“Will you take a check?” I asked.
The amused little smile danced at the corner of his thin lips again. “My business is cash only I’m afraid.”
“An IOU then,” I said.
“You’re beginning to strain my patience, Mr. Riley.”
“How much are you worth?” I asked.
Without the slightest hesitation he said, “Four million and change.”
I nodded and thought about it.
“A little less with what I pay this guy,” he said as Burke walked into the room. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“Takes what it takes,” Burke said. “I came straight. Soldier,” he said, nodding toward me.
“Burke,” I said.
He walked over and stood close to where Perkins was sitting.
“So,” Perkins said, “we doing business or shall Mr. Burke see you to your car?”
“Would you entertain an offer?”
“Look, I’m a businessman. If the offer’s good enough I won’t just entertain it, I’ll show it the time of its life.”
“I’m prepared to offer four million,” I said. “And change.”
This time there wasn’t just the hint of a smile but the full-blown, thin-lipped mean thing itself.
“My life for the girl’s,” he said. “You’d be way overpaying if you had mine to offer, which you don’t. So it is amusing, but that is all.”
He stood and turned toward Burke. “I’m going to bed. Take care of this for me, would ya?”
I stood too.
“One more offer,” I said.
“Yes?” he said, a weary frown on his face.
“Old-fashioned barter,” I said.
“You have nothing I want,” he said.
“You sure?”
“What then? Spill. You’re quickly becoming tiresome.”
“Your sister,” I said.
“But you don’t have her,” he said.
“But we do,” Clip said from the open doorway behind them.
They both turned to see Clip holding Doris Perkins in front of him, his gun to her head.
He was holding her just like we had discussed, in the exact spot I had told him.
While I had been talking to Perkins, he had snuck in and up to her room. It was the best plan I could come up with and so far it was working just like I had hoped.
Doris was disheveled and drowsy, maybe even drugged. Above heavy, hooded lids, her hair stood out on the top and left side of her head.
Clip began easing into the room, pushing Doris before him, her slippers shuffling on the floor.
“Pull your guns out slowly and drop them on the floor,” Clip said.
“I can take him out,” Burke whispered to Perkins.
“Are you certain?” Perkins said.
Burke didn’t respond.
“Sorry,” Perkins said. “Do it.”
“Now,” Clip said. “Or I splatter her brains all over that bar right there.”
“Okay,” Burke said. “Okay.”
He began withdrawing his weapon and I knew he intended to shoot Clip, not drop it to the floor.
As he did, I withdrew the small revolver in my waistband at the small of my back, stepped forward, and back-shot both men––Burke first, then Perkins. I squeezed off one round each in the back of each man’s head. Dead center in the back of the head.
Two quick pops. Two bodies crumpled to the floor.
Trading my honor, my code, my character for my life, my love, my Lauren.
Neither man died immediately. Both writhed and gurgled a bit, but not for long.
A short, dark-haired man ran in, his gun drawn.
“What’s goin’––” he started.
Clip turned and shot him in the face.
Doris had yet to really react.
I stepped over her brother and walked toward her.
“Where is Lauren?” I said.
“What?” she mumbled breathlessly. “Who?”
“Lauren,” I said. “Where is Lauren? The girl from the hospital. Where does your brother have Lauren?”
“Lee?” she said.
“Yes. Lee. Where does Lee have Lauren? Take us to her room.”
“Pretty Lauren,” she said.
“Yes. Pretty Lauren. Where is she?”
“Sick Lauren,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“Her room … Her room’s beside mine,” she said.
I took off running.
Chapter 34
Out of the Cypress Lounge.
Gun drawn.
Down the empty hallway.
Alert for more security.
I had been so close to her just a few hours ago when I had gone up to confirm Doris was really here. Right beside her. In the very next room.
Up the staircase.
One flight. Then another.
As I turned to start up the next flight, another one of Perkins’s men was there.
He went for his gun. I shot him in the chest before he could unholster it, the rapport deafening in the stairwell, stepped over him, and continued up the stairs.
When I reached Lauren’s floor, I opened the door and looked down the hallway.
No one.
Continuing to her room, I tried the door.
It was locked.
I tapped on it two quick times and stepped to the side.
When it opened, the face that appeared in the narrow crack was Armando. I pressed the barrel of the gun to the tip of his nose and said, “Give me your gun.”
He did.
“How many inside?”
“Just me.”
“Come out.”
He opened the door slowly, then stepped out into the hallway, the tip of the gun never leaving the tip of his nose.
