by Diane Capri
“It is what it is. You know that. Stop expecting him to change.” Gaspar had twenty years to go and no alternative career he could fathom. But Otto was ambitious. She had plans. Options. She should move on before this assignment got her killed or ruined her life, whichever came first. She should have moved on already. But he knew she wouldn’t. So he said nothing more.
After a couple of seconds of silence emphasizing Otto’s malaise passed between them, she asked, “Did you see Reacher anywhere?”
Gaspar remembered the glint in the sniper’s nest, but wagged his head. “Weston’s delusional. So’s the Boss.”
She seemed to feel slightly better when he voiced what amounted to confirmation that Otto hadn’t been derelict somehow and missed Reacher when he was right there, larger than life.
Gaspar said, “Our flight’s at midnight. We’ve got maybe four hours left to kill before we’re stuck here. We can have a decent dinner, find out what that reporter knows about Reacher, go back to the hospital for Weston’s statement, and then head out.”
When she didn’t reply, he said, “You’re such a foodie. I figured you’d be thrilled about our dining experience, Susie Wong. You’re in for a treat.”
“It’s about time you took me to a decent joint, Chico,” she replied, a small grin lifting the corners of her lips.
Which was also true. So Gaspar laughed and he felt good when she joined in, for once.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Before the traffic light at the intersection of Bayshore and Gandy Boulevard, Carson’s convertible pulled into the left turn lane and stopped briefly before crossing the eastbound traffic lanes to reach the Plant Key Bridge. A simple two-lane track lying flat above the shallow Hillsborough Bay. One way on and one way off the private island. Which was probably both the good news and the bad news, depending on the traffic and whether one was inclined to feel trapped.
Carson rushed into the surprisingly crowded parking lot at the front entrance.
The red brick building fairly twinkled in the gathering dark. Indoor lighting spilled cheerfully through the windows. The rest of the place was bathed by floodlights around the perimeter. Smaller light streams punctuated the darkness and the steel minaret on the roof.
Gaspar lost track of Carson and Kimball while he searched for an open parking space.
“This place is amazing,” Otto said.
“What? Doesn’t your Michigan house look exactly like that?”
“I thought it looked familiar,” she said, which made him feel better. She’d emerged from her mood, at least.
“First time I came here,” he said, “I was told the place was built as a private home. Can you imagine living in a place like this? Servants and horses and such, of course.”
“Pretty idyllic setting for a restaurant, too,” she replied, still taking everything in. “Now I really feel underdressed.”
By the time he settled the sedan appropriately, Carson and Kimball must have already entered the building. Gaspar stopped to stretch when he got out of the sedan, like always. He acted like he was just being lazy. But the truth was that if he didn’t stretch out his right leg, he’d fall flat on his face when he tried to move.
Otto watched and waited. “Kimball says she knows everything about the murder of Weston’s family. Since Reacher was the investigating officer at the time, she may have some Intel or maybe a couple of leads helpful to us. Let’s be sure we don’t leave here without it, okay?”
“I’m driving. Can’t drink. So I won’t have anything better to do,” Gaspar said and then set off at as quick a pace as he could manage. But Otto kept up easily. Which was how he judged himself and knew he was moving at glacial speed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kimball was waiting at the hostess station inside the front entrance. “Judge Carson said she’d be right back and we should look for a booth in the Sunset Bar.”
“Lead the way,” Gaspar said. He’d been inside the building before, but its old-world charm was no less impressive this time. Spanish influence was heavy, dark, massive, and spacious. He imagined gaslights and servants roaming the halls. Maybe his ancestors had served in such a place in Cuba.
The Sunset Bar was a much more casual eatery than Gaspar expected. A television, booths, a well-stocked bar that hugged the entire side of the room opposite the west-facing windows. Gaspar imagined magnificent sunsets could be enjoyed nightly.
Against all odds, there was one empty booth. The bad news: it was surrounded by listening ears and watching eyes. Which meant less opportunity for intelligence-gathering than Gaspar had hoped.
