Force of Nature (14 page)

Annie winced as she touched the back of her head, using her other hand to drag up the top of that sarong Burns had given her.

“I’ll get some ice,” Martell said, standing up. They’d been far enough away from the window to not have glass all over them. That, at least, was a plus.

“Go upstairs,” Ric told him. “Into my apartment. In my freezer. There’s a bag of frozen peas.”

“What I could really use are some clothes that actually stay on,” Annie called to Martell, who was already heading up the stairs. “Particularly before the police get here.”

And, indeed, there were sirens in the distance, getting louder.

“Damn it,” Ric said. He raised his voice so Martell could hear him, too. “Okay, here’s the story we give to the locals…”

“She told me her name was Lillian Lavelle. I have a copy of her driver’s license, and no, now it doesn’t surprise me at all that it was a fake. At the time it never occurred to me to check to see if she was who she said she was.” Ric told the story for what had to be the tenth time to police detective Bobby Donofrio. “It was a simple assignment. Locate the whereabouts of a friend of her daughter—the only name she had was Brenda, no last name, which was not a lot to go on. But hey, if she wanted to pay…? Like I said, I didn’t find the friend—I’m not sure she existed.”

Naturally Bobby D was tonight’s detective on duty. Martell inwardly shook his head at Ric’s bad luck. This entire evening had to be one of the most bullfuck-filled of his friend’s entire life. Although why the boy genius would mess around with Bizarrina McAxmurderess when Annie was so clearly in the on-deck circle…He could
not
figure that one out.

And okay, yeah, the lingerie thing had a certain appeal. And the woman was put together in a very yes-there-is-a-God way. But the waves of crazy coming off of her were so strong, they were visible to the human eye. That kind of shit was an instant soft-on in Martell’s book.

Of course, Ricky had proved time and again that, as far as intimate relationships went, he sure knew how to choose ’em.

His last girlfriend was some little blond Spanish teacher from Ohio. Yes, children, you heard that right. Oh. Hi. Oh. As in, she lived a thousand miles away. Apparently she enjoyed conjugating her verbs with Enrrrique, so she flew down for the weekend every few months or so. As for Ric, Martell suspected that, for him, the relationship was similar in nature to those of women who hooked up with lifers in prison. Ricky had the illusion of having a girlfriend, with relatively no-strings if not quite regular sex, without any of the day-to-day work.

Of course, it
was
possible that Ric had really liked the girl. When she sent him that Dear John e-mail, he’d been pissed enough to tell Martell about it.

Beeyotch actually wrote to tell him that she was going to be coming down to Sarasota with her brand-new fiancé, Vern—just like that. No
Hello, how are you? I’ve been thinking hard lately and fear we’ve grown apart…

Just
Vern’s kind of old-fashioned
, and
Would Ric please get his things out of Daddy’s waterfront condo before she arrived?
She didn’t want to freak ol’ Vern out.

Of course, Ric being Ric, he didn’t plaster the walls of the place with poster-size reprints of the two of them doing the musicless mambo. He just quietly got his bathing suit and what-all, and left the key with the super.

And then didn’t bother to tell anyone that he and Blondie broke up—at least no one besides Martell.

As the clock on Annie’s desk flipped from 5:11 to 5:12
A.M.,
as this marathon of a night refused to end, Ric now expounded to Detective Dickhead that his relationship with Lillian Lavelle had gone from business to very personal—as was often the case with Ric and beautiful women. Next thing he knew, she showed up with a gun and started shooting at him.

Both statements were mostly true—he just left out the parts about her gunning for Gordie Burns Junior, and her wanting to get away so that she could try to shoot Gordie again.

The woman was obsessed, armed, and dangerous. She hadn’t shot at Ric to kill him—merely to keep him from chasing her. Still, that shot she’d fired through the office window could’ve left someone very dead.

“I don’t know,” Ric said now in response to Donofrio’s question about motive. No way was he going to bring Gordie’s name into this conversation with the locals. He’d give that info only to the FBI.