As he stepped out I used his body, which was still blocking most of the doorway, to take a quick look inside.
The room was dim and there was one blind spot, but it didn’t appear there were any other gunsels inside.
“I thought you didn’t even know where his sister was, let alone that he had Lauren.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I swear it. Not until after you left tonight. He called me in and told me everything and sent me up here to guard her.”
“From me?” I said. “You’re guarding her from me?”
“I––”
“Over here,” I said. “Away from the door.”
He stepped over and I shot him in the nose.
A quick clap, a spray of blood on the wall behind him, and he fell to the floor.
I ran into the room and into the barrel of a .45 semi-automatic.
Without hesitating I fired, ducking away from his shot as I did.
Click.
Click.
Two dry fires. I was out.
He wasn’t out. He fired two live rounds, but he had ducked out of the way from what he had thought would be my shot, and the movement had caused him to miss.
“You’re out,” he said, righting himself and aiming down at me.
“Please,” I said, holding up my hands.
He laughed. Then his head exploded.
As he fell to the ground, I turned toward the sound of the shot and saw Clip standing there, gun still held out in front of him.
I jumped up and ran over to the bed.
The hotel bed had been removed. In its place, a hospital bed.
And there she was.
My beautiful, perfect girl. Alive.
I began crying immediately. A hard, gut-wrenching sob that seemed to come from somewhere inside me I didn’t know existed.
My knees buckled and I went down.
As I pushed myself up, I saw Clip pulling the man’s body out of the room and then close the door.
As I stood, Lauren slowly opened her eyes and looked up at me. Then came tears of her own. Unlike mine, quiet, dignified tears that leaked out of the corners of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
“Soldier,” she said. “I knew y
ou would come for me. I knew it.”
Through the window the dawn was breaking, a soft, hopeful, orange-gold glow in the east.
“You found me,” she said.
“Yes I did.”
“Again.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Am now,” she said.
“Now and always,” I said. “I told you we’d make it.”
She nodded. “You did,” she said. “And you were right. The long dark night is over.”
Chapter 35
“How’re you feeling?” I asked. “Really.”
“Better,” Lauren said.
That was how she always answered.
“You always say that,” I said.
“It’s always true,” she said.
It was the first time we had gotten out. We were back behind the Cove Hotel near the bay. I had pushed her out in a wheelchair and we were sitting near the water. It was a quiet Thursday morning––two days ’til Christmas, and we had the place nearly to ourselves.
The sun was bright, its rays bouncing off the bobbing waves of the bay, the day clear, the breeze brisk, cold but not too cold.
Our last few days had been spent in seclusion, in recuperation and recovery. We were both in bad shape––just how bad I wasn’t really sure yet––but we were together and, as she kept saying, getting better.
“You wanna talk about what happened?” I asked.
“I don’t need to, but I don’t mind,” she said. “Honestly, not much. I was a prisoner and they treated me as such––and they let me know horrible things were coming––but mostly I was just treated like a patient. A few of the guards told me what they were going to do to me, but no one actually did anything.”
The relief I felt was indescribable.
“All I did was think about you,” she said. “About you coming for me. About us being together. I knew I could endure anything, survive anything, as long as that was even a possibility. I didn’t know how badly you were hurt or if you had even made it until they began to tell me how they were going to kill you. Then I knew. I knew you were alive. I knew you would figure everything out. I knew you would come for me. I knew we’d be together. I really knew it.”
I nodded.
We were quiet a long moment, holding hands, healing, enjoying the bay and the day.
We were staying in a room at the Cove because we had nowhere else to go––no home, no money, no plans, no prospects.
We had nothing but each other. We had everything.
“You shot men in the back for me,” she said. “Murdered them.”
“I did,” I said.
She started to say something but stopped.
“Does it change how you feel about me?” I asked.
“What? No. Not at all. It’s just … I still can’t … I just can’t believe you did it. How did you do it?”
“It was easy,” I said. “It was for you.”
“But … what about … what’s that line you’re always quoting about––”
“I’ve changed it a bit,” I said. “Yet this inconstancy is such as you too shall adore. I could not be honorable, dear, so much loved I not you more.”
Her breath caught and she brought her weak white hand up to her heart.
We were quiet a moment.
“You …” she began. “You really love me more than––”
“Anything,” I said. “I love you more than anything.”
She studied me for a long moment, her eyes searching mine. “You do, don’t you?”
“I do.”
Tears of pure joy began streaming down her cheeks, streaks of happiness and love and nothing less than the meaning of life.
