Season of Fear

by Brain Freeman

  ‘A mole,’ Cab said. ‘Undercover.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  There was only one person Ramona would have used for a mission like that.

  I needed someone I could trust implicitly.

  Ramona said nothing more, but she didn’t need to say a word. Cab knew exactly who it was. When you can’t trust your friends, you turn to your family.

  ‘Lala,’ he said. ‘You put Lala inside Common Way.’

  He grabbed his phone and dialed.

  47

  Gloria Estefan sang, and Peach stared at the caller ID on Annalie’s phone. What she saw made no sense at all.

  Cab Bolton was calling Annalie.

  She pushed herself to her feet, standing over Annalie’s prone body. Her first paranoid thought was that Cab was part of the conspiracy, but she’d checked his identification. She’d called the Naples Police. He really was a detective. He really was one of the good guys.

  Or was he?

  Don’t trust anybody.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  There was a pause before he answered. When he did, she recognized his voice. ‘Who is this?’

  She tried to think, but confusion overwhelmed her. She said nothing.

  ‘Hello?’ Cab continued. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s Peach,’ she murmured.

  ‘Peach? How did you get this phone?’

  ‘Why are you calling Annalie?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s a friend of mine. Peach, is she there? Can I talk to her?’

  Peach stared at the woman on the floor. Her eyes were open now, and her lips were moving, but Peach couldn’t understand the words. ‘She killed Justin,’ Peach said into the phone.

  ‘What? No, she didn’t, Peach. She didn’t. I promise you.’

  ‘I have her gun.’

  ‘Peach, let me talk to her. Please.’

  ‘You people took Justin away from me, but you’re done. It’s over. You can’t stop me.’

  His voice grew urgent. ‘Peach, listen to me.’

  ‘No, you listen!’ she shouted, losing control. ‘I’m sick of people lying to me. Justin lied! He shut me out, and he lied! Now Annalie lied to me, too. Do you hear me? I’m sick of it! You’re not going to get away with it anymore.’

  ‘Peach, stop,’ Annalie murmured at her feet.

  ‘Peach, stop,’ Cab told her, like an echo.

  She pointed the gun at Annalie’s head again. ‘Why should I? Why shouldn’t I just shoot her?’

  Cab’s words tumbled over the phone line. ‘Peach, the woman that you know as Annalie is actually a police investigator named Lala Mosqueda. She is not part of any conspiracy. She did not kill Justin. She’s been working undercover for the Attorney General to find out what really happened to him.’

  Peach blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘She is not the enemy. She is on your side.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ Peach said. ‘You’re all lying to me.’

  ‘Peach,’ whispered the woman at her feet. The stranger at her feet. ‘I’m sorry. It’s true. I’m a cop. I was working with Justin.’

  Peach still held the gun in her hand. It was pointed at Annalie’s head. Except Annalie wasn’t Annalie.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ she demanded.

  The woman on the floor braced herself on her hands, her elbows bent. The barrel of the gun was an inch from her dark eyes. ‘Because Justin was my friend, too. Because I want to catch whoever killed him as much as you do.’

  Cab’s voice came through the phone. ‘She’s telling you the truth, Peach.’

  ‘I don’t – I don’t know …’

  ‘My name is Lala,’ the woman said to her. ‘Is that Cab on the phone?’

  Peach nodded mutely.

  ‘Okay, listen to me. Slowly point my gun toward the wall. Please. Nice and steady. Don’t make any sudden movements with it.’

  Peach looked inside her heart. Annalie was Lala, and she didn’t know who Lala was, but she realized that nothing had changed. She liked her. She didn’t want to hurt her. She wanted to trust her – and Cab Bolton, too. Her whole arm trembled as she thought about what she’d been ready to do. The gun in her hand felt ugly and lethal. She could hardly hold it, and she swung her whole body in order to point the barrel at the wall.

  ‘That’s good. Give me the phone, okay?’

  Peach handed the phone to her. The gun was still in her other hand.

