by Jack Hardin
Tyler led the way down the narrow ramp that led to the crushed shell parking lot, and they got into his truck. When he slipped his keys into the ignition and started it up, the radio blared out Metallica’s Fuel. He reached toward the radio knob and punched it off.
“Hey. That’s not George Strait or Kenny Chesney,” Ellie said.
He gripped the steering wheel. “Don’t tell my mama.”
“You know, a guy like you can’t just cross genres like that. You’ve already moved to Florida, something a real Texan would never do anyway.” Then, remembering why he had moved out here in the first place, Ellie found herself feeling a little foolish. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be insensi—”
He raised a genial hand and then jumped as a loud, rapping knock sounded on his window. He turned and saw Gloria on the other side of the glass. To his right, Ellie was laughing. He turned toward her. “I wasn’t startled, okay? I just...wasn't prepared.” He rolled down his window. Gloria set a hand on his door, wheezing. They waited for her to catch her breath.
“Sorry...I haven’t….” She paused, took in another batch of oxygen. “Haven’t run that fast since grade school.”
Tyler was surprised it had been that recent. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I—” Her gaze fell to the inside of Tyler’s truck. “This is a nice truck, Tyler.” She leaned in a little. “I like the black leather.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you need to tell us something?” Ellie prodded.
“Oh.” She laughed at herself. “Of course. Yes.” She rubbed at her forehead. “I’m a little embarrassed. Ellie, a friend of yours called the bar late yesterday morning, right after Katie opened it. Katie had gone over to the coolers at the marina to get some fish when the phone rang, so I answered it. A man was looking for you, said he didn’t have another number for you.”
“Who was it?” Ellie asked.
“He told me to tell just you. No one else.” Gloria looked at Tyler suspiciously, like he might be a spy, like maybe this had been the moment he’d been waiting for all along.
“Tyler can hear it too, Gloria. Did he say what he wanted?”
“Well, see, I don’t know about that. Honestly, I’m a bit confused myself. Fu is convinced you have a secret boyfriend or something.”
Tyler’s brows went up.
“He sounded a little distressed and made me repeat the message back to him three times.”
“So who was it?” Ellie asked.
“He said his name was Virgil.”
Ellie’s next words were filled with tension. “What was the message?”
Gloria waved a hand. “Like I said, I don’t understand it, and Fu, well, he said—”
“Gloria!” Ellie snapped, and didn’t apologize.
“Oh. Sorry. Virgil said to tell you...duststorm?”
From the corner of his eye, Tyler saw Ellie’s entire body tense. She leaned toward the driver’s window. “You’re sure that’s the word he used? Duststorm? It’s important.”
“Well, sure. I remember because I got to thinking about this show I saw on TV where—”
“Gloria,” Ellie interjected, softer now. She managed a light smile. “It was just an old college friend of mine carrying on an ancient joke between us. Silly. I’m sorry you pulled away from the bar just for that.”
Gloria relaxed. “Oh, good. Like I said, he just sounded so worried and made me promise half a dozen times that I would get you the message right away. I thought maybe he or you were in some kind of trouble.”
“He’s a bit of a troublemaker, even to this day,” Ellie said. “It’s an old game he just won’t let go. Tell Fu to forget all that nonsense about a boyfriend.”
Tyler let out a breath.
Gloria, looking relieved, said, “I’m sorry I forgot to tell you. As soon as we hung up, Greg Sanderson docked and called us over to see this huge redfish. It was in his live well and he was going to send it back into the water.”
Ellie thanked her again, and Gloria waddled back up the ramp.
Tyler brought the window back up. “That wasn’t good news she gave you.”
“Drive,” she said.
He backed the truck up and pulled out onto Oleander Street. The cab was oddly silent for the next mile. Ellie rubbed her palms back and forth against the tops of her thighs. “You know how I told you a few weeks ago about the old team I had been with in Europe?”
“Of course.”
“The man who called the bar—he’s the teammate I saw at Mango Mania.”
“Okay.”
“Back then we had a codebook that gave us terms for certain situations. Many went unused, but we had to know them in the event that we ever needed them. That word, it was just a precaution, one of the terms in our book that we had to know.”
“Duststorm?”
She nodded.
Tyler kept his eyes on the road and spoke slowly. “What does it mean?”
She took in a deep breath and let it go in a controlled release. “It means I have someone after me.”
“After you? As in, someone who wants to kill you?”
“Yes.”
Tyler shook his head and blew a puff of air from his cheeks. “And you’re sure this isn’t a joke?”
“He wouldn't joke like that. He was going out to Arizona to look into a hunch.”
“What kind of hunch?”
“I really can’t say more than that.”
“Come on, Ellie.”
“Just...give me some time to work this out, okay?”
“You’re going to the cops, right?”
“No,” Ellie said.
“What?” Tyler hit his brakes, pulled off onto the grassy shoulder. He looked over at her. “Ellie, come on.”
“Tyler, you need to understand what this means. A trained killer—call him an assassin if you want—is probably coming for me. The police can’t do anything about it.”
