DJ didn’t owe him a minute of his time.
“Last chance, Dep. Say it now or forever hold your peace.”
“I’m your damned partner, DJ,” Jerry said. “Hildon Pharmaceuticals is connected to this. They killed Luc Baptiste, and they killed Dr. Markel and his wife. They’re in the process of killing Flor and will kill us once they realize we have the information Markel died trying to get out. We have to hang together on this. Get me?”
DJ laughed. “Man, I’m way ahead of you. They aren’t gonna do nobody harm now. I’m seeing to that.”
“You’re seeing to that?”
“You did all that preaching about keeping a steady hand, about not giving into my…” DJ looked down the street and saw a guy hanging out of a food truck window, within earshot. He lowered his voice. “…need to get things done the way they gotta be done, because you thought I’d get checked. But guess what? Doing things my way, I scouted your urgent news last night. I already saw all the pieces moving on the board. I already knew whose hand was on the queen. You’re playing two moves behind me, partner.”
“You can still get hurt,” he said.
DJ bit the inside of his cheek and laughed. God help him, Jerry couldn’t admit when he was wrong.
“Spare me the bullshit about my mortality. I got that rubbed in my face by a Taliban IED years ago. And you know what I learned from that? I got no problem giving my life up, so long as I’m doing it for something right.”
“This isn’t what you think it is. You’re not helpless, DJ.” But the way Jerry said it, DJ practically smelled the lie through the phone.
“So, you look at my leg and talk about how we all gotta play it cool and not let things get out of hand, because some of us can’t hold our own and that’s—what? A nervous tic?”
“I never did that,” Jerry said.
“Using that half-hearted tone, you know you said it,” DJ continued. “You don’t call me a cripple and kick my leg out from under me, but, damn man, you treat me about as bad with that polite I’m worried about you look in your eyes.
“Whether you want to believe it or not, I’ve been handling my business for years, Jerry. I climbed up on a boulder with McDermitt to save your ass. You remember that night you and Alicia got paraded to the edge of a cliff and held at gunpoint by all those drugged-out cult people? They were going to toss your ass to the sharks, and if it weren’t for me, you’d be chum.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” Jerry said.
“Then you don’t remember it the way it happened.”
Jerry didn’t answer. Only the wind came to his defense, and it offered nothing of substance. He must’ve been on Wayward. Must’ve been nice to stand on the flybridge of his luxury catamaran, chastising the guy on the street.
DJ remembered the day after he’d finished Armstrong’s orientation. He’d never pictured himself working hand in hand with anybody—much less that same blond surfer-boy he’d saved months earlier—but that was exactly who Stockwell had sitting on the deck of Ambrosia when DJ came aboard to get his first assignment.
If DJ had known he’d get mothered by Jerry Snyder, he never would have shook the man’s hand that day. He would’ve told Stockwell to stick his papers in his craw.
“Look, DJ—you’re right.” The jarring shift in Jerry’s voice caught DJ off guard. He almost tripped over a broken piece of sidewalk, but he caught himself against a mural of two dogs nipping each other’s legs. Was Jerry being sincere or was this a trick they taught all the kids who went through cotillion?
“I hear what you’re telling me,” Jerry said. “You’re a man. I didn’t mean to treat you like you couldn’t handle yourself, but I did. You don’t need me to be your mother.”
“Damned right I don’t.” He should’ve put that a gentler way, but the collar of DJ’s T-shirt still felt a touch warm.
“But DJ, just hear me out before you go forward. I’ve got things I don’t feel comfortable discussing over the phone. Please don’t do whatever you’re about to do.”
DJ felt the clench of Blunt’s neck, gasping for air, as if it were his own. Adrian Dos Santos was laughing at him.
“It’s too late for that, man,” DJ said. “Too many pieces are moving.”
“It’s never too late. You can still stop yourself.”
Stop himself? The ache suppurating in DJ’s guts squirmed. It would not sleep until it had been fed.
