by Amy Vansant
“You expect us to pay someone to watch for an imaginary killer?” asked Hector.
Tabby chuckled and touched Charlotte’s shoulder to get her attention. “What do you think’s going to happen if you run a bunch of drones over Terra Siesta?” She pantomimed shooting a shotgun into the air.
“Terra Siesta is not a bunch of rednecks,” said Billy through gritted teeth.
“Just ninety percent,” said Penny. She and her sister laughed and high-fived.
It seemed the two meanest sisters on the planet had one thing in common.
Meanness.
“Well, the meeting ended without bloodshed,” said Charlotte as they headed back to Declan’s Jeep.
Declan nodded. “There’s that. Do you feel like you made any progress with them?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll at least encourage their people to be a little more aware. Would you mind stopping at Gryph’s house for a second? It wouldn’t hurt to get some drones in the sky.”
He looked at his watch. “It’s ten.”
“He’s a night owl.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
As Charlotte placed her hand on the Jeep’s door, she heard a crash and ducked to the sound of falling glass.
Her heart raced.
What now?
Chapter Twenty
Vince pulled onto the dirt street Wanamaker Homes had plowed into existence the previous week, rolling to a stop where the main road’s ambient light couldn’t reach. He turned off his engine and sat another second, feeling both pleased and angry.
His evening was going as planned. About that, he couldn’t be happier. But the fact this convenient new road existed irked him. He didn’t like the area exploding with new residents. When he’d arrived, Charity had been a sleepy town, a secret oasis twenty minutes from the beach and one-tenth as crowded as the seaside resorts. The developers sniffed the place out, though. The road he sat on now marked the beginning of yet another housing development. To his right grew a swampy forest, to his left, cleared land, where they’d build the model house, its twins destined to spread across the landscape like a virus.
Unlike some of the loons who wrote into the local paper, he didn’t care about the critters the development would displace. They wouldn’t catch him moaning about shrinking dirt owl habitats and rare lizards. He cared more about the things new developments spawned—more cars clogging up the roads and more people crowding the food stores and claiming all the good restaurant reservations.
His fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
It makes me so mad...
He remembered the breathing lessons his therapist recommended to him and took several deep inhales, letting each out slowly.
Breathe. Let it go.
He checked his pulse on the exercise watch he’d bought for that purpose and watched it drop from one hundred and three to eighty-five.
Not great, but better.
Thanks to Dr. Burke, he’d made some progress controlling his anger. He regretted not finding a therapist in his previous life. So maybe he wouldn’t have spent the rest of his days wrestling mosquitos larger than his head.
Back in New York City, his temper had inspired him to whack a guy from a rival mob family. He’d tried to cover it up. He’d dumped the body in the endless marshes out in New Jersey where no one would find the lout, but no one believed Franko had just left. They knew he had to be dead, and they knew Vince probably did it, thanks to the explosive animosity between them.
In retrospect, he should have pretended to make up with the moron before killing him.
Stupid.
When tension between the families hit an all-time high, he knew his own people would have to whack him to keep peace. So, when the cops approached him, he’d turned state’s evidence. He might have taken his death sentence like a man, if it hadn’t been for his wife. He’d entered witness protection to save her, only to have her leave him and shack up with Larry the Lip. She had no intention of living in a Florida swamp. Not when Larry could keep her in jewelry and, more importantly, in New York.
He’d come alone to Charity, only to find himself under the thumb of some crazy U.S. Marshal who, it turned out, liked to moonlight as a serial killer.
I should have let them kill me.
Thinking about Jamie Moriarty, his hand slipped from the wheel and curled into a fist, fury pumping through his veins.
I should kill that—
He sucked a breath through his nose and glanced at his watch.
One hundred and ten.
He released his fingers and laid his palms flat on his thighs.
Breathe. In. Out.
Vince took a few more breaths and then stepped out of the car before his mind could wander back to his troubles. He opened his trunk to retrieve his rifle, an unmated sock and a travel coffee mug.
The winds rustled the trees above his head. The closer the hurricane crept, the harder it would be to shoot anyone. Jamie had mentioned it would be a bonus if he killed his marks during the hurricane, but if she wanted the job done, he needed to tweak the rules a little. It looked as though Declan and his girlfriend were together for the evening.
Sorry, Jamie, tonight’s the night.
The young couple had entered Angelo’s Pizza Pit to join a crowd in the event room. Now, all he had to do was wait until they walked back out again.
The boy and girl on Jamie’s hit list couldn’t have picked a better spot. The road on which Vince parked ran through the burgeoning development to the highway on the opposite side of the property. The view from the edge of the forest shot clean across the road to the front of the restaurant. They’d even parked on the portion of the parking lot closest to the road, so all he had to do was wait until they returned to their car and pick them off, one-two.
As a bonus, from what he could tell from peering through the eatery’s window, they seemed to be meeting with other people. Chances were good there’d be other people milling around when he pulled the trigger.
They’d be key in keeping him out of trouble with Jamie.
