Beachcomber Trouble

by Stephanie Queen

  That was the last thing he remembered, save for the painful bash of a heavy object against the back of his head.

  Chapter 4

  The only light in the room was the sunlight shining through the slits around the steel door, but it was enough for Dane to see his surroundings when he opened his eyes. He’d been lying in a heap on the old wood floor of the tight space. He figured it was a hallway or entry room of some kind. As he pushed himself up in spite of the splitting pain in his head, all the circumstances of his current predicament came rushing back. He jumped to his feet and called out.

  “Shana.”

  There was no answer. He looked for his Glock and picked it up from the floor next to him and checked for rounds—it was still full. He rushed through every door and down every hall in both floors of the unit where he’d found himself, finding it empty save for some odd office furniture, a few mouse carcasses and a cat.

  His assailants had politely left him with his phone as well as his Glock, so he pulled the phone from his pocket and pressed in Cap’s number, only to find that the battery was dead. He slammed the front door open to the street where the morning sun blinded him. Pain shot from his skull down his neck and through the blades of his shoulders. It might as well have struck him through the heart. What the hell had happened?

  Shana was gone. Floyd Parker—or whoever he was working with or for—must have her. But why? Dane forced himself to hold back on his conclusion. Someone had hit him, but he had no idea who it was. It could have been Floyd or whoever had lured Dane into the meeting. It didn’t have to be Floyd—but it was too coincidental not to be.

  What had happened to Shana? She could be back at the beach shack drinking coffee right now. But she wasn’t. If Shana weren’t in trouble, she would never have left him there.

  If she knew he’d been hit on the head—but maybe she didn’t know…

  He ran back down the street to where he hoped his car would still be, felt his pocket and found his keys.

  Damn it to hell. And back. Where was she?

  The pounding in his chest as he reached his car took his attention over the splitting ache in his head. Not because he ran too fast, but because it was fear driving him, throbbing in his veins until he thought his chest would explode if he didn’t get control. Shana was gone.

  Worst case—someone had taken her.

  Dane jumped in the Jeep and circled around to where he’d seen Shana park her bike. It was gone. Stepping on the gas, he headed for the beach shack, forcing himself to breathe and to think.

  Why the hell would they take Shana and her bike—and leave him?

  Shana could have driven her own bike—back to the beach shack.

  Dane checked his rear mirror once to make sure there were no cops—or anyone else—in pursuit. He’d pushed the old Jeep to its tire-screeching limits on the turns more than once until he slammed on the brakes, shoved the gear handle into park, and pushed from the vehicle. He wasn’t surprised to find Cap’s state police car there waiting at the beach shack, but Cap was accompanied by a local cop car with lights flashing and radio blaring intermittent static, codes and commands. Leaden dread settled in his gut as he forced himself through his back door.

  He found Cap in his kitchen barking orders at a couple of his people—a man and woman Dane recognized. They were taking pictures. The place was a shambles. Cap turned to him. Dane gingerly stepped into the kitchen. Someone made a mess of the place. But the computer equipment was still there. The raid had been a scare tactic or a power move.

  Cap said, “You’re a sight for sore eyes—I was worried. I got your message, but Shana had already called me. David Young and Chief Dan O’Keefe are on their way.” He paused and they stood for a beat. “Where’s Shana?”

  Dane had been about to ask Cap the same thing. He didn’t say anything, but he knew the expression on his face answered Cap’s question.

  The look on Cap’s face—shocked and drained of color—froze him. Except for an acid burn erupting in his chest. Dane might have harbored a hope that Shana would be here, waiting for him, that whoever hit him had nothing to do with his meeting with Floyd Parker. But now he knew for sure. Shana was in trouble.

  “Call the Coast Guard and don’t let anyone off this island,” Dane said. He ran back outside with Cap following. “I’m going to the airport. We can’t let anyone take off. What time is it? How long have I been out?” In his haste to get back, it hadn’t even occurred to him to check his watch. He’d known. Dreaded knowing.

