“Yeah? Who told you that?”
“Oh, I think it’s kind of common knowledge, don’t you? The papers told of your involvement in the cryptocurrency crime ring and the invaluable assistance you provided to the Paradise Isle Royal Police Force.”
“So you can read, big fucking deal. You wanna gold star or an extra recess?” I was starting to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The papers knew about my involvement in the scene that had played out at the airport just shy of eight weeks ago, but only a handful of people knew about the money.
“No, as a matter of fact. What I want is a piece of the pie.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, actually, now that I think about it. You know what I’d like instead of a piece of the pie? I think I’d prefer the whole pie.”
“I’ll give you a pie. Right in the fuckin’ face, I’ll give you a pie.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, Daniel. You should be nicer to me than that.”
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
“Because I have something I know you’ll want.”
“I doubt it.”
“Oh, but I do, Daniel. Because I have Pam.”
9
Stunned, I gave Al a funny look from across the table. I shifted in my seat. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
The gravelly voice purred slightly. “Ohhh, I think you heard me. I have Pam.”
“With you?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, with me. Would you like to speak with her?”
Thinking about it, I frowned. Was this seriously happening right now? Was this lunatic implying that he’d kidnapped Pam? And then the realization hit me: perhaps Pam herself had set this all up. Less than two handfuls of people knew about the money—my parents, Al, Artie, Manny, and a few of Al’s geriatric squad members being the entirety of those people. But if Pam had recently spoken to my mother, like she said she had, it was more than likely that Pam also knew about the money. Maybe this whole thing was a setup, staged to do two things. One, to get her grubby hands on my money, and two, to somehow win me back.
I swallowed and shook my head. “No. I don’t really care to speak to her. Thank you.”
“You don’t want to speak with her?” The man sounded like I’d caught him off guard.
I shrugged. “I’d prefer not to. If she’s there with you, you can fill her in on our conversation, can’t you?”
Now the man didn’t sound quite so confident. “Oh, well, I suppose—”
I cut him off. “Okay? So what’s the plan? You keeping her?”
“Well, that’s up to you now, isn’t it?” said the voice, trying to resume his previous menacing tone. “If you want her back, it’s going to cost you. Seven million dollars, to be exact.”
I fought back a chortle. Seven million dollars or Pam? He couldn’t be serious. “And what if I don’t want her back?”
There was a pause, like the guy on the other end hadn’t expected that question. Finally he spoke. “Simple. Then I’ll have to get rid of her.”
“Get rid of her!” My free hand covered the smile that had begun to creep across my face. I took a long pause, trying to compose myself. Finally, I could hold it in no longer. “Deal!” I breathed into the phone. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! Get her cheating ass off the island! I never want to see her face again!”
“Daniel, I don’t think you’re catching my drift. I didn’t mean that I’d give her an all-expenses-paid vacation back to wherever the hell she came from,” croaked the voice. “I meant if you don’t pay up, I’ll be forced to kill her.”
I lifted a brow. “Just out of curiosity, is Pam sitting right there next to you?”
“Well, she’s in the other room. I can get her if—”
But I didn’t let him finish. “Oh, good. Here’s the thing. Pam’s a little squeamish when it comes to blood, you know—or dying,” I said with a wrinkled nose. From across the table, Al’s watery blue-green eyes stared back at me incredulously. I held a finger up to him to stop him from interrupting. “So you’re probably not going to want to let her know what’s coming ahead of time.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I don’t know how you plan to do it. Knife, gun, rat poison, chain saw, shark attack…” I thought about it for a second. “You know, if I were you, I’d probably skip the shark attack thing. She might literally lose her shit if you put her in with some sharks. We watched Sharknado once and the woman didn’t sleep for a week. I mean, if you’re gonna kill her, there’s really no sense in giving her nightmares. That’s just cruel. You know what I’m saying?”
“Drunk,” whispered Al from across the table. “What’s going on?”