“Do you know what it’s like to see a man’s eyes ripped with fear one second, then glassy as a doll’s the next? You know what it’s like to see that in your friend’s eyes?
Jerry began to say something, then hesitated. He cleared his throat. “I do.”
“Then you know why I can’t stop.”
“I stopped,” he answered.
“Then you’ve got no heart.”
DJ hung up on me.
A chill rolled down the back of my neck. It’d been almost midnight when we’d gotten Wayward back to her own slip. I was tired, stressed, and dangling by a thread DJ was trying to cut.
Standing near the port side of Wayward’s flybridge, I rested my hands on top of the bulkhead and watched the mast of the twenty-seven-foot sailboat in the next slip over sway with the gentle waves in Long Bay.
I didn’t want DJ running headlong into a fight. Facts were facts, and the fact at hand was DJ only had one leg. Whether he wanted to accept it or not, it was a liability. But it wasn’t my place to stop him. He was his own man, playing his own game.
“Jerry!” Alicia’s voice came up from the docks at Wayward’s stern. Her smile dropped away as soon as she laid eyes on me. “DJ isn’t coming along, is he?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know why I got my hopes up.” Alicia pinched her nose and sighed. “Working with the only guy on the planet more stubborn than you must be hard, huh?”
I pushed away from the rail and stood up straight. “For most people, it probably would be. But I’ve had lots of practice with the world’s most stubborn woman.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. I returned the gesture, then walked over to the helm to gather my sunglasses and this morning’s coffee cup. I couldn’t let DJ drag me down. I had to keep a brave face. This enterprise with DJ seemed to be drifting apart for good and dwelling on it did nobody any favors.
I climbed down the steps from the flybridge, turned to make sure the salon door was locked, then stepped onto the swim platform and hopped onto the dock.
Alicia linked her arm in mine, then laid her head on my shoulder for a moment. I kissed her, then we walked up the quay.
“Once DJ gets his head out of his ass, I’m going to shove it back in,” she said. “Did you talk to Armstrong about him?”
“I thought about it, but I’m not a snitch.”
She laughed lightly. “Snitch? Does that make me your moll?”
“Stoolie, tattler, informer, whatever. DJ’s mess is self-made, and I don’t want any credit for it.”
“He’ll come back around. He has to,” Alicia said.
On the way up, we made a quick stop at the Yacht Haven Grande office. I told the guy at the counter to fill up Wayward’s fuel and water tanks at his first opportunity. The future wasn’t clear at this point, and I wanted her gassed up and ready to depart as soon as possible.
After that, Alicia and I walked out front. Our second-hand Wrangler was idling curbside, with Flor already sitting in the backseat, her head leaning against the rollbar with a pillow.
“How’re you feeling this morning, kid?” I asked.
She smiled weakly, her eyes regarding me with shame. She opened her mouth to say something, but I spoke before she could.
“I owe you an apology,” I said.
She knitted her brow. Something told me Flor Ramos wasn’t used to seeing men offering apologies.
“What you’re going through—I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is, and you don’t need me making it harder. Instead of grabbing you, I should’ve shut my mouth and
listened to what you had to say.”
“That would’ve been better,” she said with a thin smile.
I reached over the side of the Jeep and planted a kiss on her bandana.
“Flor, I promise you we’re going to get through this. All of us.”
She nodded, but I could tell she was holding something back.
“Talk to me, kid. I want to know what’s going on inside that head.”
Flor inhaled deeply through her nose, then let her breath go. “I know you mean well, but a lot of men have made a lot of promises to my mother and me. None of them have ever lived up to it. My whole life, it’s only been her and me relying on each other.”
The two of them alone against the world. I tried to imagine how close they must’ve been, and now Flor was apart from her mother, left in the hands of strangers.
“It’s hard to trust someone new,” I said.
She nodded.
“I hear what you’re saying. And to that, I say this: you don’t have to trust me. All you have to do is let me try.”
She searched my face for any hint of a lie. She wouldn’t find one. “Okay, Jerry.”