  “Close to six hours. I’m coming with you.” Cap followed him out the door into the driveway.

  “Shit.” He sounded lame with the understated epithet. His chest thudded but more steadily. His hand shook as he dragged it through his hair, feeling the baseball-sized lump on his head. He didn’t bother wincing.

  “You took a blow to the head—I’m taking you to the hospital first,” Cap said.

  Dane laughed. “My head is fine, but you’re out of yours if you think I’m wasting time going to the hospital.”

  A faint bit of color came back to Cap’s face then and he nodded, a slight twitch to one side of his mouth signaling as much of a smile as he had in him. Cap dialed up the Coast Guard and spoke in clipped tones as Dane considered whether to wait for David Young and Dan O’Keefe. But he decided he had one place to visit before his guests got to the island.

  Dane didn’t slow down. He jumped into the passenger side of the state police car and Cap’s spinning tires blew crushed seashells from the driveway as they launched into the street, siren blaring, racing to the heliport.

  “There are too many places they could get a boat out of here. The Coast Guard can’t corral the whole island.”

  “I have a feeling these people aren’t boat types. I think they’re in a helicopter.” He remembered the MO from the last time he’d met Oscar’s handler and the uneasy feeling he’d gotten. Oscar had insisted he could handle his handler. They’d been in Columbia, which was a tough place. But Oscar was tougher.

  Wasting no more time, Dane called Peter while Cap drove.

  “Trouble,” he said the instant the governor’s voice came on the line.

  “Tell me,” Peter said.

  Dane told him about the call and the e-mail from Floyd Parker, Oscar’s handler. Peter remained silent until Dane finished. “Shana’s gone.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Dane. We’re on this. I’ll find out where Oscar was last operating. Hold on.”

  Dane looked at Cap while the governor put him on hold and they drove toward the heliport.

  “I’ll check in with the Coast Guard—Captain Tony Vendi,” Cap said as he pulled the car into the parking lot of the heliport.

  Peter came back on the line and Dane’s spine snapped to attention as another sharp pain shot straight through his shoulder blades and up into the back of his neck and head.

  Peter said, “Oscar was last in Haiti. According to the station chief he last reported in four days ago and is due to report in again tonight.”

  “What do they have on Floyd?”

  “As far as they know he’s currently on assignment as Oscar’s handler and is in communication—such as it is. You know the CIA.”

  “Last time they spoke?”

  “They didn’t say, but I didn’t ask. You think he has something to do with this?”

  Dane ignored the question and instead asked, “What was Oscar working on?”

  Peter paused a fraction of a beat and Dane’s insides iced over.

  “Oscar was working on the disruption of a human trafficking pipeline.” Peter stopped and took a breath.

  “Where did the pipeline lead?” Dane asked, but he knew.

  “Brazil.”

  “Shit-damn.” Dane took a deep breath and kept his black thoughts stowed away. Cap jumped back into the car and looked at him.

  Something had clearly gone wrong.

  Someone was using Oscar to flush Dane out—to get him to Brazil. For revenge.

  Bu
t if that was the case, why the hell hadn’t they taken him instead of Shana?

  Another arctic chill went through him.

  They were in the human trafficking trade. And they wanted Shana. Someone wanted her. Someone namd Tavares.

  His mind went back to the Brazilians and the surfing competition scam the Tavares brothers had run the summer before to recruit unsuspecting beauties into their business. He, Shana and Cap had shut down the operation, but they knew it was only one tentacle of an oversized octopus-type operation run by the family. Henrique Tavares was the CEO.

  He feared giving voice to his suspicion. He feared his voice would betray him, but he spoke anyway.

  “It might have something to do with the Brazilian operation run by the Tavares family.” He explained his theory to Cap. “Oscar was working with the CIA to shut down the funnel of women from Haiti to Brazil and Mexico. There are few coincidences in this business and I don’t believe this is one of them,”

  Dane and Cap talked to the heliport manager and he told them a private copter had left a few hours ago with a party of four. They’d arrived with a party of three.