As Martell watched, Ric glanced over at Annie, who was curled up with her poodle in the corner of the sofa, sipping a cup of some kind of freaky herbal tea, bag of frozen peas still pressed against her head. She had on one of Ric’s T-shirts—advertising the New Orleans Jazz Festival—and a pair of his jeans. Truth be told, the entire ensemble had never before looked quite so good.

“Maybe Lillian was jealous,” Ric continued. “Although I never claimed to be exclusive.”

Martell sat down next to Annie. “Do me a favor and give Ricky an I-can’t-wait-till-this-asshole-leaves-so-I-can-do-you look.”

She didn’t. She chose, instead, to give Martell an evil eye of withering disbelief.

“No,” Martell said quietly. “Come on. It’ll drive Donofrio crazy. This is the guy Ric threw against the wall, by the way, the day he quit the force.”

“Really?” That got her interest. She looked over at the heavy-set police detective. “It’s hard to imagine Ric throwing anyone against a wall.” She laughed, disgusted. “It’s hard to imagine him with Lillian, even after I saw it with my own eyes. He’s good at presenting this nice-guy image—a real Boy Scout. He’s so laid-back and charming, and he pretends to listen when you talk. He’s funny, and…a total jerk. As least as far as women are concerned. He was like that in high school, too.”

“No shit?” Martell looked over at Ric, too. “Because, I’ve known him for years, and he’s never been a player. I should know because I’m a player. Stay away from me. I
will
break your heart.”

She laughed, and damn. Even exhausted, with her head clearly still hurting, she lit up the room. “Thanks for the tip, Don Juan.”

“Ric had this one girlfriend—Carrie Stark. They were together for four years,” Martell told her. “It seemed really serious—at least from Ric’s end.”

“What happened?” Annie asked.

“She got back with an ex,” he said. “Ric even went to the wedding. When I asked him, you know, what he was thinking, he told me he was happy for her—that he always knew he was her second choice—that he was glad she finally got what she really wanted.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. If I’m going to spend four long years with just one woman, it’s going to be someone I can’t live without. And I’m going to be weeping and clinging to her legs as she tries to walk away. I’m going to be screaming
don’t leave me
—not dancing at her wedding.”

Annie was looking over at Ric again. “Do you know his current girlfriend—which really gives the whole thing with Lillian an even higher ick rating. God.”

“You mean…Miss Ohio?”

“I don’t know her name,” Annie admitted. “My brother said Ric was seeing some teacher, yeah, I think she’s from Ohio.”

“They were over months ago,” Martell told her.

“Really,” Annie said.

“It’s possible Ric didn’t tell Bruce,” Martell suggested. “I think his own father still thinks he’s seeing this girl.”

“Really,” Annie said again.

Pierre lifted his head from her thigh. He had this way of looking at Annie with pure adoration, as if she were the High Priestess of Alpo.

Probably because she didn’t talk down to him.

“Hi,” she told him now. “What do you need?”

The dog stood up. Stretched. Looked at her expectantly.

“You need to go out,” Annie concluded, giving him a kiss on the top of his ugly little head. “Good boy.” She put her mug on the end table, the pack of frozen peas beside it, and stood up. “Let’s go.”

Ric looked over at them. “Where are you—”

“Nature calls,” she said, gesturing to Pierre, who was already waiting by the door.

Ric looked pointedly at Martell.

“Hey, I know, maybe I’ll go, too,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.

Dawn was streaking the sky as he joined Annie and Pierre out on the lawn in front of Ric’s building. In the light, the broken car windshields—the front of Annie’s car and the back of Martell’s—along with the shattered office window, made the place look like something of a war zone.

“What was it the FBI agent said?” Annie mused.
“Just have a regular day.”

Martell nodded slowly as he surveyed the mess. “So far so good.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

J
ules sat at Ric Alvarado’s conference table, listening as the former police detective filled him in on the events of the past few days.

He made notes on a legal pad, to help him keep the cast of characters straight. Lillian Lavelle, Brenda Quinn, Gordon Burns and his son Gordie Junior. A henchman named Foley, the doctor—a local surgeon—who wouldn’t reveal his name, but whom the FBI had already identified as one Dr. Kyle Givens.

