Goes down easy: Roped into romance (15 page)

Her visit this morning was now looking more like an elaborate setup in which she hadn’t been aware she was playing a part. She was willing to go to jail to protect the name of the informant who’d pointed her in Della’s direction, but why she’d been pointed that way, she hadn’t a clue.

Her own history with Eckhardt was simple enough. After her husband’s layoff and subsequent suicide, she’d sued the firm for the couple’s emotional distress. She’d never expected to win the case.

The gesture had been all about making a statement—or so she’d said to Detective Franklin. She’d wanted to go public with details of the way the Eckton employees in New Orleans had been left high and dry when Eckhardt had pulled up his Big Easy roots.

Book, however, had learned the whole story after wrangling a few legal strings—that having the money to do so and preferring to salvage what remained of Eckton’s good name, Eckhardt had silenced her with a settlement. And, as part of the agreement, had the court records sealed.

Dawn Taylor would want for nothing the rest of her life. Didn’t say much about her convictions, Perry mused. But then, seeing the reporter this morning, it didn’t take a big stretch of her imagination to picture the woman finding comfort in all that cash.

Unfortunately, they were back to a big fat square one, and Jack was out wasting his time. He needed to be here. She needed him here. She needed to feel his arms around her, to absorb his strength.

She needed to lean on him while he reminded her that as small and fragile as Della appeared, she was nothing of the kind. She was strong. She could make it through anything. And Perry knew he was right—as long as anything didn’t include whoever had her deciding she was too much of a threat to keep around.

Seconds after the thought crossed her mind, she heard a vehicle drive up and a door slam in the alley. She glanced out the open back door and saw Jack’s SUV. Relief surged through her.

She got to her feet in a whirlwind, shouts rising outside, and Book looking out the kitchen window behind her saying, “Della.”

He ran out with Perry on his heels. Della had only made it halfway to the fountain before they reached her. And then their questions fell one on top of the other. “What happened? How did you get free? Who took you? What’re you doing with Jack’s keys? Where’s Jack?”

All Della could do was shake her head. Swearing under his breath, Book finally swept her up in his arms and headed for the kitchen, calling over his shoulder for an officer to radio for a medic.

Perry rushed to keep up, holding her aunt’s hand until they reached the door. Once inside, Book set Della in one of the chairs while Perry hovered, feeling useless, finally putting on water for tea.

Book didn’t even give the federal agents a chance to get close. He knelt in front of Della, holding both of her hands in his, his voice breaking when he asked, “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “I’m fine. But you need to find Jack.”

Perry caught back a sharp choking sound, as Book asked, “What’s Montgomery got to do with this?”

“He found me. At the reporter’s house. They were holding me there.”

“Dawn Taylor’s?”

Della took a deep breath and nodded again. “The group behind Eckhardt’s kidnapping are trying to set her up as the one responsible.”

Book snorted. “They’re not doing a very good job. We just cleared her.”

“Wait.” Perry placed her aunt’s cup of tea on the table. Liquid sloshed over the side. “What about Jack? Where is he?”

“I don’t know, Perry. I’m sorry.” Della held out a hand. “I haven’t been able to see anything yet. I had to get back here, and there’s still too much noise, too much energy. I can’t focus.”

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Book said, boosting up from his knee and pulling a chair close to face Della’s. “Anything you know, anything you learned. We need to know.”

“I didn’t learn anything. Not until Jack arrived and the man holding me started to talk.” She twisted her fingers together. “I say man, but he’s so much of a child.”

“A child?” Perry asked, moving to a third chair and
leaning into the table, her arms outstretched on top as she reached toward her aunt. “What do you mean, a child. How old?”

“Early twenties I imagine. But he seemed to be no more than a teen. There are four of them. They worked at Eckton Computing. Chris, Kelly, Pauly.” She closed her eyes for a moment, her hands wrapped around her teacup. “And I believe this one’s name was Kevin.”

Book’s pen scratched across his notepad. “They have Eckhardt—”

“And Jack,” Perry put in, flexing her fingers and trying not to claw a hole through the table. “Eckhardt and Jack.”

“Right.” More notes. “Is Eckhardt—”

“Alive? Yes. But that’s all I can tell you. I don’t know where they’re holding him.”

“What about the kid who took you?”

“Very thin. Six feet tall. Blue eyes. A narrow face. Blond hair that’s a bit long. He wore a knit ski cap, so it was hard to tell, but at least over his ears.”

“What was he driving?” Book asked, his pen flying.

“A very small foreign car. It was white, two doors with a hatch in the back. And a logo of some sort across the rear window.” She paused a moment, then said, “A surfboard. Or perhaps a skateboard. I can’t see it clearly.”

“Did he have a weapon?”

