“Growing is legal now,” Scotty said.
“With a permit, it is. Without one, it’s a federal crime.”
Scotty looked around the parking lot for a saving grace. His eyes paused on the black-and-white parked at the Kayak Shack. Lana saw it too.
“Looks like I won’t even have to make that call,” she said.
“You better come with me,” he said.
After an awkward fumble of heat lamps and doorknobs, Scotty begrudgingly handed Lana his key ring. She unlocked the yacht club and held the service door open wide, relishing her newfound proprietorship of the situation. The door opened onto a narrow hallway, made tighter by the crates of onions and toilet paper lining the walls. The smell of fish and old fry grease hung in the air. Lana tried to hold her breath and not touch anything.
They reached a metal door near the end of the hallway, far from the kitchen and the restaurant dining room. Scotty stopped and took a long look at Lana. “You sure you want to peek behind the curtain?”
“It’s just the two of you, right?”
Scotty nodded.
“You swear?”
Scotty made an ill-advised attempt to draw the sign of the cross without dropping any more light bulbs.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.” She dangled his keys. “Got to get those lamps unloaded before another one breaks.”
Lana unlocked the door and entered a dank, pungent lair. She clamped one hand over her nose to keep from gagging on the smell. The stench of wet skunk and lemon peels hung in the air, slipping between her fingers to fill her nostrils with an acrid fog.
It was a storeroom. Or it used to be. Boxes were shoved together and stacked in the middle to form a long, uneven table, covered by a large blue tarp. On top of the tarp, a makeshift greenhouse was taking shape. Rows of small, leafy plants had been hastily potted and interspersed with box fans.
Lana’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light. Her other senses, however, were overwhelmed. The wet-skunk smell had a sweet, fruity underlayer, like berries left to rot in the sun. And then there was the sound, which was almost as bad as the smell. Punk music was pounding from a speaker, harmonizing with the whirring box fans to create the kind of noise Lana imagined you might hear if you ripped the wings off an airplane mid-flight.
Paul was at the far end of the table, bobbing his head to the music, twisting himself over the boxes to rig up a scaffold over the plants, presumably to hold the heat lamps.
“Took you long enough,” Paul yelled over the noise, turning toward the open door. Then he saw Lana. “What the hell is she doing here?”
“Gave me no choice,” Scotty yelled back. He dumped the electrical equipment onto the tarp and switched off the music, dropping the decibel level into a zone where Lana’s ears were no longer in danger of bleeding.
“She knows,” Scotty said. “Told me she’d call the cops if I didn’t bring her to you.”
“And you just rolled over and handed her your keys?” Paul was still shouting. His face was red, and there was a line of sweat that stretched across his chest from one armpit to the other.
“Dude. The sheriffs are looking for you.”
“Paul, everything’s going to be fine,” Lana said.
“Oh, sure. We’re all hunky-mc’dory here.” He walked over and got right up in Lana’s face. She didn’t flinch.
“Gimme those.” Paul grabbed Scotty’s keys out of Lana’s hand. She offered no resistance, and Paul’s plan apparently ended there. He looked at the key ring in disgust and threw it onto the tarp. Then he kicked a box, causing the half-assembled jungle gym of PVC pipe to clatter to the ground.
“You done?” Lana held herself still, her face a blank wall, while Scotty scrambled across the room to set the rig back into place.
“Why. Are. You. Here.” Paul had switched to an imitation of a tough guy, gritting his teeth and standing straight, legs wide, arms folded across the line of sweat on his T-shirt. His gruff appearance was blunted by the box fan blowing in his face, ruffling his hair up like a child who’d woken in the middle of the night with a bad dream.
“You didn’t kill that young man,” Lana said. “Ricardo Cruz.”
“I’m listening.”
“I know who did.”
Paul said nothing.
“And I need your help to prove it.”
“Why should I help you?”
“Well, first of all, it’ll get the cops off your back. They think you did it.”
Paul waved that off. “I didn’t.”