They landed shortly afterward and he felt like a kid on his way to an exam he was unprepared for. They were returning to the beach shack. The shot up wreck of his home. Courtesy of Floyd and Tavares.
As he got out of the Jeep, still working the kinks out of his achy beat up body, the acknowledgment of Floyd’s hate—and the reason for it—left Dane with a shadow of discomfort. He walked across the crushed shell drive to the back door. Deep down Dane was counting on Floyd being desperate enough, crazy enough and full of enough hate to try taking him down on his home turf.
He was right. He was convinced of it.
The rest of the crew, including Shana, walked behind him, letting him take the lead. He could feel the heat of her eyes on him, her presence pushing him forward. How much of the homey feeling was the shack’s refuge and how much of it was about Shana sharing it with him, even if she rarely shared his bed? There was always the possibility…
Remembering the way he’d left the shack, ripped apart and strewn with the debris of their daily lives, Dane stopped. He took a bracing breath of sea air before taking the two steps and pushing the back door open. A jolt of surprise, followed by a mix of suspicion and pleasure hit him. The place was immaculate.
Acer said, “Cap had a couple of friends of yours come by to clean up.”
“Don’t tell me—the pie girl and the kid?”
Acer nodded and said, “Cap called Sassy and Ronnie Ryan in before we left. Cap was the only one not cursing you out and happy to leave the place a mess.”
Shana crowded in the door behind him and saw Cap. She blew out a whistle.
“What the hell?” Her million-dollar smile made him shudder, raising goose bumps of promise and trepidation along his arms. He held his arms still.
“Cap,” she said and rushed into his open arms. Cap squeezed her in a bear hug. Dane turned away.
Chapter 15
Shana freed herself from Caps strong arms. The embrace had been exactly what she needed—a true homecoming welcome. But when she turned she found Dane’s eyes on her. The granite stare. The one that felt like it was coming from the distance of an unreachable mountaintop. She still felt the warmth of being home. Safe. Any juice left from the days of adrenaline-induced action faded to nothing.
“Now we wait for a call from David?” She let her smile free. She was too tired to discipline herself. “How about if I call for some food—maybe some pie.” She winked at Dane to bridge the gap. Even his distance couldn’t dispel the bubble of euphoria in her chest, making her feel calm and happy and her mood impossible to hide. The long trip had relaxed her when it shouldn’t have. It felt like there was a truce between her and Dane while they flew the endless hours through dark and then light, stopping to refuel and stretch and not much else. During the flight she rested her mind as much as she did her body in spite of the cramped quarters and hours spent sitting. Shoulder to shoulder with Dane, feeling his heat and his solid strength up against her, had calmed her. It could have gone either way. Some days it would have created an exhausting tension. Most days.
She might as well admit it to herself—it had been his choice, under his control. Dane let her rest, he inspired her rest. This time.
Now he gave her his usual look committing to nothing, admitting nothing. Then she spotted it—a small twitch and a crinkle under his left eye. It was an unguarded move. He’d allowed it. She promised herself not to care. At this moment Dorothy returning from Oz had nothing on her—wicked witch Dane Blaise or not.
She flipped her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. She needed to change her clothes. She needed to take a long shower. The image flashed through her mind of Dane’s strong arms, his hard wet chest. Soap suds sliding over her skin under the sensual pressure of his hands. Maybe she ought to take a cold shower. She held the smile on her face and concentrated on pressing the number for Sassy Stephens. She could use one of Sassy’s pies right now. She could use some of Dane’s loving right now even more. Sassy’s voice dispelled her runaway thoughts like the jarring landing of a jet on a runway.
“Sassy—”
Dane turned to watch her talk. Shana turned away and listened to the excited girl, waiting for an opening to order pie for five hungry people. They hadn’t been concerned about eating before they left Brazil. They’d been concerned with nothing except drinking tequila and getting out undeterred, getting home. Home…
“I bet you’re hungry. What kind of pie do you want?” Sassy asked. After a beat of empty air, she prompted, “Shana? Everything all right?”