  ‘You know how to rack the slide,’ Lala told her. ‘Keep your finger off the trigger.’

  Peach yanked the slide of the gun back and forth, and a gold cartridge popped from the barrel like a jack-in-the-box and fell to the floor. Lala closed her eyes and breathed easier. As Peach watched, Lala spoke into the phone.

  ‘Cab Bolton,’ she said. ‘Get your ass over here.’

  *

  Cab squatted in front of Peach, who sat on the floor with her back against the wall and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Her eyes stared out the window at the storm. She looked even younger than she was.

  ‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ he said. ‘You had no way of knowing. I didn’t know, either.’

  Lala winced as she held an ice pack to the back of her head. ‘I wanted to tell you, Peach. Really. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I almost killed you,’ Peach murmured.

  ‘Well, you didn’t. Anyway, I understand how you must have felt, seeing me in those pictures. I feel stupid that Curtis Ritchie was able to get those photos without me realizing it.’

  Cab got to his feet. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked Lala.

  ‘I think so. It’s just a nasty bump. I was woozy, but I didn’t black out.’

  ‘Still.’ He took her face in his hand and moved his finger left and right in front of her nose to make sure that her eyes were properly focused. She stuck out her tongue at him, and then he leaned in and kissed her lips. ‘I didn’t have a chance to do that this morning,’ he said.

  ‘I said goodbye,’ Lala told him, ‘but you were asleep. Guess I wore you out.’

  ‘I guess you did.’

  Peach stared at them. ‘So are you two—?’

  ‘I keep him in my life to drive myself crazy,’ Lala replied.

  ‘I keep her in my life to drive my mother crazy,’ Cab added.

  Cab watched a little smile play across Peach’s face. She found them funny.

  ‘So why are we here, Peach?’ Cab asked. ‘You said this was Justin’s hidey-hole, but you didn’t know about this place until after he was killed?’

  Peach shook her head. ‘I knew he had a safe house, but he never told me where it was.’

  Cab looked at Lala. ‘What about you? Did you know about it?’

  ‘No.’

  He studied the wreckage of the house. ‘Well, someone found it.’

  ‘I don’t think it was Curtis Ritchie,’ Peach said. ‘There were no pictures of this place on his camera. The trouble is, whoever searched it took everything. There’s nothing left to tell us anything. It’s a dead end.’

  ‘How did you find this place?’ Cab asked her.

  He listened to Peach explain about the photograph attached to a draft e-mail from Justin and to the edits in the picture that had led her down San Fernando Drive to this house. She pulled a hard copy of the photograph from her back pocket and showed it to him.

  ‘See? Justin kept this picture in a frame by the window. I thought maybe he was sending me another message, but I guess I was wrong. I couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘You said the photo in the e-mail was edited,’ Cab said. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The street number is the same now. So’s the little house on the restaurant sign.’

  ‘What about other changes?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure I really looked.’

  ‘Do you still have the original?’ Cab asked.

  Peach nodded. ‘It’s on my phone.’

  She scrolled through her camera roll, clicked on a picture, and
handed the phone to Cab. He stared at the image on the camera screen, then at the printed photo in his hand. He went back and forth several times, and at first he thought Peach was correct. The photos were identical.

  Except …

  ‘The vent,’ Cab said.

  Lala looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Justin added an exhaust vent on the roof of the restaurant. It’s right above Peach. It’s in the hard-copy print here, but the vent’s not in the original photograph.’

  Cab didn’t have time to say anything more before Peach was on her feet and over to the bedroom window. She threw up the sash and practically jumped through the cramped space into the flooded yard. She pushed through the standing water until she could see the roof of the house, and then she pointed and screamed.

  ‘There’s a vent above the bedroom. Right above the bedroom! That can’t be right!’

  Peach ran for the side of the house, and Cab saw her struggling to mount a telescoping ladder against the frame. It fought her in the storm like a reluctant dance partner. When she finally slapped it under the roof line, he reached out through the open window with both hands and grabbed the ladder to steady it. The lightweight aluminum bucked and swayed as the wind tried to rip it out of his grasp.

