Cooler Than Blood (20 page)

I was suddenly tired of the whole deal. Too much time trying to get Rutledge and McGlashan to help. Too much phone tag with Binelli. Too much outsourcing. A half-ass operation at best.

No more.

I called PC and said I’d changed my mind. I told him to hustle down to Fort Myers Beach. I gave him the address of the apartments across from where Billy Ray’s car had been found. He said it would be close to 10:00 p.m. before he got there.

“If someone’s lights are on,” I said, “knock on the door. If not, knock anyway. Hit them as they emerge in the morning. It’s an eight-plex. There aren’t that many tenants.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything they recall seeing in that small beach parking lot across the street
before
the police arrived…and PC?”

“Still here, man.”

“Someone
was
there before the police. Walkers, joggers—engage them all. Maybe a guy two streets down sweats that road every morning, and he lumbered by at the right moment. Maybe someone’s doing his neighbor’s wife, and he saw something when he was sneaking out of a house, but he doesn’t want to come forward. I couldn’t care less. Someone saw something. Always. Find that person. Split up. Hit everyone. It’s an island.”

“Running up a big note, Jake-o.”

I had no formal arrangement with PC. After he’d helped me secure the missing Cold War letter, I’d paid him two grand in fifties. What he split with Boyd was up to him, but I was pretty sure he cut it evenly. PC was nineteen years old and operated on an IQ, in all likelihood, well north of 140. He instinctively knew that formal education was a ruse. He saw more moves ahead than anyone I’d ever played chess with. You don’t find those people on East Coast–college cafeteria-recruitment days. But that’s not what drew me to him.

He was on the fringe of society and could go either way. When I tripped over him, he and Boyd had just walked out of juvenile detention for computer hacking. PC had programmed the county’s 911 line so that a lady with a crisp English accent came on and congratulated the caller for being selected and said to please stay on the line and take a brief survey. Despite his raw intelligence, he didn’t grasp the potentially heinous consequences of his crime. A few years older, and he would have been in the slammer for years. He divulged that it hadn’t been their first trip to the juvie residence.

PC and Boyd were on the edge. The more time I spent with them, the heavier my responsibility grew—to them and to me. I didn’t want to fail.

“Find my person,” I said to his comment and hung up.

I’d been too absorbed in my conversation to see them approach, and now it was too late. Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood on each side of Kathleen’s car. Tweedledum, the nut brain with glasses, peeled back his jacket to reveal a revolver the size of a miniature cannon tucked into his pants. What was he going to do? Unload it right there on the street? I might have overestimated his mental capacity.

“Mr. Dangelo would like to see you,” he said.

“And if I refuse, what are you going to do with that thing? Contribute to a live performance of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
?”

Tweedledum took his time with that, as if it were a serious question, then announced, “I don’t think so. It’s a common misconception that cannons are always used. Tchaikovsky opened Carnegie Hall in 1891 with his overture, and even though he wrote sixteen cannons into the score, I’m pretty sure there weren’t any guns on the stage that night. Now haul your ass out of the car.”

Okay, so I’d misjudged his brain. But I’m telling you, the guy had a dick the size of a baby carrot. I had no idea that Russian composer Pyotr Liyich Tchaikosvky, born in a different St. Petersburg, had ever conducted at Carnegie—I would have bet money the other way—nor did I appreciate learning it from this clown.

“Lead the way,” I said.

I put the top on the Lexus up just as it started to rain. It was a light drizzle that mixed with the dust from the city bus. As we walked away, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Kathleen’s car morph into a dirtier shade of clean than it had been when I’d driven it out of her garage.

CHAPTER 32

W
e paraded a block south to Dangelo’s condo and rode to the tenth floor. Like Kathleen’s, it had its own entrance off the elevator. The Tweedle twins didn’t enter the room—nor did my gun, which they confiscated at the door. I assumed they’d been instructed to make camp outside Dangelo’s door. Perhaps Tweedledum had brought along his music history textbook to study.