She’d told him to make the hit look like an accident, but accidents weren’t his thing. He didn’t know how to poison someone and make it look like a heart attack. He didn’t know how to plan elaborate traps like Jamie did.
“I shoot people,” he muttered to himself.
Unfortunately, bullet holes tended to look like bullet holes. Heck, often, the bullets themselves were pretty easy to find, too. They had to land somewhere. And even if he shot someone and then dug the bullet out of their head, the death wouldn’t look like an accident. People’s skulls don’t spontaneously explode.
Not only did Jamie want an accident, she wanted two people dead. Is she crazy? How do you kill two people and make it look like an accident?
Cars seemed the only possibility. He’d considered pretending to be a cab driver, picking them up and crashing the car, but the plan made no sense. First, two people who owned cars would have to call for a car to pick them up. He’d have to intercept the call, kill the real driver and take his place. Then, he’d have to figure out how to crash a car in such a way he lived and they died. Was he supposed to reverse into a tree? Even then, they’d probably just bang their heads on the back of the headrests. The worst thing to come out of the whole ordeal would be the couple giving the dead driver he’d stuffed in the trunk a one-star review.
Rigging a car bomb wouldn’t work. Cars don’t explode as often as action movies make it seem. He could maybe shoot a gas tank with a tracer round, but the odds were in favor of one or both of his targets escaping before any resulting fire engulfed them and, again, once the accident was investigated—bullet hole.
No, he needed to use his rifle and kill them the way he knew how. He couldn’t make it look like an accident.
Once he’d accepted that simple truth, the solution to his problem had appeared.
He couldn’t make their death look like an accident, but he could make it look n
ot like a hit.
His neighbor, Don, inspired the idea. The jerk was out back screaming on the phone about what losers his bosses were. He’d been fired, which Vince didn’t find surprising. The man was a raving drunk. His wife had already left him. He’d been in a spiral for a few months—the kind of guy who could snap at any moment.
And there was Vince’s answer.
He spent half the day researching manifestos online. He printed out the craziest ones and then copy-pasted them into a document he could edit to make it sound like the ravings of his neighbor. He doctored two manifestos. One, he’d brought with him to the forest. It contained plenty of references to lead cops to his neighbor. The other he hid under the neighbor’s car seat, as if it were a discarded early draft. While planting that, he stole his neighbor’s travel coffee mug and a sock, which he intended to leave in the forest. If the references in the manifesto didn’t put the stupid cops on the right trail, the fingerprints on the coffee mug would.
The cops would find his victims in the parking lot, trace the bullet trajectories back to the forest’s edge, find the items his neighbor left behind, and conclude Don was a lunatic who’d snapped and shot up a bunch of people at the restaurant.
Vince would take out the couple, maybe pop one or two other people to make it less obvious who the real targets were, and then get out of there. He’d go home, leave his unlicensed rifle under the neighbor’s back porch, and then sit back and wait for the cops to show up.
Chuckling to himself, he clomped into the forest, happy he’d thought to wear long sleeves, long pants and a ton of bug spray. He could hear the bloodthirsty mosquitos buzzing around his head.
Bastards.
Vince found a fallen tree log perfect for steadying his shot. He set down the coffee thermos still half-full of the coffee his neighbor brewed the day he lost his job, and lowered himself onto his belly. Resting the rifle on the log, he peered through the scope, Declan Bingham’s silver Jeep clear as if it were parked a few feet in front of him.
Perfect.
The traffic wasn’t busy. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid hitting a passing car.
All he had to do now was wait.
What sounded like a twig snapped in the forest behind him and Vince glanced over his shoulder, holding his breath.
Were people walking through the woods at night? He couldn’t imagine, but people in Florida were so weird he couldn’t be sure.
The light wasn’t good, but he scanned the darkness for movement. Twenty feet away, he saw a flash of white fur waddle into the underbrush and released his breath.
Possum.
Cracking his neck, he peered through the scope again.
Something rustled behind him.
“Come on,” he hissed out loud.
He pointed the rifle at the trees and stared through the scope. It didn’t help. He didn’t see anything, but he knew his answer.
He was sitting in a forest in Florida at night.
The place is crawling with critters.
The forests in the northeast had wildlife, too, but other than the occasional bear, none of it might kill him.
He sniffed and turned back to his business.
I hate this godforsaken jungle state.
He grimaced when he heard the next rustle, but refused to look.
“They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,” he muttered to himself.
A Florida swamp forest was no place for a boy from Queens—
Through the scope he spotted movement through the restaurant’s blinds. The meeting had broken up. People were leaving.
Finally.
The front door opened and people spilled into the parking lot.
Declan appeared, his girlfriend at his side, a good-looking young lady.
Shame.
He heard something behind him and bit down, steadying for his shot.
Not now, possum.
He let out a breath and squeezed the trigger.
His head exploded with pain.
Vince heard the rifle shot, but knew there was little chance he’d hit anything. The pain came with force, and he now lay on his side, blinded and blinking.
