The Victim (37 page)

“
I’m at home,” he said, thinking on his feet. “Where are you?”

“
I doubled back. I’m heading south on Biscayne, a few blocks north of Flagler.”

Mandy stepped into his jeans and pulled them up. His Glock was in his holster, resting on the dresser. He snapped it to his belt and threw on his shirt.

“
Good. Meet me at Gordon Biersch in fifteen minutes.”

“
Done.”

He hung up.

Mandy turned around. Daniella was standing in the doorway holding two wine glasses by their stems.

“
Everything okay?”

Mandy grabbed a glass and slugged it down in one sip. “Yeah, everything’s fine.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Look. Can I take a raincheck on the takeout?”

Her face slackened for a moment but she mustered up a smile. “Yeah, no problem.”

“
Thanks for being understanding.”

He kissed her on the lips and headed out the door.

She listened to the footfalls fading down the hallway.

She reached for her phone on the dresser and texted Anton.

Who’s the victim now?

CHAPTER 39

Anton waved Mandy over to the high top. A pitcher of hefeweizen was on the table with two glasses. The Heat game played on the flat screens above the bar. Anton watched with waning interest. They weren’t the same team as they had been last season when they won the NBA championship. More a collection of high-priced prima donnas than a cohesive unit.

Kobe drove to the hole and hit a three-pointer, bringing the Lakers lead to 17 points.

A collective groan resonated through the room.

“
Thought you were a Lakers fan?”

Mandy took a seat and poured himself a glass.

“
I was until I moved here.”

Mandy shook his head. “You and the rest of the bandwagon.”

Anton laughed, loosened up his collar. He needed a distraction.

Mandy winced, looking at the side of Anton’s head. “
Aye
, they do that to you?”

Anton felt the swelling on his right temple. The adrenaline dump had numbed the pain of the punches and now it was starting to hurt. He’d have to think of something to tell Gina.

“
Yeah, little guy was one mean dude. Almost got the drop on me.”

Anton recounted what had happened under the overpass. Mandy listened with wide-eyed enthusiasm, but for Anton the words tasted foul. Mandy and his cop buddies could tell swinging-dick Rambo stories for days. Anton didn’t have it in him. This was nothing to be proud of. It was one of the most frightening things to ever happen to him.

Mandy clapped him on the shoulder. “
Oye
, most guys would have cried and begged for their lives but not you.” He nodded with approval, flashing a crooked grin. “You got a lot of fight in you, Mackey. That’s something you can’t learn or train to do. That’s pure caveman instinct, bro. Some alpha male shit. You would’ve made a great cop.”

“
I sure lie like a cop.”

Mandy huffed. “What does this have to do with that thing from eleven years ago? Quincy Arrington’s a piece of shit thug. Thinks you’re not giving his case enough attention so he sends a few goons to do you in? Nah, that’s a separate matter completely. You wanna go to the cops I'll back you up.”

“
No cops. I’ll call Sylvia and see if we can have a hearing in chambers. I don’t want the media to know anything. I’ll withdraw from the case and we’ll leave it at that. Let the PD take the case and finish it out.”

“
Exactly.” Mandy flagged down a waitress and ordered a chicken quesadilla. Anton waved her off, said he wasn't hungry. When the waitress was out of earshot Mandy said, “So look. It’s scary that this kinda thing happens, but you deal with scumbag criminals for a living. Frankly I’m surprised this kind of thing hasn’t happened before.”

Anton brought up Daniella’s text message on his screen and showed it to Mandy.

“
Right after we got off the phone, she sent it to me.”

Mandy felt his throat clamp up. He took his foot off the crossbar of the chair and set it on the ground for balance. He smacked his dry lips and quickly reached for his beer.

That evening after work when he had gone to Daniella’s apartment, the night he brought her the prepaid cell phone with the encrypted SIM card on it—the phone that could activate a one-way listening feature just by sending a phantom text—they were listening to Anton talking on the phone with Quincy.

Mandy figured it was all in fun. Okay, maybe not fun. More like a practical joke taken a step too far. After all, she just wanted to mess with the kid, right?

Surely she didn’t want to kill him.

“
Mandy?”

“
Huh, what?”

“
You look worse than I do.”

“
Nah.” Mandy shook it off. “Nah, it’s nothing. Just…you think she somehow got these guys to come after you?”

“
How else would she know?”

Mandy bit his lip, his eyes casting a quick glance toward the floor. Daniella had obviously overheard the conversation.

“
I have no clue, bro.”

“
Look.” Anton leaned in. “Do me a solid here. Quincy’s in custody. He’s got a lot of juice in jail; even corrections officers do him favors. But an order had to travel from TGK back to Liberty City. Be it a letter or something mentioned during a visit or a phone call, you know that everything in jail is monitored or otherwise recorded. This was a hit, Mandy. Quincy wanted me dead for some reason. Neglecting his case for a few weeks? Eh, doesn’t seem right. He may be a career criminal but he’s not a hothead. Violent, yes. But he’s calculated and calm, thinks things through. Something had to set him off. Find out for me. Please.”

“
You think this was a hit? Not just some attempt to scare you?”