She nodded. “A handgun, yes. He held it on me while I tied a scarf around my head as a blindfold.”

Perry could see the color rise on Book’s face as he made his notes. It hit her then how very much he cared
for her aunt, how anxious he must have been waiting for news on Della.

The way Perry was anxious now, knowing nothing of what had happened to Jack.

“What happens now?” she asked, fearing the answer, waiting to hear that Eckhardt came first—after all, weren’t the federal agents here for him?—and that Jack was a back burner item.

“The medic will check Della over,” Book said, silencing Della’s protests before she did more than open her mouth. “We hit Eckton’s personnel files, connect one of the four to the car Della described, put out an APB—”

The ringing of the phone cut him off. Perry glanced over, glanced back. Della hadn’t been gone long enough for tracing equipment to be put on the line. “Do you want me to answer that?”

Book nodded solemnly, got to his feet. Perry did the same and crossed to the counter where the handset sat cradled in its base. She took a deep breath and picked it up, her heart in her throat as she said, “Hello?”

Both Book’s and Della’s anxious faces looked on as she waited, expecting the muffled or distorted voice of Jack’s kidnapper making demands.

But all she heard was background noise. The sort that usually meant a cell phone had mistakenly—and randomly—dialed a number from the bottom of a pocket or a purse.

Book listened in, waited, then shrugged. She hung up, wishing not for the first time that Della had caller ID. “There’s no one there.”

“Do a call back,” Book said. “Star sixty-nine. See what you get.”

She picked up the phone, frowned when she heard no dial tone, pressed the receiver down and tried again. Nothing. She shook her head, held out the handset. “I can’t get a dial tone. Whoever called is still connected.”

S
LACKER
B
OY
may have been a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but the rest of the crew was prime Kobe beef. Jack felt like he’d been shuffled straight from the steam table into the Sorbonne.

His only saving grace was that they hadn’t yet discovered his cell phone in his pants. Then again, if the connection had timed out before anyone figured out who was calling, his goose was undoubtedly cooked. So much for all his intensive, specialized training.

After he’d blindfolded himself and Della had tied his hands behind him, Slacker Boy had stuffed Jack in the back floorboard of a tiny import and covered him with a tarp. And stuffed had been the truth of it. The car was the size of a lunchbox, and Jack was a full course meal.

He’d tried not to breathe in the mold spores and cat hair, or more than one layer of the dirt ground into the carpet, and had managed to tuck his chin to his chest and use his sweatshirt as an air filter—not that the fabric had done much to help with the smell.

He’d also managed to twist his hips in one direction, his arms in the other, and grab his cell phone off his
belt. It had taken a furious amount of concentration to not only remember Della’s number, but to blindly dial it when he was facedown on his knees and the keypad was upended behind him.

But he finally did, slapping himself a mental high five when he heard Perry’s muffled greeting. He’d then pushed the phone into his boxers and prayed that when Slacker Boy stopped the car, he could shake it down his pant leg to the ground and kick it out of sight.

Not that it would’ve been easy, being blindfolded and all, but he’d never had the chance. The minute he’d been hauled to his feet, he’d been hauled away from the car. He’d listened closely before being pushed up what he thought were porch steps, trying to pick up exterior noises, but heard nothing he could identify.

No traffic, no voices, nothing except what sounded like tree frogs, lapping water and rustling leaves. And that made a whole lot of sense considering everything around him smelled wet. The air was heavy with moisture. The ground squished beneath his feet. He smelled compost and fish and weeds. And the pungent bite of cypress.

Drowning. This was it. What Della had seen. If he didn’t figure out where he was, if the cell phone call didn’t lead Franklin to this location…Jack didn’t even want to think of what Eckhardt had suffered because he was pretty damn sure he’d be suffering the same.

He needed to know where he was. What he did know was that he’d ridden on his knees with his ass in the air for not quite an hour. He’d counted off the minutes until his legs had gone to sleep. He’d spent the rest of the ride trying to keep his head off the floor.

Not knowing the area and not being good on directions with his internal compass bounced all to shit, he wasn’t going to be a whole lot of help letting anyone know where he was if he got the chance. But he was pretty damn sure he was in the middle of a swamp.

He stumbled over the threshold when Slacker Boy pushed him across the porch and through the door. And then he was met with scrabbling feet, a lot of foul language and a loud female screech.

“Kevin, you moron!”

Kevin had hold of Jack’s elbow and jerked him to a stop. The shrill voice probably belonged to the love of Slacker Boy’s life, Jack mused.

“Where’s the psychic? And who the hell is this?” Same voice. More attitude.

“He’s the one who knew about the finger and about Eckhardt choking. She didn’t know any of that. She told me you and Chris were running out on me and Pauly.”

