Offside Trap

by A. J. Stewart

  “Tell me about the boy. Jake. No point lying now.”

  Nigel’s head dropped, like it was heavy, then he picked it up again and looked at me. “He told ya, that’s not our style. Only reason to finish someone slow is for it to hurt, and you can’t hurt him if he’s out of it.” Nigel coughed and winced. “And that boy would have had to have been out of it already for him to ever take Maxx, he was such a princess. You’d have to knock him out with roofies or GHB or something first, and that’s amateur date rape stuff.”

  “Or Liquid X,” I said to myself.

  “GHB and Liquid X are the same stuff, you moron.” He shifted slightly and a bolt of pain must have shot up from his leg. By rights the leg should have been elevated to lessen the blood loss, but that wasn’t going to happen. “The last guy we had dealing resigned, he graduated college, and Jake should have took his place. He was such a princess. But we didn’t off him. The kid moved a lot of PEDs.”

  Something about what he said set all sorts of synapses firing off in my brain.

  “Why the baseball bat? With the girl? That wasn’t about pain,” I said.

  He groaned. “All work and no play make Nigel a dull boy.”

  I felt bile burn my throat. I pointed Sally’s gun at Nigel’s face. He looked at Montgomery lying on the floor, the rest if him dripping down the wall. He sucked in a breath to control himself, then through gritted teeth he spat.

  “Aim true, scumbag.”

  “This is for Angel,” I said. And I dropped my aim, held the gun by my thigh. It was the line that Sally had talked about, and Nigel and I had both left it behind. I stood over him and waited, his bloody hands on his leg wound. At first he didn’t understand, wondering if I were giving him a reprieve. Then, as he felt his heart beating, the understanding swept across his face and he scowled, unable to move, weeping first with pain, then with the realization that life was slowly leaving him, and I held his gaze for the longest time, until the blood had all pumped out onto the floor and his last dirty breath had left him.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  SOMETIMES THINGS HAPPEN for a reason. I hadn’t expected Montgomery to shoot his bodyguard in the leg, but he had. So I figured rather than leave two bodies and a crime scene to solve, I’d leave two bodies and a solved crime. There may have been flaws in my plan, but I was banking on the Miami PD not knocking themselves out over this one. I left the empty Glock in Montgomery’s hand. Then I picked up the gun Sally had given me and put it back in my trousers. I wiped down and then placed the gun that had killed Angel, shot Danielle and then killed Montgomery into the dead hand of his bodyguard. The Miami PD would run ballistics as a matter of course and find that this gun was the one used in all of those cases. The scene looked like a servant-master relationship gone wrong. Maybe Nigel wants a piece of the action, Montgomery taunts him, guns are pulled, guns are fired, voilà. I’d leave Miami PD to create the best story. But the deaths of two drug dealers responsible for murder and the shooting of a law enforcement officer would be wrapped up as cleanly and quickly as possible, so they could move on to some crimes that mattered.

  I pulled the throttle back on the console to bring the huge boat to a stop. It coasted for a long while, and as it did, I carefully stepped around the blood and bodies and out of the cockpit. I waited in a dark corner of the small upper deck lounge in case there was anyone else on board, alerted by my stopping of the boat. No one came. After several minutes I crept back out the glass doors, which I closed behind me, and then down the external stairs to the main deck. I jumped over the transom and landed on the swimming platform that was wet from the backwash of the slowing boat. Leaning against the transom, right on the words El Jefe, I waited. The engines rumbled against my back, even in neutral. The smell of marine diesel filled the salty air.

  Then I heard the high-pitched buzz coming from the darkness between me and the distant lights on Key Biscayne. I watched the lights bobbing up and down, and the buzzing continued long before I saw the rubber ducky motor into the halo of light spilling from the lounge on board El Jefe. The boat was a red inflatable, and at the helm was the heavy silhouette of Lucas. He looked like a retired Navy SEAL, all sinew and muscle and wind-burned skin, out in a vast, dark ocean in a little tender, but looking completely at home doing it.

