Never Too Late (21 page)

"I'll be
taking you to hell first," Carter said, hand gripping the machete while
raising it to his shoulder.

"Don't
test my patience, old man," Cavallaro said. "If you take me to hell,
your daughter will come with me. Now drop the machete."

Carter's hand
tightened on the handle, as if to hurl the thing, and Jerry was about to disarm
Carter himself, when Carter tossed the machete at Cavallaro's feet.

"That's
better." Cavallaro looked at Jerry. "You too." Jerry tossed his
machete alongside Carter's. "Like I said, you'll be flying me out of here,"
he told Carter. "Schribe's going to clear it with customs and the airport
so we can leave without any questions asked."

"Where is
Schribe now?" Jerry asked, wanting to distract Cavallaro, watching for a
chance to rush him, which would be out of the question as long as he had a gun
pressed against Andrea's head. But if the man looked away for an instant, he
would. He wasn't sure what to expect from Carter though. He could be a loose cannon.
Or he could be competent in disarming Cavallaro.

"He's back
on the trail, tied up." He looked at Carter. "Along with your body
guard. Next time, hire a man who's up to the job. Schribe's also going to call
for a boat to take us to Andros Town, and have a car waiting to take us to the
airport. After I'm safely away from here, you'll be free to return home."

Jerry didn't
think for a minute Cavallaro would simply let them walk away. Andrea's
testimony in court could put him away for life, and for that reason alone,
Cavallaro couldn't let her go. But for now, they'd have to go along with him
until they could jump him. "Let my wife go and take me as hostage
instead," he said.

"I can't
let your wife go," Cavallaro replied. "She knows too much."

"If you
kill her you'd better kill me too then," Jerry said, "because I'll
hunt you down and see you suffer a slow agonizing death before I'm done with
you." And he meant exactly that.

Cavallaro let
out a short, ironic laugh. "I don't want to kill your wife," he said.
"I want to take her back to Italy with me. I'd almost convinced her to
come before all this turned up. You see, I appreciate her in a way you never
did, isn't that right
cara
mia
?" he said in a soft voice,
allowing his finger to leave the butt of the gun to stroke Andrea's cheek. She
recoiled from his touch, but said nothing. He leaned over her, and said in a
quiet, affable voice, "
Querida
,
I do not want to hurt you, but I need the stamp and I'll do whatever it takes
to get it. Do you understand what I'm saying?" It was a softly spoken
threat.

When Andrea
didn't reply, anger flared in Cavallaro's eyes. "The stamp,
querida
. Where is it?" he said in a
harsh voice.

"She
doesn't have it," Jerry said. "Let her go."

"She
either has it or she knows who does," Cavallaro said. His thumb stroked
the handgrip of the pistol as he held Jerry's gaze, a gesture to remind them he
was not playing games.

Jerry raised
his eyes from Cavallaro's hand, and said, "When Schribe looked in my
wife's handbag he found a slit in the lining where you hid the stamp, but the
stamp was gone. No one knows who took it or where it is."

"Then I
want the handbag." Cavallaro said. "Once it's destroyed, there will
be no evidence. Where is it?"

"Scribe
sent it to a lab," Jerry replied, realizing too late he should have
claimed ignorance. As long as there was a chance the handbag could be recovered
and destroyed, Andrea would be safe because her testimony would mean nothing
without hard evidence.

Cavallaro
leaned toward Andrea and said, "Then I guess you won't be coming to Italy
with me after all." His finger curved around the trigger. "You won't
be going anywhere but down that blue hole with your husband and father because
your testimony could put me away for life. Believe me, it's not the way I want
it. I would like to have had you with me in Italy." He glanced down at the
blue hole. "The water's at least fifty feet down, so after the fall it
will be quick. But I'll give you one last chance to tell me where the stamp is.
It's worth over two-and-a-half million dollars. We could live well in Majorca
on that." His finger left the handgrip to brush her cheek. "So what's
it going to be,
cara
mia
?" he said against her ear.