I got behind the wheel. Alicia smiled at me, her eyes misting before she quickly hid them behind her sunglasses. She put her hand on my thigh and kept it there as I drove us a half mile down Frenchman Bay Road, toward our house on Havensight Point.
Once we were in the driveway, I helped Flor out of the Jeep, then carried her up the steps to the back door.
We didn’t get any farther than that.
The sliding glass door had been shattered. My heart jumped around inside my rib cage. I looked at Alicia behind me—she’d seen it too.
“Jerry—”
“Back to the car!” I hurried down the steps, right on Alicia’s heels. We got Flor into the backseat, then I turned my attention to Alicia.
“Take the keys.” I clapped them into her hand.
“But Jerry—”
“There’s no time to argue,” I said, closing her fingers around the keys. “Get back to the marina. Make sure they’ve got Wayward filled up—we might have to make a quick getaway.”
I turned toward the house and started forward but stopped when Alicia snagged my arm. She pulled me toward her, her eyes like morning sky. I didn’t want to leave her.
“Be careful, Jerry.”
I kissed her. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
She was too worried to laugh. Alicia sank into the driver’s seat of the Jeep and started it. As she backed out, instead of going to the back door, I made for the beach.
I stayed low, weaving between the tree trunks and the brush, heading toward a sandy ridge to the southeast. The crest of the ridge was somewhere about four or five feet above sea level, dropping down a thirty or forty degree grade where it then flattened into beach, closer to the water.
Once I’d gotten over it, I dropped to my belly and faced the house, which was about twenty yards off.
Except for the broken glass in the sliding door, nothing else struck me as suspicious. The drapes behind the door flitted, but I assumed that was only the wind.
We’d been gone all of two days—whoever broke in had had plenty of time to do the job, and the sounds of the waves killed nearly every other noise around, unless you were a lot closer to the source of it than our neighbors would have been. I was sure they couldn’t say for sure when it had happened, or whether anyone had come or gone. I had to proceed like someone was still in the house.
Hildon might have known about Markel’s laptop. In the case of a high-profile contractor being murdered, it wasn’t completely out of the question for a company with Hildon’s clout to hire a private eye to do their own investigation. That person may have interviewed Gabriela already, and they might’ve traced her back to my house.
On my elbows, I crawled to my left, sure to keep my head below the top of the ridge. One of the first things I’d done after buying this place was to set up a couple of insurance policies around the property. I found an old stump with a dark gray rock about the size of a bowling ball next to it—both were just inside the tree line.
I rolled the rock aside. Below it was a small hole in the stump, about the size of my fist. The tide had brought in sand to fill it, even after I dug it out, so I had to scoop it all out again until the tip of my middle finger brushed against a sheet of plastic. I grabbed it and pulled.
Out came a Beretta 92F handgun—almost the same as the M9A1 sidearm I’d used throughout my time in the service. Both layers of the plastic bags I’d wrapped it in seemed to have held up okay. I opened the first and found the second one to be as clean as the day it was buried.
Inside that second bag, my Beretta was wrapped in clean linen, lightly sprayed with gun oil. It didn’t have so much as a grain of sand on it, nor a hint of rust. I pulled back the slide, inspected the chamber, and saw nothing that gave me pause. When I let go of the slide, it clicked back into place. Two magazines the gun was wrapped with also passed the eye test as well.
I fed one into the handgun, then loaded a round into the chamber. Ready to go.
Armed, I set my eyes on my house and lay on my belly, perfectly still, except for my slow, shallow breaths. I tuned out the waves hitting the shore behind me and tried to pick up any odd noises coming from the direction of the house. I watched the curtain dance near the back door.
After a time, I decided to get closer.
I hopped up, my back hunched low, knees bent, and my sidearm leveled and ready to fire.
My thighs burned as I came down the other side of the ridge and flattened myself against a tree trunk. Adrenaline coursed through me, making my fingers tingle around the grip of the handgun. I came off my cover and pushed forward.
