The Gift of the Dragon (14 page)

As Guzman said the name, Alice felt as if she just noticed a poisonous snake crawling up her leg. Her breathing increased, her neck hairs rose, and her heart rate went up.
The signs of an animal that hears the sound of a predator,
she thought.

“An assassin? Who does he work for?”

“A man who lives here in Miami, by the name of Laird Northwin.”

Alice tried to slow her breathing.

“How much about Sara’s recent life did you know?”

“Not very much other than just before she was shot. I hadn’t spoken with her in years.”

Tomas sipped his bourbon. “Sara was a wonderful girl, full of life, generous. She was the sort who would bring food to people without it if she could. If she had ten dollars, she wanted to give eleven away to someone in need. If she felt she owed a friend something, she would fly to the end of the earth to pay them back.”
 

He must have cared for her,
Alice thought.

“Yet for herself, she too often felt too little. If someone loved her, she said she was not worthy. She would take huge risks, stupid risks, to do the right thing. In many ways, she was like her father.”

“She was a very sweet friend,” Alice said.

“Yes, well, I’m going on. If she said that I could tell you what your necklace is, that I can do. However, for that we will have to go to my lab.”

“You have a lab?”

“Yes, dear, so I do. I am not just a humble barkeeper, it turns out. I have another secret life as a computer genius.”

“Really? I would never have guessed.” Alice thought it odd that someone would call himself a genius. That didn’t feel right.

“We all have our secrets. Don’t we, Lilly?”

The way he said her name had her hair rising again. Alice raised her eyebrows innocently.

“Now, if you would follow me…” Guzman put down his empty glass on the bar and started toward the door.
 

“Hold it! How do I know you aren’t leading me into a trap out there?”

“Well, you’ve got a gun pointed at my back, don’t you?”

How did he know
that
?
Alice gripped the Centennial in her pocket. “It isn’t
pointed
at you,” she said.

“Do what you feel you need to with it. In order for me to help you with your mystery, we need to leave this room, walk through the bar, and go down the elevator to the ground floor and then around the block to my other building.”

“Okay, you
walk.
Do not run.”

“I understand, Lilly.”

Guzman said her name just as he opened the door, and a wave of sound rolled in. She almost thought he had said, “Lil-lie,” but that must have been her mind playing tricks, again.

He led her down the bar toward the elevator. Alice felt famished after the adrenaline rush of the day. She grabbed a handful of pretzels from a bowl. A few of the well-dressed people at the bar looked disgusted as the frumpy, overweight woman following handsome Tomas Guzman stuffed her face while walking, crumbs dropping behind her.
 

Guzman didn’t seem to notice, or pretended not to, as they entered the plush, dark-wood–paneled elevator. Two drunken young women entered just after them, giggling with each other over some secret. One of them smiled shyly at Guzman. “We’re goin’ to the groun’ floor.”
 

Guzman smiled and, with a bit of a flourish, pressed the G button and said, “Be my guests, my ladies.”
 

Alice thought she heard one giggle and say, “Well, there’s no sofa in here,” but that didn’t make sense. Guzman appeared not to notice the state of the women either, smiling faintly at their antics for the short ride to the ground floor.

They all exited the building in the fading light. Outside the glass doors, she saw a red brick courtyard with the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern. Leaning on each other like the bricks, the two women veered off in the direction of the ocean while Guzman strode across the brightly-lit street. He slowed so that Alice walked just a bit behind him, turned, and asked, “You know what they say about the Miami night?”

Alice raised her eyebrows.

Guzman waved his hand. “This is where neon goes to die.”

The lights
were
bright beachward and along the waterfront and the side of the street they were on, with the storefronts and restaurants that took up the ground floor of Guzman’s tower. However, they were headed for the dark side of the street, where what looked like a miniature forest grew along the sidewalk, with palms, large-leaved green trees, and huge ferns hedging nearly to the concrete’s edge. As they crossed over Bayshore Drive, Guzman held out his arm, palm out, pointing the way down the street away from the ocean and into the shadows.
 

“This is the way we go from here.”
 

“How far is it?”

There seemed to be no streetlights on this side of the road, and the palms reached up like fingers, blocking the light from the buildings beyond.
 

“Well, we need to go until we come to the end. It’s just a block.”

Alice knew she heard something like that before but couldn’t place it.
 

“You first, please, Tomas.”
 

“Of course, my dear, of course.”

Guzman walked ahead of her, and to Alice his walk seemed more bouncy than it should, not as if he were being followed by a woman with a gun to his back at all.

She noticed a large delivery truck up ahead. The back of the truck looked like a still life, with a large bottle of water on a step and in big white letters, “Home Delivery: call 988-830-8001.” She thought that a bit of an odd number and then shook her head. Why was she noticing strange things like this? She turned back to Guzman’s back, and he seemed to be bouncing even more, almost dancing. Then as they passed the truck, it hit her; the Knob Hill had been drugged!

Breathing hard, she tried to fight the fog rising between her eyes and the world. Alice saw a flash of metal from the side of the water delivery truck. Something struck her leg, and her hand flashed down to find it as she struggled to pull the Centennial from her pocket. She saw herself brushing away a dart-like object, and her mind said,
Tranquilizer… or poison!
 

She thought back,
Thanks a lot, voice—you’re a bit late to the party.

She felt her legs going out from under her and Guzman turning to catch her.
He set me up!
She struggled to regain control, and it seemed for a moment her forgotten training might overcome the drugs in her system as she pushed Guzman away with a hard palm to his chest and struggled to get her feet under her. Staring at Guzman, she saw a knife suddenly sprout from his breast.