Kevin rattled it off in such a hurry, Jack could almost hear the kid sweat.

“And you believed her?” Shrill became a shrew.

“Yeah, and you know why, Kelly?” Kevin’s voice rose to an ear-piercing decibel. “Because she knew about you coming back to the office when Chris worked late.”

“God, Kevin, can you freakin’ forget about Chris for a minute?”

Jack turned his head to the side, heard footsteps pacing a hardwood floor. The shrew went on.

“So help me, if you’ve screwed this whole thing up
because you’re jealous of Chris, I will never let you climb into my bed again, got it?”

“What the hell’s going on, Kel?” This was another male voice, deep, beefy sounding.

Kel blew out a heavy breath. “Kevin decided not to stick with the plan. He let the psychic go and brought us this guy.”

“Who is this guy?” Beefy Boy asked.

“Someone who seems to know more than he should,” Kelly said, the tone of her voice not exactly music to Jack’s ears since she’d gone from shrill to sinister. “Take him out back and tie him up. Tie him good, got it? Wait. Give me his wallet.”

Kevin dug into Jack’s pocket for his wallet, ran across the bulge of his cell phone on the way out. “What the hey? He’s got a wire or something in his pants.”

“Sheesh. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.” Kelly was obviously not too happy with her man. “Where?” she asked, and seconds later Jack felt her cool fingers diving into his boxers. “It’s his cell phone, you moron. You brought him out here and left him holding his phone?”

“He was tied up, Kel. It’s not like he could make a call.”

“It looks like he did just that.” She paused, and Jack heard the snap of his phone closing, listened to her rustling through the papers in his wallet. “Oh, isn’t this just rich. He’s a private dick. From Texas.”

And then Jack felt her up in his face. “What about it, dick? You working for that bitch, Cindy Eckhardt?”

“Sorry. My client list is confidential.”

It was when she shoved the barrel of a gun into his throat that he first got nervous. And it was when she whipped off his blindfold and got up in his face that he finally began to sweat. “Answer me.”

He weighed Cindy’s right to privacy against his right to live and tell his grandchildren about this adventure. He looked down at the girl who was no bigger than Perry and said, “The Eckhardt family hired me, yes.”

“What have you told them about us?”

Where Perry was gypsy wild and gypsy hot, Kelly was a throwback to bad Goth with thick black liner ringing her eyes and burgundy black lipstick painting her lips. Layers of long-sleeved T-shirts clung to her body. She’d tucked the tops into the jeans that hung low where she should’ve had hips. A wide belt studded with eyelets served to hold up her pants and holster the gun she carried. And this hideout was nothing but a fishing camp. “Nothing. I don’t know anything about you.”

“How’d you find Kevin then?”

“Because I went looking for Dawn Taylor.” Jack was beginning to wonder if the laws of deduction applied only to him. “That was the direction you were pointing the authorities.”

“Kel?” Kevin’s question barely drew Kelly’s attention. She did no more than bark out a sharp, “What?” before pacing the width of the tiny room.

There wasn’t much to see here, but Jack took it all in. A brown Naugahyde sofa, a matching club chair, the material of both cracked and peeling and stained.
The floor was the same planking as the walls. One door led off the main room toward what looked to be sleeping quarters—two walls lined with bunks.

And then all that was left was the kitchen—no more than a hot plate, a sink, a small refrigerator, and all of it powered by what sounded like a generator running out back. Folding chairs sat grouped around a card table. Empty chip bags and candy wrappers and soda cans sat on top.

“You weren’t coming back for me, were you?” Kevin was saying, trying to get Kelly’s attention and getting Beefy Boy’s instead.

The bigger man stepped into Kevin’s space. “Leave her alone. Let’s figure out what we’re gonna do now.”

“Get out of my face, Chris,” Kevin snarled, and headed toward the back room.

O-kay, Jack thought, wondering how this bunch had managed to do anything right when it seemed the only thing they had in common was getting into Kelly’s pants. He shook off the thought, got back to thinking about the long shot of getting the hell out of here.

It wasn’t being in the middle of nowhere that had his gut tied in a knot. It was being in the middle of a bunch of armed lunatics with a big fat morale problem and a bucket of life sentences hanging over their heads that had him just about ready to puke.

“Take the dick out back, Chris,” she finally said. “I’ll figure this out.”

Chris gave a laugh that curdled Jack’s stomach even more. “How ’bout I send him out to Eckhardt. The guy could probably use the company.”

“No, not yet. We have to wait for Pauly, and that’ll give Kevin a chance to chill. Besides, I need time to think.” She stopped pacing, rubbed at her temples and a moment later looked up.