Anton thought about the dead eyes of the two men who attacked him, devoid of empathy or concern for human life.

“
No. Those guys meant business.”

“
Bet they didn’t expect you to come out on top.”

Anton folded his napkin, blotting the residual blood ringing his nostril. “Something tells me neither did she.”

CHAPTER 40

The Cessna Citation cruised above the Gulf of Mexico at 27,000 feet. The calm waters glimmered white reflections of sunlight. Out his window, Jack watched as the Louisiana coastline came into view amid heavy glare. The jet gently banked right on a northwest heading. Dappled bayous and tiny specks of offshore drilling rigs dotted the horizon.

Jack reclined in his brown leather seat, taking a break from the open laptop and mess of papers strewn before him on the mahogany desk. The interior of the private jet was his own design—dark upholstery, dark wood. It had a rustic hunting lodge motif to it, which seemed to calm him on those long flights.

“
People call this a ‘cheap’ plane,” he told Anton, seated across the aisle. “Popular among the billionaires are the larger, grander selections in private aviation. Gulfstreams, Boeing Business Jets. Forty-five, fifty million apiece.” He sipped his favorite in-flight drink: two inches of Laphroaig served neat in a Waterford crystal tumbler. “If you want to buy a Citation, sticker price is about twenty-three mil. Great plane if your priorities are speed and range, something those bigger jets can’t quite manage. This nine-seater can go thirty-two hundred miles without having to refuel at a speed of more than five hundred knots. Guys like me? We timeshare. Unless you’re in the toxic tort or tobacco litigation game, it’s tough to get mega rich practicing law. Certainly not criminal law. You think Rob Shapiro made his millions repping O.J. Simpson? Hell no. LegalZoom fuels his private jet.”

Anton got up from his seat and stretched, standing on his toes, his fingertips touching the ceiling. The cabin was spacious and equipped with phones, faxes, scanners, Wi-Fi. The inlay was real twenty-four carat gold.

“
This is real nice, Jack.”

Anton leaned toward the window, watching the coppery ocean beneath the wisps of cloud. They would continue on their heading to New Orleans, and then westward, following I-10 across Texas, New Mexico, and into Tucson where they would head north until they made their descent into Scottsdale.

Jack eyed the reddish lump on the side of Anton’s head. “You sure you okay? You don’t think you have a concussion or anything?”

Gina had asked him the same question after he told her he slipped on the sidewalk. He didn’t even think about it, the words just came out on the spot. To preempt her, in the event she noticed the damage to his bumper, he said that he found his car like that after being parked on the street all day. Miami is notorious for hit and run accidents.

“
It’s fine. Just a little tender.”

What troubled her was his insistence that she keep the doors locked and the garage closed—two things she often forgot living behind the pretense of guard-gated security. He said that he had a hectic day and would be out of touch for hours at a time. He made her promise that she would answer her phone. He even made her recite the combination to the gun safe in the nightstand.

He didn’t know if those guys from the night before knew where he lived.

He checked his iPhone. It was set to airplane mode. Prior to takeoff he had gone into his settings and disabled the geolocator feature.

“
You really think Daniella had something to do with your client’s friends trying to hurt you?”

Anton checked the text on his phone. “It’s right here. She obviously knew that something had happened to me.”

“
You got Mandy checking it out, right?”

“
Yeah.”

Jack sipped his Scotch, smacked his lips. “I’ve been a defense attorney coming up on forty-six years. I’ve tried almost four hundred cases to verdict. A hundred of those homicide cases, mostly capital. I’ve worked with dozens of private investigators throughout the years and none of them hold a candle to Mandy. He’s been my go-to guy for what, almost seven years now?”

“
I remember him when I was a county court prosecutor. He was a detective, Crime Suppression Team, if I recall. He did a lot of drug investigations, buy busts, reverse stings. That sort of thing. Think I had him as a witness on a few misdemeanor possession cases. He left the Miami Beach Police Department before I got to felonies.”

The muscles in Jack’s face twitched as he clenched his jaw, gazing out the window. Interstate 10 was a faint gray line among green and brown squares of East Texas farmland.

“
Yeah. Seventeen years of a promising public service career, gone in an instant,” he muttered. He cleared his throat and downed the last bit of his Scotch. “But he makes about four times what he used to.”

“
Any idea why he resigned? I mean he was what, in his thirties? Was it the allure of private investigation money?”

“
I think some things are better left unsaid.” Jack got up and took his empty glass to the galley in the back of the plane. “Sure you don’t want a drink?” he shouted from behind the partition.

“
It’s not even nine o’clock.”

Jack returned with a refill and eased back into his seat. “Good whisky doesn’t know what time it is.”

“
We need to be sharp today.”

“
Why? In the unlikely event that Earl Simpson is at that rehab center?” Jack swept his hand in front of his laptop and spread of papers on the desktop. “Forget it. I’ll use these flight hours to bang out that motion to suppress I’ve been putting off. Really should’ve asked one of the paralegals to do it, but when the client’s family’s paying you half a mil to get them out from under federal mandatory minimums for possessing a couple thousand kiddie porn images on their laptop, I think they expect you to do the work yourself.”