“Shhh,” I mouthed, holding a finger up to my lips. I pointed at the receiver and added, “This guy’s got Pam.”
“Daniel, I don’t think you understand the severity of the situation,” said the man on the phone. “I will literally kill this woman if you don’t bring me my seven million dollars by the end of the day.”
That was when I’d had enough. My jaw set. There was no more playing around. “No, buddy. I don’t think you understand. Pam Calcara is my ex-fiancée. They put the x in there for a reason. It’s to signify how low down the alphabet the woman is in my life. Now if she’d been just my fiancée, then she’d be higher on the alphabet. You see? Because f comes before x. But she isn’t. She’s my ex. She’s a low-down, dirty, no-good cheating slut that I made the mistake of giving a five-thousand-dollar engagement ring to. That’s what she is. So if you want to keep her, by all means. Keep her. I can promise you, she’s nothing but a headache. She’ll spend your money, make you wait a year to marry her, and then on your wedding night, she’ll fuck her ex-boyfriend on your brand-new Sealy Posturepedic. Okay? It’s that simple.” I shook my head. “If I were you, I’d send her back to the US, because you know what? She ain’t worth the hassle.” And on that note, I hung up the phone.
I sucked in a deep breath and noticed both Al and Desi staring at me. I looked out over the food in front of me and picked up a particularly tempting piece of extra-fatty bacon and bit off half of it. “Mmmm. Anyone else as starving as I am?”
10
Artie Balladares leaned across his oversized desk onto his meaty elbows. “You can’t be so flip about this, Drunk.”
Al’s shoulders stooped over as he looked up at me. “Artie’s right, Drunk. That’s just not right.”
I leaned against Artie’s file cabinet and shrugged. “First of all, I feel like this is something Pam set up. She’s probably not even actually kidnapped. She probably hired someone to make that phone call. She just wants to get her fake nails into my money, and fuck if I’m about to let that happen.”
“But, Drunk!” said Al. “You don’t know that Pam did this. She could really be kidnapped. Whoever has her might actually hurt her. You can’t let that happen. You’ve got to do something!”
I let my head fall back on my shoulders as I groaned. “You guys are being so dramatic! It’s not that I’m letting anything happen. I mean, you know if this is a real kidnapping, and I refuse to pay them, they’ll probably just put a bag over her head and drop her off at the airport or something. Why would they want to hurt her if they’re getting nothing out of the deal?”
“And if they don’t want to let her go?” asked Artie.
I shrugged. “I mean, if they don’t let her go, then we’ll turn it over to the island cops. They can handle it. I’m not a cop here on this island, you know.” I’d learned that lesson the hard way. Paradise Island cops didn’t care for Americans, and they extra didn’t care for American cops, never mind the fact that I wasn’t that great of a cop to begin with.
Artie sliced the air definitively with his hand. “Nope. We can’t report this, Drunk. Business still hasn’t gotten back to normal since that whole Jimmie fiasco. Finding a dead body in one of our rooms was definitely bad for the bottom line. If folks hear that there’s been a woman abducted from resort property?” He
shook his head. “They’d never come back.”
I looked from one man to the next. “Look, fellas. I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not paying these fuckers seven million dollars for Pam. She ain’t worth the price of a stamp, much less seven million fucking dollars. Besides. I didn’t even get seven million dollars. I got six point nine million.”
Al lifted a brow. “You invested in those accounts I told you to, didn’t you?”
I raised a shoulder uneasily. “Yeah, so?”
“Then you should have much more than six point nine million dollars by now. You should have considerably more than seven by now. Those accounts have been doing gangbusters this quarter.”
It was true. I’d picked Al’s brain for a week straight, trying to figure out where to invest my money. Al was a whiz with the markets, even considering himself a personal friend of Warren Buffet’s although he’d never actually met the man. So, thanks to Al, I actually had more than they’d asked for. The market was up and so was my nest egg.
“But I spent some of it,” I argued weakly.