  “Was there a woman with them?”

  “Appeared so. I didn’t get too good a look. They hustled to the copter like they were in the ‘Amazing Race’ and heading to the finish line. I thought maybe they actually were and I looked around for the TV cameras.”

  “How did they get here?”

  The man shrugged. “By car.”

  “Where is it?”

  “A guy dropped them off.”

  Dane looked at Cap and smiled. They had on-island help. That gave him a lead. He turned to the heliport manager and spoke slowly and succinctly in a deep, intimidating growl.

  “Think very carefully and tell me every detail you remember about the car and driver.”

  The man complied. Ten minutes later Cap called in the car, plate and description of the driver.

  “I can’t believe how lucky we were to get a partial plate,” Cap said. “But I’m a little disturbed that we have a connection on island to the Brazilian human traffickers.”

  “Probably someone left over from the surfing competition. A local stringer.” Dane thought of his own two stringers and wondered if he might need one or both of them. This was an all-hands-on-deck situation with Shana missing.

  “We may as well wait here for David and O’Keefe. They’ll be landing in ten minutes,” Cap said. “We can give them a ride back to HQ and get the results on the plate then.”

  Dane nodded, but the last thing he wanted to do was sit and wait. He needed to do something. He paced around the tarmac near where they’d parked the car a few yards from the building.

  “I can’t believe I let this happen,” he said.

  “You had no choice but to trust Floyd. Shana … shouldn’t have followed.”

  Dane whipped around. “She did what any self-respecting partner would do. Don’t blame her for that.”

  Cap put his hands up. “Okay—you’re right. I’m just saying there was nothing you could do about it—you had to go to the meeting.” He paused a beat. “Maybe I should have been there backing you both up.”

  Dane kept pacing. “Maybe I should have suggested it. You didn’t know Floyd Parker. I knew not to trust him.” At least deep down he’d known. “Or I should have known.”

  “I thought Floyd was CIA? Why should you think you couldn’t trust him?”

  “Something was off with him. Nothing explicit. But he was not straightforward—less so than the usual CIA character. He wasn’t a field guy either, so why was he out in the field? It was odd that he would be here and odd that he wouldn’t give me the intel on the secure phone. There were enough red flags—”

  “They called out of the blue. Purposely caught you off guard.”

  Dane heard the distant whip of helicopter blades and looked up, slowing his pacing. “They won’t be catching me off guard again. Not ever. The Tavares family will not be in business much longer. They will not be in a position to do another run before I’m done. I promise you that.”

  “I believe you,” Cap said. He unfolded his arms from across his chest and stood up from his leaning posture against his state police car. They headed toward the helipad where David Young and Chief Dan O’Keefe had landed.

  “You know O’Keefe?” he asked Dane.

  “No, but I do know he’s a childhood friend of David and Oscar’s. I know the stories. So I’m expecting he’s one of us.”

  Cap nodded. They were too close to the spinning rotors of the landing copter to say anymore. Dane stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Cap and waited for the rotors to slow and the two men to disembark. A gut wrenching longing for Shana to be the one standing with him shuddered through him.

  Dane led the group of somber men back to his beach shack. The police team had moved out but the place was still a shambles. Dane didn’t have the inclination to clean it. Didn’t care. He walked through the kitchen, stepping over some broken glass and a sticky wet spot, flicked a glance at the remnants of a tequila bottle, and went straight into the dining room.

  He righted a chair and pulled it up to the table, motioning for the other men to follow suit. They did so without saying a word. Dan O’Keefe was the man in the room Dane knew the least. He was Chief of the Boston Police Department and childhood friends with David Young and Oscar and that’s why he was there. Not because they needed the Boston PD.

  “O’Keefe has known Oscar since we were all youngsters, before my family moved back to London,” David said. “And we both owe him.”