  “Jesus, mate, could you have gone a little further out? I think I can see the Biminis from here.” He came astern and edged the rubber bow into the swimming platform.

  “Stay low—you don’t wanna fall in the drink.”

  I did as I was told and got in a crouch and stepped across onto the bow and then down into the tender. There was a wooden plank for a seat, and I sat facing Lucas. He came off the throttle, and we drifted for a moment, both looking at the big motor yacht, its engine still grumbling but making no headway.

  “All done?” said Lucas.

  I nodded.

  “Righto, let’s get home. Just watch out, could get a bit wet.” He hit the throttle and the whiny engine burst to life, and we screamed southwest, bouncing across the water past the beaches on Key Biscayne. Lucas skirted Bill Baggs Cape at the southern end of the island, and then turned inland past the lights of Gables by the Sea, and into Deering Bay. As we neared the country club to the north I felt sea grasses lapping at the boat, and Lucas tilted the motor up a touch and pulled back on the throttle. Over the buzz of the motor I called to Lucas.

  “You know anything about the Greek alphabet?” I yelled.

  He nodded. “Used it for signals back in the service.”

  “You know gamma?”

  He nodded again, took his hand off the tiller and made a sign with two hands.

  I nodded to him, and he dropped his hand back to control the boat. The shore loomed before us, dark and uninhabited, and I had visions of us ending this whole sorry episode run aground on a sandbank. But Lucas puttered his way in, until finally I saw a small light, flashing on and off. Lucas headed for the light and brought us into a small beach, surrounded by mangrove and brush. Sally stood on the beach with a flashlight in hand. Lucas motored the boat at Sally and pushed us up onto the sand. He killed the motor and in a well-practiced move collapsed the small motor on itself and pulled it free of the boat. He pulled out the fuel line, and launched himself over the side and into the knee-high water, and then he flung the motor on his shoulder and carried it up the beach. I stepped out of the inflatable and pulled it further onto land, and then Lucas returned and together we carried it up to his Tacoma and slid the boat into the flatbed. The truck sat at the end of a dirt track on the tiny beach.

  I turned to Sally.

  “You got a cell phone on you?”

  “Yeah. You planning on ordering a pizza?” he said, handing me his phone.

  “Sorry, pal, no. I gotta call the cops.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very. But don’t worry, not Miami cops.”

  Sal frowned.

  “Best get in the truck,” said Lucas. “Crocs like hanging out here.”

  “You neglected to mention that earlier,” said Sally, scrambling up into the cab. The three of us squeezed onto the bench seat of the old truck. Lucas put his hand on the key in the ignition and turned to me.

  “We good?”

  “Define good,” I said.

  “Are we going to have to go out into the Atlantic Ocean in a rubber ducky in the dead of night again anytime soon?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’re good,” he said, kicking the truck to life and driving us out of the darkness and back to civilization.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  I ARRIVED AT the townhouse in the early morning, when most folks were either sleeping or munching on their granola. The disheveled face at the door didn’t look happy to see me.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Your uncle sent me,” I said, stepping around Sean Lawry into the townhouse. Sean eyed me as I passed. He might have been unimpressed by my moxie, but I had every reason to believe he was assessin
g my excuse for visiting. I got to the kitchen island before he finished his thinking.

  “Why don’t you just come in?”

  “Thanks.”

  “My uncle didn’t call you. You shouldn’t be here.” He opened the door a little wider. I chose to miss the hint.

  “He didn’t tell you about our round of golf?”

  He frowned and let the door ease itself closed.

  “What round of golf?”

  “He didn’t tell you?” I said. “Gee, I thought you said you guys spoke all the time.”

  “We speak enough.”

  “Enough to get you out of trouble but no more.”

  “Look, what do you want?”

  I glanced around the room. “Your roommate about?”

  “No, she’s at class.”

  “This early? Could it be she’s having breakfast at her own home?”

  “What?”

  “Where were you, Sean? The night Jake OD’ed?”