Al looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Oh yeah? On what?”
I shrugged and tugged on the hem of my tank top. “I bought some new threads.” I’d bought an entirely new wardrobe, actually, since I’d tossed all the clothes that Pam had bought with my money for our honeymoon.
“Anything else?”
“And I just ordered a new big-screen for my new bachelor pad. Oh, and I got myself the new PlayStation and a few games.” I had to have something to occupy my time when Al was napping and there were no women willing to party with me.
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much,” I said, bobbing my head. I wasn’t much of a big spender. Besides spending money on alcohol and living expenses and occasionally a fancy dinner for a female companion, I’d never really spent much over the course of my lifetime. And here on the island, as part of my compensation package, Artie took care of my rent and put me on the all-inclusive plan when it came to food and drinks. It was quite the setup, and another reason I had yet to bounce back to the States.
I held up a finger. “Oh! I almost forgot. I signed my mom up for a meat of the month club, and I had a new grill shipped to Pops. It’s a grill and a smoker. He’s gonna love it. Of course he won’t tell me he loves it, but I’ll know deep down in his heart he does,” I said, nodding. I didn’t add that I’d actually had the money for all of that stuff in my savings account before the seven-million-dollar payout.
“That stuff couldn’t have cost you more than five grand,” said Artie, shaking his head. “Look, Drunk, it was found money anyway, I think you need to pay the guy.”
I shook my head. I didn’t care if it was found money or hard-earned money. That was my nest egg. That money gave me the freedom to take the Seacoast Majestic job or leave it. It gave me the freedom to tell anyone at any time that they could go fuck themselves. It meant I didn’t have to go back to Kansas City or anywhere near Pam Calcara. That money was my freedom. “Nah. Not happening, guys. I mean, I’ll put in a word with the big guy in the sky. I can’t promise it’ll be a good word, you know, there’s not many nice things I can say about the woman, but I’ll ask him to do his best to get her out of her present situation. That’s the best I’m gonna be able to do for her.”
“Oh, come on, kid. These guys might not be playing around. They could kill her!” said Al, his hands splayed out in front of him.
“We don’t even know if they really have her. Maybe she staged all of this. Maybe she did find her own transportation. Maybe she caught a cab and stopped off down at the strip to do a little souvenir shopping and, you know, take advantage of the duty-free shops and shit. And then she lost track of time.”
“They said they’d put her on the phone, Drunk. They’ve got her.”
“We don’t know that,” I said. I knew I was grasping at straws, but I didn’t know how else to disengage myself from the situation. “I tell ya what. Let me do a little investigating. I’ll run down and talk to the maid that Akoni talked to. Maybe she saw Pam leave or something.”
Al nodded. “That’s a good idea. Find out if any of the maids saw anything. You could check the surveillance tapes too.”
I shrugged. Now he was getting carried away. I didn’t feel like spending hours holed up in the tiny little shoebox of an office Artie had assigned me and watching grainy black-and-white footage of lizards fucking in the streets and whatnot.
“Yeah, we’ll see. Lemme go talk to Mari and find out which one of her girls helped Akoni out. Alright?”
“And if she really was kidnapped for ransom? What then?” asked Artie.
I swatted the air with my hand. “Let’s not go jumping the gun if it ain’t loaded, alright, fellas? Lemme do a little snooping around and see what I can’t dig up.”
11
Mariposa Marrero, the head of the cleaning and front office staff, was a forty-two-year-old single mother supporting three children who ranged in age from eight to seventeen. Having been raised in Guanajay, Cuba, in a family of tobacco farmers, she’d eventually immigrated to Paradise Isle to give her children a better life. So she took her position at the resort very seriously.