Kimball slid across the bench and Gaspar settled in next to her on the outside so he would have more room to stretch his right leg unobtrusively. Otto probably noticed. She noticed everything. She slid across the bench on the opposite side facing Kimball and leaving room for Carson opposite Gaspar.
Kimball leaned in and said quietly, “Those two guys over there?” She tilted her head to her right, indicating which ones she meant. “They get around. I saw them at the memorial service today. I noticed because they were also at the execution of the killer of Weston’s family. A third guy was with them both times.”
Impressive memory, Gaspar thought. Probably came in handy for a reporter.
Both men were Weston’s age. Latin. Heavy-set. Casually and expensively dressed. They didn’t look exactly like mobsters, but they weren’t ordinary businessmen having an after work drink, either.
Otto was sitting upright now. In a conversational tone, she asked, “Do you know who they are?”
“That’s one of the things on my list to find out.”
“What did the third guy look like?” Gaspar asked, although he suspected he already knew.
“Like he’d been to hell and didn’t make it back. What you’d notice about him first was a black eye patch covering an empty eye socket. Scars from a healed head injury.” She hesitated a second. “Something wrong with one of his hands, too, but I didn’t see it well enough to describe.”
“That sounds like the fellow who shot Weston this morning. What did Crane say his name was?” Gaspar searched his memory for the name but before it came up, Otto supplied it.
“Michael Vernon.”
Kimball nodded slowly as if she was searching her internal hard drive for data on Vernon and coming up empty. Which Gaspar figured was a ruse of some sort. Surely she’d found a way to get a look at the shooter earlier today. If so, she’d have already made this connection. Not that she owed him anything, but what other information was she holding back?
A waiter appeared at the table with menus and took drink orders. All three ordered coffee. Kimball and Otto ordered black. Gaspar requested café con leche, the rich, Cuban coffee heavily laced with heated milk.
“What’s the best dinner on the menu?” Otto asked.
“You can’t go wrong,” the waiter replied. “George’s Place has the best chefs in the city. The food here in the Sunset Bar is the same you’d get in the dining room.”
Otto said, “What did you have for dinner?”
He grinned. “My favorite is the Thomas Jefferson Roast Beef. Hands down.”
“I’ll have that,” Otto said, handing the menu back.
“I’d add the pear salad with gorgonzola,” he said.
“Sold.”
“Make it two,” Kimball said.
“Three,” Gaspar said.
“You got it,” the waiter replied, before collecting their menus. “Be right back with the coffee while you wait.”
When they were alone again, Kimball said, “Like you, I’m handicapped a bit because I don’t know Tampa all that well. We can ask Judge Carson who those guys are. She might know, if they’re regulars. Or if she doesn’t, she can find out, since her husband owns the place.”
Otto’s eyes popped open a little wider, but Kimball had been watching her quarry and didn’t notice.
Gaspar played white knight for Otto and pupil for Kimball at the same time. “I didn’
t know Carson’s husband owned this restaurant. His name must be George?”
Kimball returned her gaze to Gaspar and Otto and her lips turned up in the most natural grin Gaspar had seen from her yet. She had a pretty face when she wasn’t scowling. Which had been rarely so far.
“Let’s give the Cuban dude a cigar,” she said. “Speaking of which, Willa Carson smokes Cuban cigars. You probably didn’t know that, either, did you?”
This time, Gaspar did laugh out loud. The flamboyant Judge Willa Carson was becoming more and more interesting. Too bad he wasn’t posted to the FBI’s Tampa field office. Sounded like a lot more fun than Miami.
“I’ll be sure to ask her if she’d like an after-dinner smoke if we have the time.” Cuban cigars were illegal, but the tobacco was now being grown in places like the Dominican Republic. The best ones were hand-rolled, of course, and aged until just the right flavor was to be experienced. Gaspar hadn’t enjoyed a quality cigar since he left Miami and he missed them.