  ‘Be careful, Peach,’ he called. ‘I can’t hold it.’

  She climbed past him. He could see her legs and feet immediately in front of him as she pulled herself up onto the house’s low roof. Her body thumped on the shingles over their heads. She shouted something he couldn’t understand, and then a tortured twisting of metal screeched from above them. Cab saw an aluminum vent hood sail like a Frisbee across the yard. Peach’s body reappeared in front of him. He hugged the ladder, but when she was halfway to the ground, a gust of wind wrenched it from his hands and threw it backward. Peach flew, landing flat on her back in the water.

  ‘Peach!’ Cab shouted.

  He started to climb through the window himself, but she pushed herself to her feet. ‘I’m okay, I’m okay! I’ve got something!’

  She had a large plastic-covered package tucked snugly under her arm.

  He helped her through the window back into the bedroom. She looked immensely pleased with herself, and he realized that the importance of this discovery wasn’t about anything they might find inside the package. It was about her and Justin. In the end, he’d trusted her. He’d left something for her to find. Not anyone else. Her. He was still the young man she’d loved.

  Peach reached out her arms and handed the package to Lala. ‘You look,’ she said.

  The package was approximately twelve inches by fifteen inches, wrapped in heavy plastic and sealed with duct tape. It was damp with spray but otherwise undamaged. Cab could see a thick sheaf of papers and manila folders inside. Lala took the package to the mattress and used her fingernails to pick at the duct tape and peel the folds of plastic apart.

  Cab saw a stack of photographs that had been produced on a home printer. He recognized the first page; it was a match for the article on Frank Macy that Peach had found under the filing cabinet. Justin was no fool. He’d anticipated that things might come to a bad end, and he’d made a backup of everything he’d discovered.

  Lala didn’t flip through the rest of the photographs immediately. Instead, she removed a thick manila folder, similar to the records that Peach had stolen from Dr Smeltz’s office. Peach recognized it, too.

  ‘Is that a medical file?’ she asked Lala.

  Cab saw Lala’s brow wrinkle in confusion. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Curtis Ritchie had a photograph of Justin outside Dr Smeltz’s office,’ Peach said. ‘He’d stolen someone’s file. Is it a duplicate of what I found? Is it Ms Fairmont’s file?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not hers.’

  ‘Then whose is it?’

  Lala looked at Peach. ‘Yours,’ she said.

  48

  Tarla tipped her champagne glass into the circle with Caprice and Diane. Their crystal glasses clinked together.

  ‘To Governor Diane,’ Tarla said with a smile.

  Caprice repeated the toast, but Diane said nothing. Her smile was forced. They drank, and then Diane turned away toward the windows looking out on the garden. Candles lit the room, flickering and throwing shadows on the walls. The power was out.

  Caprice leaned close to Tarla’s ear. ‘Do you know where Cab is?’

  ‘No, I haven’t talked to him.’

  ‘You know how much I like him, Tarla, but he’s going to ruin Diane’s campaign if he’s not more careful. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the collateral damage we could face if certain things are exposed.’

  ‘My son never met a sleeping dog he didn’t want to wake up,’ Tarla commented.

  ‘Well, I’d still feel better with him in the house today.’

  ‘Does Cab believe there’s a serious threat?’ Tarla asked.

  ‘He can’t be sure, but some bad things happened overnight. I’m worried.’

  Tarla nodded and sipped champagne. Caprice wandered away to an armchair in the corner of the sunroom, where she tried to get storm updates on her cell phone. Signal came and went.

  The threat of violence didn’t feel real to Tarla. Something so foreign never felt real until it happened. It made her think about the warm Labor Day night ten years ago. A holiday then, a holiday now. Her only concerns then had been Diane’s health, and her annoyance with Birch, and her frustration with Cab shutting her out of his life. Then, in the blink of an eye, blood had been spilled. People had died. A man who smelled of sweat and fear shoved the barrel of a gun in her face.

  She didn’t believe something like that could happen again. Could it?