Ric sat across the table from Jules, next to his gal Friday, a freshly pretty young woman named Annie Dugan, and his frowning lawyer, another former Sarasota cop named Martell Griffin.

Annie was obviously intelligent, and extremely capable-looking—no fragile flower she—but, as Ric emphasized for about the twelfth time, she was a complete novice in terms of law enforcement experience. She hadn’t even so much as held a handgun, let alone fired one.

Her response to that? So teach me.

She and Alvarado had been friends for years. That much had been clear from the moment Jules walked in. They finished each other’s sentences and obviously exchanged boatloads of information with the briefest of eye contact.

Jules would’ve guessed that they were romantically involved as well—until Ric told him about Lillian Lavelle’s seduction attempt, and their decision to keep Burns’s name out of the police report by identifying Lavelle not as a woman looking to kill Gordon Burns’s son, but as one of Ric’s many jilted lovers.

At that point in the tale, Griffin kind of casually leaned over and draped his arm around the back of Annie’s chair. What was
that
about? Ric noticed it, too, giving Griffin a look that Jules couldn’t quite read. Griffin’s response was an extremely nonsubtle
So?

Big and black, with his shaved head gleaming, Martell Griffin was dangerous-looking in spite of—or maybe because of—his nicely tailored suit.

The two men were longtime friends as well—the info in Jules’s report had them working together in the Sarasota Police Department for quite a few years. Martell left first, to get his law degree. Ric had resigned more recently, after a deadly shoot-out with a teenager, in which the teen had not survived.

It was interesting, actually, to watch just how protective both men were of Annie. It was no accident that she was sitting in between them.

And when she chimed in with the fact that Gordon Burns had thought she’d be good girlfriend material for his crazy-ass psycho of a son, the tension level of both men went through the roof.

Jules half expected Annie’s little dog to start growling, too, from his spot on the floor, next to Jules’s feet. And
that
was apparently something of an aberration—the fact that Pierre was so taken with Jules. Apparently the dog didn’t bond like this with everyone.

It was something of a dubious honor, due to Pierre’s not quite daisy-fresh dog-breath.

Ric wrapped up his story by telling Jules that Gordon Burns wanted to hire Ric—and Annie, she’d chimed in—to befriend and protect Gordie Junior. Oh, yeah, and spy on him, too. Of course, if Gordie found out about the spying part, he’d be pissed.

And when he got pissed, he got violent. And when he got violent, people disappeared.

Talk about an impossible—and dangerous—job. One that it was clear Ric didn’t want Annie to have any part of.

Of course, there was also Lillian Lavelle. She was out there, a loose cannon, still gunning—literally—for Gordie Junior. Anyone near him was in danger of being caught in her apparently less-than-careful cross fire.

Jules immediately called Yashi and set the wheels in motion for the FBI to find Lillian Lavelle first.

And then it was his turn to talk.

“As you’ve probably figured out,” Jules told them, choosing his words carefully, “the FBI’s been investigating Gordon Burns for quite some time. We believe his organization is involved in smuggling al Qaeda operatives into the United States.” No doubt about it, he now had their full and undivided attention. “We believe that sometime soon, Burns will receive a ‘shipment’ that will contain a high-ranking terrorist—Yazid al-Rashid al-Hasan—whom we do not want inside our borders. But we don’t just want to keep him out—we want him in custody. We’re currently at a serious disadvantage, because our agent inside Burns Point, who was monitoring the situation, has disappeared.”

He took a photo from his briefcase and slid it across the table to Ric and Annie.

“Her name is Peggy—Margaret—Ryan,” Jules told them, and they both looked at the picture. “She was working at Burns Point as a housekeeping assistant.”

Ric picked it up, looking at it even more closely. But he shook his head as he passed it to Annie. “I didn’t see her last night. Did you?”

Annie shook her head, too.

“The only female servant I saw was an older woman,” Ric told Jules. “Puerto Rican. Graying hair. Her name was Maria.”

“That’s right,” Annie agreed. “Maria. I didn’t see any other women, either. I’m sorry.”