  “Then you must know Oscar’s real name,” Dane said.

  O’Keefe said, “His mother named him Antonio.”

  “Antonio what?” Dane pressed.

  “Antonio never-goddamn-mind,” O’Keefe said. “He created the alter ego for a reason. A very good reason.”

  David exchanged a glance with O’Keefe and put up his hands. “If you need to know for some specific reason, Dane, I’ll tell you.”

  Dane shrugged. He knew Oscar’s real name. Antonio Rizoni. It was a good test. O’Keefe had failed. In spades. He didn’t reveal his friend’s real name because he didn’t trust Dane.

  “How soon until we get any ID on fingerprints?”

  A typical police-type question. Dane knew O’Keefe was referring to prints from the ransacking of the beach shack. But Dane was way ahead of that lead.

  “Maybe later today. Maybe never. But no matter. I know who’s behind this.” He addressed Dan and then turned to David and Cap. He saw the flinch in David’s eyes, the flash of the light bulbs going off above his head. He knew. The only one left to be enlightened was Dan.

  “The Tavares family,” Dane said. He turned back to O’Keefe to elaborate.

  “We had a run-in with two of the brothers last year, Aldo and Bento. The family has a well-run organization headquartered in Brazil. Aldo and Bento teamed up with a French con, Jean Luc Ruse, and had him front a surfing competition scam for them. Our interest was in a missing heiress named Susan Whitaker, but it soon became apparent we were up against a larger agenda—human trafficking. More specifically, high-end, refined beauties for an elite clientele. The Tavares brothers were getting creative in their recruiting methods. We set them up using Shana George, David’s Scotland Yard recruit fresh in from Australia—a former surfing champion—who was the perfect bait.”

  Dane looked down and took in a deep breath. His heart had accelerated. He felt a bead of sweat trickling down his spine and along the hairline of his temple. He resisted swiping at it. Cap rose from his chair.

  “I could use something cold,” Cap said. He helped himself and handed Dane a bottle of the local craft beer from Edgartown, Bad Martha beer.

  Chief O’Keefe prompted, “So now you think these Tavares brothers came back for Shana—a year later?”

  Dane didn’t hold the skepticism against him.

  “In the process of taking down their operation, we killed the younger brother—Bento Tavares.
The other, Aldo, was sentenced to a long stretch in a federal prison.”

  “The U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Not supermax, but high security,” Cap said.

  Dane took a swig of his beer. He studied O’Keefe. “How much do you know about what Oscar was up to recently?”

  “Next to nothing. Except that he was in Haiti—and that he would be one of the good guys in whatever operation he was involved in. That’s for certain.”

  Dane nodded. This he knew. He only hoped to hell his suspicions about Floyd Parker were wrong.

  David said, “So we think the Tavares family—a half dozen cousins and at least two uncles—are doing business in Haiti recruiting women. They ran into Oscar and figured out his connection to Shana and used him as bait to get her—to retaliate—an eye for an eye.”

  “No,” Dane said. “They took Shana to get to me.”

  “Then why didn’t they take you when they had their chance?” Cap said.

  “Because they want both of us—in Brazil. In Rio. I’m sure there’s a larger agenda than pure revenge or retaliation. They probably wanted high value hostages—maybe in exchange for Aldo’s early release—and figured we’d fit the bill. They’re not fond of us. Revenge and prisoner exchange.” Dane didn’t mention that they might have a third motive—that they might want to keep Shana. He flicked a gaze at Cap. Dane could see in his eyes that he had the same thought.

  “I don’t understand how they would make the connection between Oscar and you—or Oscar and Shana,” David said. Dane did not want to share his theory yet about Floyd Parker’s role in that.

  “And I still don’t understand why they wouldn’t have taken the both of you then—when they had you,” O’Keefe said.

  “I know—that’s why it only makes sense if they have a larger agenda. One involving me going to Brazil. Possibly involving a whole posse of us going to Brazil.”