My father stopped a few times to get his bearings. I’d lost him to the past—I let him stay there. The past was where we’d find the answers. “The years have changed this place,” he whispered.
“From what you say, any change would be for the better.”
On the verge of saying something, he paused, then shook his head. He consulted the map. “Do you see three rocks, large rocks, piled on one another?”
“After all these years? Seriously?”
He ignored me.
I let go of him and we both searched in an increasing radius. I kicked at the leaves littering the ground, wet and wilted. Somehow, I identified with them. I felt awe and terror as I hung on the precipice of my parents’ secret—one so awful they still couldn’t breathe a word of it.
Would an old murder stop a new one?
Would my father go to jail?
And here I’d thought a new sister wandering into my life was the worst I had to worry about.
One kick, then another. On the next one, my toe connected with rock. Bending down, I brushed back the dirt. One stone, then two more, but not resting on top of one another. “Here.”
My father abandoned his search and joined me.
“Are these the stones you remember?”
After consulting the papers then stuffing them back, this time not as carefully, he squatted. His hand shook as he reached for the first rock. He brushed off the dirt, looked at that side, then flipped it over. Not finding what he was looking for, he moved on to the second rock and did the same. On the third, he paused and paled…if that was possible. A flat stone covered with mud and darkened by time. Normally a fastidious man, he was heedless of the mess as he scrubbed at the dirt, wiping it away.
On the rock, someone had carved a set of two initials: MF and LF.
He wiped his hands on his five-hundred-dollar Italian wool slacks. In the past, I’d seen him apoplectic over a small spot. He worked at the dirt covering the carvings a bit more. “I haven’t seen this stone in a very long time.”
“Are you going to tell me who MF and LF are?”
“Not now.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. A slight smile of remembrance played with his lips. He wiped at the rock some more. His smile evaporated.
Scratched below the initials, the lines whiter, the message newer:
Fuck you.
“No need to dig.” His hands still shook as he pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and pretended to wipe his hands clean. As he stuffed the cloth back where he’d found it, he looked at me, his expression cold, his voice lethal. “I know who we’re looking for.”
“Who?”
“A dead man.”
The news wasn’t exactly unexpected—I’d figured there was a dead guy involved since we were on a grave-robbing expedition. But the news that a ghost was doing the killing was a bit of a surprise. “We need to dig to make sure.”
I turned the cold earth as the light to the west disappeared and the night deepened to an inky black.
We found nothing…only ghosts.
On the drive back, I left my father alone with his ghosts. His lips had moved in silent conversation as he’d thought through whatever it was. Several times, he’d pulled out his phone—I knew he wanted to call Mother, but I knew he didn’t want to talk in front of me.
My phone chirped when it picked up coverage again. Then another tone signaling a voicemail. I hit the button to listen. Romeo. Cole had taken a load of ropes off old Dr. Dean.
Interesting.
Back on the plane, I tried everything to warm the Big Boss, but chills racked through him, although the twenty-five-year-old Macallan seemed to help.
“Father, I can help you, but first you need to help me. I need a name to give to Romeo so he can stop all of this and so no one else gets killed.” I added the last part in case he’d gotten so caught up in his personal stakes he’d forgotten the real risks.
“I don’t think he’ll kill anymore. He’s got our attention.”
“What does he want?”
“It’s not what; it’s who.”
My blood ran cold. “It has to be either you or Mother. That’s the way this thing is shaping up, right?”
“Looks that way.” He didn’t want to believe it any more than I did. “Your mother is safe at the Babylon. I made sure no one would be allowed up to the apartment. Security is on it.”
I wasn’t sure if he was reassuring himself or me. “I still can’t figure out why he killed Turnbull. Any connection that you know of?”
“Not that I’ve put together, but there were a lot of pieces to the story I didn’t have.”
He kept saying that. I didn’t want to go where that was taking me, but I did. “Mother is the key, not just a target.”
“Like I said, part of this is her story.” He wrapped his hands around the tumbler of whiskey.
Some of the story could wait, but not all of it. “You have to tell me who you threw in that shallow grave back there.” I waited for a response. “Who are we looking for?”
As the pilots buttoned up the door and then worked to bring the engines online, I resisted urging him to hurry.
“A man who deserved it.” But he wouldn’t meet my eye.
“No doubt. But I’m sure vigilante justice was illegal even back before the earth was cool and you were young.”
That didn’t even get a disgruntled look.
I held my phone at the ready. “Give me a name.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know it. Your mother wouldn’t tell me. At first, she didn’t want me going after the guy, then after…” He slugged back his Scotch, then poured himself some more.
The engines spooled up and the pilots began to taxi to the runway.
My brain seemed to capture the energy. “So now, whoever it was, has risen from the dead and is seeking revenge.” I was being half-flippant, but the stone-cold look on his face told me I’d struck pay dirt.
