Read Online Bone Key by Les Standiford - Free Book Online

civilization carried along in that boiling current. The Stream was actually a mighty, mid-ocean river that ran from South America through the Caribbean, carrying its warm waters all the way to the North Atlantic, where its heat softened the stern European climate and made the British Isles habitable.
    He turned his face square into the breeze and lengthened his stride, the rhythm of the run and the rush of the wind threatening to lift him out of his physical self. His earliest memories were those of the beach and staring out over these waters in permanent wonder. Poking along the ragged mangrove inlets in his dinghy, out on the swells in the
Miss Miami Priss
whenever his old man stole a day from the business for time on the bounding main.
    The smells he breathed then, as now, were those of promise and adventure. Pirate ships and plunder. Sailfish, swordfish, and marlin. Distant ports of call.
    The wind is in from Africa
, he thought. Dear God. The night that Annie had told him she was deserting him, and Florida, for New York City, he’d driven out to the end of the road on Key Biscayne in a daze. He’d pulled his old man’s Chrysler half off the side of the road, climbed over the barricade at the entrance to the state park, and made his way to the beach, where he stayed until morning, watching the endless sweep of the lighthouse beacon and staring out to sea, wondering how anyone might leave such a world behind.
    He’d bought into it all as a kid. Atlantis. The Bermuda Triangle. Sunken treasure. Hell, he thought, a part of him still did. He shouldn’t have been so hard on the kid who wanted to sell him stolen gold. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. He could have pieces of eight jingling in his pockets right now.
    “You trying to make this a macho thing?” Russell called, breathing heavily as he came up on Deal’s right.
    Deal blinked, bringing himself back into his body. He gave Russell an apologetic look and eased off a bit. “Just got carried away, I guess.”
    They were well down the beach road now, he saw, clipping along the island’s southeastward stretch of beach, a lonely area where an inland marsh had kept development at bay for nearly two centuries. The sun was struggling up behind a bank of clouds on the eastern horizon, a dull orb that cast a dim glow on the fringes of the thick stand of mangroves that still claimed the soggy ground.
    Deal glanced across the deserted roadway toward the overgrown salt marsh, trying to imagine the string of upscale condominiums that Franklin Stone hoped to build there. Stone had already turned the former naval station downtown, where Harry Truman once kept his “Little White House,” into a sprawling, gated community—dubbed Truman Town by the locals—from which he’d made a fortune.
    Stone had bulldozed the nondescript wooden naval complex flat, then platted its forty-five shady acres with a gridwork of streets where he built several hundred condominiums and predesigned saltbox-style homes, all of it as neat and orderly as a town Disney might have built. In the dozen years that had passed, what had once seemed like astronomical asking prices for the residences inside the Truman gates were now commonplace. Now Stone proposed to turn the last undeveloped section of the island into another residential community, one that would dwarf the Truman project in both size and asking prices of the domiciles within.
    “That’s where we’re going to work, huh?” said Russell Straight, who was at his left shoulder, on the ocean side now.
    Deal glanced at his jogging partner. “I’m just down here to talk,” he said.
    “Uh-huh,” Russell said. “You saying you’d hesitate one second if the man offered you the job?”
    “It’s a complicated project,” Deal told him. “And I still haven’t seen any numbers.”
    “Whatever the number is, gonna be a big one,” Russell answered.
    “Stone’s still got some problems to iron out with the site,” Deal said, pointing across the