He’d have asked more questions, but Otto interrupted the foolishness. “So those two guys and the shooter killed today must be locals. These two must also know Weston. Might have known the Weston family shooter, too, if they got permission to attend his execution.”
Kimball said, “Makes sense to me.”
“So whatever connection all five men have must relate back in time, at least, to the murder of Weston’s family,” Otto continued.
If you didn’t know her, you’d think she was simply musing out loud. But she’d already reached conclusions and was just polishing them.
Gaspar said nothing.
“Makes sense,” Kimball replied. “I can’t confirm that, based on my investigation so far, but it’s a good working hypothesis and probably true. You’re FBI agents. You could ask them. It’s illegal to lie to a federal agent.”
“You said Weston owed money to a gang that he didn’t pay,” Otto said. “You said that’s why his family was killed.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of gang? Drugs? Human trafficking?”
Kimball shook her head. “The gang itself was probably involved in all of that. But Weston’s vice was gambling. Got in way over his head, as gamblers often do.”
“Back then, when Weston’s family was murdered, gambling was mostly illegal here except for Greyhound racing,” Gaspar supplied for Otto’s benefit.
“Dog racing?” Otto said. “There’s that much money involved in dog racing?”
“I guess there could be,” Kimball said. “But Weston’s gambling was the illegal kind. The allegations that Reacher investigated at the time involved pari-mutuel betting.”
“OTB,” Gaspar explained. “Off track betting. Down in the Miami office, we’ve got several OTB joints on our constant watch list. It’s legal and regulated these days. In Florida, OTB is a money maker for the state. But it’s also a cesspool of corruption where a guy with a gambling problem can get into really big trouble.”
“Exactly. Weston got in way over his head. He was employed by Uncle Sam in a military job that, well, let’s just say it didn’t pay a million a year.”
“He owed a million bucks?” Gaspar asked.
Kimball nodded. “He had no way to come up with that kind of money. He was a high-profile guy here and the gang decided to make an example of him. They told him to pay up or his family would pay for him. Apparently, he chose option two. Scumbag.”
Kimball stopped talking while the waiter delivered the coffee.
When he left, Otto said, “You’re saying Reacher discovered all of that and arrested Weston, but the locals couldn’t prove any of it? So Weston walked away?”
Gaspar thought that sounded exactly like Reacher’s methods. He’d have figured everything out and handled the matter himself. He didn’t worry much about whether the courts accepted his proof.
Kimball sipped her coffee and returned Otto’s level gaze. “That’s how it looks from the file and everything else I’ve found. Weston didn’t pull the trigger, but he didn’t do anything to stop the killing, either. Of course he denied all involvement. He had an alibi. The shooter confessed. There was no evidence of Weston’s debt. No evidence that the threat had been made by the gang or ignored by Weston. The gang leader certainly didn’t come forward.”
“No admissible evidence against Weston, so he was released. And Reacher was already gone by the time everything was sorted out.”
As Otto completed her sentence, the fourth member of their dinner party arrived and slid into the booth across from Gaspar.
“From Weston’s questions at the hospital, I gather your assignment has something to do with Jack Reacher,” Carson said as she waved to the waiter to let him know we were all collected. Seeing they were drinking coffee, she ordered café con leche for herself and picked up the menu for a quick look. Gaspar figured she had to have it memorized by now. “I met him once when he was here.”
“You met who?” Otto asked.
“Who was here?” Kimball asked simultaneously.
Carson decided on dinner, put the menu down, and glanced at Otto and Kimball. “Jack Reacher. He didn’t stay long. But I’m told he never does.”
The waiter took her order and refilled the coffee. He was even more attentive now that the boss’s wife was in the house.
“What was Reacher doing here?” Otto asked, after the waiter left.
Carson settled back into the booth and turned slightly so she was facing everyone. She seemed to make a few quick decisions before she answered. “This is not my case. If it were, I wouldn’t be discussing this with you. I’m on call tonight and that’s the only reason I agreed to preside over the two sworn statements.”