Dangelo sat at a desk that made him look big. He didn’t stir when I entered. I took a seat on a white leather couch and flipped through a magazine that told me about ten fantastic Caribbean restaurants I had to dine at before I jumped off the bus. I didn’t look at the article. I did look at the pictures of tan girls in white bikinis. The classics never go out of style. I helped myself to some salted cashews in a cut-glass bowl that rested on top of a glass-topped coffee table with a coral-reef base.

“Jacob.” It came out as he swiveled around in his chair so he could face me. “Have you found my missing funds?”

I finished my chew. “Working on it, Joe.”

“How? By going into one of my bars and informing the staff that I instructed you to talk to this missing girl whom you think I have? Such a childish game.”

“Staff?”

“Yes?”

“I just don’t see Special as staff.”

Dangelo stood. “Our arrangement, in the event that you’ve suffered short-term memory loss, is that you find my missing funds,
then
I do what I can to help you locate the missing girl, whom you erroneously think I possess.”

“That arrangement didn’t hold my interest. I find Jenny Spencer, and your money won’t be far behind.”

“You think?” He took a step toward me. “Then you are not thinking at all—for if that were the case, and I, as you have accused, am harboring the girl, why are we having this conversation?”

“I said, ‘far behind,’ not ‘with her.’ You didn’t bring me here for this.” I got up and dropped the magazine onto the glass table. “I’ll keep you posted.” I headed for the door.

“I did a little research.” His voice came from behind me. “You served for five years, but your trail gets cold the day you left the army.” I pivoted. He picked up the magazine from the coffee table and glanced at it. “I don’t think I even pay for this anymore. They just keep sending it.” He brought his head up. “Tell me—how does one get involved in your line of work?”

“A strange question from a man like you.”

“I’m curious…” He tossed the magazine, reached into the bowl, and grabbed a handful of cashews. “What chances did my two men have if you decided not to comply with my request for a visit?”

“None.”

Dangelo nodded as if I’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but it was the wrong answer for me to give. I saw it too late. Arrogance is the first step toward self-destruction.

“No,” he said with a tone of resignation, “I suppose not. You know”—he popped a few cashews into his mouth—“we had an incident not far from here about a year ago. We lost four employees, and the locals expressed alarming disinterest in the situation—not, of course, that we pressed them. You understand?”

“Not a clue what you’re talking about.” I started to circle the room.

“Sort of like me, when you bring up your missing Ms. Spencer.” Another cashew met its fate. “It did occur to us, however, that even if we had pressed our cause, the law just didn’t care. As if someone had hushed up the whole scene. ‘Bad for tourism,’ I believe the line was.”

“You can’t have four dead bodies in the sand in a beach town.”

“I never said they were on the beach,” Dangelo said.

“I read the papers.” I passed the front door and with my right hand turned the deadbolt. I kept circling. The distance between us shrank. Time and distance.

“They were good men. One of them was our best. They must have encountered someone who was highly trained, a professional, and not acting alone either.”

We paused. I wasn’t going to lead. At that point, I could do more harm than good—and already had. “There was a lady involved.” Dangelo said it cautiously and in a different tone, as if we had entered the demonic final movement of a musical score. My neck stiffened. My hand tightened into a fist. “Tragically she died on that beach.” His eyes rested on mine. A car honked. “Did you read that as well? In the papers?”

“I seem to recall something about that.”

“We…how shall I put this? We possibly overreacted. We thought at one time that the deceased lady might have knowledge of certain nonpublic aspects of our business. In retrospect, she probably had no knowledge at all. Our judgment was rash, but not nearly as bombastic as our adversary’s.”

Dangelo waited, but I remained silent, until the silence was self-incriminating. I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“After your sophomoric theatrics at the Winking Lizard, I had you followed. The car you were driving—”

I was on him in two steps and slammed him into the wall. His head snapped back with a thud then bounced forward so his forehead struck mine. A half-eaten cashew flew out and landed on my shirt. I choked his throat with my right hand. His neck was fat. I wanted to rip off a chunk and stuff it in his mouth. The door behind me rattled.

“What about the car?”

Dangelo took a second to get his breath. He smelled like cashews. The last time I smelled him, it was Swiss cheese and ham. “It’s double-parked, Mr. Travis.” His voice was tight. I loosened my grip. “Find my money, and you were never here tonight. This conversation never took place.”