With effort he rolled onto his back, trying to make sense of his predicament. His vision returned to reveal a woman standing over him, dressed in tight black clothing.
She pulled a black balaclava from her head, a spill of blonde hair visible by the street lights just beyond the forest’s edge.
“Hey,” she said.
He blinked hard. “Jamie?”
As soon as he said the word, he knew he was wrong. The woman looked like Jamie, but no. She was younger. He blinked again, confused.
The blonde held what looked like a thick branch in her hand.
Did she hit me over the head with that?
He tried to get up but his elbow slipped.
“Don’t get up,” she said, and there it was, a gun in her hand where the branch had been.
Uh oh.
A decade earlier he’d stumbled on one of his guys in the act of dying, a bullet hole in his chest. With seconds to live, the kid looked at him and smiled.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he’d said.
Then the light in his eyes died.
Vince thought it a strange last thing to say at the time, but it made sense to him now.
He smiled at the girl, knowing soon he’d be out of that damn forest.
Out of Florida.
As she raised the gun, he swallowed and spoke.
“Live by the sword, die by the—”
She finished his sentence a second before he heard the blast.
“Beretta M9A3.”
Chapter Twenty-One
After the crash of glass, Declan turned as a string of gasps, yelps, and one good, solid curse filled the air outside Angelo’s Pizza Pit. The parking lot felt darker.
“Are you okay?” he called to Charlotte on the opposite side of the Jeep.
“I’m fine. What was that?”
Declan spotted glass at the bottom of the lamppost outside Angelo’s. The glowing globe once sitting on top had gone missing.
He moved to the back of the Jeep to meet Charlotte there, both of them staring at the pile of glass. A gust of wind swung Charlotte’s ponytail.
“Was it the wind?” she asked.
He shrugged. “That, or maybe the bulb exploded? I heard something pop.”
He turned to look across the street, finding nothing except a clump of trees beside a plowed, empty lot, earmarked to become a new housing development. He scanned the tree line and pointed. “It almost sounded like the pop came from across the street,” he mumbled.
“It’s lucky no one was standing under there,” said Charlotte, her attention still on the lamp.
Nothing moved in the trees and Declan tried to shake his uneasy feeling. He wasn’t in the jungles of South America fighting guerrillas anymore. In Florida, as a rule, there weren’t snipers hiding in the forests. Shrugging, he headed back towards the restaurant. “The crash probably echoed off the trees. We should see if everyone is okay.”
They joined the group standing outside the restaurant, everyone chattering about how they’d nearly been killed.
“Is everyone okay?” asked Charlotte.
“I’m going to sue these people,” huffed Penny, who hadn’t been anywhere near the lamp. Declan had watched her return from her car when everyone screamed.
Always the peacemaker, Charlotte made an attempt to calm Penny down before her litigious thoughts swept through the rest of the group.
“Accidents happen. Would you want Pineapple Port people suing you every time something broke?” she asked.
He loved the way she always thought she could fix things.
Though with this group...
Penny’s eyes flashed, but before she could answer, her sister appeared beside her to wink at Charlotte.
“You ought to sue Penny for having such a subpar development.”
Penny redirec
ted her escalating anger toward her sister and Charlotte used the opportunity to touch Declan’s arm.
“I think they’re all fine. We should get out of here while we still can.”
He nodded. “Good idea.”
Back in the Jeep, they pulled out of the lot to make the ten-minute drive back to Pineapple Port. With Charlotte’s direction, he navigated to Gryph’s house and parked on the curb.
“Handy he lives so close to you,” said Declan, opening his door.
“Where are you going?” asked Charlotte.
He smiled. “I’m your shadow, remember?”
She rolled her eyes.
The grinding gears of a garage door opening made them both look.
Gryph appeared, feet first, then knees, waist and then Chip, his cat, curled in his arms. By the time the door opened, it was clear cat and owner had been living together too long. Both had tufts of white hair sticking from their ears. Both were overweight. Both had whiskers.
Gryph eyed Declan as if he suspected him of a crime. Declan smiled and offered a little wave.
Gryph frowned and turned his attention to Charlotte.
“Tilly said you might be coming,”
“Looks like she sent me to the right guy,” said Charlotte. She motioned inside the garage, where, mixed with stacks of computer equipment, hung a shelf lined with drones. “You can fly all of those?”
“I can fly a few of them. Give them patterns to follow.”
“That would be great.”
“What am I looking for?”
Charlotte shrugged. “Suspicious activity in general. I don’t know how much Tilly told you, but there might be a killer on the loose who hates hoarders.”
“Who doesn’t?” said Gryph. “Five hundred a night.”
Charlotte scowled. “One.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Deal.”
Charlotte put her hands on her hips. “Though, you really should do this as a free service for your community.”
Gryph laughed, the cat bouncing in his arms. Without another word, he turned and headed back inside, slapping the garage door controller as he reentered his home.
“I think that’s a no on the freebie,” said Declan.