“Well, dammit, what about the CIA? Can’t they post people around your house or something? Don’t they have a code word for that?”
“That’s not how it works. I have a contact I trust. I’ve already reached out to him for answers about my dad. I’ll tell him about this too, but he won’t be able to get me protection. For now, all he’ll be able to do is get me to the right person to file a report. I don’t even know who’s after me. For all I know it’s someone on the inside. If Langley knew anything they would have already warned me.”
Tyler’s jaw was clenched, and he shook his head again. “Unbelievable. So what are you gonna do? You can stay at my place or something.”
“No. I can’t stay with anyone I have connections with. I need to lay low until all this gets sorted out.”
“Lay low?” He dragged an open palm across his stubbly chin. “Someone is literally coming to kill you?”
She threw her hands up. “I don’t know what’s going on, Tyler. I just know that I don’t have a reason not to trust what Virgil was trying to tell me.” Trying to...trying to. Why did he only try to? she thought. Why did he only call the one time? Suddenly, Ellie felt ill. “Yesterday morning,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Gloria said he called yesterday morning.”
“So...why hasn’t he called again?” Tyler finished. “You think they got to him?”
She straightened up. “I need to rent a place. Right across the canal from mine, if I can. I need you to put it in your name. And I need you to get Citrus and some stuff from my house for me.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“And I’ll need to borrow the truck you keep at Reticle.”
“That old clunker? Okay.” He ripped his hat off his head and ran a hand through his hair. “Good Lord, Ellie, this is ridiculous.”
“I’m aware of that. But I have a plan.”
“You have a plan? Already?” He looked glumly out the windshield. “Of course you do.” He shook his head and pulled the truck back onto the road.
Chapter Twenty-Eight<
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Each fall, around the first week of October, Sandi Littlejohn would trade in her Cadillac Escalade for the newest model. From there she would drive it directly to a shop in Fort Myers where they would strip the paint and slap on a coat of Pepto pink. When Sandi drove her Escalade around Pine Island, it would glisten in the Florida sun like a child’s candy on wheels. And it wasn’t just the Escalade that was pink. It was all pink: her clothing, nails, earrings, phone cover, shoes, pens, purse, wallet, eyeshadow; Sandi plundered the world of all things adorned with the fanciful color. Someone had recently started a rumor that even her toilet lid was pink, and no one was quite sure that it was wrong. Sandi had heard that one when she was getting her hair done at Hattie’s Hairport and liked it very much. Someone else had once quipped that Sandi Littlejohn gave pink a bad name, and maybe she did, but she had a brand no one could compete with and, as a result, happened to manage more vacation rentals than anyone else on the island.
No one was privy to the fact that her favorite color was actually a softer version of olive green, and Sandi had no immediate plans to tell them. Locals chatting it up behind coffee cups and beer mugs and fishing poles didn’t tend to gossip much about people who had an optical affair with olive green. They did, however, gossip about Pepto pink, about a tacky sense of style. Sandi Littlejohn happened to know this and just how to capitalize on it.
“Come See Sandi...You’ll be Tickled Pink!”
This is who Tyler went to see about renting the house across the canal from Ellie’s. He had never met the lady, but she had a three o’clock available today. So Tyler had jumped in his truck and driven up to Pine Island Center. He had expected to find an eccentric, middle-aged woman wearing too much makeup who drawled on and laughed too much. What he found instead was a first rate professional.
Many of the homes in St. James City were owned by snowbirds, who came down from up north each year, generally around December, and waited for the icy snows to come and go before heading back up to their summer homes. The interim months away from Florida had many of them turning their empty properties into vacation rentals. Sandi informed Tyler that the house directly across the canal from Ellie wasn’t available. Someone was coming later this week for that one. But the one right next to it—on the north side—was; the previous party had backed out of the rental yesterday, and would he like to grab it up? Tyler thought about that for a second and told her it would be fine, just fine. A half hour after he’d walked in, Tyler left with a rental agreement, a set of keys, and, he admitted to himself, tickled pink.
____________________
Ellie’s house was small, the rental house smaller, but it would work well for their purposes. Instead of a stunted section of grass that served as a backyard, the home boasted a screened-in Florida room that stopped a couple feet from the seawall. From there to her boat lift Ellie estimated the diagonal distance across the canal to be less than sixty feet.
After Tyler finished shaking hands with Sandy Littlejohn, he had gone to a used electronics store in Fort Myers and purchased everything on Ellie’s list. Then he went to her place and spent an hour installing hidden infrared cameras around the house while Citrus inspected them, jumping up and yipping crazily as though auditioning for Big Brother 87: Dog Edition. When Tyler was done, he gathered some of Ellie’s personal items and drove around the north end of the canal to the rental.
Citrus was thrilled at his new living arrangements. He spent the first ten minutes sniffing every square inch of the place and the next ten minutes running sprints across them. After crashing headfirst into a door jamb knocked some of the spunk out of him, he went and laid on the couch, finally falling asleep upside down, his head hanging off the cushion toward the floor.