I dug my fingers into his neck.
“What about the car?”

“N-nothing.” I eased up even more on the pressure. “We thought—that is, my associate thought—he might have recognized it from the around the neighborhood.”

“Are you threatening me?” I was ticked that I’d been followed. I should have been more alert. Too bad for Dangelo. I swung him around and pressed his face against the window. “Because I’ll drop you through this window right now. Do you understand that?” His eyes widened in the reflection of the glass. I leaned into his ear and repeated what he’d told me at the deli. “Look elsewhere, Joe. The beach scene wasn’t me.” I gave the lie my best conviction. I like lies. Judiciously applied, they can help your cause more than a standing army. “And,” I continued, “here’s the new plan: find your own goddamned money.” I gave him a shove and stepped back.

“Certainly,” he started and then paused to catch his breath, although he tried not to show it. “Certainly you understand that if we had our money, we would be inclined to fully—no,
permanently
—support any decision made for the benefit of tourism. Whether or not, or not, you…um—”

“Save it. I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not making any deal with you.”

“We say such things in times of—”

“The man you had lunch with the other day—he give you the script tonight?”

“No.” He regained his posture far faster than I’d thought he would. Dangelo might have been all dressed up, but he clearly had spent some of his youth on the street. “I’m not the puppet you seem to think I am, and spying on me certainly won’t advance your cause. Your reaction, Jacob, was totally uncalled for. All we’re—all
I’m
saying is that perhaps you can help us out. I didn’t mean to imply any threat. I apologize if you took my comments in that manner.”

But he knew. And he knew that I knew that he knew. Still, his earnest conciliatory tone caught me off guard. I couldn’t get a read on Joseph Dangelo—perhaps, though, through no fault of my own.

Regardless, I’d blown it. It wasn’t my first mistake and wouldn’t be my last. He had no way of knowing my elephant gun was loaded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything else—I’d already behaved foolishly. Dangelo called off the dogs, and I marched out of the room.

“Lewis Carroll would be proud of your career choice,” I said to Tweedledum as he handed me my gun.

“You mean Charles Dodgson?”

Screw this guy.

CHAPTER 33

I
left at 2:45 a.m. with Garrett and Morgan. I had taken Kathleen’s car back to my house and sent her a text. A phone call was too much work. I thought of my comment to her about failing gloriously and decided that the first word carried so much weight that it rendered the second meaningless. Some words should never cohabitate.
Moral victory. Small hurricane. Casual sex.

I pulled up in the alley behind the Winking Lizard. Garrett and I retrieved a four-foot piece of piling out of the back of the truck. When I’d scoped the place, I’d noticed the back door was like the pine trees at Camp Tecumseh. Beefy. It also had two commercial deadbolts. I wasn’t worried about the interior door, as it appeared to be standard hardware fare with a generic padlock. Although a camera was trained on the cash register, I hadn’t noticed any other security system. Like the Visigoths, the three of us rammed the waterlogged piling, and the back door splintered. Morgan stayed back with the truck as our lookout. Garrett and I crossed the kitchen toward the interior door. Halfway there, I dug in my heels. My Maglite illuminated an open door. The lock was off, and the door was splintered.

I hit the lights at the top of the stairs. As I took the stairs two at a time—far more difficult to accomplish going down that it is going up—I nearly lost my footing and resprained my left ankle. I did a quick scan with my beam. The room was empty. Garrett was beside me.

“Do you think she was even here?” I asked more to myself than to Garrett.

“Someone busted the door. There’s got to be a reason for that.” He swept his beam across the room. “Let’s see what we can see.”

Garrett and I worked the room, but it held nothing other than a hodgepodge of discarded bar equipment. There was couch large enough to owe real estate taxes. An oversize white sink was against the wall. I remembered the Colemans’ garage. My Maglite swept the walls, then the floor. When I first saw it, nothing registered. The floor drain was high, and the floor had accumulated dirt that extended in a one-foot radius beyond the drain. I crouched and brought the Maglite up close.

“Here we go,” I said.