From the very beginning, Al had advised that being tight with Mari was like having a key to the whole resort, so I’d made it my personal mission to figure out how to get on her good side. But no matter what I did, winning the woman over seemed like an impossible feat. And I’d tried almost everything to charm her. I’d started by picking her up after her shifts in one of the resort golf carts and driving her to her car in the employee parking lot down the hill. Then I’d found out how she liked her coffee, and I’d brought her a cup every morning for two weeks straight. And when I’d discovered our mutual love of chocolate, I’d spent a pretty penny importing an array of fine chocolates that I could share with the woman. But I still hadn’t managed to warm her up to me.
“Mari,” I said, raising a hand to stop her from boarding the elevator in the lobby. “Hold up.”
Mari was a short woman with a large bottom and thick thighs that rubbed together when she walked, leaving a little zipping sound trailing behind her wherever she went. She had dark black hair that was always pulled back into a sharp bun. Her pudgy cheeks dimpled when she smiled. And because she never wore even an ounce of makeup, there was nothing to hide the scowl that she wore when she saw me coming.
In fact, today she sighed when she saw me jogging slowly in her direction. I had a feeling that talk of my indiscretions with her girls had made it to her ears. “What do you want, Drunk? I need to get upstairs.”
“What’s going on up there?”
“One of the girls said the water isn’t working in room two fourteen,” she said with a sigh.
“You want me to call Hector and have him come over and fix it?”
“I’ll handle it. What do you want?” She looked at me impatiently, her hand on her hip.
“Want?” I swallowed hard. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why it was that I could talk to any beautiful woman without so much as a weak knee, and yet one scowl from Mariposa Marrero made my adrenaline spike and my limbs heavy. “Oh, yeah. Uh, Desi was handling getting a woman off to the airport this morning. He said he was working with you. You know anything about that?” Unable to meet the ferociousness of her glare, I kept my eyes trained on the framed portrait of a salty old sea captain on the wall behind her.
“Yeah, I know something about that,” she said, tapping her foot on the ground and crossing her arms over her chest. “What I know is that you shouldn’t let your personal business interfere with resort business.”
“But she was a guest!” I blurted. “I simply asked Desi to handle getting a guest from point A to point B. That’s what we do around here. We help guests out. And besides, that’s Desi’s job! He’s the concierge. He finds guests rides to the airports and to the shopping centers.”
She wagged a finger at me angrily. “I don’t consider your sexua
l conquests to be resort guests.”
I swallowed hard. “Mari, I can honestly say that I’ve never slept with that woman.”
Mari narrowed her eyes to pinpricks and came at me with a pointed finger. “Oh, please, Drunk. I’m wise to your ways. And don’t think I don’t know about you using my girls as your own private welcome wagon. You know, I don’t hire girls just for your personal pleasure.”
“You don’t?” I said, finally meeting her eyes with a smile.
She didn’t think that was funny. Her black eyes flashed at me as she frowned. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. How long has the new girl been here, Drunk? A week, week and a half, and you’ve already managed to get her into your bed.”
I held up two hands defensively. “Listen, Mari. I don’t ask you what you do on your time off. Why is what I do on my free time up for discussion?”
“Because it could be considered sexual harassment in the workplace!”
“How? I’m not her boss. I don’t have any control over her hiring and firing. Besides, Mack seduced me. I didn’t even realize that you’d hired a new girl until she introduced herself to me down at the swim-up bar one night.”
Mari’s cheeks flushed. “You know, just because you have more money than God doesn’t mean you don’t have to take your job here seriously, Drunk.”
My eyes widened as I stared at her. “More money than…”
“You heard me! Some of us have to actually work for everything we have. We aren’t all best friends with the boss. We have to work if we expect to have a job the next day. And we aren’t all sitting on a pile of cash to tide us over if we do get fired!”
“Wow,” I said with lifted brows. “Tell me how you really feel.” Her words actually kind of stung. I’d done nothing but try and get her to like me, and now I was finding out how she really felt about me.
Clearly annoyed with me, she swiped a hand in the air as if to erase the conversation. “Whatever. What do you want?”
Drunk on a Boat Page 5