  “Here. I told you that. My roommate backed it up.” Sean strode around the island and took a soda from the fridge. He didn’t offer me one.

  “You got a real clean place here, for a college guy.”

  “What’s your point, man?”

  “My point is, Sean, you don’t got a roommate. Sure as hell not a female one. You give women the creeps. I asked Alice Chang about you—when she heard your name, she went and put on a rape whistle. She didn’t even realize she was doing it.”

  “You’re talking trash.”

  “Who is she, Sean? This Elissa who’s pretending to be your roommate. Looking at this place, I’m guessing she’s your cleaning lady.”

  “You are seriously annoying me, man.”

  “Like the girl at your last college? The one you hit up with Liquid X? You tried to have your way but her friends turned up, right? What a bummer.”

  “You repeat any of that, you’re finished.”

  “Your uncle fixed it, kept everything quiet and got you out of town. But it was the last straw, wasn’t it, Sean? He thinks you’re a waste of good Florida oxygen. He told me as much. You mess up one more time, you’re on your own, right? Cut out of Camelot, so to speak.”

  “What have wizards got to do with anything?”

  I shook my head. “But you did mess up again, didn’t you. Big time. You were interning with Jake Turner, the big man on campus. Popular, star athlete, going places. Even Rinti could see he was a smart kid, a fast thinker, a team player. You said he was finishing the best years of his life, but that wasn’t Jake, that was you. He was leaving you in the dust and it drove you crazy.”

  “Turner was nothing.”

  “Oh, but that’s not true, is it. Did he wave it in your face, Sean? How he was self-made and going places, and you were a worthless piece of nothing living off the last of your uncle’s coattails?”

  “That’s crap, man. Jake was a loser, like you.”

  “Jake was like me, in a lot of ways. Probably too cocky for his own good, just like me. And he didn’t like you one bit.”

  “The feeling was mutual.”

  “No doubt. So he taunted you with his achievements until it drove you nuts. Which is when you let slip something you knew but he didn’t. The Rinti deal on campus. You shouldn’t have known either—your uncle doesn’t trust you. But you overheard.”

  “Just because he and my dad think I’m invisible doesn’t mean I am.”

  “But once you blurted it out at Jake, the cat was out of the bag. The big jock, about to lose his beloved athletics. You figured he was going to tell tales and blow the whole deal. Your uncle, Rinti, the school, they’d all blame you. The coattails were about to be severed. You’d lose this natty pad and your housekeeper.”

  “None of this means squat.”

  “Oh, but it does, Sean. It means you had motive to kill Jake Turner.”

  “Turner OD’ed, moron.”

  “Yes, he did. With a little help from you.”

  Sean gave a look of shock that was right up there in the acting stakes with that kid from the Home Alone movie.

  “You repeat that, I’ll own you. You got no proof.”

  “I got plenty of proof, Sean. Like your MO. You have a history of using Liquid X on other people.”

  “Liquid X didn’t kill him.”

  “How do you know that?” I tapped my fingers on the counter and let him stew for a bit. “You’re right, of course, it didn’t. But you knew what it would do. It would effectively make him fall down drunk, isn’t that right? Make it easy to get something more powerful into him. Like Maxx. Which you and pretty much every other kid on campus knew he had been tasked to sell, since the previous dealer graduated, or resigned as they preferred to say at Maxx HQ. You knew he had it, and you could use it.”

  “Listen, Miss Marple, I’ve had enough of you and your Spanish Inquisition. You got no proof, so get lost and don’t come back.”

  I was going to say something clever, but a knock at the door stopped me. I had to smile. The timing couldn’t have been better if we had synchronized watches. On a brand-new townhouse with a spiffy new door bell, very few people knock on the door. Let alone knock again, harder.

  Sean scowled at me. “Who the hell?” He strode to the door and wrenched it open.

  “Mr. Sean Lawry?” came the clipped tone of Officer Steele.

  “What the?”