"Damn you to hell!"
Jerry
bellowed. He drew in a ragged breath to steady the erratic beating of his heart.
"Alright. I know where the stamp is, but I'll have to take you to it
because it's hidden where no one could find it."

Cavallaro
looked at Jerry, cold and hard. "You're lying."

"Why would
I lie—" his eyes shifted to the gun "—with that aimed at her
head?"

"Maybe
you're a fool." The smooth snick of the cylinder rotating into place broke
the momentary silence as the man cocked the gun. He shoved the muzzle harder
against Andrea's temple. "You have ten seconds to tell me where the stamp
is. Nine... eight... seven..." Andrea closed her eyes, waiting to die...

"I have the stamp."
A man
stepped through the opening in the brush and into the grotto, a gun in one
hand, the other hand pressed against his pocket holding the stamp. "Drop
the gun, Cavallaro, and kick it over here," the man said. When Cavallaro
didn't follow the man's orders, the man said, "Make no mistake, Cavallaro,
I'll be on that Learjet when it leaves today. You can either go with me, or
I'll shoot you and toss you down that hole. So what's it going to be?"

Cavallaro eyed
the man, hatred and disbelief on his face, and said, "I should have known
it was you, Acheson. You're the only one who knew what was going on, the only
one I trusted to carry out the plan. I should have figured it out when Stanton
didn't make the transfer. But stuffing him in a trunk... That's not your style,
so I wasn't sure."

"I didn't
have too many options that night. And I haven't been getting enough cut of the
action either," the man added, "until now. So what's it going to
be?"

"This!"
Cavallaro hurled Andrea aside, and in the process, the gun was flung from his
hand. Cavallaro threw himself at the other man, and while they were in death
grips and rolling close to the edge of the embankment sloping down to the hole,
Jerry grabbed the gun and fired a shot to stop them. But he was too late. The
men rolled down the embankment together, arms disentangling as they went, while
reaching out for something that wasn't there. Their desperate cries echoed as
they plunged toward the water below. The sound of splashing water ended their
cries. Then silence.

***

Andrea stared
out the bedroom window of her parent's suite at Finnigan's Hideaway. She felt
oddly melancholy over Alessandro's death, not because she cared anything for
the man, but because he was a man who'd had everything going for him—charm,
charisma, exceptional good looks—and threw it all away because of a lust for
money. Strange how that can twist a person. Jerry also had a lust for money,
but he channeled it in a positive way, providing for his family...

"Let it
go," Jerry clipped, as he walked into the bedroom. "The man got what
he deserved."

Andrea bristled
at Jerry's misinterpretation of her feelings about Alessandro. He was reading
things all wrong, as he frequently did when he was pissed, which aggravated
her. "I don't care anything about Alessandro Cavallaro," she said.
"I was thinking it was such a waste of what could have been a good
life."

"Yeah, I
suppose living in a villa in Majorca and cruising the Mediterranean on a
sixty-four foot yacht could have been a good life. Now you'll have to settle
for Myrtle Beach."

Andrea glared
at Jerry. For some reason she'd expected, after their harrowing encounter in
the forest, that things would be different between them. Clearly she was wrong.
They were back sniping at each other. "I don't believe I want to hear any
more of this," she said, then went to join her parents in the living room.

She'd rather
face her father than listen to Jerry's attempts to make something out of
nothing, because the bottom line was, Alessandro had been nothing to her from
the start, other than a pair of appreciative male eyes, or at least the
perception that he found her attractive. But almost any nice-looking man would
have been able to fill that role the day they boarded the ship. She'd been
primed to take a lover, if only to block Jerry from her mind. But now, she
realized no man could take Jerry's place in bed. But out of the bed, Jerry was
as impossible as ever...

"Honey, "
her mother said.
"
Sit down and have some canapés."

"I'm not
hungry," Andrea replied, her stomach suffering the effects of a deeply
disturbing day. First, a near-death experience, then watching two men plunge to
their deaths, then listening to the details of how to fish two bodies out of a
blue hole using a giant hook, and finally, spending over an hour with Inspector
Schribe, while he took her written testimony with all the humiliating details
of her interaction with Alessandro, almost as if she were reliving her four
days of absolute, and complete madness. The only respite in the entire day was
that the inspector didn't require Jerry to be present while she relayed the
events of those life-changing days.