It was funny, actually, how much Jules had hoped that one or the other of them would look at the photo and say,
Hey, I saw her there. She was serving drinks out by the pool. She’s fine—definitely healthy and very much alive.

He put the photo away—and laid everything else out on the table. “You’re currently my best way in,” he told Ric, told them. “Into Burns Point, into Burns’s organization. I know it’s dangerous, and, yes, as you’ve said, Annie’s got no experience, but—”

“I’m up for it,” she said. “I want to help. I’ll do whatever I can.”

Ric was not happy. “Great, you can go be Gordie’s new girlfriend. Christ, Annie.”

She looked at him in a way that only an old friend could, to convey her total conviction that he was an idiot. “Like
that
would work. Since when have
you
ever gone out with a woman that your father wanted you to date?”

“I don’t want you near either of them. Gordie or his father.” Ric turned to Jules. “If we do this, how will you ensure Annie’s safety?”

And wasn’t
that
the million-dollar question? Jules met Ric’s eyes and gave him an honest answer. “I can’t.”

Ric laughed. “Well, that’s great.”

“What, you want me to bullshit you?” Jules asked. “I’m not going to do that. This is a highly dangerous situation, and I can’t ensure your safety any more than I could Peggy Ryan’s. But my hope is to go in with you—provide backup by being as close at hand as possible.”

“Go in how?” Ric asked. He was not happy, but Jules had read him right and won some serious points by being point-blank honest.

“The strategy I’ve chosen is to have you introduce me to Burns as a silent partner in Alvarado Private Investigations,” Jules told him. They were working right now on obtaining Gordon Burns’s social calendar—the idea was to have Ric, Annie, and Jules “accidentally” run into Burns in a social setting. “The hope is to pique his interest by telling him that I’ve made some lucrative investments in movies as well, and that I’ve even got producer credit for several upcoming big-name films. My team is building me a page on the imdb—the Internet Movie Database—as we speak. Burns is a huge movie fan—”

“We know,” Ric said.

“Our story will be that you and I met through your father,” Jules told him.

“Oh, good,” Martell said, who was far less impressed by everything Jules had said, “let’s bring Ric’s father into this
highly dangerous situation
, too.”

“—who did the score for one of my soon-to-be-released films,” Jules continued. “We’re making a webpage for that, too. And we
won’t
actually be bringing your father into it, although if we did, he’d probably be the first—after Annie—to volunteer to help.”

“Oh yeah,” Martell was indignant. “I’m sure you know Teo Alvarado real well.”

“I’m a fan of his music,” Jules said. “I know he volunteered to serve in Vietnam. I know he risked a lot to come to Florida from Cuba, back before you were born.” He also knew that Karen Valdez, of Valdez Imports out of Miami, had been disowned by her family when she married Ric’s father. Risk taking ran in both sides of Ric’s family. He looked from Ric to Annie and back. “Some things are worth the risk.”

“I agree,” Annie said, but the look in Ric’s eyes was pure
easy for you to say—what are
you
risking?

“We’ll try to phase Annie out as soon as possible,” Jules tried to reassure him, “but at this point it sounds as if she’s a major part of the reason Burns wants to establish a business relationship with you. We’ll have to play it by ear. If it looks as if he won’t want anything to do with you if you break up”—that was the cover they’d already put into place, that Ric and Annie were more than business associates—“then we’re going to need to keep her around.”

“I should also point out that this assignment could take a great deal of time,” Jules continued. “Yes, we believe al-Hasan will be entering the U.S. in the near future. But plans change—particularly when an FBI agent disappears. If Peggy Ryan was compromised, if her identity as a federal agent was discovered, the entire operation may have been temporarily shut down, and al-Hasan’s mission delayed. It could take months. Or longer.” His cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. It stopped, but then started shaking again, so he took it out. It was Yashi. “I’m sorry, I have to take this call.”

Jules stood up and left the room as he punched his phone on. “Yeah, Yash.” He closed the conference-room door behind him—actually behind Pierre, who’d followed him into the outer office.

“Hang on a sec, sir,” Yashi said, and put Jules on hold.