  “May we come in? Thank you.” Steele entered not by stepping around Sean Lawry but by herding him into the middle of the lounge room like a sheep dog. Steele was in his crisp police uniform. As was his rotund partner Harris, who shut the door. Steele nodded to me.

  “Jones.”

  “Officer Steele.”

  “Listen, you guys can’t just bust in here—I know my rights. You need a warrant or something.”

  “Sir, I asked if we could come in.”

  “Well, he’s trespassing,” said Sean, pointing at me.

  “You invited me in.”

  “That was before you started going on about Jake. That has nothing to do with me.”

  “We all know that’s not true, Sean,” I said. “When we found out about your history, I admit I didn’t make the connection, other than you being a good for nothing dirtbag.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that.”

  “It was my ignorance. When I heard Liquid X, I assumed it was ecstasy, or MDMA. I was wrong, wasn’t I, Officer Steele?”

  “You were. Liquid X is a street name for GHB, which is a depressant, not an activity-inducing amphetamine, like ecstasy.”

  “Exactly. And Jake’s doctor told my partner that Jake had high levels of a hormone in his body when he OD’ed. She wrote the name down but Ron misread it. He confused a Y for the Greek letter Gamma. As in gamma hydroxybutyric acid.”

  “Or GHB,” said Steele.

  “Otherwise known as Liquid X. The same stuff you drugged the girl in Georgia with.”

  “There were no charges laid, so you’re going nowhere.”

  “In my own meandering way I am indeed going somewhere. The reason no charges were laid, apart from your uncle, was that you got interrupted before you did anything to the girl. So there was only the drug charge. They took blood from the girl and found GHB, or Liquid X, and large amounts of tequila in her system. But at a party, the cops couldn’t pin the exact glass with the drug residue down to you, even if they had found it. And that’s how you delivered it, isn’t it, Sean? One of the signature properties of GHB is that it dissolves in liquid, but is very salty-tasting. Hard to slip into a daiquiri, but easily masked by tequila. And perfect for an electrolyte sports drink.”

  “What sports drink?” said Sean.

  “The one you doctored at lacrosse training. Each player had their own bottle on a table at training and games. I thought for health reasons, but it seems it depended on which PEDs they were using. I saw the bottles when I went to a game myself. Just there, out in the open. You saw them too, when you followed Jake. You also knew that he usually went to the basebal
l diamond after training to chill out and stretch. So you doped his drink and followed him to the diamond.”

  “I doctored a sports drink? Good luck proving that, moron.”

  “Officer Steele?” I said.

  Steele turned his eye to Harris, who held up an evidence bag with a sports drink bottle in it.”

  “Right where you said it would be,” said Harris. “Under the home team bleachers.”

  “That could be anyone’s,” said Sean.

  “Except it has two sets of fingerprints on it,” said Steele. “Jake Turner’s, which we had on file, and another set we matched to an arrest record in Georgia.”

  I smiled a big wide grin. “That would be you, Sean.”

  “That’s not . . . that’s nothing.”

  “No, it’s something, as I am sure the lab tests of the contents will show. After Jake drank the drink his friend Angel described him as being out of it. You didn’t realize she was there, did you? You followed Jake to the stadium entrance, but Angel’s habit was to climb up the fire escape at the back of the bleachers. And she was there. She said he was clumsy, that he knocked his drink bottle off the bleacher. She left, then he tried to do the same, but you met him on the walkway between the two stands.” I turned my gaze to Steele. “And this was the bit that felt off kilter from the get-go,” I said. “Underneath a bleacher was certainly a place you would find a kid doing drugs.” I looked back to Sean, “You had that bit right. But when I went under, the wooden home bleacher was way more likely. It was darker, creepier. The aluminum bleachers let in more light; it was practically a sunroom in comparison. It didn’t feel like a drug haven. Until I realized it wasn’t. Had Jake done this to himself he would have been under the home bleacher, but you needed to see what you were doing. So you chose the side with the best light.”

  “I’ve never been near those bleachers, let alone under them.”

  Steele nodded at Harris, who left the room, toward what I assumed was the garage.