He gaped down at it, and his hands rose, feebly trying to remove it. Falling again, she managed to turn toward the bushes where the knife must have come from and saw a dark figure rising and a silenced weapon spitting fire at the delivery truck. Guzman fell faster than she did and hit the sidewalk first, letting out an anguished, racking gasp. She made one last turn to look back at the truck where the dart in her leg had come from, and she saw a Swiss-cheese pattern clustered around a hole where the barrel of the dart gun that had shot her now pointed skyward.

Then, as if she were watching from elsewhere, she saw herself falling in a spiral, spinning. With the last gasp of her consciousness, she felt strong arms gather her up as she spun into darkness.

Chapter 9, A Dream Remembered

Callan

Callan could hear the sigh of sand as the waves drew it down and then flung it back up on their return. Almost the same sound each time, it began… and ceased… and then began again. The sand washed between his toes, and girls in bikinis and maillots, and guys, some in Speedos and some in surfer shorts, played and ran and laughed in the setting sun.
 

After kicking the heads of his lazy team in Venice to get them back on track, he had taken his Fountain 38, a triple-engine speedboat that cruised at eighty miles per hour, over to Treasure Bay Casino on the Mississippi coast. When he made deals with his customers from the South, Callan liked to meet them at the various casinos along the Gulf Coast of Alabama to keep them away from his base of operations in Venice. He found that after some drinks and allowing them some small wins at cards, his customers tended to make deals that were more profitable for Callan. Always cautious, he visited the casinos before having meetings at them, checking escape routes, law enforcement presence, and the beauty of the waitresses.
 

Today, despite the idyllic scene on the shore next to the giant beached ship that gave the Casino its name, thoughts raged like a storm inside him.
How had Thorn found him in Klamath?
Thorn might not even be after him for the tablet. Thorn was Northwin’s dog, and Callan had been running from Northwin for years.
 

Callan had once carried the wolf’s head badge of Northwin’s Guardians, the private army of the Apple Creek Corporation. When he had joined, he had been told that one does not quit. Callan had left after a particularly dangerous mission when Thorn had taken all the credit and most of the bonus money.

Northwin had chased him ever since. Callan had been hiding from Northwin and had done the jobs for Franklin McAlister that Northwin would not touch.
 

However, Northwin never came after him with the kind of force used in Klamath. He preferred to operate with more subtlety, with small operations easy to cover up. Callan suspected that Franklin McAlister might be behind Northwin’s new fervor—Franklin and his tablet that worked so well but for the one encrypted file that, it seemed, nothing could open.
I need to find the key.
 

First, though, he needed to take care of his problem with Northwin. For his Guardians, Northwin hired many former commandos, retired Special Forces operators, US Navy Seals, and Marines.
 

A tough bunch to take on.
 

With his until-recently successful credit card scams and gunrunning operations and the money made freelancing as an assassin, Callan felt ready to take the fight to Northwin. He knew that McAlister and Northwin were not friends. Only Robert Brandon’s firm hand kept them from each other’s throats after Sangerman died, when Northwin accused McAlister of lying about the need for the old man’s death.
 

Callan strolled farther into the ocean, which now rose above his knees, soaking the bottoms of his shorts. Having solved his problem in his mind brought a smile to his face. The female half of a young couple to his left smiled back at him, and the male half said, “Nice sunset, eh?” His rage settling as his planning coalesced, Callan smiled back, “Sure is.”

Just then he saw her rising out of the waves and drawing her long, black hair tightly between her fingers, straightening it, shedding water droplets like falling red pearls, shining in the last light of the sun. As he looked up, he had to shade his eyes with one hand, and the woman he saw then mirrored the long, dark hair, the sweet, heart-shaped face, and the brown, lithe limbs of Sara Moore.
 

Callan wiped his eyes. The woman wading in his direction could not be Sara. He had watched her die at Bonneville Dam. As the woman passed by, she looked at him, and the likeness dropped away.
She is just someone who looks like Sara,
like she looked when I first met her.

Long-suppressed emotion flooded him, and he remembered back to when he had first seen the real Sara in San Francisco, at the Museum of Modern Art—at a wine exhibit, of all things, with exotic labels, tasting, the works. Back then, Callan had still worked for Northwin, and he often had to meet with Thorn to plan various jobs. Most of the jobs Northwin had for Callan back then were dirty.
Dirty and wet.
 

***

Sara actually attended the wine exhibit looking for bottles to bring back to her boss in Tampa. A connoisseur. So she said.

That damp, cold, gray summer morning, he had arrived early to check out the location of the meeting. They might both have worked for Northwin, but Callan did not trust Thorn and had known that feeling was returned. That time, Thorn clearly had not looked at the museum’s schedule for the day he suggested they meet there as, instead of the usual few straggly artist types gaping at the strange exhibits on a weekday afternoon, the free wine and snacks had gathered a diverse crowd.
 

Along with the crowd problem, he found a dusky, dark-eyed woman playing with her hair and looking at a Japanese manga book with a bottle beside it. She wore a long, forest-green leather coat/dress buttoned over her slim waist and calf-high black-snakeskin boots. As far as Callan could tell, she wore nothing else besides a black, beaded necklace. He walked up next to her, and she turned as if she expected him. She asked what he thought of the book and the bottle.
 

Not having looked closely at the book at all, he needed a second to take it in. He saw on the open page a drawing of a wine named Screaming Eagle. Around it, characters were speaking in oriental symbols. Despite his mother’s best efforts, Japanese was not one of his languages, so he could not tell why the wine was in the book, nor if the cartoons were praising it or cursing it.