“Yes. Glad to be home. How about three pies—” As Shana placed the order, she watched Dane place a call and half listened. He spoke to Ronnie Ryan, aka the kid, who worked in food delivery for The Shark’s Table when he wasn’t moonlighting for Beachcomber Investigations as an errand boy. Ronnie saw the job more like a role in a movie than real life and Shana worried about him—almost as much as Dane did. Dane spoke to him as if they were both still in eighth grade now.
She ended her call and looked down the hall toward her bedroom and the bathroom she shared with Dane—with the shower she longed to share with him.
“You can shower first,” Dane said.
She snapped around and found everyone in the room watching her. Throwing her hands on her hips, she quelled the rising heat in her chest. “Don’t mind if I do—although you all need it more than I do. You can use the outside shower. Or the hose.” She turned and headed for the bathroom, grabbing her small duffel from the floor next to her where she’d dropped it, and listening to the scoffs and chuckles with an inside-her-heart smile.
Dane told himself he was glad Shana was out of sight. The last of the out-of-time ease of their flight had disappeared. The shack was filled with familiar tension, familiar comfort, promise, and trepidation and, not to mention, weapons and ammunition.
“You suppose Ronnie ‘the kid’ Ryan thought to stock the freezer appropriately?” Acer asked. He walked in the direction of the refrigerator, practically stepping on Dane’s toes in the tight quarters of the kitchen. Oscar, Cap and Acer were lined up against the wall with the back door, barely inside the house.
“I’m betting he did,” Dane said. “I’ll bring the glasses. It could be a long wait.” He banged open cabinets and found new glasses stocked inside. They were made of high-impact plastic and decorated with beachy designs in turquoise and lime. He sensed Sassy’s influence. Overcoming his design reservations and the kick to his manly sensibilities, he grabbed a handful of the practical, potentially unbreakable glasses and led the group of men into his dining-room-office. Shoving the laptop and a file box to the far end, he plunked down the fun cups and sat in the furthest chair. He slipped the special phone, purchased for this occasion, from his pocket and put it on the table. Acer and Cap took chairs at the table dominating the dining area.
“I apologize for the glassware.”
Oscar plunked the very large bottle of Patron in the middle of the table. “Your man Ronnie aims to please. I’ll put in a good word for him with the department.”
“He thinks he owes me for saving his life,” Dane said. He glanced at his watch.
Oscar opened the bottle. “Let me do the honors.” He poured drinks all around in a manner that suggested he’d had a substantial stint as a barkeep in one iteration of his past identities.
Ronnie Ryan and Sassy Stephens arrived simultaneously, crowding into the kitchen with pie and food. They stayed and unloaded pie carriers and takeout boxes all over the table. Dane didn’t want them to stay. Their presence at the shack was agitating at the best of times and caused sweat to trickle at times like this in the midst of a mission. But David hadn’t called so he figured they had some time before all hell descended on them.
By the time they finished eating, they still hadn’t heard from David and O’Keefe. This no longer represented a comforting reprieve. Dane put the phone back in his pocket. He didn’t want to take any chances if they needed to leave in a hurry.
Shana felt
like herself again after showering, dressing and eating. She felt at home with the crowd around the table—almost like a family Sunday dinner. Conversation was kept light in deference to Sassy and Ronnie’s sensibilities—no matter how much they prompted each one of them for a hair-raising story.
But when Shana rose from the chair and brought her dish to the kitchen, she gazed out the window overlooking the harbor and the thought of home was followed closely by the thought of an impending invasion.
She turned to find Dane right behind her. He liked to stand behind her at the kitchen sink. It was probably the closest they ever came to simulating a domestic scene. But it was usually—like now—more like a sensual flirtation than anything domestic.