Slipping underneath my back deck, I leaned my shoulder against the foundation of my house. The concrete felt cool to the touch, a world apart from the hot, sunny beach just out of sight. I looked up through the slats of the deck and listened.
Any kind of sound would’ve set me off. Footsteps, a coffee mug placed on the living room table, the AC unit under the deck kicking on. But I heard nothing.
So, I tiptoed out from beneath the deck, then stopped at the bottom of the wooden steps leading up. I kept my eyes on the curtain at the back door. They fluttered, and I pulled the trigger, making the curtain ripple when the bullet cut through it and sent it wafting to the floor.
My nerves arcing, I rushed up the steps, keeping the smoking mouth of the Beretta ahead of me and at the ready. When my sneakers crunched over the broken glass on the tiles inside the back door, I realized there was no one there—all I’d managed to do was ruin the curtain and put a hole in the ceiling.
But that was the least of the damage—my house had been ransacked. The couch cushions sliced up, the bookcases cleared, the cabinets emptied, so I went room to room, checking corners and closets, until I was satisfied that Hildon hadn’t paid someone to kill us too.
I returned to the ripped sectional in the living room and plopped down. Somewhere deep in my gut, I felt a burning, like I’d swallowed hot coals and was roasting from the inside out, but I knew it was this whole mess finally catching up to me as the tide of adrenaline pulled back.
I put the Beretta on the coffee table, then slowly looked around the room. The hutch near the dining room table was completely empty, our wedding photos pulled from their album and strewn around the floor. Alicia’s good silverware was, likewise, spread around the dining room, along with various knickknacks and keepsakes.
But nothing valuable was taken. The TV was here. And I seemed to remember Alicia’s jewelry box in our bedroom, disorganized, but still holding her things.
It had to have been Hildon. Probably looking for Dr. Markel’s laptop, which was back on Wayward, tucked into a locked hold underneath our berth in the master stateroom.
A chill fell over me. Wayward—if they knew where I lived, they had to have known about our boat too. For all I knew, we might’ve passed whoever did
this on the way out. They might be on our boat now. They might have taken Alicia.
I jumped up, dug my phone from my pocket, hurried outside, and called Alicia as I ran toward the marina down the road.
She answered on the first ring.
“Jerry?” she said. “Oh my God, Jerry, are you all right?”
“Are you back on the boat?”
“Yeah, the guy at the marina is just finishing with the fuel tank—is something wrong? Are you hurt? Why are you breathing like that?”
“No, I’m fine. Everything at the house was fine,” I said. “Listen carefully, baby—you’ve checked all over the boat? Did you see anyone?”
“No, I came in and just put Flor back on the guest bed. Do you think there’s someone here?”
“Nobody was at the house.”
“What? Do you think someone is on Wayward?”
“You can handle this until I get there,” I said. “Do you remember where the revolver is?”
“In the compartment under the wheel, up on the flybridge,” Alicia whispered.
“Go get it. I’m coming to you now.” I said “I’ll be there in four minutes. Get the revolver. I love you.”
“I love you too.” She hung up.
I would’ve stayed on the phone with her the entire way to the marina if she wanted. Instead, I kept the phone in my hand as I pumped my arms and sprinted down the middle of Frenchman Bay Road. I only had to cover half a mile.
Was telling Alicia to get the little S&W Shield the best thing to do? I should have told her to leave. Grab Flor, get off the boat, and get the hell out of there. Stay in the marina office, call the police.
No, not the police. They’d ask too many questions and explaining why we thought someone was hiding on the boat, intending to kill us, would mean having to explain why we had a laptop stolen from a murder scene, and that we had illegally accessed Hildon’s private documents.
We were outside the Armstrong organization, doing this without a net. Getting the gun was the right call.
I came down the big hill and kept my speed as I passed the cruise ship dock and bounded onto the sidewalk. Ahead, a throng of tourists extruded through the gate from their boat, and I side-stepped a pair of teenagers, then spun past a bald man with a long white beard and came out the other side of the thickest part of the crowd.
Wayward Sons Page 33