Garrett got down on one knee beside me. “Four, one, two, nine,” he said. “She’s dropping bread crumbs.”

The numbers were barely legible, and the nine could have been mistaken for a four, but we knew what it was. I didn’t spot a tool; Jenny must have scrawled it with her fingernails. I crunched a piece of drain dirt between my fingers. I rose to my feet, and my left knee emitted its usual series of cracks. “Did I give her up today?”

“They’ve got a key, right?” Garrett ignored my question and focused on what was important. “Why would they bust down their own door? This is someone new.”

“Or they lost the key, had no time to find the key, dropped the key down the storm drain—there’s an unlimited number of key possibilities.”

“There’s no way of knowing if your actions led to his,” Garrett said, coming back around to my question. “If you didn’t come in, you never would have found the basement. We know Dangelo’s other locations, and they—”

“We already eliminated them,” I said. “He has her. We—”

“We don’t know that. We’re fairly certain that he’s the one who snatched her from the Colemans and that he
had
her. But just as he did unto them, someone may have grabbed her from him. Your key theories are a stretch, not the most likely scenarios. You don’t break into your own house. I’m hitting the front door.”

He vaulted the stairs. He was right. Even if Dangelo had decided to move her, why bust up your own place? I followed him up the wooden steps but then veered off to the restrooms. Both were empty, but I noted, as I had earlier, that you could park a car in the ladies’ room. Easy place to set up camp until the business locked up for the night. Garrett and I met at the bar and avoided the camera’s angle.

“Unlocked,” he said. “Next time, we should try walking in the front before storming the gate. I think that eliminates Dangelo’s crew. It’s too far a stretch to think they unlocked the front door, broke the interior door, then left without locking up.”

I switched off my Maglite, and Garrett did the same with his. We were at the front of the Winking Lizard now, and even though it had dark windows, there was no need to take unnecessary chances. The barstools were upside-down on the bar, and the added floor space enlarged the room. “Someone was already in the building,” I said. “The last person to leave. They busted the basement door then waltzed out the front.”

“The pertinent concern isn’t how, but who and—”

“And we don’t have a clue. There’s a third party, and we’re in the cold.” I was fed up with the whole failure routine. It
was
a routine. We were chasing Jenny, and I had no clue whether we were even closing the distance. “Let’s get out of here before the blue flashers show up.”

“No Jenny?” Morgan commented as an apparent fact when we hauled our gloomy attitude like overweight luggage into the truck. Neither Garrett nor I responded. Morgan fired up the engine, and after two lefts, we were on 275 south.

“We’re further from her than when we started,” I said to the window as the night rushed by. “We can’t even pretend to be close to her.”

“We can change that,” Morgan said. “You’ve got the tape, right? I’d like to hear her voice. I think it’ll help us.”

“Why not? This night’s no good for sleep.”

“Let’s grab three hours,” Garrett said. “It’ll afford us the opportunity to see tomorrow as a new day, put this one behind us. We need that more than sleep.” That seemed more like my line than his. Maybe that’s why I liked it.

A love song was on. I wanted to tell Morgan to turn it off, but I didn’t want to hear the sound of my voice. A blur on a fat-wheel bike scorched us as if we were standing still. I thought of my confrontation with Dangelo. Did he recognize Kathleen? Had he known her late husband? Should I show her a picture of Dangelo? And then what? Ask her if her ex (ex-ex, now that he was dead) ever had him over for drinks? Maybe they fired up the grill. And what purpose would that serve? Confirm her worst fears that she would never be free, even with a new identity? That at all moments she must keep a vigilant watch?

What would I do—who would I become—to shield her from all that?

It was a lot of questions, and they came with a smorgasbord of nebulous answers. At the minimum, Dangelo was certainly suspicious, and my overreaction confirmed those suspicions. My pursuit of Jenny was slamming me back into the past; the game was jeopardizing Kathleen’s safety. It was never meant to be this way—escalating into warfare. Trouble followed me with the consistency of a duck’s wake on a glass pond. I always had done well, performed best, when I embraced that truth, reacted accordingly, and never shied away from an unpleasant answer. I just needed to keep reminding myself of that.