The engines whined, eager to be in the air and the pilots let them run. Acceleration pressed me back in my seat. “Give me some of that.” I motioned to the fancy Scotch. “And don’t skimp.” I stared out the window without seeing.
“I never thought he’d come back to life, not really,” my father said. “I thought maybe it was someone out for revenge. Or out to extort money. Someone who had finally pieced together the story, then confirmed it by checking the grave. I thought, worst case, we’d find the grave disturbed.” He slugged back more of the Scotch. “But I never thought we’d find the grave empty.”
“Not too many risen-from-the-dead realities.” The whole thing seemed surreal.
“If it’s him, really him, I wonder why? Why after all this time?”
“Since I don’t know who or why, it would be ridiculous for me to speculate.”
My father weighed my words as he stared out the window. “The person who tried to kill him? It wasn’t me.”
My world tilted. “What?”
He took another sip of Scotch as he settled back in his seat. “That’s all I’m going to say. There was no murder, so that’s off the table.”
“Attempted murder?”
“Much easier to defend. Squash knows the particulars. He has a file. He can help.”
“That’s how you met?” My turn to slug some Scotch.
“He was a total greenhorn, but I could tell he knew how the game was played. He was Mona’s attorney—I stayed out of it. I couldn’t know. We weren’t married, and if any of it came to light, I’d be called as a witness. So, they collected evidence, built the case, on the off chance it would come back to haunt us.” When his eyes met mine, they were clear, unclouded by worry. He had a plan; he trusted the plan.
“He still has it all?”
“Of course. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
“Attempted murder,” I corrected. And now I was sure that what I’d been desperate to know, was something I
didn’t want to know at all.
My father held out his hand. “Get your mother on the phone. We can run all this by her.” At my look, he added, “I’ll make her give us a name.”
I had to check my cell for Mona’s number before I could log it into the satellite phone—speed dial made remembering numbers a waste of time…until you needed one. I pressed the send button, then handed the phone to my father. Then I settled back with my Scotch—I didn’t really like Scotch, but right now I needed the punch it packed. We were close. We’d have the killer in custody soon, and maybe I’d have some answers. Whatever the story was, we’d deal; we always did. I felt myself relax just a little. It felt good. This adrenaline junkie was perilously close to an overdose.
My father’s voice broke through my reverie. “She’s not answering. The call rolled to voicemail.” He held out the phone.
I could hear my mother’s voice reciting her message.
Ice shot through my veins. We both knew the phone never left my mother’s person—it was her talisman against boredom. A whole world to bother right at her fingertips.
I grabbed the phone. “I’ll try the landline.”
One of the nurses picked up on the first ring. At the sound of my voice, she dissolved into hysterics. “The babies, they are here. They are safe.” She pulled in two ragged breaths that I died through. “But your mother! She is gone!”
Before I could ask any questions, someone wrested the phone from her.
“Lucky?” Jerry! His tone cut through any hope I had. “We’ve got a problem.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AT twenty thousand feet, I made phone calls on the satellite phone, and, between them, I tried to keep my father from stroking out. “It’s going to be okay.”
“I am too old and have seen too much to be comforted by platitudes.” My father shifted from Scotch to coffee.
At least he had some fight left.
“Okay, how’s this: this time she’d listen? That’s what you said, right? Don’t you know better by now? You should’ve…”
“Should’ve what?” His voice rose. He was looking for a fight.
I knew the need. “Drugged her. Chained her to the bed. You’re good at that.”
“I beg your pardon?” Squash Trenton answered then swam for shore as he found himself in the eye of the storm. “Chain them to the bed? Do you have that on good authority?”
“Trenton, Lucky here. You know that file you’ve been holding onto for my father?”
“Is he there?” His voice sharpened.
I held the phone out and gave my father an imploring look. “Talk to her, but use your discretion,” my father said loud enough for the lawyer to hear and understand.
I pressed the phone back to my ear and filled Squash in.
He let out a long breath. “Whoa.”
“I know, right?” I tried to process. Failing, I banked the problem and focused on the killer. “We can assume he has Mona. According to Jerry, against orders, Mona came down to the lobby. She met a young girl who I suspect was Bethany.” I could totally see how Mother’s curiosity got the better of her. And the Babylon was her home; she was safe there.
Until she wasn’t.
In so many ways, my mother was like a child.
“The problem here is we’re chasing a ghost. I’m narrowing it down—I need one more piece of information.” I hoped Jeremy called soon. “In the meantime, I need you to talk to Beckham. Romeo has him.”
“No,” Squash’s voice had lost its hardness. “No, he doesn’t. When the coroner established the time of death for Dora Bates, we couldn’t establish his alibi—the hotel didn’t have a security system, so no way to know if he was swilling booze at the bar or not. But nothing we have put him at the scene of the crime around the time of death—much later, yes, but that’s hardly incriminating. Nobody pressed charges on the assaults. He’s gone, Lucky.”