The dog was standing there, looking at him expectantly, so he crouched down next to it and scratched its endearingly silly ears.

Yashi, Deb, and George had all flown down with him, from D.C. They’d spent the afternoon wooing the locals at the Sarasota FBI office—making sure they’d get the computers, telephones, fax machines, desks, and, yes, the full cooperation that they’d need.

Feelings often got ruffled when higher-ranking agents from D.C. swooped in to take control of an ongoing investigation.

Jules would have been over at the local office himself, singing and dancing his way into their hearts if he had to—had it not been so vital to move forward as quickly as possible with this new connection to Gordon Burns.

“Sorry about that.” Yashi apologized as he came back on the line. “Got some info re Burns’s schedule,” he told Jules, sounding, as always, as if he were about to fall asleep. “Thought you’d like it ASAP,” he said about as slowly as was humanly possible.

“Yes, I would,” Jules confirmed, standing up and moving into Ric’s office to better hear him. It sounded as if Ric, Martell, and Annie were arguing in the conference room. Something about
The Odd Couple
?

“Sarasota Film Festival starts tonight,” Yashi reported as Pierre followed Jules over to the couch and jumped up onto it. He stood there, looking at Jules, his head cocked. So Jules sat down, and the dog plopped next to him, his head on his leg. “Burns is attending an opening-night star-studded extravaganza at the Bijou Café—I’m reading this right out of something called the Pelican Press. Tickets are five hundred bucks a pop, yowser, guess
I
won’t be attending—all proceeds going to support the festival. Open bar courtesy of…drumroll please…Gordon Burns.”

“Get me tickets,” Jules said, scrunching Pierre’s ears.

“Consider it done,” Yashi told him. “So what are you going to wear, boss? And do you think Tom and Katie’ll be there?”

Jules laughed, because Yashi, with his perpetually bored-sounding, nearly monotone delivery was the furthest thing from a gushing fan that he’d ever heard. But then he stopped laughing. Because what if…? No. No way. Robin Chadwick didn’t have a new film out. Did he?

And
that
was the dead last thing he should’ve been worrying about.

“We’ll need electronics.” Jules refocused. “Mics. Minicams. A surveillance van—”

“Deb and George are already on it,” Yashi reported. “I’m handling the, uh, important stuff.”

Jules had worked with Yashi before. He was, no doubt, printing out local take-out menus and MapQuesting every Starbucks within city limits. “What time does this thing start tonight?” he asked.

“Twenty hundred,” Yashi said—military-speak for eight o’clock. “You got the Scooby Gang on our side?”

“Yeah,” Jules said. “They’re in.” He looked down at the little dog, who was leaning against his leg, gazing up at him lovingly. “Including Scooby.”

“As your attorney,” Martell said, after Jules Cassidy left the room, “I can’t recommend that you do this. No offense to the little FBI guy, but
he’s
your backup? What’s he gonna do, bite Burns on the ankle?”

“I like him,” Annie said. And Pierre obviously did, too, the little traitor. She stretched in her seat. God, but she was exhausted.

“I like him, too, but he’s so…” Martell searched for the word.

“Gay?” Ric supplied.

Annie looked at him in scathing disbelief.

“What?” he said. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. I’m just saying that he sets my…what’s it called—gaydar clacking. That’s all.”

“No, he’s not exactly gay,” Martell mused. “More like…precise.”

“The same way I set it off?” Annie asked Ric.

“But it’s not like he’s fussy,” Martell continued, “like Felix on
The Odd Couple.
More like…careful. A brainiac instead of an ass-kicker, but maybe that’s a good thing.” He frowned at Annie as what she’d said finally penetrated. “The same way
what
?”

She turned to him. “Bruce told Ric that I was gay. And he believed him.”

Martell laughed. “No way.” He looked from Ric to Annie and back. “Really?”

“Yes really,” she confirmed. “And by the way—Felix? Totally gay.”

“Dude was married,” Martell pointed out.

“Yeah, and his wife threw him out because
she
at least figured out that he was totally gay.”

“Can we please talk about our potential impending deaths?” Ric implored.