“Doing the dishes, girlie?” He whispered the words close to her ear and gave rise to goose bumps along the skin of her neck. The instinct to lean into him was quickly beaten by the hard-learned move to stiffen. He clutched a handful of her hair. She stiffened more. He let his hand drift through the tendrils, creating a whirlwind of sensations and a leapfrog of tenderness in her belly. She clenched her gut ruthlessly.
“I wish we could rest, darlin’, but if David doesn’t call in the next five minutes, I’m going to call him. Assume there’s a glitch.”
His words sounded intimate, unalarming, even though the message was anything but. He had a habit of doing that—calming her while there was every reason to be the opposite of calm. It worked. She felt relaxed as her mind spun out the course of possible events, the action that would be needed.
“Sassy… Ronnie,” she said.
“I know.” He moved closer. She braced herself for one last act of tenderness before the storm of separation and the real world chaos of events would descend. But the tenderness never happened.
The shrill sound of Dane’s phone blasted between them.
Dane not only hated his phone at that moment, but he could safely say he hated the entire world and all the events and people who conspired against him having one moment, one goddamn moment of sweet reprieve. A kiss. A simple embrace. A tender flicker. The kind that other people had every single goddamn day.
He stepped back from Shana without taking his eyes from her emotion-filled green ones. Then he slipped his goddamn phone from his shirt pocket and put it to his ear.
“David.”
“We had them in our sights. We were on their tail or they were on ours. Henrique, Erico, Floyd and a few other men. They got the message, but we lost them after they left our abandoned hotel room. We headed to the airport.” David took a breath. Dane said nothing. He knew something was coming.
“Tell Shana there is no sign of Gabriela—she’ll be glad to hear it.” David paused again and Dane braced himself, putting the phone on speaker now.
David’s next words sounded loud in the otherwise silent space of the kitchen and dining area.
“Bad news is by the time we got to the airport we discovered they’d taken a private jet—a Gulfstream G650. I understand it’s an ultra-long range model, the kind with enough range to make it all the way to Martha’s Vineyard. And fast. They should be arriving any minute if they haven’t already landed.”
David paused. Dane stopped breathing, but he held Shana’s eyes. She didn’t blink, but her eyes changed from emotion-filled to hard green chips. No one else in the room did more than breathe, but they were breathing heavier than before. David continued.
“We’ll be on a fight leaving in forty-five minutes and not arriving until late evening. Sorry we won’t be any help in this confrontation. I called the governor—he’ll need to wait until something happens before he can convince anyone to detain Floyd, but he may be able to get someone to snag Henrique on an active warrant. Probably have to let Erico go and whoever else is in their entourage unless they have some kind of file. The governor will work on that—getting the warrants. We’ll have the state police—”
“Keep the state police out of this. No need to get any of them killed. I’ll call when we need them.”
There was dead air and a still dread filling it. No one took a breath—at least Dane’s chest felt too tight to suck in any of that bad air.
Shana spoke up, dispelling the pall. “I’ll make sure we call when we need back-up. I promise. Watch your back.”
David scoffed at that and ended the call.
“I should at least put my men on alert—”
“No,” Dane said. He stared Cap down a beat. They both knew it would be dangerous. “We’ll call them in when we have Floyd dead to rights.”
Shana said, “You two need to disappear.” She pointed at Sassy and Ronnie. If Dane figured they’d be scared out of their pants and running for the door given their past harrowing experiences at moments like this, he’d have been wrong.
But Dane was hardly ever wrong about people and he knew he’d have to toss them out bodily or at least threaten bodily harm to them, their family members or their cats, before they’d cooperate.
“Call the airport and check on—” Dane began.
“Already on it,” Acer said with his phone to his ear.
“Where’s your stash of weapons?” Oscar said. All the normal boisterous jocularity was gone from his voice and manner. He understood this was more serious than an ambush in Rio. This was home turf. An advantage, but also a disadvantage. There was nowhere else to go. They needed to defend themselves here. At all costs. Dane’s gaze gravitated to Shana, who was trying to shove Sassy toward the back door. And not gently.