“And he could be the killer.” If we’d had him, then let him go…
My phone started pinging on final approach. Nothing from Mona. I hoped she was alive so that I could kill her when I found her. “Couldn’t she have given us a clue?”
In answer, my father stared at me with tired, worried eyes. He looked like a ghost, fading away. If I didn’t find Mona alive, I’d lose both of them.
The first call that had hit my phone while I was airborne was from a number I didn’t recognize, so I hit redial.
Bethany answered. “Lucky! Shit, where have you been?”
“Chasing ghosts. Where are you?”
“At the Babylon, in your office. I didn’t know where to go or what to do.” Her words strung together in a hurried rush.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I was at the hospital with Doc. He was acting all weird. Didn’t want to stay. I think the whole thing with Mrs. Bates really bothered him. He told me and Poppy to wait in the waiting room while he got dressed—he was going to check himself out. We did. But Poppy got a phone call from her dad and started acting really weird.”
“The doc checked himself out?”
“Yeah.”
“Poppy was acting weird? How so?”
“Just like she had something to hide.”
“Or someone to protect?”
“Yeah, like that.”
Fuck! “Okay, what happened?”
“I followed her here, to the Babylon. Then some lady came down and met her in the lobby. The lady pulled Poppy into a little alcove. I couldn’t get close enough to hear what they were talking about without being seen. I assume the woman was Mona? You look like her.”
Double fuck! “I don’t see the resemblance. What happened next?”
“They left.”
“In the limo?” Oh, please, Mother, be that smart.
“No, in a car.”
“A cab?”
“No, a pickup.”
Triple fuck! “Could you see who was driving?”
“No, but the truck was theirs. It had a longhorn sticker in the back window.”
Grand slam fuck! “You didn’t follow them?” How I didn’t shout, I don’t know.
“I don’t need to. I know her password to iCloud. I can use Find My iPhone.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded like a good thing.
“I don’t know anything about following people, and I don’t have any money or a car. I can find them when we’re ready.” Her voice trailed off as her confidence fled. “I hope I did the right thing.”
“The perfect thing. Do you know where they are?”
“Let me check. Before you called, I’d been following them around the 215.” A moment of silence, then she came back on the line. “Still heading west on the 215. They’re at Rainbow Drive.”
“Keep watching them. Tell Miss P to have Paolo drive you to the FBO at the airport—tell him there’s a C-note in it for him if he breaks our record and delivers you alive. He’ll know what I mean. Run, Bethany, run.”
“You need to go now.” My father used a tone that brooked no argument.
Except it was me he was dealing with and that tone no longer worked. After terminating the call, I stared at my father. “We’re taxiing. This would be a bad time. The Feds frown at folks dashing across the runways at their airports.” At his look, I was glad there were no weapons readily available. “I need help. And help will be here by the time we get off this bucket of bolts.” Stifling my own fear, I tried to imagine his. “I’ll hurry, but having some help will better our odds. If Dora Bates is any indication, when it’s personal, the killer likes to take his time. I’m assuming this is personal?”
“Very.”
“Then have faith.”
“I always have.”
Now, perhaps, was not the time to tell him it was often misplaced. It also probably wouldn’t help to tell him that handling psychopaths was a bit out of my comfort zone, and I was scared, and my ability to function normally was gone—which, now that I thought about it, was a good thing, for so
many reasons, but right now primarily because I would be required to function abnormally. So, instead, I offered a weak, “Something’s bothering me.”
“Only one thing?” His deadpan delivery was spot on, but the terrified look in his eyes killed his attempt at humor. “I can’t lose her,” he whispered.
“I know.” I squeezed his hand, then held up a finger. “One more call.”
This time I didn’t even have to ask. The Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock started right in. “I was just getting ready to phone you.” He sounded defeated. “I didn’t get a hit cross-checking everyone on the suspect list with the prison database.”
“That’s terrific!”
“What?”
“None of our suspects had been incarcerated there?”
“No.”
“Read me the list of names you searched.”
“Homer Beckham, Dr. Walter Latham, Toby Sinclair, Darrin Cole, and I added Trevor Turnbull for good measure.”
“No hits.”
“Right.”
“Awesome. Remind me to tell you to increase your hourly rate, after you bill me, of course.”
“Of course.” I could hear his smile and his confusion.
“How soon can you get to the FBO at the airport, the northwest corner? We’re having a party and wouldn’t think of starting without you.”
Despite the odd location and the late hour, Jeremy didn’t question anything. “Be there in ten.”
“Make it five.” Now I could return my attention to my father—reinforcements were on their way. “We’ll bring her back to you.” I knew better than to tell him not to worry.
“So, what’s bothering you?” He picked up my former train of thought.
Thankful he’d kept me on track, I sorta smiled at this one and resisted torturing the metaphor with some reference to being derailed. I held up another finger. “Sorry, one more call.”
Lucky Ride (The Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series Book 8) Page 28
