was kicked to voice mail.
“You’ve reached Joe. I’m busy milking the yaks. Leave one.”
“The guy’s a comedian,” I said as Monck rolled to a stop.
The GPS had directed us to a home on Karst Way, an unmarked stretch of blacktop snaking up a precipice whose exposed layers of limestone were now carved by eons of wind and water. I estimated it was a half mile inland from the beach to which the dead boaters had been brought.
A mailbox stood where the oyster shells of the driveway met the crumbling edge of the asphalt. The nameBenjaminran in black letters down both sides of the post.
Monck turned onto the drive, crunched forward, and shifted into park. I lowered my window.
Overhead, birds voiced their indignation at our intrusion. Inside the Explorer, silence as Monck and I scoped out the place.
The house was set back across a stretch of hard-packed mud hosting maybe twenty blades of grass. It was a buff stucco one-story affair with lattice-paned casement windows, all cranked wide. No screens. The roof hosted a gray dish with a small cylinder jutting from its base.
“What’s that?”
Monck glanced up at the thing.
“Probably a WiFi signal booster.”
A two-car garage sat just beyond the house. A battered black pickup, maybe a Toyota, was bumpered-up to one of its double doors. A motorcycle was parked outside the other.
Though vague on the truck, I knew the bike. A red and black Kawasaki Ninja 250. Harry had owned one during her brief brush with college.
Disorganized shrubs obscured the home’s front facing, thriving despite—perhaps because of—a lack of pruning. The backyard, large and fenced, had a glass-windowed storage shed in one corner, a homemade doghouse in another.
Wordlessly, Monck elbow-popped his door handle, did the legpivot thing, and pulled himself from behind the wheel. I got out and followed him across the yard.
The home’s main entrance had double doors, the inner one made of wood and painted a nauseous chartreuse, the outer one screened. Both were set at ground level, no porch or stoop, but below an overhang.
Blue ceramic planters flanked the double doors, each hosting a discouraged-looking philodendron. A Ring doorbell glowed on the frame beside them.
Monck hit the button with a bionic thumb. I had to admit: his dexterity with the prosthesis was remarkable.
A dog went wild.
No human answered.
We waited.
Reinforcements were adding their voices to the avian first responders. Dozens of birds, mostly crows, now looped in the sky and screamed from the sole palm shading the yard.
Monck pressed the glowing blue circle again.
The dog flew into a frenzy, yapping and clawing the inside of the door.