  She studied Diane, who was unusually quiet. They hadn’t had any real chance to talk, and the unspoken things hung between them. Tarla felt guilty about what she’d told Cab. The money changing hands between Diane and Frank Macy. She felt angry, too, that Diane had never told her that the baby she’d lost had been fathered by Cab. Even between good friends, there were secrets that could cost everything.

  Tarla approached Diane by the floor-to-ceiling windows and put a hand on her shoulder. Her friend looked back and acknowledged her. The silence between them seemed to carry all of their apologies, as if nothing else were needed. Each of them knew what the other was thinking. Sometimes it was strange to recall that they had been friends for more than four decades, ever since they were ten-year-olds lying side-by-side on the open lawns of the Bok Sanctuary and fantasizing about their futures. Neither of them could have imagined how the future would really turn out.

  ‘Don’t tell Caprice,’ Diane murmured.

  Tarla was concerned. ‘What?’

  Diane looked at her aide, whose back was to them on the other side of the sunroom. ‘When the storm is past, I’m getting out of the race.’

  ‘No! Why do that? You were born for this.’

  ‘I’ve done things,’ Diane whispered. ‘Things that can’t be undone.’ She saw Tarla’s face and added: ‘Not Birch. Other things. If I’m going to ask people to trust me as governor, I have to be able to trust myself.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ Tarla told her. ‘The past doesn’t matter. I know who you really are.’

  ‘Do you? I don’t even know myself anymore. Maybe it happens to every politician. I’m becoming the mask that I despise in every candidate from the other parties. We need someone authentic.’

  Tarla squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t do anything rash. Give it time.’

  Caprice called to them from a chair in the corner. ‘You’re on the air, Diane.’

  She’d found a live stream on her phone. The local network superimposed a photograph of Diane over footage of surf pounding the beaches, and they played a voice-over of a phone interview she’d conducted earlier in the morning.

  ‘No, I’ll be right here in Tampa. I’m not going anywhere. The important thing is to put safety first, and that means supporting the first responders who are putting themselves at risk
and going without sleep to help everyone in central Florida. If you don’t need to be outside, stay home, and let those good people do their jobs.’

  ‘Nice,’ Caprice said.

  The screen shifted to a shot of the Governor outside the Capitol building in Tallahassee. He had a similar message of support, pledging every available state resource to protecting the area and rebuilding from any storm-related damage. It was impossible not to notice that the sun was shining in the Panhandle. He was a long way from Chayla.

  ‘Not so much as an umbrella,’ Caprice added. ‘That’s going to hurt him. He can talk about not getting in the way of rescue efforts all he wants, but people will remember that you were here, and he wasn’t.’

  Diane said nothing, as if she were sick of political intrigue. She turned back to the windows. Behind them, Caprice muted her phone again, restoring silence except for the beat of the storm. Tarla could see their reflections against the glass in the darkness of the morning. The light of the candles aged both of them. They were two middle-aged women at that stage of life when they had to decide if they could forgive themselves for their mistakes.

  ‘I told Cab things I probably shouldn’t have,’ Tarla admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Diane’s lips creased into something like a smile. ‘Well, I didn’t tell Cab things that I probably should. I guess that makes us even.’

  ‘You could have told me. I wouldn’t have judged either of you.’

  ‘Keeping secrets is a hard habit to break,’ Diane said.

  Tarla heard her phone ringing in her purse on the breakfast table. She retrieved it and saw that her son was calling. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she told Diane. And then into the phone: ‘Hello, darling. We were just talking about you. Are you going to join us?’

  ‘Soon,’ Cab said, but his voice crackled with static, as if he were far away. ‘Is everything okay over there?’

  ‘Perfectly fine. Just three lonely women against the world. The power’s out, but we’re making do.’

  ‘You’re alone?’ Cab asked. ‘Where’s security?’

  She struggled to hear him. ‘Oh, I’m sure there are men with guns wandering around somewhere. And of course, we have Garth, in case there’s a massage emergency.’