And
life-changing, they were.

For the first
time in years, when she looked at Jerry she saw the hunky male Val and the
other women on the cruise ship saw. She wanted Jerry again. And she wanted him
to look at her the way he had when she was wearing the swim suit. The way he
once looked at her. But a major part of their physical relation was missing.
Those rowdy, uninhibited moments before they made love were gone because the
fun in their marriage was gone. If they stayed together now, their life would
vacillate between having hot, heavy, totally self-gratifying sex, and the
vehement, throwing of barbs. It had been their pattern too long to break. At
least the throwing of barbs had been. She never would have dreamed, six days
ago, she'd want Jerry back in her bed again. And right now, she wanted a dose
of hot, heavy sex to relieve the tension.

Her mother
handed her a wide-mouth goblet with a slurry of ginger ale and lime juice, and
said, "Think of it as a Margarita without the tequila."

Andrea took the
drink and stepped to the window. She gazed out at the turquoise water lapping
against a stretch of glistening pink sand that reached out in both directions,
and thought about all the little private beaches, completely cut off from view
by palms and mangroves, and wondered if any of them were occupied by couples at
the moment...

…a place for lovers...

She turned from
the window in disgust. Would those words, spoken inside her head in a soft
Italian accent, always come back to haunt her, reminding her of her
foolishness?

To her
annoyance, Jerry strolled into the room. For some reason she had expected him
to have let himself out by now. Her father, who was mixing himself a whiskey
sour, looked up and said, "You'll have a drink with us, Jerry?"

The glass in
Andrea's hands dropped to the tile floor, shattering.

While Edith, the
maid her parents brought along with them, rushed in to mop up the mess, Andrea
was aware of her mother saying something, but she didn't catch it, so stunned
she was with her father's change of tone with Jerry. She couldn't remember one
time, during the twenty-five years she'd been married to Jerry, when her father
addressed him by his first name...

"Honey?"
her mother repeated. "Are you alright?"

Andrea blinked
several times and nodded to her mother, then said to her father, "Daddy,
you just called Jerry Jerry."

"That's
his name," her father said, as if it had always been that way.

"Yes, I
know it's his name, but it seems to have taken you twenty-five years to get it
right. I'm just wondering why."

"It's not
too hard to figure out," Carter said. "Jerry and I found out we had
more in common than fighting over you. So, Jerry, can I fix you a drink?"

"I tell
you what, Carter," Jerry said. "Mix me one of those whiskey sours you
like so much, and I'll let you know if it would have passed the Ninth Street
Gang test."

"Carter?"
Andrea said, staring at Jerry.

Jerry shrugged.
"It's better than the other names I had for him."

The men
exchanged glances and there was no animosity, but their expressions were that
of two men who had just shared a private joke. Someday she'd ask her father
what happened to change things between them, but for the moment, she didn't
want to be reminded of anything that took place in that dense forest earlier in
the day, even if it was to learn what transpired between two aging commandos that
brought them together.

When she
realized Jerry was settling in for at least the length of time it took to have
a drink with her father, she said, "If you'll excuse me, I have to go
pack."

"That
should take about two minutes and a shoe box," Jerry said, with irony.

Andrea glanced
at her parents, who were waiting for her response. She shrugged, and said to
her parents, by way of explanation, "All my clothes are on the ship, and
those Jerry bought for me don't take up much room since there's so little of them."

Ignoring
Jerry's glare that told her he was pissed because she insisted on staying with
her parents instead of with him for a night of hot, heavy, sex—a decision she
regretted, miffed as she was with Jerry—she said to her father, "You did
say we'd be flying to Cat Island in the morning, didn't you?"

"Yes,"
Carter replied. "Your mother's anxious to get home, and your cruise ship's
already there. But you and Jerry can still fly back with us to Charleston if
you want. I'm sure the girls would understand."