Jack swallowed hard. The dark emptiness in her eyes was more malevolent than the gun in her hand, more deadly than the flat, lifeless tone to her voice when she said, “I need to decide what to do with this dick who just stepped up and ruined my life.”

G
REEN
. Thick and ripe. Slithering. Deep. Verdant. Hues of grey and blue. Bottomless black
.

Crushed bone between teeth. Talons tearing, shredding. Ropes. Everywhere ropes. And cold
.

Life. A thread. Seeping strength. Seeping water. Wings. Fins. Scales. Fangs. Men.

Red. A heart beating. A heart slowing
.

A heart stopped
.

Rubbing her temple with one hand, Della took the stairs slowly, sliding her fingers along the brick wall wondering, as she had before, why Sugar stayed. If she had no choice. Or if she had found in death what she had missed in life. And, if that was the case, what it was.

Knowing that Perry waited anxiously with Book in the kitchen, Della slowed her steps even more. What the rest of the day brought to this household would change the future for many. What she didn’t know was who would celebrate the highs, and who would mourn the lows.

These were the times when her gift took on the
guise of a curse. Nothing she had seen could possibly be of use in locating Dayton Eckhardt. Or, she feared, Jack. Admitting this to Perry felt like a failure. She knew her niece was looking for hope, and she had none to offer.

Neither could she present Book with leads to follow or clues to unravel. She’d thought by taking time to free her mind of the day’s lingering anxiety, she might connect with Jack as she’d been able to do today in Dawn Taylor’s kitchen. She’d even hoped that she might find remnants of Kevin’s energy as he focused on getting to Kelly.

The only thing she was able to find was a vast release of emotion flowing from Book. She thought she had driven him away by reaching into a past he didn’t want her to see. So to learn now of his affection, his tenderness, his passion was a pleasure almost too rich to bear.

But this wasn’t the time to dwell on what was personal. So, schooling her features, she stepped through the beaded curtain and into the kitchen, stopping in the entrance as all heads turned her way. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to be of any help. I’ve seen thriving life.” She steepled her hands, offered the prayer to Perry along with a request for forgiveness. “But I’ve also seen death. I can’t identify anything more than what appears to be wildlife and wetlands.”

Perry turned away, hugged her arms across her middle and stared through the window out into the dark. Della sensed the waves of worry, the fear for Jack’s well-being swirling like an undertow and sucking her niece down.

She wanted to go to her, to offer comfort, but she had none to give. And so she turned her attention to Book, who was nodding his head, scanning his notes.

“Believe it or not, this is good. This is good. The phone call that came in earlier tonight? It came from Montgomery’s cell. The last tower that picked up the signal showed him on the Lafitte-LaRose Highway headed south.”

Book flipped through the pages in his notebook. “Kelly Morgan’s family owns several hundred acres down in the Barataria Swamp near Jean Lafitte. Been in the family for generations. I’d say we start there.”

“H
ERE’S THE THING
, dick,” Kelly said, stepping out onto the back porch of a house that Jack had decided, during the last couple of hours of freezing his ass off, was a hideout par excellence, sitting as it did on the edge of a swamp. If nothing else, this much they’d done right.

He didn’t like his odds of being discovered. And he sure as hell didn’t like his odds of getting out of here alive. Pretty damn humiliating to make it out of Chechnya and the Sudan with a couple of bullet wounds, to spend a month in the hold of a cargo ship, crossing the Pacific three times while being held hostage by the trafficking ring before he’d escaped, given no light, little water, and even less food, only to succumb to some snotty kids in a swamp.

He was old. He was soft. He didn’t like being either. And he missed Perry beyond belief. So much so that not telling her how he felt was going to be his life’s biggest regret.

When the motley crew inside hadn’t been bickering like a flock of biddies, and his own teeth hadn’t been chattering loud enough to break glass, he’d heard a diesel pickup or two chugging in the distance. But that was it. He could’ve shot off a flare gun and still gone unnoticed unless he’d timed it just right.

They’d tied him up, but they needn’t have bothered. It was the middle of the night. He had no idea where he was. And without more than a quarter moon to guide him, he wasn’t about to step onto a road and over a bump that might end up having bone-crushing jaws.

He couldn’t imagine what Eckhardt must be going through. While securing Jack to the frame of a folding metal chair, Beefy Chris had taken great pleasure in pointing out where Jack would be able to see the other man once the sun rose over the swamp.

And since his pleasure-taking had also extended to circulation-strangling knots, Jack couldn’t help but wonder about the pain of Eckhardt’s bonds, and whether or not he could see the house from where the gang had tied him to a cypress root and left him to rot.

Kelly let the screen door slam shut behind her, pulled the string on the overhead light. Jarred back to the present by both, Jack glanced over.