Tyler left again for a Winn-Dixie run to stock Ellie up on some fresh groceries. While he was gone she got to work at the kitchen table, setting up the monitors he had purchased. When that was complete she opened her laptop and started programming the video feeds from her home. Once it got dark Tyler would position two more cameras on the outside of the Florida room so they could have a clear shot of Ellie’s back door and the canal in front of it.
After getting the feeds set up, Ellie checked her email. There was a message from Eugene Ripley, her Zurich-based connection who was getting her information on Ryan Wilcox’s death. He said that his Ukrainian-based informant would have the requested information to him in the next few days.
She cleared her inbox and then put in a call to her Langley contact, Nathan Price. His cell was turned off. She left him a voicemail, telling him to call, that it was urgent. Though she was no longer with the CIA, protocol still required her to report Virgil’s message to a special hotline. The idea that someone would actually follow such a procedure was almost comical to Ellie, at least in this particular situation. She didn’t know who to trust, and she wasn’t going to call a generic phone number where the wrong people would surely be keeping their ears tuned in. Nathan Price was a good man, as best she knew, and if she was going to trust anyone in the intelligence community, it would be him.
She set her phone on the table and clicked on her internet browser, intent on finding anything she could that might suggest Virgil or Cicero were in trouble. Ten minutes later, when Tyler walked in with grocery bags dangling from his fingers, Ellie was staring at her laptop screen, wiping tears off her cheeks. “What’s wrong?” he asked. He set the bags on the counter.
“Virgil. He’s...he’s dead. So is Cicero.”
“What? How?”
She motioned to her screen. Tyler squatted down and turned it toward himself. Ellie stood up and went to the couch, pulling her knees up to her chin and hugging them. Citrus woke up, took a quick look at his owner, and rested his chin on her feet. The news article detailed a patient who had escaped Banner Hospital in Phoenix and murdered a local pawn shop owner before dying from trauma. The patient was also connected to several deaths up in Flagstaff a couple days prior.
Tyler scrolled back up the page. “When was this?”
“Yesterday.”
“It doesn’t say what happened in Flagstaff,” he said.
“There's a couple other tabs in the browser. From all I can tell Virgil ran into an ambush or an assassination attempt. I think he or Cicero may have killed the team that came after them, but he was injured getting away.”
“It says that Virgil killed a pawn shop owner?”
“No. That is not what happened. Whoever failed to kill him in Flagstaff came after him and set him up. If I had to guess, that shop owner took him in after he got away from the hospital. Somehow they found him anyway.” She looked over at Tyler. “That’s why Virgil called and left me that message.” She choked on her next words. “And that’s why he never called back.”
Tyler stood up and went to the couch. He nudged Citrus. “Give me some room, Bucko.” Citrus, who knew something was off and was still recovering from a concussion, quietly moved over. Tyler sat down next to Ellie and took her in his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
They sat there for several minutes while Ellie kept wiping tears away. “I’m so angry,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”
“I know you think we shouldn't get the cops involved, but now—”
“No.” Her voice was crisp. “The very reason Virgil escaped from the hospital is because he knew the authorities couldn’t protect him. Did you see in that article about his wounds? He didn’t bolt in that condition because he hated the food. If I call the police I will have no control over this. The assassin won’t show the way I think he will, and he’ll find a way around them. Let’s just stick to the plan.”
He stood up, walked to the Florida room, and looked across the canal toward her house. He folded his arms. “Fine. No cops. But I don’t like it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chewy pushed on the door to the fishing shack, and Andrés followed him in. Looking around, Chewy sat on a wooden crate next to the air compressor. A
ndrés remained standing and peered through the small window toward Cayo Costa.
Chewy was wearing a new trench coat—same brand, same tobacco brown. It rested a little stiff across his shoulders, and he was thinking maybe it just needed breaking in when he heard the drone of a boat engine drawing nearer from the south. It slowed on its approach to the shack and finally cut off. A minute later Quinton appeared in the doorway, smiling.
“Gentlemen,” he said. Andrés turned away from the window. “Thank you both for meeting me out here.” He motioned toward Andrés’s feet. “Andrés, I wouldn’t stand right there. It looks sturdy, but that area of the floor is rotten on the underside. I’d hate for you to take an unexpected swim.”
Andrés smiled. “Thank you.”
Quinton ran a hand up the wall. “As soon as I can come about some more wood, this old girl will be right as rain.” He turned back to his associates. “I’ll be brief,” Quinton said. “You know that when I left for my trip this past spring I was fulfilling a promise.”
Both men nodded.
“However, in my extended absence I had also agreed to see what connections I could make for us in other cities. Most of them weren’t right for our purposes or present business model. However, there was one in particular that I think will be a good fit for us. Especially since Nunez is no longer around. So, for now, I’m going to divert a quarter of what we bring in to an alternate distributor. Neither of you will need to move inland. It will just remain at the drop off. I’ve gotten someone else to handle pickup.”
Andrés shot a concerned glance toward Chewy, who kept his gaze on Quinton.