Gaspar figured she was splitting hairs for reasons of her own. But Weston was not his concern and Reacher was. He didn’t care about her legal balancing act, but he was impressed with the way she slid around the rules without breaking any.
Otto, ever the lawyer, replied, “Understood.” Maybe she felt the same way Gaspar did. “We’re doing a routine background check on Reacher for the special personnel task force. Anything you can tell us about him would be helpful.”
“I looked into the files today when the FBI asked me to preside over Weston’s statement and saw that Reacher was here in the late summer of 1997.”
A few months after Weston’s family was murdered, Gaspar calculated. Also after the killer was arrested and Weston released. About six months after Reacher left the Army, too. He’d failed to get Weston for the murders the first time. His bulldog tenacity must have pulled him back again for another try after his Army discharge, long after he should have moved on.
“I remembered meeting him. He’s not the kind of guy you’re likely to forget,” Carson said. “Weston ended up in Tampa Southern Hospital almost dead that time, too.”
“Which explains why Weston didn’t attend the first annual memorial service once he was released from jail after his family was killed. And after that, he’s been out of the country,” Kimball voiced the thought that had occurred simultaneously to Gaspar.
The food was delivered. Carson and Kimball fell on the meal like feral dogs, but Otto ignored her food, focused on Reacher like a heat-seeking missile. Gaspar felt his stomach growling, but felt he should hold back until Otto tucked.
Carson gestured toward the plates. “We don’t have a lot of time. We can talk and eat simultaneously. I’ve done it for years.”
Otto lifted her fork and Gaspar dug in as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks. Which he hadn’t. The food was amazing, even better than he remembered. Exactly the sort of meal his wife loved. The beef was rare and crusted with mango chutney. The Madeira mushroom sauce was light but flavorful. The combination of ripe Bartlett pears, Gorgonzola cheese, candied walnuts and vinaigrette perfectly blended. A dry Cabernet would have made the meal one of his wife’s all-time top five. Which meant he couldn’t tell her about it. At least, not until he could bring her to experience the meal herself.
“We’
ve never met Reacher,” Otto said, barely moving her fork around the ambrosia on her plate. “What’s he like?”
“Big. Quiet. No fashion sense at all,” Carson laughed. When Otto didn’t grin, Carson seemed to consider the question more seriously. Slowly, as if she was uncovering buried artifacts from the depths of memory, she said, “He stood out like a sore thumb, but he exuded confidence like a force field that repelled all challengers. He seemed American, but not American at the same time. In the way that military kids do. Like he held a valid passport but didn’t really belong here. He didn’t seem to care that he didn’t belong. He didn’t seem to care about much of anything, actually.”
“Was he living in Tampa? Or visiting someone?” Kimball asked. Maybe she was thinking about the gambling situation. Or maybe she thought Reacher was looking for Weston, too.
“He said he was passing through. He asked me where the bus station was. Headed north, I think. Atlanta, maybe?” She wiped the Madeira sauce off her mouth with her napkin and sat back from her plate. “Of course, everywhere in the country is north of here, and most roads lead to Atlanta.”
Kimball said, “From what you’ve described, Reacher doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d even come into contact with, Judge. Where’d you meet him?”
“Didn’t I start with that? Sorry. A fundraiser. We attend dozens of those things. This one was education scholarships for military orphans, I think.”
“Where was the event held? At MacDill?”
“Greyhound Lanes,” Carson replied. She must have noticed their bewilderment. “Not the bus station or a bowling alley. The dog track.”
“Dog racing?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Was Weston there?”
“If he was an officer at MacDill then, he might have attended the fundraiser. Sure. Quite a few military folks were there. It’s a big annual event. Very popular. Huge family affair.”
Kimball looked toward the two Latin kings across the room. “Anything to do with those guys sitting over there? They look familiar to me, but I can’t place them.”