“And who the hell do you think is going to take care of your cats if anything happens to you?” Shana said. Dane smiled—on the inside. Her voice sounded three octaves higher than normal. Maybe Sassy didn’t recognize the level of urgency in the normally icy cool Shana. It caused Dane’s heart to skip a beat then race ahead.
He turned to Oscar. “In the basement.” He tossed the man the keys to the locker and told him where to find it. Then he turned to Ronnie.
“What’s my assignment, boss? I can be a lookout—”
Dane covered the ground to where the kid stood between the dining room and kitchen and grabbed him by the arm. He used his momentum to drag Ronnie, in spite of the kid’s dragging his rubber-soled canvas sneakers across the old linoleum floor, to the back door. Cap pulled the door open for him.
Acer slipped his phone in his pocket and called out, “Dane. No time for fooling around.”
Dane stopped where he was—about to shove Ronnie out the door. He lasered in on Acer and prompted an explanation with mental telepathy—or the look in his eyes.
“They landed and ‘commandeered’ two taxis. The airport manager’s words. They had eight men and several large heavy-looking bags.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
Dane looked at the back door and reflexively pulled Ronnie back from it, allowing the outside screen door to screech on the hinges until it banged against the wood frame. He swung the heavy inside door shut and slammed his back against it as he harnessed the million thoughts running through his head into some semblance of a prioritized list.
“You—to the basement.” He shoved Ronnie back through the kitchen toward the hall. He looked at Shana. He didn’t need to tell her what to do. She’d grabbed Sassy by the shoulders now and shoved her in the same direction.
“You two hide in the basement and protect each other and call the state police in when we give you the signal.” She flipped the phone from her pocket and gave it to Sassy as Dane opened the door and the two were shoved through it. Oscar was heading up in the other direction with two bags and they squeezed past each other until he emerged and Dane slammed the door closed behind him.
That was priority one. He knew there was anywhere from two minutes to zero seconds to prepare.
A phone rang and they all turned to Cap. He slipped it from his pocket, put it to his ear and said, “Governor.” Cap put Peter on speakerphone.
“I called ATF and the FBI. No one has a live warrant. Not even on Henrique Tavares
.”
The bottom fell out of the room. It went from dark and cloudy to tornado-swirling skies in the short span it took for Peter to say twenty-four words.
Dane said, “None of them have done anything yet officially—especially not Floyd—since Oscar was never kidnapped. We can’t prove Floyd was responsible for kidnapping me and Shana.”
Peter said, “Maybe he wasn’t responsible. Oscar—what do you think?”
“I still need some convincing.” Oscar met Dane’s eyes, unapologetic.
“Even if we could prove with your testimony that Henrique Tavares kidnapped you and threw you in a dungeon—” Cap squinted at him “—and that Floyd beat you up, that was in Brazil. Outside our jurisdiction.”
“I agree with you both,” Peter said.
Dane felt the anger vibrating in Peter’s voice.
“We have nothing on him yet except your personal accusations.” Peter added in a quieter voice, “I can’t go to my contact at the CIA with that. We need something more solid.” What Peter didn’t say, but Dane—and everyone else in the room—understood was that they would need to play the pigeons and let Floyd and Tavares make a move on them. And hope to hell they could escape unscathed when it happened.
Dane felt the chill in his blood begin at his core and spread over him. He said, “Floyd Parker will know all this. He will have thought it all through and come to the same conclusions.”
Dane didn’t need to say out loud that Floyd would not walk into their trap with guns roaring and hand them a case against him. He’d convince Tavares of the merits of patience as well. Henrique Tavares was not the idiot his nephews were. He would be willing to bargain for Aldo’s release from prison.
“He’s not going to let us play pigeon and get caught with his pants down. Neither Floyd nor Henrique Tavares will want to come after us with guns blazing so the authorities can bring them in.”
“I’m confident you’ll come up with some way to get them. Call me when you do.” The governor ended the call. Cap slipped his phone back in its belt holster.
Beachcomber Trouble Page 15