Tears of my own trickled out of my moist eyes, and we wept in silence for a long while.
A good bit later, she said, “What’re you going to do about Henry Folsom?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Not thinking about him or anything else right now. Only you. Only us. Only this.”
“I still can’t believe he did what he did,” she said. “Then tried to kill you and was going to let them … do what they were going to do to me.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything, and once again pushed Henry Folsom far from my thoughts.
“What if he had … what if they had succeeded?” she said. “What if they had killed you and …”
“He didn’t. They didn’t.”
“I regret every second we haven’t been together since we met,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Let’s not be apart any more than we absolutely have to ever again,” she said. “However long or short that is.”
I nodded. “We won’t be.”
Her words made me wonder if she knew more about her condition, about her prognosis, than she had let on. I had to get her to a doctor to see what we were looking at, what we had to deal with moving forward.
“What about Miki Matsumoto?” she asked. “What will become of her?”
“We’ll figure that out too,” I said. “We’ll help her have … as good a life as she can.”
“Where is she?”
“The last place her uncle would ever look,” I said. “She’s staying with Clip.”
“I need to thank Clip again,” she said.
“You don’t think the first thousand times were enough?”
“What he did,” she said. “What he has done for you and for me …”
“You can thank him some more tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I like the sound of that.”
I smiled.
“Tomorrow,” she said again. “Has a nice ring to it.”
I thought of the quote from Macbeth and wondered if it were echoing through her mind too.
“‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’”
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” she said. “That means something so different than it might have. If you hadn’t found me, hadn’t saved me, if we hadn’t …”
“But we did,” I said. “And I did. No out, out, brief candles, us. No tale told by an idiot. No sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“No, none of that,” she said. “No walking shadows. And all our yesterdays brought us to today, to this day, to be together––today, tomorrow––”
“And,” I said, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
And thinking of another line from another great writer, I took her hand in mine and looked out over the bay, from the small boats rocking in the distance to the trees on the shore beyond, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her, but one.
Please take a moment and review THE BIG HELLO.
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About the Author
Multi-award-winning novelist, Michael Lister, is a native Floridian best known for literary suspense thrillers and mysteries.
The Florida Book Review says that “Vintage Michael Lister is poetic prose, exquisitely set scenes, characters who are damaged and faulty,” and Michael Koryta says, “If you like crime writing with depth, suspense, and sterling prose, you should be reading Michael Lister,” while Publisher’s Weekly adds, “Lister’s hard-edged prose ranks with the best of contemporary noir fiction.”
Michael grew up in North Florida near the Gulf of Mexico and the Apalachicola River in a small town world famous for tupelo honey.
Truly a regional writer, North Florida is his beat.
In the early 90s, Michael became the youngest chaplain within the Florida Department of Corrections. For nearly a decade, he served as a contract, staff, then senior c
haplain at three different facilities in the Panhandle of Florida—a unique experience that led to his first novel, 1997’s critically acclaimed, POWER IN THE BLOOD. It was the first in a series of popular and celebrated novels featuring ex-cop turned prison chaplain, John Jordan. Of the John Jordan series, Michael Connelly says, “Michael Lister may be the author of the most unique series running in mystery fiction. It crackles with tension and authenticity,” while Julia Spencer-Fleming adds, “Michael Lister writes one of the most ambitious and unusual crime fiction series going. See what crime fiction is capable of.”
Michael also writes historical hard-boiled thrillers, such as THE BIG GOODBYE, THE BIG BEYOND, and THE BIG HELLO featuring Jimmy “Soldier” Riley, a PI in Panama City during World War II (www.SoldierMysteries.com ). Ace Atkins calls the “Soldier” series “tough and violent with snappy dialogue and great atmosphere … a suspenseful, romantic and historic ride.”
Michael Lister won his first Florida Book Award for his literary novel, DOUBLE EXPOSURE. His second Florida Book Award was for his fifth John Jordan novel BLOOD SACRIFICE.
Michael also writes popular and highly praised columns on film and art and meaning and life that can be found at www.WrittenWordsRemain.com.
His nonfiction books include the “Meaning” series: THE MEANING OF LIFE, MEANING EVERY MOMENT, and THE MEANING OF LIFE IN MOVIES.
Lister’s latest literary thrillers include DOUBLE EXPOSURE, THUNDER BEACH, BURNT OFFERINGS, SEPARATION ANXIETY, and A CERTAIN RETRIBUTION.
Michael’s website is www.MichaelLister.com
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